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My whole childhood in the 80s was writing video games at home. It's all I wanted to do. I was really fucking good at it. First job out of school - writing vide

My whole childhood in the 80s was writing video games at home. It's all I wanted to do. I was really fucking good at it. First job out of school - writing video games professionally. It sucked. Really sucked. This was back in the mid-90s when the profession was in a really bad place. I got out within 2 years and never went back :( I heard the industry was much better now, though? This is the game I worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje...

zabzonk 5y ago
> I heard the industry was much better now, though? Perhaps get a hearing aid? It's extremely toxic.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
I hope, as with the original article author, that you find a way to rediscover your childhood passion in a form that works for you today. It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches. Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone. Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls. You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It's also not unusual that even someone absolutely in the top 1% of the industry by one or more measures when relatively young just doesn't recapture the magic as companies change, consumer tastes change, etc. And even if they stay in the industry and talk at GDC and so forth, it's just not the same thing.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. What's weird to me is that I feel like we're in a gaming dark age. How can that be if gaming engines make everything so much easier? The single player game I probably played the most last year was MicroMages, a game written in 2019 for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Somehow it was more captivating to me than say, GTA Online. Some of my other fondest memories of games were very, very obscure games with text graphics that aren't even well known among people who play games with text graphics. All made by lone hackers.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    I think a major reason for this stagnation in games and movies is that limitation breeds creativity. When you have a very restricted computer, your creative brain feels challenged and inspired, but when the world is at your fingertips, you have to work a lot harder to find inspiration. Combine that with high budgets and big teams (high price of failure) and you have a recipe for stagnation.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  > I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. That game had a 3D engine I wrote from scratch in two weeks (the game suddenly changed from 2D to 3D overnight), and it had a multi-channel audio engine I wrote in C++ that was way over the top for the game's need and I shaved a whole yak there.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I've heard Robolox is a nice place to work and every other gaming company is a little better than it was in the past because they have to be.
- McKayDavis 5y ago
  That’s partially due to that fact that Roblox is a platform and is not a gaming company. It’s a different business model and culture that isn’t subject to the vagaries of the games industry. (And yes, it’s a great place to work!)
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    They are kind of both right? Like Steam and Epic. Roblox is a game. It is also a platform. But I see what you are saying. The model is very different from a typical game studio.
    - McKayDavis 5y ago
      Not really. Roblox the company doesn’t actually publish games (or experiences as we prefer to call them). Valve and Epic both develop big titles in-house. Whereas Roblox’s experiences are developed by entirely separate entities.
      - AlwaysRock 5y ago
        Roblox isnt a game that the company Roblox makes?

zabzonk 5y ago

> I heard the industry was much better now, though? Perhaps get a hearing aid? It's extremely toxic.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

I hope, as with the original article author, that you find a way to rediscover your childhood passion in a form that works for you today. It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches. Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone. Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls. You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.

ghaff 5y ago
It's also not unusual that even someone absolutely in the top 1% of the industry by one or more measures when relatively young just doesn't recapture the magic as companies change, consumer tastes change, etc. And even if they stay in the industry and talk at GDC and so forth, it's just not the same thing.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. What's weird to me is that I feel like we're in a gaming dark age. How can that be if gaming engines make everything so much easier? The single player game I probably played the most last year was MicroMages, a game written in 2019 for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Somehow it was more captivating to me than say, GTA Online. Some of my other fondest memories of games were very, very obscure games with text graphics that aren't even well known among people who play games with text graphics. All made by lone hackers.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  I think a major reason for this stagnation in games and movies is that limitation breeds creativity. When you have a very restricted computer, your creative brain feels challenged and inspired, but when the world is at your fingertips, you have to work a lot harder to find inspiration. Combine that with high budgets and big teams (high price of failure) and you have a recipe for stagnation.
kingcharles 5y ago
> I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. That game had a 3D engine I wrote from scratch in two weeks (the game suddenly changed from 2D to 3D overnight), and it had a multi-channel audio engine I wrote in C++ that was way over the top for the game's need and I shaved a whole yak there.

AlwaysRock 5y ago

I've heard Robolox is a nice place to work and every other gaming company is a little better than it was in the past because they have to be.

McKayDavis 5y ago
That’s partially due to that fact that Roblox is a platform and is not a gaming company. It’s a different business model and culture that isn’t subject to the vagaries of the games industry. (And yes, it’s a great place to work!)
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  They are kind of both right? Like Steam and Epic. Roblox is a game. It is also a platform. But I see what you are saying. The model is very different from a typical game studio.
  - McKayDavis 5y ago
    Not really. Roblox the company doesn’t actually publish games (or experiences as we prefer to call them). Valve and Epic both develop big titles in-house. Whereas Roblox’s experiences are developed by entirely separate entities.
    - AlwaysRock 5y ago
      Roblox isnt a game that the company Roblox makes?