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351 Days Left To Play: Next Sign Of Doomsday : Adobe Sales Are Up
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 351 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. The next Sign Of Doomsday: Adobe sales are up It turns out,…
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352 Days Left To Play: First Sign Of Doomsday : Atari Defends Its’ Intellectual Property
The current Mayan Countdown has us at 352 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. The first Sign Of Doomsday: Atari starts to defend its…
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My Interview With Johnny Wilson (CGW) Live on GameCareerGuide.com
A few months back I got the urge to catch-up with Johnny Wilson, the long-time editor of Computer Gaming World. I do this from time-to-time. I get nostalgic about old games or magazines, and then attempt to look-up some of the personalities and get them to speak on record about…
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spaceport.io Takes some of the Pain Out of HTML5 Game Development By Helping you convert AS3 to HTML5
Wow, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the exciting new APIs, SDKs and platforms emerging for HTML5 game development! We just took a look at Ben Savage’s spaceport.io project today, and it looks really interesting. There is both an SDK that helps you to convert…
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Atari Nerd Chronicles: The Best Christmas Ever
Although I had no idea in early 1981, my brother and I were video game obsessed twins on a collision-course with the pinnacle of ultimate geekdom: computer ownership. We both loved arcade games and owned an Atari 2600 that we played constantly. We spent all of our money on…
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The 12 Years Of Atari Christmas 1981-1992
On Christmas ’81 Atari gave to me, a VCS under the Christmas tree On Christmas ’82 Atari gave to me, two arcade conversions and a VCS under the Christmas tree On Christmas ’83 Atari gave to me three Swordquest titles two arcade conversions and a VCS under the…
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HTML5 Canvas Game: Tic Tac Pro Quack The Glass – Goes Gold
8bitrocket in conjunction with Producto Studios and in association with TicTacDontion.com is proud to announce the launch of our HTML5 Canvas only game targeted to work on ANY HTML5 browser platform (mobile or desktop). 8bitrocket and Producto Studios did all of the game programming in HTML5 and TicTacDonation.com provided the…
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Atari 80’s Christmas Commercials (More Filler For A Slow Week)
Nothing brings back 8-bit Christmas memories like atrocious video game commercials from the 80’s. The funny is, we LOVED these commercials. They represented the mainstream accepting our love of Atari and video games…at least that is how we thought about it. Anyway, here are a couple for your viewing…
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Atari History Book Kickstarter Project Launches
By Jeff Fulton Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel have launched their Kickstarter.com project to help get their massive Atari History book project off the ground. Here is a video about the project: [iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”410px” src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ataribook/atari-history-book-volume-1-beginnings-to-1984/widget/video.html” width=”480px”/]
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Image Gallery : From Altair To Nintendo : Christmas Themed Computer And Video Games Ads and Editorial Pages, 1975-1989
When I was growing up, getting into the Christmas spirit usually involved reading my favorite computer and video game magazines and paging through the special Christmas content created just for the holiday. Since the physical magazine era is quickly coming to a close, I thought we would salute the golden…
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Italian Review of HTML5 Canvas : fantastico!
Here is a review of our book HTML5 Canvas in Italian. The English translation appears to be pretty positive, however, the Italian looks better…so here is a quote in Italian: L’esempio che viene discusso e realizzato è veramente fantastico: un video puzzle. Si tratta di un video che viene diviso…
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HTML5 Puzzle Game : Color Drop : Game Demo + AS3 vs. JavaScript Code Comparison
Color Drop was game that was featured in our book The Essential guide To Flash Games. Earlier this month I decided to to see how hard it would be to tackle a similar game for HTML5 Canvas for the next version of HTML5 Canvas for O’Reilly. Color Drop HTML5 Canvas is…
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What the hell are you running from?
