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Google 8-bit Quest Maps For April Fools Are So Awesome I Want Them To Stay Forever
Google’s April Fools “joke” this year is an 8-bit looking map style for Google Maps. Not only does it look great, but I could so easily see myself traveling around on these things, killing monsters on my quest to be the Avatar. In fact, Google should hire Lord British…
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Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition
I have been meaning to start these up again and cover the world of games, retro, etc, but time has not been on my side. Ace SV is filling the gap though and sent this over today. Dragon Age – but in Flash with hexagons. If you’ve played or seen…
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Flash Premium Features: Adobe Wants Some “Zynga Money”, But Probably Not Yours
By Steve Fulton Adobe announced yesterday a set of “Premium Features” for Flash. These are features that, when used for web games, will require a license fee after a certain threshold of revenue has been reached (currently $50K) After that, they want their “tribute” in the form of a slice…
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Support The Concept Of Indie Game Development : Buy Shay Pierce’s Connectrode For iOS
By Jeff Fulton Shay Pierce had a solid job working for OMGPOP up until last week. Then a large social game outfit bought the company so they could get access to OMGPOP’s top-selling game, Draw Something. Pierce was not working on Draw Something, but he had the option…
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HTML5 Game Development Survey
[iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHlOeG9temNETl8xRUloTkw3SlVqMkE6MQ” width=”760″ height=”1200″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″]Loading…[/iframe]
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FlashFireBug Rocks The His-house!
Last year when I was doing Facebook game development (and hating life) for a large, monstrous gaming company, we had a lot of trouble getting the Firefox Flash plug-in for FireBug to work correctly and show internal trace’s exceptions, etc. So, I never used it. This last Friday,…
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Journey Out Of An Abyss: How My Rejected Cracked.com Photoplasty Images About Classic Video Games Changed My Life
Last year I joined the cracked.com forums. Cracked.com is one of the best humor sites on the interban, and what’s really cool about the site is that they allow nearly anyone to join their author forums, and try to develop content for the site. There is no guarantee that…
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Ace The Super Villain Comes Out Strong With “FireArm”
Another day, and another encouraging sign of things getting back on track. Ace The Super Villain , One of our best and longest running readers has just finished a new game named “FireArm”, an impressive beat-em-up style game in Flash. You Can see it below. [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/R1eotggajX8″…
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Rush Hour Plus! Yes, Good Flash Shooters On The Web Are Still Being Produced!
We were just sent a link to this from our friends over at Sokay.net (Chris Rock and Bryson Whiteman)! Rush Hour Plus is a classic, pixelated shooter with power-ups and insane blasting action. The game made me happy today, which is no mean feat. Click below to play:…
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Nolan Bushnell Speaks About The Atari PongDevChallenge (video)
By Jeff Fulton [iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/x2u6YFtSaXE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Atari’s PongDevChallenge is still moving along. Atari sent us this press release yesterday, and it alludes to the video above. “The #PongDevChallenge is in full swing. With one month left to go for developers to submit their ideas for a chance…
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Coming Back From The Dead…
We had a near total failure of the site last night. However, we were able to export all the old content, and get everything back up this morning. We will be searching fr new themes and logos and stuff to make this a (albeit forced) fresh start. Any ideas…
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Richard Davey Speaks About The Reality of HTML5 Game Development
By Jeff Fulton Pro Flash game development veteran Richard Davey has a great article named “The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and making money from it” that you NEED to read right now. It’s an awesome overview of the an industry that is blowing up right now written by a…
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Emergent Game Play In Classic Games
A few weeks ago on one of the forums I frequent, a fellow retro game fan (Rimbo) talked about playing “Time Pilot:Pacifist”. This was not a new game, but rather, a different way of playing an old game. In his version of Time Pilot, he chose to never fire a…
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Ansca Corona Cross Platform Mobile Development: The Good, the Kind of Bad, and the Not So Ugly
By Jeff Fulton Ansca Corona For Cross-platform development At Producto Studios, we have just finished a large 5 month cross-platform (iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Android Tablet) project using Ansca Corona as the API and tool kit. Corona is not a drag and drop style app builder, but a robust, subscription-based API…
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Top 10 “Other” Ways To Punish A Laptop Computer (Besides Shooting It 8 Times) (Video)
By Steve Fulton [iframe width=”550″ height=”440″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/OugrYsr7pOA” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] A few weeks ago we saw a video of a guy punishing a Windows laptop by shooting it with 8 hallow point bullets. Now while we are all for punishing Windows laptops (they certainly punish us all day long), we think…
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Stuck trying to think of a mobile game idea? Try App-o-Tron.
