The Journey Day 17
By: Tony Miller
Tags: Full Stack, Games, Gamedevhq, Technology, Game Development

The First Blog

A brief talk about progress…

The first ever blog was created by Justin Hall while he was a student at Swarthmore College in 1994. Although recognized as the first blog, Links.net was referred to simply as “his personal homepage.

It wasn’t really until 1997 when the term “weblog” was used. It’s been attributed to Jorn Barger as he wrote one of the earliest examples of a blog nestled between elements of html and css styled into the influential “Robot Wisdom”.

Almost simultaneously a small startup named Catapult Entertainment was working on what would become the precursor to the modern pvp experience. This product would be called the XBAND. The XBAND, was a dialup modem that sat between your cartridge on the Sega Genesis or SNES. It allowed players to connect and play against another opponent on a console for the first time. It remains to this day the only modem released in the United States that was licensed by Nintendo.

I was amongst the first to get on XBAND. By the time I had finished playing Super Street Fighter in 1997 I had racked up over 500 wins with less than 30 losses. There were a few other games, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, and Mario Kart come to mind, but generally I was there for Street Fighter.

Aside from the games, another interesting thing was happening on XBAND. During the same time frame of 94–97, users were beginning to form their own blog network. Given an individual about space on their profile much as profiles today give users to tell about themselves, each XBAND would afford a person up to four accounts. With a 1000 word limit based on 250 words per about page, some of the first blogs appeared on that game changing device contributing to the growth of blogs as we know them today.

I started my first blog in late 1995. I had come across a few during that time. Some were club spaces, others were game and system reviews, etc. A typical antiquated browsing experience. Some were good some were really bad but it was more about people starting to share information in a totally different way than ever before. That was the real beauty of this.

At the time I worked for a video game store named Captron. Captron was originally owned and operated by Capcom USA. It was eventually sold and fell away into the abyss of history that comes to take all things eventually. But at the time, Captron afforded me a unique opportunity to play a substantial number of video games across all platforms. We were told to learn the hot games, have tips and tricks, as well as know the in’s and out’s of all the systems.

As new games came out, I would play test them and write about it once a week. There was a community of us on XBAND that promoted each other and helped each other gain readership and by the time the second E3 convention came around I was taking it all in on press passes. For a 23 year old young man who grew up gaming, it was a pretty big deal.

The Early Blogs pages of XtN rOx, 2, 3, and 4 on XBAND

From those early day’s, my blog writing has always been a thing that I’ve practiced in spits and spurts. Now, at 2:03am, I write for the purpose of documenting my journey on my life path as a developer. Specializing in web development, this recent turn to game development, 3D animation, and cinematography has changed my blogging so that it now serves the purpose of documenting… more games. Life comes full circle.

As I sat in front of my space shooter 2D project, I considered how far life can travel to get to the place that it’s going. With a giant 73% peering back at me, I could see the end of this project coming soon. My list of setup items had taken me through the last of setting up my UI, around the corner through audio, and into post production and design. Backtracking some, I went back into all of the explosion animations and prefabs to really give them some lift with particle effects and fragmentation. I would finish at 90% done today.

Tomorrow’s agenda (today’s agenda) will be music and sound effects. Using placeholder music and sound files, I just wanted to give the game some feel today but really want to capture the right tone of the game through the audio version of the UX as well. How does the music flow together with the course of the game? What is just the right sound for each explosion? All of the fun stuff that the music producer in me has been waiting ever so patiently to begin work on.