Games

Meeting your heroes

by Matthew Stibbe on January 24, 2011

I’ve been lucky, I guess. In my life, I have had the chance to meet many of my personal heroes. For example, I met two of the astronauts who walked on the moon and I got to know Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, quite well when I worked on SimIsle. I’ll always [...]

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My origin story – Painting by Numbers

by Matthew Stibbe on January 20, 2011

After yesterday’s post about origin stories, somebody asked me what mine was. It’s not really a place but a TV programme. In 1981, Horizon produced “Painting by Numbers” which was about computer graphics, their history and future. I was 12 and it inspired me. The rest of my career has been an effort to explore [...]

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Google Pac-Man

by Matthew Stibbe on May 21, 2010

For just a couple of days, you can play a Google-ised Pac-Man in your browser simply by going to Google.com and clicking ‘Insert Coin.’ It’s written in JavaScript and is a pretty good emulation of the original game but, of course, it spells ‘Google’ too.

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Tiny epic usability fail

by Matthew Stibbe on May 11, 2010

Today I spent 45 minutes helping my father-in-law fix a problem that had been caused by a kludgy bit of UI design in Windows 7. It has so many options and buttons and ways to do things that it’s really easy for a naive user to do something that appears logical but actually causes real [...]

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Interactive stories

by Matthew Stibbe on March 26, 2009

Chris Crawford, game design legend and personal hero, has released Storytron. This website lets people create dynamic, interactive stories. You can already play “Balance of Power: 21st Century” and see how you would do as president. It’s surprisingly fun and very, very clever.

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