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> “In a fast growing market, studios wanted to make it more difficult for competitors to poach talented programmers by keeping their identities hidden. This pra

> “In a fast growing market, studios wanted to make it more difficult for competitors to poach talented programmers by keeping their identities hidden. This practice is why we don’t know exactly who conceived and programmed Aquaventure, along with many other titles from the early ’80s.” I don't think Activision did that. I remember David Crane's name on Activision newsletters and maybe instruction manuals, too. Then of course there is the first Easter Egg ever - Warren Robinett's hidden name in "Adventure", but that supports this statement rather than refutes it.

imdsm 5y ago
Is that why the room of names was created? I can't recall which game it was, but being able to view everyones names within the game when a developer/publisher didn't want them credited.
kgwxd 5y ago
Activision was formed by former Atari employees specifically because they didn't get the recognition they deserved.
- arwineap 5y ago
  Wow, if that's true, then my perception of activision has been wrong for a long time [edit] it is!
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    Oh, don't worry. The Activision you're probably familiar with is the one purchased and revived by Bobby Kotick in 1991.
  - vikingerik 5y ago
    The current Activision and Atari each have nothing to do with the companies from the early 1980s - each shut down and ceased operations long ago, and the name was just bought out by successors.
    - 300bps 5y ago
      Interestingly, Atari was bought by Jack Tramiel who was the founder of Commodore Business Machines that made the Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and more. January 1984, Jack Tramiel essentially got booted out of the company he founded (Commodore). July 1984, Jack Tramiel bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.
      - geoelectric 5y ago
        It's even more interesting. Commodore hired a bunch of ex-Atari people for the Amiga while Tramiel was building his cadre for what became the ST. They basically swapped talent. https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/
        0xcde4c3db 5y ago
        If you squint enough, there's a chain that looks something like this: Atari 2600 => Atari 400/800 => Amiga => Atari Lynx => 3DO. It's not that there's a specific set of people or technological concepts running through all of them, but each one has a strong connection to the next.
        pkaye 5y ago
        There is a lot of similarity between the Atari 400/800 display list and the Amiga copper list given they were developed by the same team.
        HNSucksAss 5y ago
        geoelectric 5y ago
        Think 5200 is in the middle of your first two, since I believe architecturally it was a 400 without a keyboard (or more accurately, the 400 was basically a 5200 with a keyboard). But yeah, that's super interesting too. I skipped Lynx in my console journey so wasn't as familiar with that, but I didn't realize the 3DO (which I did have) was loosely part of the talent family too. But yeah, now that I think about it, I guess Hawkins must have ended up tapping the talent pools freeing up from the ST/Amiga/GS generations since those died out right around the time 3DO was being developed.
  - vanadium 5y ago
    Not only that: "Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer." Growing up, that was the lens I always saw them through (and I had minor addictions to Laser Blast and River Raid, among others), so to see what they've become, well, you know. Not the same in any way from the David Crane days, just as it is with Atari from the Bushnell days through Warner, then Tramiel, then JTS, Hasbro, etc through present day. Days long, long gone. The memories are nice.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      IIRC, Imagic was the second? Demon Attack was, again IIRC, their first, and was visually smashing compared to almost anything else on the Atari VCS at the time.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        LaserBlast dedication page: https://laserblast.neocities.org/ https://laserblast.neocities.org/
        orionblastar 5y ago
        I played Laserblast when I had the chickenpox and I scored one million and all the numbers turned into explanation points. I took a picture but had flash on so it didn't take.
