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Let's get it out in the open: we're eclectic.

Dadgum Games started up in mid-1996, because we'd been driven to write interesting games for a long time and decided to make a full-time go of it. Someday, there will be a fun link here to our prehistory, including a long string of Atari 800 games from the 1980s and something wildly original for the Super Nintendo. But not yet.

The first game under the Dadgum monicker, Bumbler, was released for the Power Macintosh in late 1996. A deluxe version, Bumbler Bee-Luxe, that fixed all the embarrassing stuff showed up eight months later. We're biased of course, but you can hunt down the four star review it received in Next Generation (see the December 1997 issue), and a number of glowing quotes from MacHome Journal. It was the only game mentioned as a possible runner up in the "Shooter of the Year" category in MacHome's "Home Choice" awards for 1998 (Quake won). It was picked as one of the top designs of 1997 in the "Paranoid Ramblings" column of Inside Mac Games. This is starting to sound suspiciously like hype. Bah!

A long-standing interest in what motivates people to create games--and okay, a heavy dose of nostalgia--resulted in the digital book Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers, originally published in 1997. It's a collection of interviews with the people who created games in the early days of the industry, gems like M.U.L.E. and Choplifter and Defender and all those groovy games which are now considered classics. It started as a labor of love, and ended up being featured in Wired News, mentioned several times on 3D gaming site Blue's News, and written-up in a number of newspapers and magazines.

The online companion to Halcyon Days is The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers. It's a big chronicle of who wrote what for the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 2600--all those nifty game systems and computers from the days when 64K seemed immense. Tidbits uncovered while doing research for the site have resulted in stories in Wired News and C|NET and other news sites. All very cool for something that began as an outlet for an overactive memory.


Is there a pattern to all of these disjointed projects? Sure! We do what we find interesting. We work on things that will hopefully end up being fun. The world has had enough of the overhyped company "dedicated to creating innovative cutting edge games"--or somesuch--that ends up going bankrupt over a half-baked clone of whatever's considered hot at the moment. Bumbler started as an interesting and original design that ended up as a good game we have fun playing. Can't ask for more than that. (If you're about to say "trilinear mipmapping" then SMACK.)