8bitrocket 5 Year Anniversary : Throwing Up the Past and Top-10 Of Everything We could Think Of

Today is our 5 year anniversary. It’s been a roller-coaster-ride-kinda-year here at 8bitrocket Towers, with many ups and downs, sharp turns and thrills, but at the end of the ride, we just feel like throwing up.

When we started 5 years ago, there were almost no sites talking about making games in Flash. We got a lot of traffic from game making tutorials (Blitting!). There were also very few indie game developer blogs at the time. For a while, Simon Carless at Gamasutra.com picked-up our feed and spread many of our stories around the world (Mid-Core Gaming Anyone?).

We played with being a game portal, general news site, retro game site, and finally settled on what we are now: whatever *this* is. There is no real way to define 8bitrocket.com except to say that it is a reflection of 8bitsteve and 8bitjeff and everything we love about games and game development, writing about game development and life itself. We’ve mostly tried to keep it positive. sure, we got snarky a few times with Mochi Flash games, social games, and few other things, but we tried to keep it on the “positive and constructive feedback” side as much as possible. We decided early-on that if we were going to review things, they would be things we “loved”. That is is why most of the reviews you see here are for books and games that we like.

As a summary of the past 5 years, here are some top-10 lists that relate to the site. Thanks for helping us make this what it *is*, whatever that may be.

Top 10 Pieces Of Content (all are tutorials)

10. Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #3: Bitmap Collision Detection (26, 433 page views)

9. Tutorial: Preloading Actionscript 3 (AS3) Games in Flash CS3 27,877 page views)

8. Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #2: Asynchronous key detection for arcade games. (32, 226 page views)

7. Tutorial: Using Flash CS3 and Actionscript 3 to create Atari 7800 Asteroids Part 1 (33, 641 page views)

6. Tutorial: AS3. The basics of tile sheet animation (or blitting). (35,662 page views)

5. Tutorial: AS3 Basics – How to use library sounds in AS3 (42,556 page views)

4. Creating Custom Events In Flash AS3 (ActionScript 3) (44, 576 page views)

3. Tutorial : Creating an Optimized AS3 Game Timer Loop (45, 077 page views)

2. Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #1: Tile Maps, XML, and bitmapData (58, 629 page views)

1. Actionscript 3: Tutorial – BitmapData rotation with a matrix (66,028 page views)

Top 10 Editorial Pieces (non tutorial)