I was suspicious that they are not mentioned, but then I realized this is a VC opinion piece and the first company mentioned joined their portfolio last year.
Seeing this kind of games so beloved by the HN greybeards, makes you wonder what will be the equivalent nostalgia games for the next generation. Pokemon red maybe? Perhaps Fortnite?
That was my first thought, too. I and a couple of my kids have great affection for Minecraft. However, I don't think that affection really matches the absolute foaming-at-the-mouth excitement we felt for Descent.
I don't think it's that video games have gotten worse (though perhaps they have). I think it's more that it's impossible to recreate the way they impacted us back then. It wasn't just about the games, but also about the times. DOOM today is a fine game and even a classic, but back then it was the first time anyone had ever seen anything like it and we were inventing online play and fps tactics and amateur map design in real time. Descent had that same blockbuster feel, but that for me that feeling faded from new releases over the next few years. (Though I won't deny Minecraft caught something of that old bombshell energy.)
I suspect the way I feel about the video games I grew up with is a feeling my kids will never exactly have. Sure, they love their games, but the 90s were an incredible time for the art form. By analogy, I love the music I grew up with, but I don't feel about it the way my parents feel about the music from the 60's. Music is always special, but that was a particularly special time for music and if you weren't there, you weren't there. In time the absolute electricity of the British Invasion became "So what kind of music do you listen to?" So I think it will go with games.
> For example, my overarching project is to develop my own computer system, from the custom CPU, up to the operating system and applications, as completely from scratch as possible. This has led me to learn more about Verilog, electronics, soldering, computer architecture, RISC-V, emulators, you name it.
How long do you estimate is going to take you to complete?
Saying good things can get you sued. The truth doesn't need to be disparaging. If you are uncomfortable about the privacy implications of some action, just say that. You don't have to use words like "evil" or "villian" to express that you are not comfortable with a particular path.
More that browsers have gotten sprouted downwards and obtained all sorts of low level access than older browsers didn't use to have. I believe this is partially why tools that were meant to just render markup have gotten so complex to build that a small team of devs is not enough to build a modern browser anymore. And by that I mean from scratch, not just piggybacking on Chromium or Gecko.
> I believe this is partially why tools that were meant to just render markup have gotten so complex to build that a small team of devs is not enough to build a modern browser anymore.
Isn't it basically the opposite? The hard parts of the browser are layout, styling, and multimedia stuff that goes into rendering markup compliantly. Then there's the infinite sink of optimization work for a JS engine, the high-level scripting language for that markup. The low level access that something like this emulator use is comparatively easy; a WASM runtime and Canvas blitting pixels from some shared buffer.
Or am I mistaken that a WASM engine is much easier to build than a performant JS engine?
Until the platform owner bans for whatever reason and if communication by way of the platform was your only means of communication with your customer base, that's the platform owner having the power to destroy your business. No different that businesses that rely on the neverending goodwill of the mobile app store owners. One misstep and your business is gone with no recourse whatsoever. Protocols > Platforms. Always.
> there is still an indefinable "Americanness" common to them all
I believe it is more of self fulfilling prophecy imo. Some quality you treat as American AFTER you learn it is an american accent rather than something you see as american before (or regardless of whether) you even know if it is american
reply