Michael Brough

What this underscores is the sheer danger of market consolidation in gaming. While companies like Valve and Epic do not legally have to carry a game, to not do so is functionally a death knell for that game on the PC; Santa Ragione has said it threatens the studio’s continued existence. This is not equivalent to a theater chain declining to carry a movie; this is two (mostly one) American companies more or less deciding what content is commercially viable across most of the world, in ways that are somehow more vague and opaque than the MPAA. This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business. Horses cannot be the ceiling for what is artistically and commercially possible in games, because otherwise we are in deep horseshit.

Chris Person takes a look at Horses, "the indie game that is too scandalous for either Valve or Epic, is only beyond the pale if you're not familiar with any other art form" (quoted from the article blurb).

aftermath.site/horses-indie...

At least read this paragraph:

Here’s my Spotify Wrapped 🎵✨

incredible sentence here

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

yeah mentorship! been thinking a lot lately about how even tiny little bits of that helped a lot, and it feels like there "ought" to have been more but the **industry** just doesn't work like that, and now i'm old and esteemed and.. still just trying to make it, not with space to mentor others

YouTube video by smestorp rl celebration - The Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction: bonus ending

oh hey my @roguelike.club talk is up on youtube
"The Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpX2...
i messed up and didn't fit in everything i wanted to say so i recorded a few minutes extra:
youtu.be/MRd3xu7nkF8

yes! thank you very much

yes this eggplant business is what has spurred me to finally cleaning up some of this mess. website/blog will be updated (but i already did plenty for today! take a break michael)

gathered together some of my old games that had fallen off the internet
smestorp.itch.io/lots-of-mich...

thanks to @zaratustra.bsky.social and the internet archive i've got them all!

(for completeness, the only game that's missing is VERTEX VORTEX REMIX CORTEX which was never on the internet, just part of indie royale bundle)

i've found those now too!

Dog is a gamer

Does anyone happen to have a copy of any of the games I've listed on my website as "released but no longer hosted"? (the bottom 14 www.smestorp.com)

blog post - year of me
mightyvision.blogspot.com/2025/11/year...

The Secret Lives of Games: All Systems Brough - Introduction We're joined by Frank Lantz (Q-UP) and Mare Sheppard + Raigan Burns of Metanet (N++) for the first episode of All Systems Brough, a year-long exploration of the work of Michael Brough. We share our th...

BIG NEWS:

We are no longer Eggplant. We are, simply:

The Secret Lives of Games

AND ALSO:

We've launched the first episode of All Systems Brough, a year-long, one-a-month series exploring the work of @smestorp.bsky.social. Join us and play along!

secretlives.games/all-systems-...

YouTube video by smestorp michael in the forest 045 - catch up

video - update
youtu.be/Z-CZ0w5poUY

3yo: i’m going to win!
6yo: it’s not a game that’s about winning and losing…
3yo: yes it is! i win!

replying to an email with some "integrate our sdk to spam your players with ads" bullshit "Hey I need to be really clear about this: by propagating ads, you are doing are doing harm. You are psychologically harming the individuals who view the ads by distracting and stressing them. You are polluting the internet as a whole and making it a less useful tool. And you are harming yourself by being someone who would do such a thing. Please stop."

haha yeah “YOU ought to do what feels good to ME” mmhm

what feels good is honestly an exemplary guide to lots of life (e.g. do i feel good about my job? if no, time to quit it. what to do instead? well, what do i feel good about?)

turns out not to generalise to literally everything, but on balance a lot of people could do with weighting it a bit more

funny how it’s never people who actually studied maths who you find using spurious attempts at quantification to justify fucked up ethics

..actually not that funny put like that

SO the wine cellars beneath this abandoned mansion in bordeaux...

the main one is “you forget a spell when you cast it”, but people have talked a LOT about that already & i wanted to draw attention to the rest of the system too (spells are discrete, nobody has the tech to make new ones anymore), possibly i counterbalanced too far for ppl not already familiar

@colewehrle.bsky.social good talk

the concept of a book of spells is very ancient, but old spells are more like recipes: you can make adjustments to them, there’s room for interpretation - indeed they‘re often unclear enough that there’s no way to “follow them exactly”, you HAVE to interpret.

no Vance is way before 1950 - those stories were published in the pulps several years before (it’s hard to find the dates now) and it’s just the compilation of several into a book that was 1950

celebration | Michael Brough Get more from Michael Brough on Patreon

www.patreon.com/posts/celebr...

Q-UP on Steam Sick of long queues, unfair matchups, and arbitrary reflex tests? Try Q-UP, the coin flipping eSport. It's one part clicker, one part multiplayer strategy game, one part demented capitalism simulator,...

We made a new game. It’s called Q-UP. It’s a coin flipping eSport. There’s a free demo! store.steampowered.com/app/3730790/...

I robot screenshot

Screenshot of Beyond Sunset

868-Hack

In my indie game “Beyond Sunset” the blue security programs are a reference to the Atari arcade game “I Robot”. The purple security programs are a reference to the strategy game 868-HACK.