A bit of history...

[Staryn]

[For those unfamiliar with these games]

This is the legacy as best as I remember. Back in around 2001, a game called Chart Wars was made by Rob Cooper, which was a record company simulator. Very basic interface, I think it was done in Pascal. It developed a following and a modding community, and became the basis of Osiris Games. Rob made two more Chart Wars games (although CW2 was never actually released), then a few other designers joined Osiris and made games with similar concepts. Osiris was sort of a link between of couple of these developers, like Nino Arndt and Damien Russell.

Between the two of them, we got things like Gamebiz: The Magical Years, which simulated a video game company in the rise of home gaming, and Myrtilus' Bestseller, about an aspiring author's rise to fame.

While the series that started it all, Chart Wars, is defunct, sadly, and Rob Cooper has moved on to other things, Osiris' legacy continues with games like Showtime.

Now I just need to actually get a copy and play it...

[Myrtilus]

Thats us in a nutshell :) I know these games arent for everyone but we all enjoy making them. Text-based games are a dying breed... but I'll always have fond memories of being a teenager and learning how to write code and playing Chart Wars 1 in MSDOS and just killing hours in it. That game by the way was written in Pascal. When Rob was making Chart Wars 2 the game was abandoned half way through because he had capped the memory limitation of Pascal and so started Chart Wars 3. So that game was released but was only half finished.... so much fun though.

[Staryn]

I know I had a lot of fun with the CW2 betas. I still remember when I discovered the first game, on some freeware site shortly after it came out. I ended up playing it all night, until the next morning. I was using Windows ME at the time, which had a glitch with the game that made it unplayable after a year and a half, so I just kept starting over. Good times...

[Myrtilus]

lol Yeah me too; the glitch that crashed the game after a year and a half was really annoying but you'd just start all over again. Looking back its quite sad really lol But so much fun.

[Staryn]

Heh, maybe sad, maybe not. It was a lot of fun. It was better once I figured out how to get work around that. I used the editor to add myself and some friends from high school, and a few fictional people as artists, and we'd have huge hits in the game. It was awesome.