When I was in 5th grade I started to run. I ran with a friend named Richie and we would circle the play ground of our Manhattan Beach grammar school 20 or 30 times per recess. I was never interested in running as a competition, just as something to do.…
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8bitrocket 5 Year Anniversary : Throwing Up the Past and Top-10 Of Everything We could Think Of
Today is our 5 year anniversary. It’s been a roller-coaster-ride-kinda-year here at 8bitrocket Towers, with many ups and downs, sharp turns and thrills, but at the end of the ride, we just feel like throwing up. When we started 5 years ago, there were almost no sites talking about making…
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HTML5 Canvas Christmas Tree Drag And Drop Demo And Tutorial
Here is another demo from DevCon5. Yesterday we showed you an action game, now we will show you something completely different. A Drag And Drop style decoration application of the type we produced by the dozens ta Mattel throughout the first 10 years of this century. We present to you:…
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HTML5 Canvas “1945” Game Demo
Here is one of the game demos we showed at Devcon5 last week. This is an action game named 1945. It uses graphics from Ari Feldman’s Spritelib and music from Musopen.com. You cannot die in this game. It’s a demo of parallax scrolling and particle effects. Move and shoot with the…
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New Forum Redux
A couple notes about the new forums. 1. the permissions have been updated so registered users can post in all forums 2. Registering requires admin approval now, as the “human spam bots” are causing issues. -8bitsteve
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New Forums To Focus On HTML5 Game And App Development (with Flash and Corona too)
We’ve had a lot of requests to start a forum for HTML5 Game and App developers. Since we use HTML5, Flash, Corona, and other tech too, we decided to try a new forum for all that stuff too. This is really just a fresh install of PHP BB with some…
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8bitrocket Blows The Roof Off DevCon5! :)
Well, maybe the roof stayed on, but our presentations were a quite bit more successful than we imagined. We’ve received tons of feedback, and it’s all been great. Maybe we should do this kind thing more often… We met some awesome people and had a great time spending some book…
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DevCon5 Santa Clara Live Blog
7:59 : 8bitsteve: Sending last Skype messages to colleagues at Electrotank. Finished the presentation last night. Actually, 2 presentations. Spent tons of free time in past 2 weeks creating demos for the conference. My actual fear right now: no one will show-up. 9:10 : 8bitsteve :Just arrived at the gate…
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Steve and I will be presenting on the HTML5 Canvas at Devcon5 on Wedensday
The conference is in Santa Clara on Wednesday and Thursday. We have a three hour block from 2-5PM on Wednesday to present. The first half will be an introduction to the Canvas and some actual code examples to get everyone familiar with the basics. The second half will be a demonstration of quite…
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The People You Will Meet At Your Garage Sale
Garage Sale People (originally written in 2004) What better way to meet the neighbors than to have a garage sale. Actually we called it a “yard sale”, and by neighbors I mean the cheapest freaks I’ve ever had the displeasure to meet. To be honest, the immediate people to the…
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Old Web Game Designer Friend Gets Published: Author Kevin Bloomfield
Back in the glory days of Mattel online, we worked on numerous Flash games and web sites with Kevin Bloomfield. He has since moved to MGA where he is a toy designer. Even back 10 years ago, Kevin talked about his dream to write children’s books. He has…
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Cerebral Fix CEO Ben Dellaca Says They Just “Discovered” Mid-Core Gaming. We Beg To Differ.
In an article at games.blog.com Cerebral Fix CEO Ben Dellaca says they just discovered “Mid-core Gaming”: Is Zynga dominating social games on Facebook so much, that it’s, in a way, killing it? I go to all of the conferences and I’m forever seeing developers who are actually looking at the likes of…
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Finally: Atari Museum Atari History Book Is On The Way!
By Jeff Fulton We’ve been politely pestering Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel from The Atari history Museum to finish their book on Atari history for at least 5 years now. Well, it looks like the day might arrive soon. Today Curt announced a new web site dedicated to the upcoming…
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Who Cares! Well, actually, Producto Studios and The Who Do!
