Virtual Bubble Wrap — M.I.A.

Hello, regular readers and visitors from BoingBoing! [BoingBoing referred to this blog in an entry posted earlier today.]

Alas, I’ve taken down the pages on which Virtual Bubble Wrap lived. I’ve been planning to put them up somewhere, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Luckily, I posted a standalone Windows version last year. You can get it from this entry.

Although BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin says that Cory Doctorow says that I am the father of all bubble wrap game sites, the real credit for Virtual Bubble Wrap should go to its creators, Dave Groff and Kevin Steele (creative directors of Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I got my first job out of university) and its first coder, Karl Borst (also of Mackerel). They created it to be part of The Mackerel Stack, an interactive presentation handed on a single floppy disk. My contribution was re-implementing it in Shockwave for Director so that it could be put onto the web.

I’ve probably mentioned it a million times before, but I’ll do it again: Cory Doctorow wrote a elegy for Mackerel titled Burying the Fish. It was intended for Wired, but never made it to print.