I'm glad that someone is making games like this because regardless of their shortcomings these are, in theory anyways, how I imagined computer games would be 'in the future' fifteen or twenty years ago. There are very few games that even approach that. There are a lot of great games I wouldn't even have been able to imagine back then, but games like this were what a lot of people dreamed about.

Amen, Aero. A great many people today don't remember the days of garage programming, when the biggest player in the world commercially was a tiny start-up company composed entirely of MIT students (Infocom). Before games became forcibly locked into rigid definitions and genre roles--RPG, Adventure Game, Shooter, etc.--they were free to be the work of someone's unimpeded imagination. The gamemaker essentially programmed his computer to reflect his mind the way an author writes down words to reflect his, and when the gaming hobbyist picked up his work in a software store, he was looking to see not only what the game was about, but what kind of mysterious creature the game actually was. There was a sense of wonder and, well, freedom surrounding computer games in those days that is completely, and I mean completely, absent today. Even most of the indie work today follows very crabbed, well-defined paths, and anyone would be hard-pressed to find a single joyous voice amongst all the whiners, mindless cynics, and just generally mean-spirited little assholes who make up contemporary gamerdom. That's a remarkable thing when you consider that the actual purpose of games is to have fun and be made happy.

So I understand what you're saying about Smart's games. They're the last living testaments to a happier world gone by (uh oh; my rose-colored glasses steameth over), and whatever his faults personally, as the stalwart defender of that flame, Smart is a kind of heroic figure.

He may or may not be an asshole, but he came from our block and he's our asshole, mutherf***ers.