I decided to check out The Soul of a New Machine after reading this account of working at Atari and writing the Donkey Kong cart for the 2600 (if you are an Atari or DK fan, read this).

Anyway, the wiki page for The Soul of a New Machine talks about the Mushroom Theory of Management:

Tom West practices the “Mushroom Theory of Management” - “keeping them in the dark and feeding them shit.” That is, isolating the design team from outside influences and instead using the fear of the unknown to motivate the team.

I’ve encountered this a lot over the years, most notably at Apple, where Mushroom Management was one of my manager’s only motivational techniques.

CC by-nc-sa licensed photo by 23bit_grrrl

See also: Mikee’s awesome mushroom pictures

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Tagged: assembly , Atari , Donkey Kong , Mushroom Theory of Management , video games

The King of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters starts playing in SF on Friday at the Lumiere. It’s a documentary about Donkey Kong nerds. I love Donkey Kong and I love documentaries about nerds! When should we go see this??? It’s playing for a week… (via BB)

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Tagged: video games

If you like old video games, you might get a kick out of this description of Metroid level design. I spent hundreds of hours playing Metroid in the eighties, and now I spend countless hours reading about it. But since it’s time that I should probably be working, I like to think that it’s time well spent! (via)

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Tagged: video games

I watched this BBC Tetris documentary this morning.. It’s a must-see for Tetris nerds, even though it’s an hour long and starts kind of slow. What makes it really gripping is the home video Henk Rogers shot while travelling to Moscow to negotiate for console rights on behalf of Nintendo. As usual in matters such as these, Alexey Pajitnov, the developer of Tetris, didn’t get any royalities from the original licensing agreements and eventually went to go work for Microsoft, where he continued to design puzzle games. Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov remained friends, and Henk eventually started the Tetris Company, which holds the Tetris trademark, and Blue Planet Software to manages the licensing rights for Tetris. Since the BBC documentary is a bit dated, I searched around and found this story by Vadim Gerasimov, the 16-year old high school student who worked with Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky at the Moscow Academy of Sciences Computer Center and tells a slightly different version of the story. Vadim went on to study at MIT Media Lab and now works in Australia. There’s a lot more interesting Tetris stuff at the tetrisconcept wiki, like a description of the Tetris Guidelines.

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Tagged: video games