Yeah, Steve shut down Dexterity Software a little while ago. Really a shame because he had some good articles there and some halfway decent games (even though they are a little dated by todays standards). Probably just too costly for maintenance for him to bother.

You got a reply from the man himself, Scott! Maybe I should leave him more trackbacks myself

Of course I don’t believe that I was the only person who used the term ‘lateral’ growth, but it’s a term I’ve been using for some time and I was simply surprised to hear another person use it without reference to a posting I’ve written. I feel the need to explain my usage of the terms in each post I write about them, but it seems that people intuitively understand them, so perhaps I don’t have to.

I’m sorry to say I don’t read your web site — I subscribe to only a handful of feeds (currently just 8 total). I did see your trackback this morning though, which is what brought me here today.

I didn’t realize the term “lateral growth” was something you’d coined. It just seemed like a good descriptive term to use. When I wrote that article, I was thinking that lateral growth implied breadth while vertical growth implied depth. I could have said “sideways growth,” but the word lateral sounded more elegant. To be honest I don’t see a lot of other ways to describe the concept, so I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that we described it the same way.

In 1998 I wrote a PC shareware shoot-em-up game called BrainWave 2. The enemies in the game used some AI to evolve new powers, and I named one of those powers “lateral thrust” — it allowed enemies to thrust sideways to dodge your missiles. The game is pretty outdated now, but it’s still available here:
http://www.dexterity.com/brainwave2/

So my lateral fetish dates back many years. Maybe it’s a left-handed thing.