Microsoft squiring Activision/Blizzard

[thekev]

The last good game Activision ever made was Earthworm Jim, and I'm not sure I would pay many billions for that.

 

[Renzatic]

The last good game Activision ever made was Earthworm Jim, and I'm not sure I would pay many billions for that.

WRONG! Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

 

[Yoused]

Windows 12: Fuck You Beta Edition.

Windows Login Denied due to Insufficient Kill Count​

 

[rdrr]

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here

> open the mailbox

Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years. So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.

Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.

www.inverse.com

 

[Renzatic]

Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years. So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.

Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.

www.inverse.com

How does Leisure Suit Larry fit into this? Did Activision buy Sierra?

 

[Nycturne]

How does Leisure Suit Larry fit into this? Did Activision buy Sierra?

Yes, in a round-about way:

After seventeen years as an independent company, Sierra was acquired by CUC International in February 1996 to become part of CUC Software. However, CUC International was caught in an accounting scandal in 1998, and many of the original founders of Sierra including the Williamses left the company. Sierra remained as part of CUC Software as it was sold and renamed several times over the next few years; Sierra was formally disestablished as a company and reformed as a division of this group in August 2004. The former CUC Software group was acquired by Vivendi and branded as Vivendi Games in 2006. The Sierra division continued to operate through Vivendi Games' merger with Activision to form Activision Blizzard on July 10, 2008, but was shut down later that year. The Sierra brand was revived by Activision in 2014 to re-release former Sierra games and some independently developed games.

Sierra Entertainment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[lizkat]

Microsoft's purchase of Activision completes it quest to own Zork for over 40 years. So, Zork was the last good game that Activision owned, followed by Leisure Suit Larry, and then Pitfall.

Four decades later, Microsoft finally owns 'Zork'

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard completes a circle that opened in 1979.

www.inverse.com

I laughed out loud reading that piece when I got to this part:

“When Adventure arrived at MIT, the reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the game,” wrote Tim Anderson and Stu Galley in their treatise “The History of Zork.” (And a pithy comment: “It’s estimated that Adventure set the entire computer industry back two weeks.”)

Two weeks? I was in a consulting group working on a project down at a bank and we did nothing but trade tips on Zork for at least a month.

The project itself was tedious as hell, since the end users were uncooperative due to all being afraid that computerization of their workflow would mean they'd lose their jobs. We on the other hand were all afraid that Zork would cost us ours.

 

[rdrr]

I laughed out loud reading that piece when I got to this part:



Two weeks? I was in a consulting group working on a project down at a bank and we did nothing but trade tips on Zork for at least a month.

The project itself was tedious as hell, since the end users were uncooperative due to all being afraid that computerization of their workflow would mean they'd lose their jobs. We on the other hand were all afraid that Zork would cost us ours.

Funny thing is that Zork and Compute! magazine with their Basic programs and snippets to type into your Atari 400/800 is what got me thinking I wanted to work with computers when I got older. Now I am seeing the finish line in my career in IT, and I got to say it *WAS* a good field to be in, not so much now a days. That grievance is for another thread... maybe.

 

[lizkat]

Funny thing is that Zork and Compute! magazine with their Basic programs and snippets to type into your Atari 400/800 is what got me thinking I wanted to work with computers when I got older. Now I am seeing the finish line in my career in IT, and I got to say it *WAS* a good field to be in, not so much now a days. That grievance is for another thread... maybe.

I actually leapfrogged from "executive assistant" to "computer programmer" to systems analyst and on up through both biz and tech ladders in infotech as the industry developed, but there were no computer science majors when I'd been in college. If you were lucky later on, like in the early 1970s, your company wanted to dislodge a raft of then pretty pricey consultants for some in-house workers (funny how times change on that score, eh?) and so shipped you off to software vendors' classes, all expenses paid...

But my original launch point was from skipping a coffee break and instead looking over some consultant's shoulder one afternoon, as she sat at a teletype machine in the offices of what passed for a hedge fund (back in the slow-go trading of that era). She was typing in code corrections to a set of portfolio management modules we ran online with a time sharing arrangement, then recompiling and running some tests.

Well I knew a little Fortran from having worked at an actuarial firm, and this consultant had just put in a fix to one of those modules, but she was next fixing up code for some reports that were done in COBOL.

That stuff sure God looked like plain ol' English to me, with a spattering of simple enough logic.

I watched what she was putting in to correct her prior interpretation of our specs for those reports, and a lightbulb went on in my head:

Sh^t, I could do that... ​

Yeah, and for 3x the pay, too: I was on my way to an infotech consulting firm not long after.