By Jeff Fulton If you are stuck spinning your wheels, trying to think of the next “Angry Birds”, “Fruit Ninja”, or “Plants v. Zombies”, why not try the App-o-Tron mobile game idea generator. It couldn’t hurt and probably will come up with better ideas than 90% of the current games in…
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Atari Clarifies Pong Indie Developer Challenge Royalties
We received this from Atari’s PR Team today to clarify royalties on winning games: “Pong Indie Developer Challenge was conceived as a way for the gaming community to celebrate Atari’s and Pong’s upcoming 40th anniversary. It is a great opportunity for indie developers to have a successful launch on a…
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Instead Of Lighting Up The Indie Game Dev Community, Atari Pong Contest Raises Familar Questions About Ownership And Intellectual Property
“Enter Game Development Contests At Your Own Risk!” We’ve written about this in the past, both online and in our book The Essential Guide To Flash Games. “Game Contests” are not always what they seem. Not “all” mind you, but many “contests” are simple ways for sites and publishers…
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While iOS Builds, we play Atari 800 Games
(Jeff Fulton) The History of Apple (early at least) and Atari are linked together in many ways, so it is fitting that while we compile iOS apps, we play Atari 800 games on the machine next to the Mac. Thought it would be fun and nostalgic to post these today.
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Up Atari’s Sleeve: An $100,000 iOS Game Contest To Reimagine Pong!
So, what Atari had up it’s sleeve was a $100,000 contest to re-imagine Pong. While this might appear to be a let-down for fans angling for something new (i.e Roller Coaster Tycoon 4, Food Fight 2012), for indie developers it’s an AMAZING CHANCE to help redefine the quintessential…
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Atari has something up its’ sleeve…
So Atari has something special to announce tomorrow. We are hoping it is something classic…
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Distellamaps : Ben Fry Visualizes Atari 2600 Code : Suitable For Blowing Your Mind (And Framing)
Sometime it seems like we miss some pretty good stuff because we are busy working and not trying to scour the interbaun for really cool things (any more). One of those things that appears to have passed us by are Ben Fry’s Distellamaps. These were made almost two years…
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8bitrocket.com Interviews Johnny Wilson Former Editor Of Computer Gaming World
By Steve Fulton (Note: A Portion of this interview ran on http://www.gamecareerguide.com/ December, 2011) Johnny L. Wilson was the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine for about 10 years, and in that time he saw computers games rise to become the dominant game medium of the 20th century. He is the co-author of…
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Retro Gamer Review
By Jeff Fulton With traditional game related magazines falling by the way-side every day, why would Retrogamer magazine still be going so strong after 100 issues? Somewhere around the middle of 2004, I was browsing the magazine shelf at the local (now itself defunct) Borders and I found a large yellow…
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By Jeff Fulton With traditional game related magazines falling by the way-side every day, why would Retrogamer magazine still be going so strong after 100 issues? Somewhere around the middle of 2004, I was browsing the magazine shelf at the local (now itself defunct) Borders and I found a large yellow…
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Flash Gaming Summit Coming up Fast! (March 4th)
The Flash Gaming Summit returns again this year as the première event for Flash game developers. We were honored to both be invited to speak (we could not sync up our plans unfortunately) and to be judges in the game competition. We LOVED the first one we attended, and…
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Interesting notes on External Interface JavaScript Call-Backs To Flash
This week we had a big project due for a new Movie that is coming out in a few weeks time. The majority of the site was built-in Flash but I needed to use an External Interface call to JavaScript in order to display dynamic content…
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8bitrocket.com Forums Are Back To Manual Registration
