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

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.