Without that little bit of curiosity during a coffee break, on an otherwise slow day of ordering Treasuries to soak up whatever cash had settled into our clients' portfolios overnight, I'd probably never have discovered the joys of Zork. There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.

 

[Yoused]

some reports that were done in COBOL

Will you please be careful with the profanity?

 

[rdrr]

I actually leapfrogged from "executive assistant" to "computer programmer" to systems analyst and on up through both biz and tech ladders in infotech as the industry developed, but there were no computer science majors when I'd been in college. If you were lucky later on, like in the early 1970s, your company wanted to dislodge a raft of then pretty pricey consultants for some in-house workers (funny how times change on that score, eh?) and so shipped you off to software vendors' classes, all expenses paid...

But my original launch point was from skipping a coffee break and instead looking over some consultant's shoulder one afternoon, as she sat at a teletype machine in the offices of what passed for a hedge fund (back in the slow-go trading of that era). She was typing in code corrections to a set of portfolio management modules we ran online with a time sharing arrangement, then recompiling and running some tests.

Well I knew a little Fortran from having worked at an actuarial firm, and this consultant had just put in a fix to one of those modules, but she was next fixing up code for some reports that were done in COBOL.

That stuff sure God looked like plain ol' English to me, with a spattering of simple enough logic.

I watched what she was putting in to correct her prior interpretation of our specs for those reports, and a lightbulb went on in my head:

Sh^t, I could do that... ​

Yeah, and for 3x the pay, too: I was on my way to an infotech consulting firm not long after.

Without that little bit of curiosity during a coffee break, on an otherwise slow day of ordering Treasuries to soak up whatever cash had settled into our clients' portfolios overnight, I'd probably never have discovered the joys of Zork. There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.

I envy the folks that can write code. I can read and troubleshoot a lot of what is out there, but I couldn't write myself out of a paper bag. For some reason I understood hardware and server OS much better, and that is where I spent my better part of my career. Now I go to meetings where everyone just views me as a dinosaur, because everything runs in the cloud. I lost the will to politely remind them that the cloud is full of hardware, not to mention the roads getting to them. Instead I look at picture of cats on my phone. j/k

 

[lizkat]

Will you please be careful with the profanity?

RPG u !!

 

[Nycturne]

There was no other game short of Crystal Quest (later, on a Mac) that ever sucked me in to point of ending up late to work or thinking I might get canned for playing on the job.

I had to go back and look it up, and wow, there's a version on Steam now. There goes my evening.

Will you please be careful with the profanity?

Where's the facepalm reaction emoji?

Random aside: one of my earliest real jobs was a contract job to translate some ALGOL to an app that would run on Windows. A simple internal tool used by a local company. The system it originally ran on used 48-bit words, and so I translated the code pretty literally when I probably didn't need to, building some utility methods to allow for data structures made up of 48-bit integers. But it was the first full "app" I wrote as a teen.

 

[lizkat]

I had to go back and look it up, and wow, there's a version on Steam now. There goes my evening.

I think I might be too old for Crystal Quest by now! I'm more into slow-go games like Pocket Frogs, which comes in handy while waiting on the phone to talk to a human being in a customer support center.

 

[Nycturne]

I think I might be too old for Crystal Quest by now! I'm more into slow-go games like Pocket Frogs, which comes in handy while waiting on the phone to talk to a human being in a customer support center.

Apparently the new version is still 32-bit, so I guess I won't be playing it again soon.

 

[Cmaier]

FTC suing to block the acquisition.

F.T.C. Sues to Block Microsoft’s $69 Billion Acquisition of Activision

The move by the commission signals an aggressive stance by federal regulators to thwart the expansion of the tech industry’s biggest companies.

www.nytimes.com

 

[lizkat]

FTC suing to block the acquisition.

Could feel just a bit late to the plate after years and years of yawning through buy-ups and shutdowns...

 

[Nycturne]

Could feel just a bit late to the plate after years and years of yawning through buy-ups and shutdowns...

True. But I think the heat is on more now that we're seeing the final stages of a duopoly here. All the third parties have been consolidating, and now the two biggest platform owners are buying up the consolidated third parties.

 

[lizkat]

True. But I think the heat is on more now that we're seeing the final stages of a duopoly here. All the third parties have been consolidating, and now the two biggest platform owners are buying up the consolidated third parties.

Yah... the stage right before the stage after which one lame dog sez if ya can walk here, I'll bite ya.

 

[diamond.g]

It is looking like MS is going to get the green light for the merger/acquisition.