8bitrocket in conjunction Producto Studios is proud to be a small part to a big cause. Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, and Dave Grohl rocked an amazing fundraiser to benefit the UCLA Daltrey/Townshend Teen Cancer Program and Producto rocked the website design. Long time “bandmate” of Producto’s Simon Hinchliffe designed the site and…
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Happy Thanksgiving From 8bitrocket.com
(turkey image borrowed from here, turned into ASCII here)
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The Kinect : Only The Illusion Of “Fun”
So I’ve been branded a “Kinect” lover by some people, and for the past year that has been a fairly accurate statement. Before that, I was a Wii lover. In both cases, I truly believed in the idea of “motion gaming”. Ever since my family played hooky from work/school in November 2006…
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R.I.P. Gary Garcia of “Pac Man Fever” Fame : Now It’s time For Hollywood To Make A Movie About “Pac Man Fever”
By Jeff Fulton “To create a song that has mass appeal is among the most difficult things you’ll ever do.” –Jerry Buckner According to Gamasutra, Gary Garcia, 1/2 of Buckner and Garcia died yesterday. Back in February we contacted Jerry Buckner about he 30th Anniversary of Pac-Man and…
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Adobe Donates Flex To Open Source Foundation
Not much else to say here except to link to this: Adobe donates Flex to foundation in community-friendly exit strategy. A good move to keep Flex viable for developers for the foreseeable future. (Thanks to R.J. Lormier for the heads-up)
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Press Release: 8bitrocket.com’s Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton to Discuss the Emerging Role of Canvas Development At DevCon5 in Santa Clara, Dec. 7-8, 2011
8bitrocket.com’s Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton to Discuss the Emerging Role of the Canvas Development Environment At DevCon5 in Santa Clara, California, December 7-8, 2011 Norwalk, CT, November 10, 2011— TMC and Crossfire Media announced that Steve Fulton and Jeff Fulton, co-founders of 8bitrocket.com and authors of the best-selling…
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More Fuel For The HTML5 Fire: Adobe Admits That The Long Term Viability Of The Flex SDK In Doubt
In the “Your Questions About Flex Blog” on blogs.adobe.com, Adobe appears to be putting the future of Flex in doubt: Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development? In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also…
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Now Don’t Get Cocky “Web Standards” Dudes, HTML5 Still Has A Looooooooong Way To Go.
Two days ago Adobe announced that were were ceasing development of the Flash player for the mobile web, in favor of HTML5. They will focus on the air packagers and PC/Mac browser plugins. Technologically speaking, nothing has really changed, as Adobe already had an issue with Flash not being…
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One Day After Adobe Retreats Flash From The Mobile Web: Our HTML5 Canvas Book Hits #1 On The Game Programming Chart At Amazon.com
Also, it has the lowest ranking it has ever achieved too.
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Adobe Drops Mobile Browser Flash Support : Are You Ready To Stop Thinking We Are Crazy And Learn About The HTML5 Canvas ?
So, we’ve heard “through the grapevine” that many of our old readers and Flash Game colleagues were pretty skeptical about our choice to tackle the HTML5 Canvas. Jeff and I have always tried to figure out new trends early, and most of the time we are Too Early (i.e we…
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Texture Packer Makes Sprites Easy to Export From Flash. For Corona, as well as Cocos2d, and more.
I have a huge new gig that includes taking 100’s of pre-existing Flash animations and using them to create a cross platform mobile application for a kids television network. The goal is to take the current Flash site (luckily in as3) and create a mobile version that will work on…
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Book Review: Fantasy Freaks And Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf
Here it is, I’ll come out and say it. I used to play pencil and paper role playing games. I played games like Dungeons And Dragons, Palladium and Call Of Cthulhu for most of the 80’s. I was blessed with a great friend (and he is still my friend to this…
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Goodbye Dad, Hello “Code Writer’s Block”
My dad died just about 5 months ago. In that time, I have done lots of things. I have written a ton of blog entries (some good, some okay, and many bad ones), I have changed jobs, read at least 10 books, and started to play hardcore video games (i.e…
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Flash Is Dead? Games Volume Grows And Multi-player Pays Off: An Interview With Mochi Media
Recently we caught-up with Alexander Shen from Mochi Media to ask him about the state of Mochi and viral Flash Games. His responses are truly enlightening. Far from Flash being dead and buried, it appears that both the volume of Flash games, and the success stories of Flash game developers…
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iOS 5 Has SUPERCHARGED the HTML5 Canvas
Wow! Just freaking wow! My current two gigs are both HTML5 gigs, so that book we wrote is getting a lot of use. One of the apps is first-person game that is basically a simple shooter with some animation and sound. While a game like that will run at 40FPS in…
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