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Another World was _astounding_ when it came out. Although the Amiga was considered a high spec machine at the time, its graphics hardware was oriented around sc

Another World was _astounding_ when it came out. Although the Amiga was considered a high spec machine at the time, its graphics hardware was oriented around scrolling, sprites, and rectangular blits. This is good for the typical platformers and shoot-em-ups that dominated gaming at the time but useless for the type of full motion video the AW was attempting. The Amiga's blitter could write almost 4Mbs per second (if you set things up juuuust right and you had the wind behind you). On a modern monitor (a modest 1920 * 1080) the Amiga's blitter would take almost 2 seconds just to clear the screen.

the_af 7y ago
It was astounding back then and in my mind still is a work of art. Like Fabien says, its limited palette actually worked in its favor. The evocative graphics still remain some of my favorites, ever. It's one of my most replayed games ever. Even when I know the plot and there are no surprises, this game manages every time to take me to... (cue music) ANOTHER WORLD.
henrikschroder 7y ago
I think the coolest part about many games from this time period is how vastly differently they were developed compared to modern games from modern game studios. "...it is the original version built from 1989 to 1991 by then 21 years old Eric Chahi working alone in his bedroom." Because he got royalties from an earlier game, and that paid enough for him to take on this project. And he did pretty much everything except the music: Programming, graphics, story, box art. One dude. One 21yo dude. In his bedroom. And he wrote a VM! He wrote his own bytecode! He wrote his own VM host in assembly!! And then he wrote the game in his own bytecode!!! And then you have the people who ported games in this time period, who often got nothing to work with. No code, no comments, no assets. Disassemble the thing yourself on a platform you might know very little about, and re-write the thing on a platform you do know a lot about. You get a couple of months. Chop chop, the publisher is waiting. And if you haven't read Jordan Mechner's journals of him writing Prince of Persia from the same era, you should. It's equally bananas. And impressive.
- armitron 7y ago
  Eric Chahi (and Jordan Mechner) undoubtedly have genius-level IQs which is to say that they stood apart even in that time period. The more important thing to note is that the brutal constraints of the day and the extremely high bar to entry acted like a pre-sorting mechanism but also fueled the best and brightest to exceed their perceived limitations and unleash their creativity. Compare and contrast with today, where the low bar to entry has led to a proliferation of garbage-level work (on all levels, not just games) that tends to not only drastically decrease SnR but calibrate the "standard". When everything looks like mediocre garbage, this is what everyone expects.
  - sbarre 7y ago
    You take the good with the bad. There may be more "garbage" work as you put it, but that's because there is more work overall, likely by several orders of magnitude.. And with that still comes some gems to go along with the garbage, so in the end, we win.
- sbarre 7y ago
  Agreed! I also enjoy that we still have a modern-day version of small indie developers (sometimes also one-person teams) building and shipping games. It is of course a different landscape today and most small or single-person teams are working with an engine like Godot, Unreal or Unity (or many others), but given the increased complexity (and capability) of the underlying hardware, this sort of makes sense.

the_af 7y ago

It was astounding back then and in my mind still is a work of art. Like Fabien says, its limited palette actually worked in its favor. The evocative graphics still remain some of my favorites, ever. It's one of my most replayed games ever. Even when I know the plot and there are no surprises, this game manages every time to take me to... (cue music) ANOTHER WORLD.

henrikschroder 7y ago

I think the coolest part about many games from this time period is how vastly differently they were developed compared to modern games from modern game studios. "...it is the original version built from 1989 to 1991 by then 21 years old Eric Chahi working alone in his bedroom." Because he got royalties from an earlier game, and that paid enough for him to take on this project. And he did pretty much everything except the music: Programming, graphics, story, box art. One dude. One 21yo dude. In his bedroom. And he wrote a VM! He wrote his own bytecode! He wrote his own VM host in assembly!! And then he wrote the game in his own bytecode!!! And then you have the people who ported games in this time period, who often got nothing to work with. No code, no comments, no assets. Disassemble the thing yourself on a platform you might know very little about, and re-write the thing on a platform you do know a lot about. You get a couple of months. Chop chop, the publisher is waiting. And if you haven't read Jordan Mechner's journals of him writing Prince of Persia from the same era, you should. It's equally bananas. And impressive.

armitron 7y ago
Eric Chahi (and Jordan Mechner) undoubtedly have genius-level IQs which is to say that they stood apart even in that time period. The more important thing to note is that the brutal constraints of the day and the extremely high bar to entry acted like a pre-sorting mechanism but also fueled the best and brightest to exceed their perceived limitations and unleash their creativity. Compare and contrast with today, where the low bar to entry has led to a proliferation of garbage-level work (on all levels, not just games) that tends to not only drastically decrease SnR but calibrate the "standard". When everything looks like mediocre garbage, this is what everyone expects.
- sbarre 7y ago
  You take the good with the bad. There may be more "garbage" work as you put it, but that's because there is more work overall, likely by several orders of magnitude.. And with that still comes some gems to go along with the garbage, so in the end, we win.
sbarre 7y ago
Agreed! I also enjoy that we still have a modern-day version of small indie developers (sometimes also one-person teams) building and shipping games. It is of course a different landscape today and most small or single-person teams are working with an engine like Godot, Unreal or Unity (or many others), but given the increased complexity (and capability) of the underlying hardware, this sort of makes sense.