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IGDA executive director resigns, joins China's Tencent
Gordon Bellamy, the (now former) executive director of the International Game Developers Association, has stepped away from the post to join Tencent, the popular Chinese online social service. Bellamy will remain on the IGDA's board (where he was before he took the executive director post), but will step away from day-to-day operations. Dustin Clingman, the current board chair, will take over in the interim until a new director can be found.Tencent runs a number of popular online social and gaming services in China (including the world's largest online community, QQ), and has recently been putting together a collection of ties to major Western gaming companies. Bellamy's Twitter account now lists him as the Director of Business Development and Industry Relations at Tencent. According to his recent tweets, he's "excited for Tencent" and is "looking forward to working with the world."
The Game Archaeologist and the NeverEnding Quest: Your journeys
I have to say, this month's been everything I'd hoped it would be for EverQuest. As with many of these older MMOs, my working knowledge of EQ was spotty and anecdotal at best, and I'm personally glad to rectify that. EverQuest's always felt like a "You had to have been there" club to me, one that stopped accepting members a long, long time ago. It's great, therefore, to see that there's a thriving community, a rich history and an uplifting future in store for the game. Above everything else, I've come to realize just how crucial EverQuest was -- for better or worse, depending on your perspective -- to the development of the MMO genre for the past decade or so. If SOE never created EQ, just how different would our games be today? It's incredibly hard to imagine. As we continue our EQ month here at The Game Archaeologist, we have two things on the immediate agenda. The first is to share a few of your personal journeys that you emailed my way, and the second is a look at how you can plug in with EverQuest if you've never done so in the past. It turns out, quite fortuitously, that this is looking to be one of the best times to do so. Read on, courageous gamer!
Flash on the iPhone, in demo form
Flash has finally made its way to the iPhone, with the help of some sneaky developers. The open source Gordon project, hosted over at github, has provided a JavaScript-powered Flash runtime. With it, you can actually load and view Flash's .swf files, even on the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser. I gave it a try earlier today and was delighted to find that several Flash demos ran fine on my 3GS, no jailbreaking or other installation necessary. Admittedly, this is a very preliminary build, that supports just these SWF tags. Also, to make this work, Flash developers will need to encapsulate the SWF into an HTML wrapper, importing the Gordon JavaScript source and then loading the swf, as shown here. I am not a Flash expert by any means, but this seems like a pretty cool development for any iPhone enthusiasts who would be interested in seeing the platform support that technology. At this point, there's not much to show for it besides a few demos (and who knows what Apple will think about this), but at least there's a currently viable way to run and view Flash on the iPhone. Thanks, August Joki. And yes, the project name is apparently a riff on Flash Gordon
Gordon Flash Decompiler
Whether you're a seasoned Flash dev or a merely getting your feet wet as a budding Flashlet, Gordon Flash Decompiler might be worth a demo download. As its title so cleverly connotes, Gordon can chew on just about any Flash SWF (and now with version 1.7, Shockwave files) you find around the internets and not only display the movie elements, but it can export both vector and raster images, as well as MP3 and AIFF sound files. Basically: this lets you steal peek inside those hot 'n spicy Flash/Shockwave movies you're procrastinating too much of your time on for the ultimate in 'how did they do that?' experiences.Gordon doesn't come cheap, however, as it's $59 for a license. A demo is available, though exporting any resources and saving files is disabled until you pony up.
