#oneaday Day 830: Original Creators

Over the last… year or so I guess? I've started to get a lot more people randomly showing up in the comments of my videos on YouTube — and of those commenters being the original creators of the games I cover. Most recently I had Simon Hunt, author of Diamonds and Dan Strikes Back, show up, and previously I've had one of the authors of Time Bandit for Atari ST, someone behind an Atari User listing and probably a couple of others I've forgotten along the way, too.

It's a real delight any time this happens, and any time the Internet threatens to overwhelm you with its rancid, sewage-filled nature, it's worth remembering that the same tech that allows 12-year olds to go "on god my oomf fixed this pedo's art /gen" and inexplicably be taken seriously by someone also allows people to connect in ways that we would have never dreamed possible a decade or two back.

When I was first playing Diamonds on my Atari 8-bit, I loved it, but I never would have imagined that one day its creator would be sending me a message saying how nice it was to see me enjoying his game many years after its original release — and indeed admitting that he was never very good at his own game in the case of Dan Strikes Back.

That's pretty awesome. And, as I say, as sites like Twitter slip deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling, rancid trash fire, it's worth remembering that the Internet is a much, much bigger place than social media might make it seem sometimes. In fact, as time goes on, it's feeling more and more like social media is just that weird side of town where the general public inexplicably seems to enjoy hanging out, even though it's a complete shithole. As in real life, the real value is in curating smaller, more specialist communities and enjoying the company of people who aren't blithering idiots.

To put it another way, I'd much rather be hanging out at the local Atari users' group than standing on a street corner smoking and drinking Special Brew until I vomit in the gutter.