-
Atari Announces Intriguing “Circus Atari” App for iOS
Atari announced that tomorrow, a free iOS app named Circus Atari” will be available in the App Store. The original Circus Atari for the Atari 2600 was compelling game that blended physics and Breakout. It was one of the best 2600 games of all time. [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/zGNAA9_8-EY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe]…
-
Atari Pong Developer Challenge Diary: What The Radio Shack “TV Scoreboard” Taught Me About Game Design.
One day, back in 1978 my dad came home with this: [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/6quqAff5fO8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] A Radio Shack, TV Scoreboard console. We had been begging my dad to let us play the Atari 2600 console in the TV department at Fedmart on every visit, so he knew…
-
Not Flash! : The Angsty Zeitgeist Of HTML5 Technology Burnout
More than two years ago we started taking a close look at the HTML5. To us, the HTML5 features like <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> were the most compelling part of the HTML5 spec because they were poised to be a true replacements for Flash. Flash had been our tool…
-
Atari Pong Developer Challenge Inspiration Video #1
Here is a video we created to help inspire our team while we work on our entry for the semi-final round of the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. We used a classic Atari color cycling Fuji symbol (of our own design) with images of some of Atari’s early Pong coin…
-
Cracked.com Chose One Of Our Images For “Video Game Plot Twists That Would Have Blown Your Mind”
By Steve Fulton A few weeks ago I wrote an article about my efforts as complete “non-artist” to create funny, classic video game inspired photo-shopped images for Cracked.com “Photoplasty” weekly contests. The gist of the story was that, even though cracked.com never features any of my images, the effort…
-
The Day “Retro” Became Cool or R.I.P. MCA
By Steve Fulton In 1994, about a week after I moved out of my parents house and into an apartment with my brother, our cable TV was installed. For the first time in my entire life, I could watch MTV any time I wanted. When I turned on…
-
Flash Professional CS6 Includes Sprite Sheet Generator
Wow. It seems like just a few years ago, we here at 8bitrocket.com were the only ones talking about using sprite sheets with Flash, and now Adobe has embraced the idea, adding support to export Flash animations as sprite sheets. This is a GREAT feature that will help keep Flash…
-
Randomness: The Best Cartoon ever Made: Feed The Kitty (now on youtube.com)
[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VTorphrBlPY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] This doesn’t look like it was posted by a legit source, so enjoy it while you can.
-
Why I think Side-By-Side Gaming On Mobile Devices Would Benefit Young Children
By Jeff Fulton The modern-school playground, sans technology, not-that-different from-1977 and what game developers can learn from it. My mornings are usually very busy. Normally I am up and out by 6:30 for a work out or training for a race (or injury recovery) and then I hit the Producto…
-
New Issue Of Distro Shouts-Out My Articles On Atari For Gamasutra
I downloaded the new issue of Distro, the Engadget tablet magazine today because it had an article on Atari, and what did I find? A cool shout-out to the articles on Atari I wrote for Gamasutra a few years back! The shout-out is to the right. You can download the…
-
A Nerd Is Born: Star Wars In-Person At Toys ‘R Us September 1977 (updated)
I’m been a consumer of nerd-laden toys and video games for most of my life. There is not a January that goes by that does not see me searching through the After-Christmas red-tag bins at Target, looking for mark-downs on video games and toys that I others would shudder at…
-
The incredible story of Atari 2600 Star Castle
By Jeff Fulton Star Castle was one of thee very first arcade games that Steve and I (along with Eric Barth) became addicted to in the early 1980’s. There was a simplicity to the design and the objective that made it as addicting as any other game made in the…
-
O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our DRM-Free HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff
By Jeff Fulton O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff: Use code: DRMFREE http://oreil.ly/Against-DRM Well, actually, all of their e-book are 50% off, but why not pick up a copy of our hot selling HTML5 Canvas book. All O’Reilly e-books are DRM free…
-
Hit Testing For Accessibility May Be Added To The W3C HTML5 Canvas Specification. What Does It Mean For Game Developers?
By Steve Fulton While searching for the updated W3C HTML 2d Context (Canvas) API Specification today I ran into some some references to a new feature the W3C has proposed to add the Canvas Spec: Hit Testing . It has been known for quite some time that the HTML5 Canvas,…
-
Semifinals, Here We Come! Producto Studios Makes It Into The Next Round Of The Atari Pong Developer Challenge!
By Steve Fulton Atari announced the semifinalists for their Pong Developer Challenge today, and Producto/8bitrocket Studios made the cut! Now we have to actually make the game we designed. I can’t wait to get started!
-
The DevCon5 HTML5 Conference April 2012 Trek Diary
By Jeff Fulton Steve and I were asked to speak at DevCon5 again this last week. We did two sessions on the HTML5 Canvas. At the same time, we are working on a second edition of our O’Reilly HTML5 Canvas Book. We were able to pull content from the…
-
Four HTML5 Canvas Game Demos Running Full Screen On An iPad 2 (video)
By Jeff Fulton [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/2hNU9uBU37I” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Four HTML5 Canvas games with touch controls running from our web site as full screen apps on an iPad 2. Notice the smooth performance in Mobile Safari. These also run on the Kindle Fire web browser with similar performance. Music: “Short…
-
Atari Pong Developer Challenge Semi Finalist Announcement Postponed A Week
According to Pocket Gamer, Atari is overwhelmed with entries (87 in all) so they are delaying the announcement of the semi-finalists until May 1st. This gives me an extra week to formulate bizarre Atari dreams and worry myself sick before we hear the news. With 87 ideas floating…
-
Death, Disappointment And Pong Dreams : The Atari Pong Developer Challenge Is Getting Into My Head
Tomorrow, Atari announces the semi-finalists in their Pong Developer Challenge. I had planned to create a demo for the contest, but instead, got sucked into writing a design document that took me the better part of a week, and the demo never materialized. I felt really good about it,…
-
See You At DevCon5, Santa Clara!
