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The Obscuritory
Personal blog · obscuritory.comgamesculturewriting
The Obscuritory is a personal blog at obscuritory.com about games, culture and writing. Since 2017, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “When SimCity Got Serious: Story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Exploring unusual and unknown games since 2008.
Most-linked posts?
- When SimCity Got Serious: Story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-05-19
- Hands-On with Macromedia Director in ScummVM4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-30
- SimRefinery Recovered3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-05
- The Boxes of Hock Wah Yeo3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-03-02
- The Obscuritory - Odd, lesser-known games and software3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-01
- “Secret Writer's Society”, the best way to swear at children in 19982 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-20
- When a re-release gets unreleased2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-10
- A Close Look at SimRefinery2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-06
What Hacker News says?
Phil Salvador wrote an article about the long lost SimRefinery by Maxis Business Simulations, and somebody who read it was able to dig up a floppy disk with the original game! When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ SimRefinery recovered https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/ A close look at SimRefinery https:…
Comment linking /sim/simrefinery-analysis/
on “Factorio 1.0”Submitted SimRefinery Recovered as a story · 723 points
HN discussionI will ask him! It would be great to have the original Mac versions. There are some other weird versions like 3DO and Sega Saturn, but I'm afraid they may be lost in the sands to time. I'm collaborating with some game archivists (like Phil Salvador, who wrote the article about SimRefinery that led to its recovery, and his Video Game History Foundation), and Olde Sküül game developers Rebecca Heineman, who can help p…
Comment linking /sim/simrefinery-recovered/
on “Descent 3 Source Code”Submitted When SimCity Got Serious: Story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery as a story · 366 points
HN discussionThis is fantastic. Not that you’re lacking in ideas, but as you mention the value of simulation I wanted to ensure that you had seen this historical case study: https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs”Submitted The Boxes of Hock Wah Yeo as a story · 71 points
HN discussionIt was litteraly developped by the BS division. >From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “SimRefinery Recovered”Submitted “Secret Writer's Society”, the best way to swear at children in 1998 as a story · 52 points
HN discussionFor those who wondered like me who this software was built for, the answer is in the full article: > The operators at the refinery sometimes had trouble getting a big picture for what was happening at the plant beyond their particular area of focus. “The whole goal if this was to teach operators that they are part of a bigger system,” Skidmore said. “Their concern at the time was that operators tended to be very foc…
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “SimRefinery Recovered”Submitted When SimCity Got Serious as a story · 35 points
HN discussionFrom my vague recollections of the original article, it was actually a sub-division of Maxis that wrote the B2B simulations like SimRefinery. They separated from Maxis and became Thinking Tools, and eventually went public, bringing on a new CEO that took the company into insolvency but not without making all the employees hate the company: 'At the end of 1998, Phillip Whalen gathered the staff together for a final m…
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “SimRefinery Recovered”Submitted Duracell: Run the Bunny (2010) as a story · 24 points
HN discussionSimRefinery was developed by a "satellite" company, "Maxis Business Simulations", so it probably wasn't stored and archived with the rest of Maxis's source code, and may not have even been delivered back to Maxis and archived. And lot of institutional knowledge was lost when EA bought Maxis. There were some old Maxis filing cabinets kicking around the EA offices, and only a few people like Maxis old-timer Mike Perry…
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “SimRefinery Recovered”Submitted A Close Look at SimRefinery as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPhil Salvador and The Video Game History Foundation do great work (simultaneously serious and fun) and excellent research and compelling writing! In his quest to deeply research the evidence, perform interviews with the people involved with Maxis's Business Simulations Division, and document the history of Maxis's long lost SimRefinery, Phil was able to pull off the astronomically unlikely miracle of actually findin…
Comment linking /sim/simrefinery-recovered/
on “The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access”Submitted Hands-On with Macromedia Director in ScummVM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt still sees active development, they keep adding new engines regularly. One of the engine I'm excited about is Macromedia Director [1] which they added initial support for in 2.5.0. That's a big endeavour though so will take time until they add everything needed for full compatibilities with a lot of games. They've also just added support for some of the Dynamix games like Willy Beamish and Heart of China[2] which…
Comment linking /essay/macromedia-director-in-scummvm/
on “Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?”Submitted Hands-On with Macromedia Director in ScummVM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSame here, this article about the designer of the Spectre box put it at the top of mind... https://obscuritory.com/essay/incredible-boxes-of-hock-wah-y...
Comment linking /essay/incredible-boxes-of-hock-wah-yeo/
on “Spectre in JavaScript”Submitted The Obscuritory: Enigma as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Video Game History Foundation is the real deal. https://gamehistory.org/ Their Library Director Phil Salvador is a serious historian, who extensively researched, interviewed people, and wrote a comprehensive deep dive into the history of Maxis's serious games division, Maxis Business Simulations, John Hiles, and SimRefinery. It was such an widely read, well received investigation, that it led to the recovery of…
Comment linking /sim/simrefinery-recovered/
on “Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions”Submitted Hands-On with Macromedia Director in ScummVM as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Obscuritory -- https://obscuritory.com/ -- if you have any interest in the culture surrounding computer games or retrocomputing or even just obscure, weird things in general I can not recommend this enough OS/2 Museum -- https://www.os2museum.com/ Fun With Virtualization -- https://virtuallyfun.com/ The Old New Thing -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing The Byte Cellar -- https://bytecellar.com/ McMansi…
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on “Ask HN: Favourite blogs?”Submitted Capitalism Plus as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIndeed. The "gayme" one you mention is called Caper in the Castro, and is considered one of (if not the) earliest known LGBTQ video games. https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/
Comment linking /adventure/caper-in-the-castro/
on “Why Hypercard had to die (2011)”Submitted Marble Drop as a story · 2 points
HN discussionShould this link be replaced with the original source? Ars Technica linked to the original blog post in the first paragraph, and the rest of the article summarizes the original source. Here's the blog post in question: https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “Maxis’ former “serious games” division (2020)”Submitted When a re-release gets unreleased as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSun City is absolutely not an appropriate tool for modeling societal policy. One of the original authors, Will Wright, gave an interview many years ago expressing his horror when he found out that city planners were doing precisely what you suggest. Quote: “I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999. But that didn’t stop com…
Comment linking /sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
on “Poor parents receiving universal payments increase spending on kids”Submitted When a re-release gets unreleased as a story · 2 points
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