Apple II Bits

Summer blockbuster season is here, as heralded by last week’s release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Comic-book superheroes will be smashing across the screen all summer, with the likes of Ant-Man and The Fantastic Four soon to follow.

Many of these characters are the creation of Stan Lee, who has played as much a role in the development of the comic book medium as Steve Wozniak has in the creation of the personal computer. If Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk can team up, why can’t these legends?

Geeks need wait only a year for that union to occur when Woz and Lee combine forces to bring us Silicon Valley Comic Con 2016.

Says Woz:

I want to give Silicon Valley it’s very own kind of Comic Con where everyone can have fun enjoying what they love. Today we’re lucky to have so many kinds of entertainment, from movies, TV shows, web series, music, video games, social media and more, and the lines between entertainment and the technology we love so much in Silicon Valley are getting blurrier every day. We’re going to create a place where all these different kinds of interests can come together, and we can come together too.

The event will be held March 19–20, 2016, in San Jose, California — home to the Children’s Discovery Museum that Woz founded. Although tickets are not yet on sale, you can register to receive information for attendees, exhibitors, or media.

The creators of Spider-Man and the Apple II will make an awesome team. Who knows what fun their fans will have at the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con!

(Hat tip to Conviron Altatis)

Attending the Different Games conference in New York City this past weekend gave me plenty of opportunity to catch up with Juiced.GS staff writer (and frequent Apple II Bits blog subject) Ivan Drucker. While waiting for registration for KansasFest 2015 to open, we reminisced about our favorite moments of last year’s event — Ivan’s sixth KansasFest, and my 17th.

I was delighted to discover Ivan had not previously stumbled upon Kay Savetz‘s video capture of a unique moment: Martin Haye, having just demoed 8-bit Western RPG Lawless Legends, burned the game to disk and declared it <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLBWA4qNQp4″ title=”5.25″ Floppy Disk in a Microwave – YouTube”>ready to ship.

For those archivists who thought it was too late to preserve floppies: Martin’s making sure of that!

For an equally entertaining pyrotechnic display, try burning an actual compact disc:

Ken Gagne, Gamebits, Apple II Bits, and Martin Haye offer no assurances, guarantees, or warranties, express or implied, regarding the safety of you or your hardware, software, or other property or loved ones as a result of information received or linked to from this or any other website.

Happy burning!

This week marks Boston‘s sixth annual PAX East, and my sixth time attending the video game expo with Juiced.GS editor Andy Molloy. Inspired by our Apple II magazine’s 2014 cover stories about Leisure Suit Larry and Shadowgate, we’ll be bringing our retrogaming love to bear on the event.

On Sunday, March 8, at 1:30 PM EDT, I’ll be moderating the panel "Reboot Our Roots: Bringing Our Favorite Genres Back to Life"

Many of today’s indie games are spiritual successors of yesteryear’s hits, from King’s Quest to Gabriel Knight to Quest for Glory — with some even being developed by the same teams that brought us the originals. What’s it like to reboot a franchise or genre after 30 years? How do you update a classic while staying true to the original? Industry veterans share their stories of revisiting their roots, taking up their heroes’ mantles, and what they’ve learned in the intervening years.

I’m excited to be hosting this panel with so many talented developers. Katie Hallahan of Phoenix Online Studios will be representing Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, as well as the King’s Quest fan sequel The Silver Lining, which I previously presented at KansasFest 2010. Steven Alexander will be on the panel discussing Quest for Infamy, a spiritual successor to Quest for Glory, while Dave Wadjet will present his original creation, the Blackwell series, a point-and-click adventure inspired by the games of yesteryear.

This will be my third year moderating panels at PAX East, and the third year the Apple II has influenced my contributions to PAX. In 2013, I coordinated the donation of an Apple II gaming rig to become a permanent part of the freeplay console room. And in 2014, I moderated a panel on gender equality in gaming, which was made possible through 8-bit connections.

If you’re in Boston this weekend and have a ticket to this sold-out show, please stop by "Reboot Our Roots" on Sunday afternoon and say hello — it’ll be great to meet fellow gamers who have been around long enough to appreciate these classic genres and franchises. If you can’t make it ot the panel, it will be recorded by Travis Stewart of Broken CRT Productions and will be posted to Apple II Bits at a later date.

UPDATE (May 25, 2015): Here’s a video of the panel, as well as coverage from 2Old2Play.

Having returned from KansasFest 2014 just a day ago, I find myself with have far too many emails to write, packages to mail, and naps to take. As such, I can offer no words of my own to express the joy and attending my 17th annual Apple II convention — so I will let others’ words do so for me.

Please enjoy the following Storify, collecting select tweets, Flickr albums, Facebook posts, and more from #A2KFest.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a fan of museums — their exhibits, their archives, their outreach all serve as a cornerstone to cultural preservation and education. America apparently agrees with that sentiment, as it was recently determined that the United States has more museums (35,000) than Starbucks (11,000) and McDonalds (14,000) restaurants combined.

From as far back as 2003, when Ryan Suenaga and I visited the Boston Museum of Science, I’ve toyed with the idea of a Juiced.GS article that marries these esteemed institutions with my favorite retrocomputer. Whether that story would’ve been simply an overview of the Apple II’s appearances and contexts in such institutions, or something more meaningful about the history of the Apple II, I’m unsure. The closest we’ve come to that pitch was Peter Neubauer’s December 2012 narrative of his experience at the newly opened Living Computer Museum.

If we ever do compile such an index, it won’t stay current for long, as new exhibits feature the Apple II regularly. The latest, having opened just last week, is Digital Revolution at London’s Barbican Centre, "a major new exhibition that explores the impact of technology on art over the past four decades", reports Aaron Souppouris for The Verge. Featured art forms include film, music, games, and more.

Pretty trippy, right? But in addition to the many interactive installation, various displays also let visitors walk the timeline of digital technology — including the Apple IIe.

A proud lineage. Photo copyrighted by the Verge.

It’s not a significant portion of the Digital Revolution, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s enough for modern art to acknowledge that it is where it is today thanks to inventions such as the Apple II.

Now that’s a good story.

Two years ago today, I was at GameFest, the opening weekend of The Art of Video Games, an art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was the performance of chiptune artists 8 Bit Weapon and ComputeHer that drew me there, but I went home with connections to the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers.

A year later, that connection landed me on stage at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention, moderating a panel on the best video games of the year. Having developed my moderation skills at KansasFest, I found PAX an exciting and encouraging venue in which to continue hosting discussions on some of my favorite hobbies.

Emboldened, I sought to return the PAX stage in 2014 with a panel of more critical social value. Inspired by the work of Anita Sarkeesian, whose work I discovered upon backing her Kickstarter, I started brainstorming with Juiced.GS associate editor Andy Molloy as far back as June 27 and finally submitted my proposal last month. With the official schedule for PAX East having been announced last week, I’m pleased to announce that my proposal has been accepted, and I will be moderating the panel "Sex, Sexy & Sexism: Fixing Gender Inequality in Gaming".

The Apple II connection? Not only would this panel never have developed without chiptune artists, Juiced.GS editors, and KansasFest sessions — I was also able to feature the Apple II itself at ten seconds into the above trailer.

The Apple II — it makes all things possible!