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> I don’t fault them for making most of these mistakes. C was a rather new language at the time. In the 90s? It was 20 years old by then and mostly ruling the

• kibwen 5y ago
  Not on game consoles, and perhaps not even for PC games more generally (hedging my bets in case Walter Bright waltzes in and starts talking about how he wrote Empire in C in 1972 or something :P ). It wasn't until the mid-90s that C ate the game industry. Recall that C wasn't standardized until 1989, that C compilers weren't free or ubiquitous or good, that plenty of now-forgotten contemporaneous languages existed, and that making entire games in assembly was still quite popular and liable to get you better performance anyway.
  • tambourine_man 5y ago
    Interesting. I didn’t know console’s market was so different. 90s PCs were dominated by pascal and C variants on the OS and app front, with a tiny bit of assembly sprinkled here and there.
    • MBCook 5y ago
      I believe the Nintendo 64 is the first Nintendo console where using C started to become prevalent. I’m not sure about the Saturn or PlayStation. But I know the 16 bit consoles were usually assembly because they had such a limited resources.
      • lynguist 5y ago
        I don’t know about the Saturn, but the PlayStation is the first mainline console that I know that had a C SDK and games were written in C on it. The first Nintendo handheld to use C was the GameBoy Advance which was also the first Nintendo console that had an ARM processor. It’s true that C only really took off in the 90s while the 70s and 80s are more of a proto-C era which still built the entire Unix system.