Richard Moss
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mossrc.bsky.social
Richard Moss
@mossrc.bsky.social
Writer/Director: *TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming*

Author: *A Tale of Two Halves*, *Shareware Heroes*, *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, a book on Age of Empires 1 dev (TBA)

Co-Writer/producer: FPSDOC

Australian

rich@mossrc.me
Pinned
The feature-length first episode of @terrorbytesdoc.bsky.social is now free to watch on YouTube. Dozens of interviews digging into the history and evolution of horror in games, written and directed by me. And if you like it, you can buy the whole series from terrorbytesdoc.com. youtu.be/TA2aZVn9FvE
TerrorBytes Ep. 1 – Enter the Survival Horror | Full Documentary Episode (FREE)
YouTube video by CREATORVC LIVE
youtu.be
Interesting assertion in this essay on postjournalism that the switch from an advertiser- to reader-funded model locked the New York Times and other traditional news outlets in ideological filter bubbles that suppress balanced views and amplify extremist ones. andrey4mir.substack.com/p/postjourna...
Postjournalism and news sourcing: supplying opinions instead of news
Postjournalism insulated the media in their ideological filter bubbles, including their bubbles of experts
andrey4mir.substack.com
November 9, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Dialing back to the 1990's and the first commercial Glider (4.0) game…

Ward Hartenstein blew my mind when I downloaded his "Hands-Off House" from AOL. You don't touch the controls to play—the house itself takes care of moving the glider along.

B&W version playthrough:

youtu.be/nIzy_Fmjexs
Glider 4.0 || Hands-Off House
YouTube video by James Howell
youtu.be
November 9, 2025 at 2:22 AM
Ron asked some excellent questions and got me sharing a few stories I rarely tell from across my 15 years writing about videogames and technology.
November 8, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Join us for an entertaining discussion of gaming, writing and what it takes to get a passion project over the finish line.

Let's Chat w/ Richard Moss - author and Macintosh gaming historian!

youtu.be/3q4Lgoreb74
Let's Chat with Richard Moss - author and Macintosh gaming expert!
YouTube video by Ron's Computer Videos
youtu.be
November 6, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Found in a box of Playmobil, of all things, which my almost-four year old is now enraptured by.
Didn't know I had this. (It's the mascot for USA '94, the first World Cup after the back pass was outlawed.)
November 1, 2025 at 8:36 AM
The Retro Gamers Podcast interviewed me about some of the processes behind — and stuff covered in — TerrorBytes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYhV...
The Retro Gamers Podcast - Episode #421: Talking Terrorbytes
YouTube video by The Retro Gamers Podcast
www.youtube.com
October 24, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
The responses this post is getting, combined with the animating grievances of large swathes of politics, has convinced me we need a kind of society wide PSA about how Buying Things Is Optional.

You don’t think video games should cost $100? Don’t buy the videogame. Buying Things Is Optional.
AAA video games should cost $100 on launch. this would still be extremely cheap for the amount of time and enjoyment you get out of them! But an audience of whiny babies has kept them literally at the same price for *two decades* despite both general inflation *and* sector-specific costs rising
October 23, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Imagine a browser where you type in “Taylor Swift” and it doesn’t even admit that her website exists. I write about Atlas, ChatGPT’s new anti-web browser that should come with a warning label. www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/a...
ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
www.anildash.com
October 22, 2025 at 9:13 PM
The Broken Sword: Reforged Collector's Edition is huge! About 1.5 times taller and double the thickness of a traditional big box game. My OG copy for scale.
October 23, 2025 at 12:01 AM
I spent so much time playing New Star Soccer 2010 back when it came out. The life sim stuff at the series' core was augmented by a deeper football simulation wherein your player attributes would go up and down in real time during matches, based on your performance — like it's simulating confidence.
Millions of people are familiar with the hit mobile game New Star Soccer, but few know of its roots as a series of excellent indie PC/Mac games.
October 21, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Always nice to find a stash of old CM2 source code and data disks. These would’ve been backups I sent to Mum for safekeeping back in 1994!
October 16, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
🚨🚨🚨

We are live! Welcome to Design Room, a new independent games media site.