Jeff and I are very excited to be speaking again at DevCon5 Santa Clara, next week. We will be speaking at two sessions the morning of Thursday the 26th. We have been busy for the past few days completely revamping our presentation from last December so we can focus on…
-
Don’t Miss Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast
I just found out about this today: Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast from the guys over at Lost Decade Games. They have been creating podcasts since last November, and so far they are really good! You should go check them out.
-
Amazing Atari Research Images From 1982 That Predicted The Future
By Steve Fulton In 1982, during the halcyon days of the original Atari, Bob Stein worked with pioneering computer scientist Alan Kaye in the Atari Advanced Research Labs. One of their projects was to imagine the future of encyclopedias. In a set of incredible images from 30 years…
-
Atari Pong Developer Challenge: Challenge Met! How About you?
I worked all weekend on our submission for the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and just submitted it a few minutes ago Even though there were complaints from some people about the terms and conditions for the contest, ultimately we decided it would be a fun and challenging project to tackle.…
-
Atari Poetry: Snack Time Is Over
Snack Time Is Over “Hey, that’s cool! ColecoVision looks radical!” Alex said. I held the magazine with both hands, scanning every word on the pages Greg and Alex looked over my shoulders “What’s the 5200?” Alex asked, pointing at the next page “It’s Atari’s new system. It’s supposed to kick…
-
Web/Mobile/Mobile Web Game Development Survey : Hype vs. Reality : Help Us Sort It Out
By Steve Fulton [iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHE0VkNLd1NZV0F4OUxINWhWbGhna1E6MQ” width=”665″ height=”2000″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″]Loading…[/iframe]
-
8bitrocket.com Podcast : Jack Tramiel And Atari
by Jeff Fulton Finally, a new podcast! Today we tackle Jack Tramiel and The Atari ST. Listen Here.
-
R.I.P. : Commodore Legend Jack Tramiel
According to Forbes, Jack Tramiel has died at the age of 83. Most Atari fans know Jack as the founder of Commodore who skillfully outwitted the first video game company in the early 80’s by beating the pants off the Atari computer division with the low-priced Vic-20 and C-64.…
-
8bitrocket.com April 2012 HTML5 Game Development Poll Results Infographic (updated)
By Jeff Fulton Our HTML5 Game Development Poll Results are in! With had a huge response, so thank you very much. The poll confirms to us that more and more new developers are planning to use HTML5 this year and that the HTML5 Canvas and related technologies are the…
-
Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition #2
ASV Interwebs, Go! (I’m already starting to see why you stopped doing this every week) Abobo – http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/587787 – A gargantuan NES tribute parody with classic NewGroundsian sarcasm, hyperbole and violence. Abobo is supposedly an NES character who was never allowed to exist because he was too violent and ridiculous.…
-
The best of 8bitrocket Track Back Spam
We get A LOT of “Trackback Spam” that comes in the form of emails to our admin account. These are supposed legitimate requests for us to post “track-backs” to sites that are linking to our posts. I figured it might be fun to post best ones for you to read.…
-
Atari Pong Development Challenge Diary #3: On The Shoulders Of Giants
By Steve Fulton We spent the last day of our short trip to Yosemite visiting the Mariposa Grove, an expansive area with a collection of giant Sequoia trees in the southern part of the National park. As we walked through the grove, crunching through the spring snow in our water-proof…
-
Adobe Working With CreateJS (Grant Skinner) To Let Flash CS6.0 Export To HTML5 Canvas
By Steve Fulton We found out about Grant Skinner’s CreateJS project a few weeks ago, and were instantly excited to start writing about it for the second edition of HTML5 Canvas. The libraries he is helping to create will go a long way to help make Canvas development…
-
Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #2: Inspiration In Yosemite Valley
I’m still on my little trip with my family, trying to recharge my batteries after a year of turmoil, and hoping to find inspiration for my entry into Atari’s Pong Development Challenge. As I described in entry #1, I had already discovered I wanted to make game that played fast.…
-
Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #1: A Trip To Sierra Online Ground Zero
I’ve been planning my entry for Atari’s Pong Development Challenge for past few weeks, the but I’ve hit a brick wall with a few elements. I still hope to have my working prototype done for submission on April 15th, even though the rules only require a design document. I…
-
Adobe To Charge Developers Per Centimeter Of ActionScript Code
Coming on the heels of Adobe’s Premium Features for Flash (developers will be required to pay Adobe 9% of revenue above $50,000 if they use certain high-tech features), comes a new, upcoming feature for Adobe flash CS6.0 : Metered Usage For ActionScript. Announced today, Adobe will start charging developers per…
intotheverticalblank.com 