I do believe the developer's name was Troika (troy-ka), not Trokia.

Here you go Cory, Wikipedia has all you will ever need: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_Games#Future_of_Troika_employees

Is that copy of Total War Autographed by Cory? because if not it should be, that would make it so much more valueable.

I thought of that, but I hated the Power Pad. There I was, running my little legs off in 1988, playing that stupid track and field game, and my cousin would get down on the floor and use his hands on the pads. Beat me every time. f*ck him.

Thanks for bringing it up.

I'll offer a rather odd observation: High-Quality Molded Plastic

I know - totally lame. However, the Atari 2600 was encased in the consumer-electronics equivalent of titanium. When I was a kid, I can't remember how many thousands of times that damned thing fell down off a TV or how many other times I saw kids fighting over the thing. Cords flew out the back, feelings were hurt, cartridges were slammed, you name it...

If you did that with any of the early personal computers of the time they'd have transitioned into doorstops. Heck, the monochrome Intellivision that came before it couldn't compare, either. Especially when you took into account all those overlays that would become invariably folded, trodden on, and lost.

It's not a direct technology, but it sure was important to creating a consumer item that was usable long enough to appreciate it...

The split screen issue - having a person horizontally (vertical split) next to you is confusing because in most games you view from left to right as opposed to up and down (when playing i mean). When you split the screen horizontally you miss out on the mental confusion of having someone moving their camera in a sort of contrary way to your own.... maybe that's just me though.

I will definitely create another name that tune if you guys want sometime in the future. It was a lot of fun to put together.

I had to put Deus Ex in there since it has my favorite game soundtrack. I can totally see how Actrasier would sound like Castlevania though.

Hope you guys had fun with it!

Oh, I totally get that, but I think the point was that Flash built the foundation -- the proof of concept -- from which these other games are born. Instant Action doesn't use Flash either, for that matter, but I wonder if Flash hadn't come along would we see this kind of adoption of browser based gaming?

The Rumble Pak for the N64. Upon hearing about it it seemed ridiculous, but it actually worked and it increased immersion in games. To top it off it has become pretty much standard in all controllers since then.

As for the power glove, I can remember duct taping a controller to a winter glove I had, which while seeming totally "rad" to me at the time didn't work very well, though neither did the real thing...

I'd play some more Quake Live if I knew there some GWJ'ers playing. The only problem I have with having the game installed onto my computer is the extra anticheat in the background program. It's just more junk to have on the computer, but I guess for something like this, its necessary.

The mouse made the game Lemmings possible for me. It was glorious. For about 5 hours, then I got bored.

RE: The N64 controller and analog stick. I always felt it was a good controller. Ergonomically, not great, but the button layout and all were as good as could be expected for doing what was essentially forcing the middle prong on the trident into an old controller design and adding grips to it. Also, I can't think of a single game where I used my right hand to control the analog stick. My left hand was always gripping the middle prong and right on the right hand prong. Did you do the whole hold the right and left prongs and try to reach over to the middle thing I've heard that a some people did?

Is it just me, or does the audio seem somewhat different?

As for the 80's video Elysium mentioned:

I nominate "Yo bitches! We gone!" to be the new official close of the show.

Sounded okay by me. I didn't really pay attention to who was coming from what angle, but the voices sounded a-ok to me.

Though I didn't have any tricks to make illicit long-distance modem calls on someone else's dime, I DID spend a large chunk of high school dialing into local Pittsburgh bulletin board systems and playing Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars, etc etc. I even downloaded the shareware version of those "Door Games" and set them up on my own mini-BBS for my friends to dial my house and connect to - only one friend at a time, of course, and this was on a Tandy 1000EX with no hard drive, where I had the BBS system running on one 5.25 floppy, and had to switch to a 2nd 5.25 floppy to run the games. It was glorious.

Thanks for bringing back those memories, guys. The transition from a world without interconnected gaming (for that matter, interconnected anything) to a world with it was, just as you portrayed it, completely mind-blowing. I wonder whether I'll ever have my concepts of possibility expanded so widely and rapidly as I did back in the early to mid 90's. I hope so.

EDIT: Also, my late father taught me programming and undoubtedly started my love of computers and games on what I'm pretty sure was a TRS-80 (but may have been one of the other BASIC-running tape-deck driven computers of the time) when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, copying guessing game programs out of the back of Boys' Life magazine. Hearing you guys reminisce about that wet my eyes a bit.