Tag: obituary

Matthew Green, of Press The Buttons and Power Button, Passes Away at 43

I had been afraid something like this had happened. A friend found an announcement on Twitter, but it’s a cesspool these days and I never go there any more so it had escaped my notice. Here’s the obituary.

He had been ailing for some time, and had struggled with Crohn’s Disease his whole life. Then he was diagnosed with cancer, and fought it bravely. He had finished radiation treatment a couple of months before, and was hopeful for a recovery, but it was not to be.

I never met Matthew in person, but we talked on Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky a bit. He was an early Metafilter member, and had a smaller user number than I do. He was also an early user of the ancient proto-wiki site Everything2.com. He got a job writing for the gaming site Kombo.com, which closed in 2011. He kept a large following though and brought them over to his personal gaming site, Press The Buttons, and ran a long-lived podcast called Power Button. Both of these things are still online, for now at least. The internet is not forever, so enjoy them while they’re up. His About page at PTB has links to much of his writing, but also many dead links, that disappeared when Kombo went dark.

Matthew Green put a link to us in Press The Buttons’ sidebar, which we greatly appreciated. In addition to our own sidebar link, we’ve put up content found through Matt four times, which can be found via the pressthebuttons tag here. Most notable of these was fairly recent, where he helped spread the word about an amazing fan-made recreation of the tracks from the lost Satellaview version of F-Zero. They were recreated by a computer program run on VHS video of a play recording of the tracks, an amazing feat. He interviewed the creator of the hack for PTB. It’s still interesting to read, so again, go see it while you can.

I’m sure there’s many important things left to say, it’s impossible to summarize someone’s life without leaving out a great deal. This will have to do for now.

This is from the “Who is Matthew Green” text from Press The Buttons:

“Matthew Green, 43, is the owner and editor-in-chief of Press The Buttons and co-host of the the Power Button podcast along with his industry pal Blake Grundman. You may have seen Matthew’s work at places like PlayStation LifeStyle, GamesRadar, & The Industry magazine, and publications such as Kotaku and 1UP have asked him for quotes. He was also the the co-host of the short-lived Press The Buttons video show with Robert Alsbrook produced in conjunction with IzonOrlando.com. Previously he was the Assistant Director of Reviews for Kombo from 2004-2010 where he reviewed upcoming video games and worked with the Kombo Review Team to craft better reviews. He also previously served as a panelist for the Kombo Breaker podcast with Brad Hilderbrand, Joey Davidson, and Dan Johnson.

“Matthew has a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Information Technology with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. By day he is a Technology Coordinator, an enjoyable job involving preparing 3D renderings and 2D site plans of conceptual designs for future construction and some light data mining. These tasks seldom feature creative writing activities, however, so that must be why he spends so much time writing for various projects outside of the office.  If you believe that Matthew’s unique point of view could enhance your gaming-related product or publication, feel free to e-mail him.”

Now it’s too late now to hire him, and we’re all the worse off for it. Farewell Matt! I wish I could have gotten to know you better.

Blaseball’s End

Sadly, it seems the struggle to update Blaseball for a new era was too much effort and not enough income to keep The Game Band, the game’s creator and maintainer, going with it, and they’ve made the decision to end it.

It’s a shame, but it could be that it was something of its time. It got started during the big lockdown period of COVID (as opposed to the long haul, pretend-it’s-not-happening period we’re currently in), when everyone was obsessing over this strange fake horror-themed baseball sim and Animal Crossing New Horizons.

I’m sure in the decades to come people will look back fondly at that time, as a moment when we could afford to be so focused on a small number of particular cultural monoliths instead of our regular diffuse fixations. Maybe a moment such as that will come again someday. But it’s not now, and Blaseball has ended.

It’s worth noting what a cultural phenomenon Blaseball was for awhile. They made a number of Youtube videos for the second era of the “splort,” called The Blaseball Roundup, that are worth watching for their own sake. And the Seattle Garages was a seriously good band that arose out of Blaseball’s pandemic enthusiasm.

Farewell Blaseball! You will be missed.

Robert Koeneke, Creator of Moria, R.I.P.

News comes from Ben S. on Twitter, and echoed by Temple of the Roguelike that Robert Alan Koeneke, creator of Moria, passed away on July 15th, at the age of 64.

TotR identifies Moria as the first follow-up game to Rogue. My notes have it popping up three years after the original, which seems like an impossibly long time now for no one to have made a copy, but even Advanced Rogue, which was built off of Rogue code, didn’t see the world until 1984. Moria, by contrast was written from scratch. Moria’s Wikipedia page notes that Koeneke originally wrote it in a form of BASIC, but rewrote it in Pascal, and I think that’s probably the version that first saw distribution.

(A good place to look for the relative appearance times of roguelike games is this page on the Tangaria website. There is also BALROG, which no longer exists on the living web but is preserved on the Wayback Machine, although a link to it currently eludes me.)

Moria was converted to the C language to produce UMoria, which the credits to Blizzard’s Diablo cite as a direct inspiration. A prototype of Diablo was found some time back that was turn-based, and was even closer to the Moria play style. There’s also GMoria, another variant of UMoria.

A browser-playable version of Moria is reputed to reside here, but currently seems broken. Moria itself wasn’t ported beyond Pascal, but UMoria was written in C and so managed to proliferate. User polluks at GitHib has preserved and cleaned up the source to UMoria and released a version 5.7 that remains true to early versions, and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Previous versions ran on VMS, DOS and Amiga. Their account also maintains several other versions of Moria, including the Pascal source of the VMS version.

The object of Moria is to descend into the titular mines and defeat the Balrog that gave Gandalf so much trouble. Some of its many improvements over Rogue include a town level where players can purchase and sell items, more types of equipment including helmets and boots, the need to carry a light source in the dungeon, and levels that could be much larger than one screen in size.

Angband players will find most of this familiar; while it has a much longer dungeon, in structure its apple doesn’t fall far from Moria’s tree. Both Moria and Angband place the game emphasis more on fighting and tactics than Rogue.

Rogue was popular in the culture of university computing, but its source was closed, and what variants it got were built off of leaked code. Moria was the first open source roguelike, which allowed for its conversion to C. This C version was renamed to UMoria. UMoria is the ancestor of mighty Angband, which is one of the most-permuted games ever made, with well over 100 variants, with even more appearing once in a while.

I can’t resist turning this into a parable about the virtues of cooperation and sharing. Because of Rogue’s closed source, its immediate variants are very hard to find now, with only the versions preserved by the Roguelike Preservation Project surviving, and Rogue itself has largely been overshadowed by NetHack and its variants.

For more on UMoria, back in 2015 Roguelike Radio did an episode on it. There is also a good Moria resource page.

Technoblade, Minecraft YouTuber, passes at 23

I saw on Metafilter a post from The corpse in the library (an unfortunate user name in context) that the popular streamer has passed away. Technoblade is one of the few channels to have reached over a billion views. He is remembered for his playing skill and his friendly rivalry with fellow Minecraft Youtuber Dream.

A message from his father:

Here is Technoblade’s Channel. His website, with merch. I don’t like linking to Fandom, but it hosts a good backgrounder on him and his life.