• We specialize in oral histories like the Final Fantasy 7 and Street Fighter 2 ones I (@mattleone.bsky.social) did at Polygon
• Our first big story is on Shadow of the Colossus: bit.ly/4hjwz8n
• See more: designroom.site
Design Room
Video game oral histories
designroom.site
October 14, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
An ad for Commodore International Soccer, one of the best (and most popular) football games of the 1980s.
October 12, 2025 at 9:42 AM
I played this when it came out and bounced off it in confusion, then tried again 25 years later and loved it. It's like old-school hip-hop as a computer game, effortlessly blending references and samples from all over the place into a unique, mostly-cohesive whole.
Philips SV Eindhoven Manager was a late 90s Amiga freeware game by a couple of Polish guys who called themselves Frey United. It is like nothing else, with constant, creative sampling of pop culture to add sparkle to the dryness of a football management simulation.
October 9, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
'Night and the City' by Chris Donlan remains one of the finest online articles on game urbanism ever. Somehow simultaneously personal, historical, and objective it is an excellent read, and a reminder that L.A. Noir remains truly unique.

Find it here: www.eurogamer.net/night-and-th...
October 9, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Found the collection of 160 games made in world builder on the ScummVM website and this is all I will be talking about this month
www.scummvm.org/games/#games...

That 2nd game, Pirate Attack, has a really nice story from the designer from two years ago
www.macintoshrepository.org/19772-pirate...
October 8, 2025 at 10:50 PM
The Continuum web/JS port now has a bunch of fan-made "galaxies" (level sets) in addition to the original one, and apparently one of the galaxies was just a 17-level sampler pack for the full 75-level set advertised in this incredible flyer.
October 8, 2025 at 3:29 AM
This thread is the most even-handed take I've seen on the Bitmap mess, and I share his "second-hand anxiety" about the book content being ravaged. As an author with two books they've published, I'm especially sad to see the poor judgement and worried about implications from the ongoing fallout.
Quick thoughts on the Bitmap Books controversy: the whole "going back on your apology" thing seems like a massive mistake. The original apology felt reasonable -- the author still benefits from having the work published, but Dyer publicly acknowledges the problem respectfully.
🧵
October 7, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Richard Moss
Some of the authors of *excellent* books from Bitmap who don't deserve to be caught in the fallout. Please follow and support them!

@felipepepe.bsky.social
@hg101.bsky.social
@gamesthatwerent.com
@stuartmaine.bsky.social
@mossrc.bsky.social
@davecook.bsky.social
@aaronpotter.bsky.social
October 7, 2025 at 6:37 AM
Apparently this is called AI SEO, or LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation), but I really think they've missed a great chance to call it AIEO or genAIEO. And then they could have made a song set to the tune of B-I-N-G-O to promote their services.
October 7, 2025 at 5:11 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
ISS Deluxe has a cheat code that turns the match officials into dogs. It's adorable.
October 6, 2025 at 11:31 PM
I was reading a big internal EA document tracking this game's AI module development, and most of the bugfixes are like "fixed player not passing the ball" or "improved CPU logic", but then every so often there'd be something like this round of fixes and I'd burst into laughter imagining it.
Some funny bugfix logs for the AI in EA's F.A. Premier League STARS from March 30, 1998, a bit over a year before the game was finished.
October 3, 2025 at 9:40 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
My favourite aesthetic: mid-90s football management game skeuomorphism.
October 2, 2025 at 12:33 PM
I've started @roadtotheball.bsky.social to talk more about old football/soccer videogames and share cool research materials, trivia, screenshots, and other fun or nostalgic stuff that I gathered while putting together A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games for @bitmapbooks.com.
September 30, 2025 at 11:11 AM
Reposted by Richard Moss
When Paul and Oliver Collyer were looking for a publisher for Championship Manager (originally called European Champions), they sent demo builds out to all the major companies, including EA, which declined due to the lack of 'live action' graphics. This is their rejection letter.
September 30, 2025 at 11:05 AM