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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.
by 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 agoEric 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 agoYou 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 agoAgreed! 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.