The 8bitrocket.com forums are using a manual, closed registration system. If you are already a member, please click here: If you would like to request a membership, please send your name and email address to into(at)8bitrocket(dotcom, and we will get you registered. Why have we down this? Because we were…
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Atari Vets “Getting The Band Back Together” To Rock Mobile Games Like’s It’s 1979 All Over Again
Denis Koble, Rich Adam, Ed Logg, Lyle Rains, Bruce Merritt, Tim Skelly, Owen R. Ruben, Ed Rotberg, Bob Smith, and Rob Zdydel are forming a game company named Innovative Leisure, and you should take notice. If you don’t know who those guys are, they are the designers, programmers, and masterminds…
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Atari Nerd Fantasy: What If Our Games Had Been Released As Cartridges For A Classic Console (photo)
We were thinking over the weekend that it would be nice to have some kind of physical way to represent the many games we have made over the years. Since most of them have been web games, they are fleeting digital objects to everyone (except us that is!). We decided…
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Chuck is gone, but it will leave a lasting impression (to modern nerds at least)
(Jeff Fulton) The TV show Chuck had it last two episodes last night and while it never achieved a huge TV audience, it represents the type of modern, innovative, quality TV programming that can exist if those involved use the same creativity with production as they do with writing, acting…
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When Social Media Fails
This week I found out that someone I know is in a very bad situation. Actually, the situation is dire, really horrible, and honestly, unimaginable. I went to school with this person, and for a couple of years we spent a good amount of time together. This person is…
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Star Wars Uncut The Director’s Cut Released : Another Sign Of The Apocalypse?
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 331 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on this year. The next Sign Of Doomsday: Star Wars Uncut : The Directors…
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Corporate Development Work Almost Killed Me
(Jeff Fulton) Corporate Development Work Almost Killed Me First the good news. I no longer work for a large corporation and I am am doing very well health-wise. Except for a few minor exercise related injuries, I am the healthiest I have been since 2006. From 1997 – 2006 I loved…
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336 Days Left : The Next Sign Of The Apocalypse : Microsoft Adds Achievements For Coding Into Visual Studio
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 336 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on this year. The next Sign Of Doomsday: Microsoft Adds Achievements For Coding Into…
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Stop SOPA and PIPA: To quote an old NRA slogan. If you OUTLAW web sites, only OUTLAWS will have Web Sites.
(Jeff Fulton) Even our Book Publisher is against SOPA and PIPA O’Reilly, (our book publisher) is one of the many companies with intellectual property that would supposedly be “saved” by massively under-thought and over-protective SOPA and PIPA online Intellectual property bills, is going dark today (along with Wikipedia, and many other web…
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346 Days Left : Next Sign Of The Apocalypse : The Kindle Fire Holding It’s Own Against The Apple iPad
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 346 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on this year. The next Sign Of Doomsday: The Kindle Fire Holding It’s…
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Where is the Point Blank Remake?
(Jeff Fulton) Point Blank and Point Blank 2 were 2 of the best party style games for the original Playstation. You needed a “gun controller” that oddly hooked up to the video “in” on your TV and to the controller port to make it work. I have both still on an old…
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348 Days Left : Next Sign Of The Apocalypse : Tom Chick Goes Solo
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 348 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on this year. The next Sign Of Doomsday: Tom Chick goes solo Tom…
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349 Days Left To Code: Next Sign Of Doomsday : Bob Cringley Quits Writing About Technology
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 349 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on this year. The next Sign Of Doomsday: Bob Cringley Quits Writing About…
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