Iain Mew

It started during the pandemic, March 11, 2020. It ended on May 9, 2024. I was already trying to learn Unity, but it was hard to find the spare time – freelance artist life is a twelve-hour, seven-day-a-week endeavour. When the lockdowns came, I tried to treat it like a long residency. At the time, I was working on a game about my job at Best Buy during the 2008 financial crisis. I’m not much of a 3D modeller, so I found someone online who had painstakingly recreated those periodspecific store layouts. I reached out over email in hopes of purchasing the models. “I’m looking to re-create my experience working in retail,” I wrote, “for an art project.” I added, “It was an important time in my life.” Silence. Two weeks later, I emailed him again, under a new email account. “Your assets are stunning,” I wrote, “I would love to use them to virtually showcase my upcoming products in a store context.” “Dear Jordan,” he responded, “this is exactly why I created these assets!!” We were in business.

It, too, is eclipsed by its afterword in the book by @remysiu.com. I am almost embarrassed that he's chosen to trust me with an essential text for understanding 1000xRESIST (and so much more)

I failed to think about the groups and now see that my second and third choices are in the same horrendous group

I'm in

#TheTenx5 Day 31

IU - Sogyeokdong
(2014, 🇰🇷)
12 POINTS

OG K-pop star Seo Taiji wrote a great melancholic synthpop song about growing up in the shadow of dictatorship. Then he gave it to a singer-songwriter barely older than he had been back then, and the result was timeless alchemy

ICYMI, this week my post was on Leader Board. Read about:

- how Access changed tack as “sports games are traditionally popular in the US and England”.
- its technical tricks like a hole that shrinks when hitting from nearer
- reviewers finding it made other golf games look "clumsy and antiquated"

Its UK chart peak (#3) happened in 2011 thanks to X Factor, which has to have helped boost the number of younger people still listening to it

I also loved this and hearing it in its official place (at the start of a badminton bronze medal playoff) it sounded even more ludicrous and brilliant

#TheTenx5 Day 30

GDJYB 雞蛋蒸肉餅 - Double Nono
(2014, 🇭🇰)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_oe...

Hong Kong 'math-folk girl band' with something beautifully haunted

The FIFA World Cup: Corruption, fascism, predatory gambling, etc

The POP WORLD CUP: Bangers from around the world! Joy! Fully democratic voting processes!

Kind of spectacular how our early 10s chart rules meant she jumped right from
- not big enough for this to be #1 (she wasn't quite a one hit wonder previously, but her second biggest hit was a #22 as a B.o.B guest)
to
- too big and unconcered with release schedules for "Shake It Off" to reach #1

#TheTenx5 Day 29

Kero Kero Bonito - Sick Beat
(2014, 🇬🇧🇯🇵)

A precise time capsule, released as a single a month before both Gamergate and "Shake It Off" changed its context completely. It remains a very fun sardonic take on video games and gender, in two languages, over a sick Super Mario 64 beat

Öoo A Bomb Caterpillar's Big Adventure!

Öoo is now available on Nintendo Switch! 🎉
If you have friends who don’t own a PC, I’d really appreciate it if you could recommend the Switch version to them! 🐛💣
www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/...

#TheTenx5 Day 28

Skepta ft. JME- That's Not Me
(2014, 🇬🇧)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xQK...

Perfectly crafted humblebrags, nostalgic backdrops visual and musical, and just the pleasure of hearing the two of them together

“It’s a pity I played Golf Construction Set before polishing up my clubs for Leader Board” wrote Bohdan Buciek in Commodore User. “It’s like playing pitch and putt after the US Masters.” Golf Construction Set doesn’t let you see your golfer swing, or give you anything like as big a view of what you’re looking at, though. And, of course, a lot more people do play pitch and putt than reach the level of dedication required for the US Masters. Alongside a heavy promotional push from U.S. Gold, eager to regain their reputation after the World Cup Carnival fiasco, the comparison, perhaps, worked well in Leader Board’s favour. Like Sid Meier with submarines, Access may not have produced the most accurate simulation of golf, but they managed to locate the fun in simulating it.

www.superchartisland.com/leader-board

A golfer wearing white takes a putt on Leader Board on Commodore 64. The player name is Mew.

A golfer wearing grey takes a putt on Leader Board on Commodore 64. The player name is Mewtwo.

This is where I get to show my naming approach when getting screenshots of hotseat multi-player games

www.superchartisland.com/leader-board

Let's go ahead and re-boost this for the morning crowd; a very good look back at the original Leader Board for C64.

After the computer locates the data it needs to construct island #10 properly, a brown ring is drawn at water level to represent the base of the island. More brown rings are rapidly added to the figure until the island reaches a height of 24 inches. The final ring is drawn green, and filled in with the same shade of green. Believe it or not, getting the green outline to fill was one of the toughest problems we had during the evolution of the game. Other graphics are added once the islands are completed. R Carver: When we constructed the islands on the screen, we had the option of leaving the screen blank until the drawing was completed or letting the user observe the scene taking shape right before his eyes. We chose the latter because the process is somewhat entertaining to watch. In the Amiga version, the drawing of the updated picture has been totally eliminated. After each shot has been completed, the new image immediately appears on the monitor.

