![]() Jdodson: Dink Smallwood is a classic game that came out in 1998, has a pretty large fan following and mod community including the GNU FreeDink project. I owed this "feature" to forgetting to remove some of my debug code. The (uncensored) words "HEY IT WORKS YA MOTHERF***ER!!" appeared every time I wrote a letter to another player. Seth Able Robinson: One memorable moment happened while playing a recently released version of LORD. Jdodson: What was the most memorable time you had building or playing one of you games? I can JUST MAKE GAMES AND DO WHAT I LOVE! It's a great thing to know what you want to do with absolute certainty. I don't have to be a cabinet maker with my dad or get a job at the plant. Truth is, I wrote the original version not intending to sell it at all so the seven copies or whatever I sold the first year were just gravy.Īfter the PC port things really started to liven up financially and it dawned on me. Jdodson: Did you ever anticipate that Legend of the Red Dragon would turn out to be as big as it was? At what point did you realize LORD was becoming very popular? What other hobby lets you create a living universe before lunch?! Thing is, after that initial push, once you've made a few games, it's quite intoxicating and you can't go back. ![]() or would I just be content to consume from the bottomless teat of today's gaming world. If I was born today, I wonder if I would have been a programmer at all. I started programming on a Commodore 16 (yeah, 16k of ram) mostly because I only had three games and got bored of them. Seth Able Robinson: I've loved games more than anything since I first played Donkey Kong with my dad. Jdodson: What was the reason you started making games? Was there any moment with a game where you thought “I need to start making stuff like this.” There is no other game out there like it and I have no idea how things will end. You can collaboratively compose music, sneak up on someone sleeping in bed and do surgery on them, build a house with a 99 toilets and get 99 real people to help you flush them all at the same time. Growtopia has a real economy with player run stock markets that can be manipulated with rumors. We've developed a lot of tools to keep things under control. Freemium + multiplayer + full text chat and allowing players to broadcast to 8,000 other online players at will = an incredible challenge. The community is great overall but we do end up banning 100+ creeps a day to keep it as safe and clean as we can. We now have help answering emails and I feel like a jerk not responding to everybody personally like I used to, but it's just impossible. One person threatened to sue us because the game's addictive qualities were responsible for her chicken's death. We get emails about everything from suicide threats if we don't give them free stuff to being told when a family pet dies. I've always put myself out there and had a "you got a question about the game I made? just email me! I ain't some big time company suit that will ignore it" attitude and it's really no longer possible to do that because we have over a million user accounts now. I think the biggest adjustment for me personally is the volume of emails we get from players. Seth Able Robinson: It's been an incredible ride, co-creator Mike Hommel and I have been working basically full-time on it since release. As the game continues and more users join, how are things progressing? Experienced any pain points as the community has expanded and asked for new stuff? Jdodson: Growtopia came out a little over a year now and has a pretty large following. I want to thank Seth for taking the time to do this and wish him well with whatever awesomery comes next! Since I have been a huge fan of Seth since my early gaming days I am very excited he agreed to talk with me. Not to have his best work end in the 90's, Seth has gone on to create Dink Smallwood, Dungeon Scroll, Funeral Quest, Tanked & Growtopia. Seth Able Robinson is the creator of Legend of the Red Dragon as well as other BBS classics such as Planets: The Exploration of Space & LORD 2. Legend of the Red Dragon was edgy, dark, fantastical and irreverent. If you had a BBS and didn't run LORD, it wasn't a BBS worth spending time on. Legend of the Red Dragon is a DOS based BBS Door Game that dominated the scene back in the 90's. If I were to create a list of my top video games of all time, Legend of the Red Dragon would be on the list.
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