I'll be honest, this was helpful for me even as someone who lives about 2km from the Quebec border. I was uncertain as you don't often see it in the Hacker News context.
The other factor that might be in play is that the people who made great games got lucky and didn't really know exactly what made their games so good and aren't able to recapture the magic.
It's a combination of all those things really. There's also a lot of people in commercial game development that get stuck in their thesis of success when the market has moved on.
In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.
And then you have Jeff Vogel, who has spent roughly 2/3 of his career literally remaking the games he first released 30 years ago. And I've literally bought them all.
This is a really interesting idea. I'd never put this together myself, but its really compelling. It really shows the value of the phrase "history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme".
I'm from Ontario and its very simplified in my experience as well. Maybe the problem is the sample audio clips they have are all 'posh', its not how most people speak. Two large examples I can think of that even have their own wikipedia pages are the Ottawa Valley Twang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Valley_English) and the 'Torontomans' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_slang). I grew up in Toronto, and the latter isn't just something funny you see on tiktok, people actually talk that way.
People are already correcting you, but I find it hard to read this much into the case of this particular text. We'd need to know the full context to what exactly happened, but they might have chosen to sacrifice the catalog for many reasons, not just because of an anti-scientific bend. Maybe it was one of many copies that they held, yet the other ones didn't survive.
We also need to consider that these sorts of texts did survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.
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