The Digital Antiquarian

The Tudor Kings

This Porsche is very much leashed. The one I got wasn’t even a turbo model. I’ve had a running joke with my wife Dorte for almost as long as we’ve been a couple. I reasoned back in the day that, since she was going to be a doctor — a more reliable source of income than writing about computer games — she should be expected to buy me the Porsche of my dreams at some point. Needless to say, I’m still waiting. I had to learn the hard way that a doctor in Denmark doesn’t earn quite as much as one in…

Your humble author in 2009, with his last even vaguely cool car, a 2000 Volkswagen GTI. I sold the GTI and left the United States that same summer. I wouldn’t own another car for ten years. Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was that you could generally expect no…

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after writing his last bit of code for SimAnt, Will Wright climbed out of bed and smelled smoke. Looking out the window of his home in the Oakland Hills of California he…

Hi, folks… I’ll have the last article in the series on Maxis Software for you next week. Today, I’m happy to say that the new ebook, covering the historical year 1999, is available, and on a far more timely basis than the last one at that. My thanks go to Richard Lindner, for developing the scripts that produce it, and to my hiking buddy Stefaan Rillaert, for modernizing them slightly and adapting them to run on Linux instead of Windows. As always when we finish out another year of history,…

Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis’s IPO. This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real. To be clear, SimHealth was not, say, a playful look at the life of a hospital, with eccentric…

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their…

Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in…

The photographer’s model for the visage of The Nameless One on the now-iconic Planescape: Torment box was actually Guido Henkel, the game’s producer, who was enlisted at the last minute when the planned professional model had a “scheduling conflict.” This article tells part of the story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers. Usually if you choose the longest dialog option, that’s the best option. — Chris Avellone Quite some years ago now, I briefly interviewed Brian Fargo about…

By 1999, Interplay had begun crediting its internally developed CRPGs to “Black Isle Studios,” a distinction that represented very little difference, given that Black Isle shared office space and personnel with its parent publisher. Note the careful choice of words on the box above, to call Black Isle the “producers” — not the developers — of Baldur’s Gate. This article tells part of the general story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers, which includes the more specific one…

Pierre Plantard in 1942, at age 22. This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It is possible to trace the Plantard family tree a fair ways back without relying on the Lobineau dossier, but not as far back as the time when the Merovingian kings ruled over the nascent nation of France. The real genealogical record shows that the Plantards were not a line of kings or demigods; they were rather ordinary…

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain on January 18, 1982. Delacorte released an American edition five weeks later, under the punchier title of simply […]

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Henry Lincoln promised at the end of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil” that he would continue to investigate the case of François-Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. He proved as good as […]

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Rennes-le-Château enjoyed its first watershed moment as a media phenomenon when Albert Salamon wrote his newspaper articles in 1956. Its second came when a documentary about the village was aired on French […]