Richard Moss

Author of *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, *A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games*, and a soon-to-be-published book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires, plus various other books in progress.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a critically-acclaimed five-part docuseries about horror games. Producer/co-writer on FPSDOC, a 4.5-hour documentary film celebrating the first-person shooter genre (with an emphasis on the 90s/early-2000s golden age) that's guided by the developers themselves.

Creates The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia podcasts.

He/him.

[email protected]
@MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Posts mainly about #gamedev and #indiegames histories and stories, #retrogaming/#retrogames, #retrocomputing, #classicmac, #shareware, #tombraider, and #videogamehistory.

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[email protected]

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relay.primal.net

nos.lol

relay.damus.io

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npub12kpydv6wet996pava5f4rfap3mjy5mlcnk5gpv4at90kv2l9trfsnjx755

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Published at

2026-06-23T07:20:14Z

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Last Notes

2026-05-28 23:25:49 GMT

Someone was inspired by my Shareware Heroes book to archive their collection of mail-order 5.25" shareware floppies, circa 1990-94, most of which came from a catalogue called Reasonable Solutions. There's a great mix of stuff in here. https://archive.org/details/525disk

2026-02-06 00:44:05 GMT

Big news on my SCUMM documentary project this week: Ron Gilbert (@nprofile…7laa) is among our first batch of confirmed interviews, along with designers @nprofile…v0z5 and Tami Borowick, programmer Aric Wilmunder, and artist-extraordinaire Mark Ferrari.
There's a great write-up at Adventure Game Hotspot with all the details: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/announcement/5936/sign-up-available-for-passport-to-adventure-the-scumm-story

2026-01-20 04:02:25 GMT

Peter Cartwright, the creator of beloved classic Mac game Escape Velocity: Override, has died. He'd been working for years on a remaster called Cosmic Frontier with help from a fellow called Tom Hancocks, who vows to push through and finish the game in his memory. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override/posts/4589101

2025-12-20 22:16:13 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…2584 Fixed. My colleague forgot to update the link when remapping the domain. Here's a direct link: https://www.scummdoc.com/privacy-policy

2025-12-20 14:42:08 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…2584 Good catch. I just let my team know. Hopefully someone will get it fixed soon.

2025-12-20 12:40:38 GMT

Introducing my next documentary project: Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story. There'll be more to share in the New Year, including the synopsis I put together with help from several LucasArts fans and adventure genre experts, but for now it'd be great if you could all just read the intro post in the attached images and join the waitlist at https://scummdoc.com if it sounds like something you'd enjoy.
https://social.mossrc.me/media/ed/1c/b9/ed1cb9fff93db7ae8eba8c4266c96ecc9966dba0e7c97b7534032a0dd4163078.jpg
https://social.mossrc.me/media/59/9e/7a/599e7afc4883cc4058fdceb93a20f77973db0f7f80459360907c1190bf16129e.jpg

2025-03-06 20:57:05 GMT

It's apparently seven years today since I created https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/, the Classic MacOS-themed website for my first book.
(One day I intend to do a new version of this design and the Shareware Heroes site design — with a toggle to switch between them — for my personal site.)

2025-01-09 23:27:02 GMT

Every Australian needs to read Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, a fascinating and accessible book about fire, ecology, and land management in 1788 (the year white folks came) versus today. Everything we've been told (at least in Vic & NSW) about fire in this country is wrong, essentially.
230 years ago, indigenous people used hot and "cool" fire with such scalpel-like precision that raging bushfires were rare, plants and animals thrived, food was plentiful, and instead of wilderness, everywhere was thought of and managed like parkland.
Fixing the mistakes of 240+ years of mismanagement and bad policy will be hard, but the authors are clear that without radical change the big fires will just keep getting worse. (See the third image for some of their proposed solutions.)
https://social.mossrc.me/media/f3653945591920900debbe1886e9e66130afdd2676aa26edfd77e2ba64967e3d.jpg
https://social.mossrc.me/media/83ea3ed6912a2cd3bcd98fdb28bd250117106f48712c93262df68ab26f6117a3.jpg
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2023-10-27 12:07:42 GMT

I'm likely to be in Sweden and Denmark for a few weeks in May next year. Anyone have suggestions for things to do/see (ideally that are toddler-friendly)?
Current plan involves a trip to the LEGO House and LEGOLand and various museums, parks, gardens, castles, etc, based on a bit of web and Lonely Planet research, but we'd love to know if there's any great stuff that you won't find in a tourist guidebook.

2023-09-18 00:41:12 GMT

tl;dr - share your fav women/non-binary or non-US/UK/Aus shareware game devs from the 1980s/90s so I can highlight them in a blog post
I sometimes see critiques of my Shareware Heroes book complain that it didn't cover enough not-men or feature enough games from beyond the US, which is fair enough but there's a reason for that. It was skewed towards men and US games because that's the reality — the shareware market was overwhelmingly US-dominated and male-dominated in both revenue and development, and Shareware Heroes focused on illustrating the stories that drove the software distribution and business revolution that shareware games ushered in (and the ones that tried but failed).
But I spent weeks searching for ways to integrate more non-US and non-male (and non-white and non-cis) stories into the book and did so wherever I felt I could get it to work within the core narrative flow of said biz/distribution revolution (eg the stories behind *Oxyd* and *Grandad* and *Caper in the Castro*, stories involving various UK/Aus devs, mentions in nearly every chapter of works involving women/non-binary people, a chapter on the UK/EU licenceware scene, the story behind a key UK-based shareware distributor, etc). I tried to find out more about shareware in Japan, too, but got trapped behind a language barrier.
I believe the book is representative of the shareware scene, at least in a big-picture kind of way, *BUT* there are loads of things I missed due to space/narrative constraints or ignorance (or, in a couple of instances, not wanting to be too Apogee and Epic-heavy), so what I'd like to do is publish some blog posts at https://sharewareheroes.com that highlight/celebrate some of those people and things missed. So if there's a shareware game creator you'd like to celebrate or recognise from the 1980s or 90s who is a) not cis-male or b) a cis-male who's not American or British or Australian, regardless of whether I featured them in the book, tell me here. It doesn't matter if they were "notable" or popular or influential or not. I'll boost your reply and add them to one of these blog posts.