I have five kids, (ranging from three to eleven years old) and while they do sometimes play video games, (the four year old is almost better at MarioKart Wii than me, and he's only been playing it for less than a year!) my focus for them this year has been primarily Legos. We made a point of scavenging all of my old Legos from my parents house just a couple of months ago, and we purchased hundreds of dollars worth of new Legos for Christmas. And you know what? While only a couple of them have had any kind of a lasting interest in video games, every single one of them is perfectly happy to sit down with a pile of bricks in front of them, for hours on end.

I think there is just something intrinsically satisfying about building something with your own hands. Legos capture that in a simplified "child friendly" form like nothing else I've experienced in my own lifetime. So no: I won't focus specifically on those "vintage" video games... but I will be searching the web for PDFs of my old Lego kit instruction manuals. (So far, I've only found one... the official Lego site doesn't go far enough back in their archive. Yet.)

Scrum in-and-of-itself isn't really critical to the issue I was attempting to address; I was only using it to help illustrate that development teams do not have unlimited resources. Scrum is simply one of the tools that my particular team uses to organize and prioritize our workload, so that we can appropriately allocate what limited resources we do have. I hypothesized (within the context of the original thread) that Valve likely uses some similar management methodology to organize their own workload.

Also, not every dev shop has a dedicated "maintenance team"... I work in a small dev shop where all of us cross-task to both development and maintenance. So in my case, it's absolutely a given that higher priority tasks (such as new development of a highly anticipated game, for example) would take resources away from lower priority tasks (such as maintenance of a game that's over a decade old, and not bringing in any cash at all for the company).

Disclosure: I am an Apple fan -- but I absolutely will not defend the practice of purging negative comments from community forums. I think censorship is probably the single most frustrating experience anyone can have in a forum, warranted or not. I speak from experience: I've been censored recently as well -- in an entirely different forum, and for reasons which seemed entirely unreasonable to me. Ironically, I had made the egregious error of trying to help.

In responding to a thread about a bug, I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3. I then went on to speculate (and I suspect this is where I went wrong) that as soon as we see a fix to that bug, we should all be on the lookout for the impending release of HL3. A short time later, that entire thread had suddenly vanished from the Steam forum, with no explanation.

And the problem crops up elsewhere as well; forum admins are frequently overzealous, especially when they see something that they view as a potential slight to their corporate overlords. It's a very unfortunate trend, and as I see it, the only way to avoid being unreasonably censored is to post your comments elsewhere, where -- hopefully -- unbiased management will leave your commentary on controversial matters intact. (Slashdot might qualify as such a haven... I know I haven't been censored here. Yet.)

Sounds like somebody might be reminiscing about The Magic School Bus.

I can see by some of the other comments that I'm not the only one who has a qualifier, here. I actually switched over from dial-up to DSL back in 2000 -- but the last time I actually used a modem in any capacity was probably 2006 as a vote auto-dialer, before my wife finally lost interest in American Idol altogether. (Thanks for that goes to Taylor Hicks, for sucking so spectacularly and yet winning anyway. In retrospect, I have to confess that I have somewhat mixed feelings on his winning... at least I don't have to watch the show anymore.)