I was just reading an interview with the makers of Leader Board about the same thing and why they decided to do it that way (at least on the original C64 version)

The way that the original PCjr release of King's Quest (1984) draws and then 'paints in' each scene element in the same way that golf games and graphic text adventures often do due to technical limitations is very pleasing to watch.

A golfer wearing white takes a putt on Leader Board on Commodore 64. The player name is Mew.

A golfer wearing grey takes a putt on Leader Board on Commodore 64. The player name is Mewtwo.

This is where I get to show my naming approach when getting screenshots of hotseat multi-player games

www.superchartisland.com/leader-board

Leader Board – “72 holes” After the international success of war game Beach-Head, Bruce Carver was in a position to grow Access Software. He didn’t have too far to look for help. Just as Bruce had originally learned to prog…

After the success of Beach-Head, Bruce Carver was joined at Access Software by younger brother Roger, fresh from working on flight sims. So soon they they did the logical thing and made a golf game. It went quite well! New post on Leader Board:

www.superchartisland.com/leader-board

The Story of Leaderboard Golf | The Commodore 64 Game That Changed Golf Sims YouTube video by C64 Appreciation Society

Watched a lovely video on Leaderboard a few weeks ago: youtu.be/p_bBkKo8b74?...

It's interesting that there's a direct evolutionary line from the original Leaderboard through Links and on to modern simulators for indoor golf.

March 1st Welcome back readers. Thanks for the shout-out, Edwin : ) And a huge thanks as well to our community at large. Over the last few days you have rallied and helped to put us back into the black. If t…

This week: A staggering 30 articles, encompassing queer theory, spectrum games, communities of play, fangames, and a whole lot more. The Game Boy Color comes up more than once:

critical-distance.com/2026/03/01/m...

Leader Board – “72 holes” After the international success of war game Beach-Head, Bruce Carver was in a position to grow Access Software. He didn’t have too far to look for help. Just as Bruce had originally learned to prog…

After the success of Beach-Head, Bruce Carver was joined at Access Software by younger brother Roger, fresh from working on flight sims. So soon they they did the logical thing and made a golf game. It went quite well! New post on Leader Board:

www.superchartisland.com/leader-board

#TheTenx5 Day 27

Indiana - Solo Dancing
(2014, 🇬🇧)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSrk...

The decade's most breathtakingly intense pop song about dancing on your own (unless you take your lead from the video, in which case it's about... something else)

Starting to get my hopes up that Labyrinth might make it in

#TheTenx5 Day 26

Pet Shop Boys - Love is a Bourgeois Construct
(2013, 🇬🇧)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7w0...

+ my Singles Jukebox write-up from 2013

Oh wow, she is probably the biggest *just forgot completely* omission from my list. Although I would likely have gone for "All That Matters"

SGGG Segagaga: Sega gaga “Now is the time to save Sega with your own hands!” declares the back of Segagaga’s box, although in hindsight it seems a little mean to imply anyone still buying new Dreamcast ga…

Anyway!

Segagaga's packed with heart, humour, and humanity. It's a guttering candle in the night. A defiant middle finger. A rebellious peek behind the curtain. A fond farewell. An honest record of mundane troubles.

A wonderful game:
kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2020/07/25/s...

Dave - Black YouTube video by Santan Dave

#TheTenx5 HM 5/5

Dave - Black
(2019, 🇬🇧)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDUP...

An article from The Guardian in June 1988. "Last week, Gallup's computer games chart was topped, for the first time, by an Atari ST title, Out Run, from Sega-US Gold. Not only is this the first ST game to head the "Chartalk 50", Gallup researchers think it is the first time the leading title has not been a Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64 game. [...] How many of last week's Gallup All Formats Combined Top 40 run on each machine? The Spectrum runs all 40. Then it goes: Amstrad CPC (36), Commodore 64 (35), Atari ST and Commodore 16 (9 each), Atari ST and Commodore 16 (9 each), Atari 8-bit (7), MSX (6), Amiga (5), Acorn Electron (4), Acorn BBC and IBM Pc (3 each). There are no entries for the Commodore Vic 20, Commodore Plus 4 or Sinclair QL."

An article from The Guardian in August 1988. "The latest virus confounded many thousands of home micro owners last week. This was not, of course, a real virus, but a new game by David Braben, co-author of Elite. Virus first appeared just over a year ago as Zarch on the obscure Acorn Archimedes. But when British Telecom's Firebird brought out the Atari ST version uner its new name, it went straight to the top of Gallup's Chartalk Top 50. (Spectrum and Amiga versions are to follow)"

Excellent video! The UK charts really bear out that the ST was well ahead in 1988, when the first 16-bit games to reach #1 on the individual formats chart were on the ST