I’ve met the creator and he has the exact same ‘mad eccentric’ vibe as someone who decides to build an OS by themselves
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my favorite kind of people
(I know it’s completely out of scope for what you mentioned but I would love to see an episode about what’s happened with Phantasy Star Online being kept alive by fan servers)
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not sure whether there is “enough going on” for it to be worth your time, but the freeplay zone is like, a little virtual space where a micro-community of (mostly) aussie (mostly) devs hang out, watch films, host live events and meetups for the freeplay awards (an indie game festival here in melbourne) and generally just vibe. it also has a discord where a lot of this stuff is managed and arranged (linked in the zone itself).
the person to contact about this is probably cecile, she seems to be like, the face of the zone, idk.
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i was absolutely fascinated by this project, though when i finally got around to playing it my web connection was too dire to really get much out of it beyond the cosmetics
still, this was one of the champs of the big indie moment of the late aughts just for its sheer ambition
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as a follow-up: i recently hung out w a bunch of people from the zone in another, apparently related(? unsure) zone: [ tinybird.zone ] which is a little space to vibe and watch videos. one of my fav parts abt this zone is the fact that u can customise your sprite, so those of us who were there worked together to make various rude or silly pictures by standing next to each other and changing our sprites. it rules! i was mostly a dog head, and people would graciously volunteer to be my body. but i spent the later portion of the night as a buttock, as shown below, next to (i believe) the creator of the zone, candle, who is the vagina.
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Could see if you could reach Gideon Zhi of Aeon Genesis fame. They host and have handled their own ROM hacking efforts into patching unofficial translations for Japanese-only games. They might be your entry point into that sphere.
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Production is about to finally start on season 2! We’re doing one more episode than originally planned, so we’re still researching potential subjects. Last chance to share ideas or people who might be a good fit! Including… nominating yourself, if you want!
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Don’t know if it’s in season 2 or if it’s possibly of interest for a season 3, but there was a VRML chat room app called Sapari that came preinstalled on Sony Vaio laptops during the early 2000s that has had a recent preservation effort:
https://kokoscript.com/sapari.html
My podcast cohost and I are planning to do an episode where we dig into this in the near future
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This Sapari project was actually on our list of potential subjects for Season 2 episodes! The software is really interesting. I’m not up-to-date on this preservation effort but when I was evaluating it for the show I had a little bit of trepidation about the fact that it’s seemingly all English speakers who never played the original game. That’s no slam on them, but it means that we’d have a hard time finding an appropriate guest for the show – we’d want to talk with someone who had personal experience with Sapari when it was active, but when I was looking at this project I didn’t get the sense that they’d connected with any original users or creators of Sapari. I may be wrong on that though!
I also got this feeling that a lot of English speaking people online who are interested in Sapari are coming from a somewhat exoticizing “haunted game creepypasta” type of place with it, which doesn’t seem all that helpful. But really that’s probably just the random youtubers who’ve covered it… I’m sure anyone who’s putting real effort into a preservation project has a more realistic view of what the software actually was.
Please let me know when your podcast episode on it comes out, as I’d love to hear more about where the project is at these days!
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Totally fair. If I ever come across someone who could be a suitable guest, I’ll let you know!
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I really appreciate that! I don’t know at this point whether we’ll do a season 3, but if we do then Sapari is definitely still on the consideration list.
I was just planning to check out the ZZT one again but I guess Means TV has taken most videos off youtube? Which is a bit of a shame, but understandable.
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Yeah, I’m not sure why they did that. I think they’re generally deprioritizing that YouTube channel. But the entire first season (and the first ep of season 2) are still entirely free, you just have to watch them on the Means TV website (no login required). Here’s the ZZT episode!
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Also, Means TV offers a 7 day free trial, so you can always use that to check out the paywalled Season 2 episodes and also see what else is on Means that you might be interested in.
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