Popularity of Retro Games

With the passing of time between our youth and our middle age, it is not unusual to think back to our childhood and remember some of the things that made us happy. It seems this force is strong in my generation and the draw of computer games from the eighties and nineties still enthuse us. Over the last few years I have seen the re-emergence of arcade games and I have been asked to write articles in The Wireframe and The MagPi Magazines explaining how to write some of the classics from the early days of computer gaming.

Even this week I have seen discussions on forums about ArcVenture with people trying to remember what the name of that game was that they spent so long playing at school. It’s for this reason that I am re-working the series and bringing it up to date. I have tried to convert parts of the old versions to run on current operating systems but unfortunately even the versions from early 2000’s no longer run properly on anything newer than Windows 7.

The new ArcVenture will be completely online (hence the new domain name) and I have been experimenting with various systems for making this happen in the best way. There are several frameworks I have tried such as Blender, Unity and Coppercube and while all of them have benefits, I have started working with the Three.js library to provide the 3D display inside a browser for a wide range of desktop and mobile platforms – it even works on iPhones (with a little bit of persuasion 🙂 ) – There will also be an app available as a companion to the main development (I may make alpha releases available through the app) containing news on ArcVenture and Archaeology in general.

It is clear from forum posts that the word is starting to get out that a new series of ArcVenture is in the works but we need lots more people to know about it so please share this blog, join the newsletter, follow @ArcVenture1 on twitter and tell everyone that ArcVenture is on the way back!

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