I was once working for a startup formed by ex-Microsoft employees from DirectX team. I was part of a team to port Mortal Combat Deadly Alliance from Nintendo Ga

I was once working for a startup formed by ex-Microsoft employees from DirectX team. I was part of a team to port Mortal Combat Deadly Alliance from Nintendo GameBoy Advance(GBA) to a very innovative Linux phone developed by the startup. I(as well as most of the team members) had no game development experience. We ported the game to the Linux mobile phone. The phone had no graphics acceleration and had very puny CPU and 16MB RAM :) The GBA though puny was custom built for games. So obviously our port was dismal in performance. We were getting 15fps and we were given a target of atleast 25fps so that it could be demoed to investors and at E3. We were able to pull it up to 23fps with various optimisation. But the hard requirement was 25fps. So the team met with the senior mangement to discuss the status. In the meeting one of the team members asked, "How did the game on GBA achieves 60fps with such low spec hardware?" and one of the management member(who was technical) said "Game developers(at the company that originally developed the game) have devilish minds." What he was saying was that game developers are highly resourceful in getting performance out of every last bit. Some of the current game developers have lost that art because most of the games that are developed by these developers are on top of some massive framework. One classic example of what level of understanding of the platforms earlier game developers had was to look at the very well known function from Quake for inverse square-root: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root