Miscellanous Information

Obsidian News Briefs

• 15 Mar: Good news for all you salivating Mac owners - apparently, the Macintosh version of Obsidian is in final testing, and should be arriving shortly. SegaSoft president Gary Griffiths posted a message to this effect on the Message Board recently, saying the Mac version is currently being tested to insure that the quality is equal to that of the Win95 version. No release date yet, but progress is being made. Stay tuned.
• 11 Mar: Marketing update: SegaSoft is planning to ship some copies of Obsidian with a new package design. From what I've been told, this new design will not replace the current "X-Files" green-and-black box, but will exist side-by-side. The reasons? Mainly, it will allow SegaSoft to do some relatively low-cost market research as to player and retailer preferences. I've been promised a copy of the new box, and I'll be slapping it on the scanner as soon as it shows up.
• 11 Mar: While we're on the marketing topic, the biz guys at SegaSoft tell me that Obsidian is selling quite well - about two to three thousand per week. While they're still quite a way from the "Doom" or "Diablo" level, it's heartening to know that the hard work is paying off.

Changes and Updates

• 30 Mar: Finally, a photo of the Bureau Chief has been added to the Miscellaneous Vidbots page.
• 30 Mar: Whoops! Due to a slight technical error on my end, apparently my digit counter refused to show the numeral 9. I've since fixed it, which has added roughly 1,000 hits to the main page. I guess we're a lot closer to 10,000 than I had originally thought!
• 16 Mar: You may have noticed the new title screen, which contains a new item: The Obsidian Apocrypha. For anyone without the benefits of a classical education, the term "apocrypha", besides being difficult to spell, is usually used in biblical research and pertains to several books of the Bible which are not accepted as part of the "true" Bible. In other words, they're sections that are quite possibly as authentic as the real thing, but have not survived history's ruthless editors. As such, the Obsidian Apocrypha is a few mysterious images of Obsidian, which do not appear in the finished work.
• 16 Mar: This close to Java, but no further. I almost replaced the title screen with a Java-enabled screen with some neat animation effects, but was concerned that it would take too long to load. Since I hate pages that take for-freakin-ever to load, I scrapped the idea. However, if you're patient and want to have a look, feel free. I'll leave it on the server for a while, but it will probably be among the first to go in the next round of disk-quota cutbacks.

About The Obsidian Realm

I've been asked, more than a few times, just who I am and why did I do all this? First things first:

A question about me? Thanks!

Allow me to paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Vell, Scott, he's just zis guy, you know?" In condensed, easy-to-read form, here's who I am:

SWM, 28, self-taught computer guru and Internet junkie, seeks quality artwork and technical excellence for occasional obsessive-compulsive behavior. Likes: surrealism, randomness, quality computer games, industrial music, film (not moo-vies), NPR, UFOs, blackjack, Bukowski, Ellison, cigars, single-malt scotch, and, synchronized clocks. Dislikes: cheap ballpoint pens, disposable razors, the 'religious right', spammers, Howard Stern, almost everything on network televison, country music, cheap beer, and, Dennis Rodman.

Since Internet people seem to have a strange fascination with details, here's the systems and software I use to keep the Realm humming right along:

P100 system running Win95; Netscape Gold for page layout and editing; Photoshop, Xara, and PaintShopPro for image creation and massaging; a Logitech TrackMan Marble and a Wacom ArtPadII for pointing and clicking; a Mustek flat-bed scanner for image acquiring; pico, pine, and perl for server-side tinkering; and a good, old-fashioned American Hertiage Dictionary for off-line spell-checking.

Why did I do this?

Because, if you build it, they will come. Actually, the reason why I made such a complex site out of this is simple: I needed an HTML-based project to whet my skills with. As for why I started writing all this stuff is a different story. Obsidian is a really good game, and I was possibly first (maybe second) in the Known World to have solved the game. As such, there was no walkthrough or FAQ. I decided to put one together and it all rolled down hill into this. The way I see it, the more gamers support quality games like Obsidian, maybe more publishers and designers will get the hint and stop hoisting mountains of me-too games on us.

Besides all that lofty pontificating, I do it 'cause it's fun.