    - DerekL 5y ago
      By the way, David Crane and others are making Atari 2600 games again! https://adgm.us/portal/index.html https://adgm.us/portal/index.html
      - tomcam 5y ago
        They don’t seem to be trying very hard. The Buy button yields, well, suboptimal results
        5y ago
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    You should check out the origin of EA / Electronic Arts. They were really about empowering artists -- the initial concept was pretty highminded and artist-oriented. [Trip] Hawkins had developed the ideas of treating software as an art form and calling the developers, "software artists" [...] Their first such ad, accompanied by the slogan "We see farther," was the first video game advertisement to feature software designers. EA also shared lavish profits with their developers, which added to their industry appeal. The square "album cover" boxes (such as the covers for 1983's M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set) were a popular packaging concept by Electronic Arts, which wanted to represent their developers as "rock stars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts#1982%E2%80%931991:_Trip_Hawkins_era,_founding,_and_early_success The name, "Electronic Artists", flowed from this idea. Incredible to think of, in light of the microtransaction nightmare hellscape seen in most EA software.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      I remember those ads. IIRC, they were two full page spreads in the most popular magazines for the Commodore, and I'd assume for Atari too. As a kid, I was confused why they were showing these people because no other company did this. From that time on, it stuck in my head from that computer games weren't some kind of magic that came down from the heavens but were created by actual humans. While I never wrote games that got published, I started experimenting and playing around with making them myself, which lead to a career in software development.
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
        Yes! Those ads were so inspirational!
        tanseydavid 5y ago
        Will Harvey's Music Construction Set was the first EA title that I ever purchased. They definitely gave this guy the aura of a rock star in the packaging that came with the title.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    Cool origin story for sure, but they're not even close to the same company anymore :)
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paxys 5y ago
Way back in the day at Microsoft it was a common practice to add the author's name, email and a small description of changes in the header comment at the top of source files. Then management started making us scrub all of them before release when vendors/competitors started using our source dumps as their recruiting database.
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  I've seen a fairly old codebase (started in the late 1980s) where the tops of the files have author details and changes but the author details are just initials.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That was common in CVS; there was a macro that'd expand into the entire changelog when you checked files out. …still don't know why you'd want that.
    - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
      Ah right - not sure what version control this project started (in 1989 I'm guessing "none" is a high probability) and I think it recently got moved from SVN to git.
- tryauuum 5y ago
  I am not a programer, but I always regarded this practice as weird. Every time I saw such headers in my company the header would feature a name of some long-gone employee. So no point of knowing the author's name since you cannot reach him for help. And if I really wanted to know the author's name, then git log --follow would help me anyway Nothing but a someone's ego boost and a theft of my screen space
coldpie 5y ago
> Then of course there is the first Easter Egg ever - Warren Robinett's hidden name in "Adventure" Here's a really good video exploring very early Easter Eggs in video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97TfAhDKGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97TfAhDKGk It's not Adventure! (I say this not to "well actually" you, but hopefully give you some fun new info!)

