Before John Romero became an epic game developer and all around awesome guy, he was a kid.  “A very smart kid,” as Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo puts it.  He was also a gamer who loved what he played and wasn’t afraid to let developers know it.  In this letter from 1985, published yesterday by Kotaku, a young Romero told Jordan Mechner exactly what he thought about Karateka.  Especially cool was Romero’s letterhead:

Jimmy Maher of the excellent Digital Antiquarian blog wrote today to let us know that his proposed Robot War Tournament, which he first announced here, has been canceled due to lack of interest.  From Jimmy’s email:

“Unfortunately… I just don’t think we can muster the participation necessary to make a tournament that feels, well, like a real tournament. We came close, maybe closer than one would have expected, but we didn’t quite get there. Disappointing, but life goes on.”

Sad news indeed, and we thank Jimmy for his continued interest in and support for our chosen hobby.

According to this article over at IGN, Brian Fargo, the man behind the original Apple II hit Wasteland, wants to create a sequel and he’s looking to fund it through a Kickstarter campaign.  Plans are still vague at this point and the campaign has yet to go live, but you can read Brian’s thoughts on the project here and here.  From the IGN interview:

He doesn’t know if it’d be straight up called Wasteland 2, but he repeatedly emphasized that, despite having thought about it for only 48 hours, it wouldn’t be a crazy genre change up. Wasteland, whatever its called, will be "100% faithful to its roots." This means a Wasteland game that "would be focusing on top-down, probably isometric, party based, skill based — where if you’d just finished playing Wasteland and moved onto this you’d feel comfortable."

Frank Kunze, the man behind the upcoming Eamon Deluxe 5.0, sent out the first beta to play testers early this morning.  Hopefully, this means a general release isn’t too far off.

You can check out Frank’s progress at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog.

The Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online, the place for all things Eamon on the Internet, yesterday posted screen capture images of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 in action.  For those unaware, this is an effort to update and improve upon the original Eamon Deluxe.  A call for playtesters went out recently and it looks like the project is progressing nicely.  A progress report from Jan 9, 2012 is available here.

Egan Ford continues to improve his Apple Game Server ONLINE! project, releasing the latest version (0.5) today.  The games available to play now numbers more than 200.  According to the Change Log, v0.5 has these updates:

* Boosted audio volume from 50% to 75%.
* Added MON download option (Apple Monitor text for pasting into emulators). Right-click to save it.

Check out the fruits of Ford’s efforts here.

Jimmy Maher over at the Digital Antiquarian is running an excellent series of articles on Infocom.  Be sure to check out his latest, The Birth of Infocom, here.  You won’t regret it.

We first mentioned Egan Ford’s Apple Game Server Online! last week.  Today Egan posted to comp.sys.apple2 that, with the help of Michael J. Mahon, he has updated the server to version 0.2.  The game count is up to more than 200 now, and he and Michael were able to speed up the 12kHz/6kHz 8000 bps HIFI to 12kHz/8kHz 9600 bps.  A significant bug was fixed, and the old CRC check was replaced with faster checksum + file length check.

Check out the new version here.

Egan Ford (aka datajerk of the jerkwerks) today announced that his web-based Online Apple Game Server is open for business. The concept is that games can be served directly to your Apple II as audio files through the machine’s cassette ports. Ford has posted a video tutorial explaining exactly how to get it up and running. Inspired by the original a2gameserver, Ford’s project has been tested on the iPhone 4, iPad 2, Mac Firefox, Mac Chrome, and Mac Safari. More than 100 titles are available to play now.