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Month: January 2020

Weirdbook #41 Now Available

Weirdbook #41 Now Available

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Cover by Iuliia Kovalova

2018 was a good year for Weirdbook, with three big issues. 2019 was a little more modest, with just one issue in June. (Although editor Doug Draa reports another one is in the pipeline…. possibly a John Shirley issue.)

Issue #41 contained stories by Darrell Schweitzer, Adrian Cole, K.G. Anderson, Steve Dilks, S. L. Edwards, and many others, plus poetry by Ashley Dioses, K.A. Opperman, and others. The cover is by Iuliia Kovalova, with interior art by the great Allen Koszowski. The issue is dedicated to two contributors who passed away in the last year, whom editor Doug Draa salutes in his editorial.

On a very sad note, we lost two giants of the field over the last four months.

Paul Dake Anderson left us on the 13th December 2018, and Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire crossed over on the March 26th, 2019. Both were Weirdbook contributors to whom I will forever be indebted. Knowing them has enriched my life. Both were great writers and ever greater human beings. They will be sorely missed by their fans, friends and families, The world is a lesser place without them.

Jason McGregor has a lot to say in his lengthy and detailed Tangent Online review, which looks at every single one of the 29 stories. Here’s a few excerpts.

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Vintage Bits: Robert Clardy, Synergistic Software, and the Birth of the Personal Home Computer Role Playing Game

Vintage Bits: Robert Clardy, Synergistic Software, and the Birth of the Personal Home Computer Role Playing Game

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In 1978 Robert Clardy released his first computer game, Dungeon Campaign, for the Apple II. Dungeon Campaign, and Don Worth’s beneath Apple Manor, are widely regarded as the very first personal computer role playing games. While greatly inspired by pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons, there were no proven concepts or templates to work from, and it was very much a trial and error effort to figure out what features and elements would work, and not least what was achievable with the limited technology at the time. Today these pioneering games might seem extremely primitive and somewhat quirky, especially from what we now perceive as the standard template in computerized versions of role playing games, but at the time they were truly innovative.

In the mid-’70s computers, how they were used, and who had access to them, started to significantly change. The landscape was starting to move away from mainframes, which took up entire rooms or even floors, to hobby kits that with the right skillset could be turned into a more or less useful (or useless) device, to an environment where non-technical users could buy an off the shelf personal computer powerful enough to run somewhat sophisticated software.

This change in computing can very much be credited to the 1977 Personal Computer trifecta, the year we tend to refer to as the birth year of the personal computer as we know it. It was the year Commodore, Apple and Tandy Radio Shack all released their own take on accessible personal computers. These machines were not only powerful enough to be useful, they were also mass-produced and marketed to the average consumer, who frequently lacked the technical skillset earlier machines required.

The advent of computer role playing games, especially on mainframes and later personal computers, has its roots in the remarkable human nature to innovate – making machines do something they were never intended for. People with access to these mysterious computer colossuses quickly saw the potential for more than just boring analytics and data-crunching.

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