imdsm 5y ago

Is that why the room of names was created? I can't recall which game it was, but being able to view everyones names within the game when a developer/publisher didn't want them credited.

kgwxd 5y ago

Activision was formed by former Atari employees specifically because they didn't get the recognition they deserved.

arwineap 5y ago
Wow, if that's true, then my perception of activision has been wrong for a long time [edit] it is!
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  Oh, don't worry. The Activision you're probably familiar with is the one purchased and revived by Bobby Kotick in 1991.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  The current Activision and Atari each have nothing to do with the companies from the early 1980s - each shut down and ceased operations long ago, and the name was just bought out by successors.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    Interestingly, Atari was bought by Jack Tramiel who was the founder of Commodore Business Machines that made the Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and more. January 1984, Jack Tramiel essentially got booted out of the company he founded (Commodore). July 1984, Jack Tramiel bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.
    - geoelectric 5y ago
      It's even more interesting. Commodore hired a bunch of ex-Atari people for the Amiga while Tramiel was building his cadre for what became the ST. They basically swapped talent. https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/
      - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
        If you squint enough, there's a chain that looks something like this: Atari 2600 => Atari 400/800 => Amiga => Atari Lynx => 3DO. It's not that there's a specific set of people or technological concepts running through all of them, but each one has a strong connection to the next.
        pkaye 5y ago
        There is a lot of similarity between the Atari 400/800 display list and the Amiga copper list given they were developed by the same team.
        HNSucksAss 5y ago
        geoelectric 5y ago
        Think 5200 is in the middle of your first two, since I believe architecturally it was a 400 without a keyboard (or more accurately, the 400 was basically a 5200 with a keyboard). But yeah, that's super interesting too. I skipped Lynx in my console journey so wasn't as familiar with that, but I didn't realize the 3DO (which I did have) was loosely part of the talent family too. But yeah, now that I think about it, I guess Hawkins must have ended up tapping the talent pools freeing up from the ST/Amiga/GS generations since those died out right around the time 3DO was being developed.
- vanadium 5y ago
  Not only that: "Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer." Growing up, that was the lens I always saw them through (and I had minor addictions to Laser Blast and River Raid, among others), so to see what they've become, well, you know. Not the same in any way from the David Crane days, just as it is with Atari from the Bushnell days through Warner, then Tramiel, then JTS, Hasbro, etc through present day. Days long, long gone. The memories are nice.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    IIRC, Imagic was the second? Demon Attack was, again IIRC, their first, and was visually smashing compared to almost anything else on the Atari VCS at the time.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      LaserBlast dedication page: https://laserblast.neocities.org/ https://laserblast.neocities.org/
      - orionblastar 5y ago
        I played Laserblast when I had the chickenpox and I scored one million and all the numbers turned into explanation points. I took a picture but had flash on so it didn't take.
  - DerekL 5y ago
    By the way, David Crane and others are making Atari 2600 games again! https://adgm.us/portal/index.html https://adgm.us/portal/index.html
    - tomcam 5y ago
      They don’t seem to be trying very hard. The Buy button yields, well, suboptimal results
      - 5y ago
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  You should check out the origin of EA / Electronic Arts. They were really about empowering artists -- the initial concept was pretty highminded and artist-oriented. [Trip] Hawkins had developed the ideas of treating software as an art form and calling the developers, "software artists" [...] Their first such ad, accompanied by the slogan "We see farther," was the first video game advertisement to feature software designers. EA also shared lavish profits with their developers, which added to their industry appeal. The square "album cover" boxes (such as the covers for 1983's M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set) were a popular packaging concept by Electronic Arts, which wanted to represent their developers as "rock stars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts#1982%E2%80%931991:_Trip_Hawkins_era,_founding,_and_early_success The name, "Electronic Artists", flowed from this idea. Incredible to think of, in light of the microtransaction nightmare hellscape seen in most EA software.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    I remember those ads. IIRC, they were two full page spreads in the most popular magazines for the Commodore, and I'd assume for Atari too. As a kid, I was confused why they were showing these people because no other company did this. From that time on, it stuck in my head from that computer games weren't some kind of magic that came down from the heavens but were created by actual humans. While I never wrote games that got published, I started experimenting and playing around with making them myself, which lead to a career in software development.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Yes! Those ads were so inspirational!
      - tanseydavid 5y ago
        Will Harvey's Music Construction Set was the first EA title that I ever purchased. They definitely gave this guy the aura of a rock star in the packaging that came with the title.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  Cool origin story for sure, but they're not even close to the same company anymore :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paxys 5y ago

Way back in the day at Microsoft it was a common practice to add the author's name, email and a small description of changes in the header comment at the top of source files. Then management started making us scrub all of them before release when vendors/competitors started using our source dumps as their recruiting database.

jamesfinlayson 5y ago
I've seen a fairly old codebase (started in the late 1980s) where the tops of the files have author details and changes but the author details are just initials.
- astrange 5y ago
  That was common in CVS; there was a macro that'd expand into the entire changelog when you checked files out. …still don't know why you'd want that.
  - jamesfinlayson 5y ago
    Ah right - not sure what version control this project started (in 1989 I'm guessing "none" is a high probability) and I think it recently got moved from SVN to git.
tryauuum 5y ago
I am not a programer, but I always regarded this practice as weird. Every time I saw such headers in my company the header would feature a name of some long-gone employee. So no point of knowing the author's name since you cannot reach him for help. And if I really wanted to know the author's name, then git log --follow would help me anyway Nothing but a someone's ego boost and a theft of my screen space

coldpie 5y ago

> Then of course there is the first Easter Egg ever - Warren Robinett's hidden name in "Adventure" Here's a really good video exploring very early Easter Eggs in video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97TfAhDKGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97TfAhDKGk It's not Adventure! (I say this not to "well actually" you, but hopefully give you some fun new info!)