4 ms·

Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free t

Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.

muzani 11y ago
10 programmers and no source control sounds like a recipe to make this even worse than it had been.
kabdib 11y ago
Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later. Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division). Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is very tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game). If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.
- kabdib 11y ago
  One fine day someone in the Home Computer marketing division decided that "Games involving shooting things are bad, we're going to stop making them." Six months later there were massive purges in marketing. Not soon enough, IMHO. I might respect a moral position, but mayyyybe you should have a business plan to back up your moral stance (if that plan is "We're going to go out of business because our resolve is strong" then, okay, I'll respect that too -- but say it so we can at least have a discussion about your continued employment). The games that resulted from that decision were horrible and never even paid for their development.
Sharlin 11y ago
I don't think there even existed a concept of a multi-programmer gamedev team back then. When your whole application must fit into eight kilobytes of assembly with zero room for separation of concerns, it's very much a Mythical Man-Month situation. Like Brooks noted, nine women can't make a baby in one month.

muzani 11y ago

10 programmers and no source control sounds like a recipe to make this even worse than it had been.

kabdib 11y ago

Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later. Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division). Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is very tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game). If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.

kabdib 11y ago
One fine day someone in the Home Computer marketing division decided that "Games involving shooting things are bad, we're going to stop making them." Six months later there were massive purges in marketing. Not soon enough, IMHO. I might respect a moral position, but mayyyybe you should have a business plan to back up your moral stance (if that plan is "We're going to go out of business because our resolve is strong" then, okay, I'll respect that too -- but say it so we can at least have a discussion about your continued employment). The games that resulted from that decision were horrible and never even paid for their development.

Sharlin 11y ago

I don't think there even existed a concept of a multi-programmer gamedev team back then. When your whole application must fit into eight kilobytes of assembly with zero room for separation of concerns, it's very much a Mythical Man-Month situation. Like Brooks noted, nine women can't make a baby in one month.