Richard Moss

The sound designers from Age of Empires I and II, brothers Chris and Stephen Rippy, tell the story behind the iconic "wololo" priest chant — for converting enemy units to your side — that's since become a popular meme, as I delve into its strange legacy.
All sound effects in this episode come from Age of Empires or Age of Empires II, except when otherwise noted. Music is a mix of my own stuff and a few tracks from the Age of Empires soundtrack, plus sn...

It’s one of those things that you know when you see it: This game’s so broken, you think, that everyone’s just spamming the same strategy all the time and there’s no point even playing anymore unless someone fixes the balance.
But what about when the balance is good? Or it feels just a little bit off? How do you know? How does anyone know? And what even is game balance?
To get to the bottom of how balance works, what it means in different genres, and how game makers go about setting—or, if ne...

Few game worlds have made a mark as big as that of Warcraft. It has birthed three best-selling strategy games, a blockbuster Hollywood movie, a bunch of novels and comics, a mega-popular (digital) collectible card game (Hearthstone), and an epic, genre-defining MMO that, 15 years on from launch, is soon to get its eighth expansion. And while most of its cultural impact and fame (and infamy) stems from that MMO, World of Warcraft, there's something to be said for the q...

How a quest to put sound in a couple of games from 1985 and '86 helped usher in a revolution in computer game audio design and production.
Features interviews with tech entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and former Adobe and Microsoft executive Eric Zocher, who together co-founded 1980s software company Silicon Beach Software — a pioneer in creative software tools and desktop publishing, as well as the publisher of several popular games (two of which we cover here: Airborne and the original Mac ver...

Video game release dates seem at times like a black art. We hear dates like “Q1 2021” or “October 25th” bandied around and try to guess what they mean for a game’s development. Does a delay spell trouble behind the scenes? Is there some weird logic behind a launch that goes up against a hotly anticipated competitor?

And why do games keep coming out—often just before Christmas, or around February and March—broken and unfinished, their players forced to download a massive day-one patch just to ...

Nintendo couldn’t do much wrong, come 1989. Four years in on the company’s first console, the NES, it had racked up around 28 million system sales worldwide and almost single-handedly revived the failing American video game market. And the previous year Nintendo had expanded its business with a hit magazine, Nintendo Power. But the NES was getting old, and Nintendo wasn’t ready to introduce its successor.

To preserve momentum, Nintendo needed another thing — a new device that…

Far from a mere "Worms in 3D", Hogs of War was its own breed of madness. Hear the story of how it evolved from a concept of "Command and Conquer with pigs", what made it such a well-designed satire, and how this underrated PlayStation game saw the funny side of serious global conflict.

How a group of Sega executives helped make video games more inclusive

Presented by: Richard Moss
Macs were at various points in the 1980s and 90s a great bastion of innovation and creativity in game design, a place where genres were born and thinking differently was a doctrine — not a tagline. Journalist and historian Richard Moss will share the biggest lessons, insights, and tales of developer wizardry from the era that he found while writing his book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

Before computers had proper multitasking support and quick shortcuts for changing apps, playing games when you're not supposed to be could be super risky. But if there's one thing that's been a constant in technology, it's that wherever there are computers, there are also games. And for a while, in the 1980s and 90s, many game developers actually put in a special key command that would bring up a fake productivity screen. This is the story of the rise and fall of the boss button.

AI-generated and AI-driven characters may still be in their infancy, with years of development yet ahead before they reach maturity, but already they are making a mark on our lives, and their use is rapidly rising.

They help us get around town, run our smart homes, file our appointments, chat with us on website support systems and social networks, and more. And within the field itself, developers are excited at the potential for these characters to come to life in augmented, mixed, and virtua...

The story of how a terrible description of the Donkey Kong arcade game led to the creation of Lode Runner, one of the greatest games of all time and one of the earliest games with a built-in level editor.

One of the most important things that Nick Suttner needs every game developer (indies especially) to understand is that it's people — not companies but rather individual champions in different parts of the industry — that make games succeed.
A former journalist, as well as a Sony alum and erstwhile Oculus developer relations rep, now an independent writer and consultant, Suttner made this his key takeaway at a talk he gave at Game Connect Asia Pacific in October last year, and he emphasized i...