Richard Moss

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

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…

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.

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...

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...

The cultural tides are rising, One More Story Games CEO and founder Jean Leggett and indie developer/Infinity Plus Two communications manager Gabriella Lowgren said in a talk attended by GameDaily at Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) about dealing with mature and traumatic content in games.
We now have biographical games, like Depression Quest and That Dragon, Cancer, that tell personal stories, and efforts like Spec Ops: The Line — which explores the horrors of war — along with the burgeoning...

Kate Edwards wants everyone to become an advocate. The former IGDA executive director previously took up the mantle for advocacy in a fiery keynote address at Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) last year. A year in, Edwards has shown no signs of slowing down in her efforts to inspire all game creators to make change happen.
GameDaily caught up with her during Melbourne International Games Week to get her take on how the industry is progressing on a wide range of issues — diversity, crunch, work...

You'd think that game credits would be simple.
It's just a list of names and roles, after all. How hard can that be to get right?
But credits are rarely simple, because neither is game development. And yet credits are an invaluable, underappreciated aspect of game making.
They're our best — and often only — record of the human labor that goes into game development, serving not only as a reminder that games are made by people — sometimes lots of them — but also as a tool for developers to adva...

Ahead of the 11th main entry in the series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, releasing this week, we tracked down nine people who worked on the original game and talked to them about how it all began. What follows, in their own words, is a story about discovering a concept with near-infinite potential and then struggling to realize even a fraction of it.

Conventional wisdom may dictate that indie game devs should put all their PC games on Steam, but Jason Rohrer's never been one to simply follow the crowd.
The veteran indie is known for doing things differently, whether he's making a game about burglary and home defense in which the perpetrators are often simultaneously the victims (The Castle Doctrine), exploring life and morality in a five-minute journey through a side-scrolling 2D maze (Passage), or burying a game in the desert in the hope...

When Zach Barth was in eighth or ninth grade, he gave himself a hacker handle.
He had no idea how to actually be a hacker, but he'd seen the movie Hackers and he aspired to be like the people he saw there. With a cool hacker handle like "thekrispykremlin" — a name he plucked out of nowhere — he could at least pretend.
Nearly two decades later, he doesn't need hacker handles to pretend. He has games to do that. His studio Zachtronics makes games about optimizing systems, programming, and now, ...

There are many reasons to be bullish on augmented reality, as development frameworks continue to improve and businesses experiment with new use cases for the technology.
But what’s it like to actually work in AR at the moment? What are AR developers excited and concerned about? And where do AR developers see the medium going in the near and medium-term future?
To answer those questions, we spoke with three developers and two of Samsung NEXT’s own experts about the state of the AR market.
Earl...

What follows is a chapter from The Secret History of Mac Gaming, a new book written by Gamasutra contributor Richard Moss. In this chapter, Moss charts the origins and impact of Silicon Beach Software's seminal game Dark Castle.
Charlie Jackson had a dream to play sport for the United States national team. Which sport didn't matter too much, so long as he could be on the team. The dream came to him in college, when two of his rowing teammates each made a different United States team — one for...

Toward the end of 2017, we ran a story on sunk cost fallacy in game development.
It featured around a dozen developers describing the price they paid for ignoring red flags and continuing to work on bad features or entire projects that were set for failure simply because they'd invested so much time, money, or energy into them.
A short time after the article went live, we got a suggestion from Axiom Verge developer Tom Happ to do a follow-up piece looking at the issue from the opposite direct...