Oh wow I spent so many nights playing and making MODs and chatting with my other nerd friends on BBSes of the day trying to share knowledge. This is truly a much-appreciated work of art! On another note, I think the people commenting in this thread would be really great together in a room somewhere with beer and computers. It's a very specific cross-section of both a skillset and a point in time.
That is amazing I understand how powerful of nerd skills it took to do all those steps. Maybe the most amazing one to me is that terraria mod to speed up their wiring code without changing any other behavior, and the combination of skills to do such nerdy stuff and also finish the project in a form that normies can appreciate and also making a popularization video of it. It's a very useful combo of skills and interests.
I guess I have a question, I know you did it yourself but it looks like you were in some community. Is it like a discord channel or was it some of your classmates or what?
Yeah I remember back in high school when I did not own a computer and did not know anything about computer programming except for FOXBASE which was taught in school, one of my friends handed me a book about computer viruses which talked about Dark Avenger's mutation engine and the whole thing blew my mind off. That was probably the smartest thing I ever heard then. I wonder where he went eventually. With his skills he could probably find employment in any position. I hope he lurks on this place too!
I was too young for the BBS era (or rather, I did not own a computer to join the era). I guess it is similar somehow to IRC and Discord? I know people could play MUDs on BBS and share files on it. Fun time. I'm glad you managed to enjoy that era.
Count me as yet another person who would likely not be here, commenting on HN, without discovering BBSes and falling in love with the merging of hacking, designing, and community.
I ran a heavily, heavily modded Renegade board in 412/724 (Pittsburgh) with some good distros into the art and demoscenes in Europe. Nearly every free minute of my life back then was related: drawing ANSI, tracking MODs, trying to figure out how to get Lightboxes to work with Renegade, playing LORD and hanging out with other users from around the Pittsburgh area.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been a curious teenager in a time when BBSes were a thing, and the web as we currently know it was born.
That's so wild. I was lucky to grow up in a relatively large city in the era of BBSes and then IRC, so I was able to find a decent community of fellow nerds. If there was one thing that consistently blew us away, it was the demoscene -- everything about it seemed so amazing and creative and we were all just so bummed that we were on the wrong continent to ever attend Assembly or TheParty.
Apart from maaaaybe Renaissance on the PC I'm hard-pressed to really name a significant American demogroup whereas I get a huge smile thinking about a party where you had Silents sitting next to Phenomena sitting next to Sanity sitting next to Scoopex.
In a way I give a lot of credit to the scene for my eventual career as a tech entrepreneur. What I loved so much to do with my computer was create: draw ANSI, make music, build websites from scratch. Eventually that became starting companies, but so much of that spirit was generated from my marvel at what some European teenagers were able to do with computer 1% as powerful as mine.
It is so incredibly fascinating to know that people who wrote legendary, old-school software are still hanging around, in this community no less, and contributing to software discussions decades later. Awesome :)
I was barely walking under my own power at the time you worked on this, by the way. Probably the same for many others who have fond memories of old games and get to meet the people behind them.
(Side note: Did anyone on HN happen to work on Jedi Knight? Modding that game was my first under-the-hood exposure to computer software, from modding to hacking around the asset checksums to cheat or do other shennanigans in multiplayer on MSN Gaming Zone).
Warcraft 3 modding is what got me interested in programming in the first place. I made a handful of somewhat popular custom maps, and having a forum where players could report bugs or suggestions gave me great insight into understanding the user perspective.
The latter-day Half-Life and early-to-mid Source engine mods... such a good time. People were cranking out all kinds of crazy stuff, pushing those engines to their limits and then some. Garry's Mod kept this going for awhile too, with people making crazier and crazier custom gamemodes and maps... man I miss those days, there was always cool new stuff to discover, communally online with others.
What a great write up of someone that was very influential in the BBS world for pretty much all users. My ZModem memory is downloading the 5 zip files for Duke Nukem 3D.
We had three BBSes (Tat's Box, Blind Man's Bluff, Microcosm) in the mid 1990s where I lived in East Texas and would have regularly monthly meetings at a local pizza place. It was a special time that I wish more people could have experienced.
The conversations about politics, religion, and computing in general are similar to what I see on the web today, but back then it felt like everyone was more aware of the fact that there was another person on the other side.
There was basic support from the beginning, but what really caused the community to flourish were modding frameworks. Hugslib (and then later Harmony) kicked off a truly insane modding arms-race, with everything from combat overhauls, expanded vanilla features, new races, new AI storytellers, new factions, new menus... there's simply too much to describe in one sitting.
And the other thing I love about it is the communities are typically super open and collaborative. I remember back when I first got into GBA development, there was a ton of docs, tools, libraries, and other things that folks had put together and then shared with one another. It's a lot of very passionate people sharing some very niche interests, which can be incredibly fun (of course it can also be a drama filled nightmare but such is life with passionate people).
Incidentally, The Massassi Temple and Jedi Knight level building/modding is what got me started with software engineering. COG programming both introduced me to programming and revealed my affinity for it :)
At the time, there were no peers in my life to challenge me intellectually, or even interested in many of the same things I was, so this community was a godsend that kept me sane through middle school. If I'd been born even five years earlier, that phase of my life would have been even more of a chore than it was in the first place.
No one at the time was discussing the Internet and computer games' role in socialization, friendship and becoming a well-rounded citizen!
Similar path for me! My entry point was Epic Pinball, then the works of Future Crew, and then further into the demoscene. I was more interested in the art than the coding however, so my next deep dive was into the artscene: ANSI and BBS modding. Soon after it was to the web!
You have to be careful sometimes with nostalgia but man, that was a great time to explore.
This is such a cool passion project, thanks for sharing your collection with us. Will bookmark this one for sure.
It's great to see remnants of the demoscene pop up like this from time to time. I'm sure there are many of us relative old-timers here that got their first taste of graphics programming thanks to those demoscene BBS tuts from back in the day (Denthor of Asphyxia anyone?).
Just the other day I was reminiscing with a fellow programmer on freenode about mode13th shenanigans and the all-nighters that ensued.
This HN post put a smile on my face. Cheers from South Africa!
> I remember some members of the modding community ending up becoming serious level designers or game developers.
I was one of them. COG scripting was my intro to game modding. I'd been writing small games until that point, but COG made the game a platform to develop for and that was different to anything I'd seen before.
BRC is a game I enjoyed immensly this year and the first game I 100% in a while, and mods like this made it even more amazing. I want to express my dearest gratitude to the creator of this mod, not only for adding multiplayer to this game but also for this article that shows whats going on behind the scenes
Nice writeup. I was part of a mod team that got by Valve long time ago, and indeed it was a giddy fun time. We had no idea what we were doing, but we just created a game that we wanted to play - and it seemed to have worked.
reply