[stella] Clarifications

Subject: [stella] Clarifications
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 09:55:46 -0700
I just want to clarify a couple points here for those who may be confused or a little concerned about the GameDeveloper.Net discussions.

I have no intention of trashing stellalist, exploiting you guys for profit, or calling into question the validity of writing for the 2600 vs. Java applets or Shockwave games.

I apologize for talking about it here if you aren't interested in the idea, but like we discussed a long while ago, I had hoped to do something web-related as far as consolidated 2600 tech information, and there is a desire on my part to centralize things for the sake of convenience and to add more robust back-end support. I wasn't necessarily thinking about a full blown CVS repository, but it's a possibility.

The net result being to provide more functionality to everyone to research, collaborate, and communicate with eachother better, and to open things up more to the general public to see some of the process that goes on here.

The dev tools on the original Stella CD were put there as an EXPERIMENT. Russ, Dan, Jim, and myself wondered to ourselves whether out of the now-convenient way to write and distribute code, and the creation of Stellalist, a little rebirth of 2600 coding might result. It didn't become as big as I had hoped, but it is a small but stable group. I still wonder what might happen if the hobby of 2600 programming were more out in the open, whether it might bring a lot of new blood into the fold. So the part of GDN relevant to Stellalist is very much an extension of that original experiment, to see if this might turn into a bigger, more mainstream hobby by rubbing elbows with the larger group of independent game authors. Don't laugh, it might actually happen, and if it did, I know I would get a real kick out of it. You never know. I never thought so many Vectrex games would ever be written as there were, and that system is far more obscure than the 2600.

Cyberpunks Entertainment is a sole proprietorship. I have no formal business plan for GameDevelopers.Net. I do have contacts and will be doing some schmoozing where opportunities present themselves, but selling the site isn't the reason to do it. (If that were the case, I'd build a porno site.) But I wouldn't want the site to be invisible to the world. I'd like it to be successful, and since it's a side-project, I'd have to ultimately either let it go in order to allow it to grow beyond a certain point, or quit my job to work on it fulltime. I'm not quite optimistic enough about it to think the latter would occur ;)

If it stays small, then I'll just keep paying the $30 some odd bucks a month for the hosting in order to provide this free service to everyone and I won't put banners on (other than maybe some webring and link exchange stuff like I have on the Cyberpunks site).


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