3 ms·

The spirit of coding was different then. It felt like you could sit in a room with an idea and 4 months later have something people would be keen to play, even

The spirit of coding was different then. It felt like you could sit in a room with an idea and 4 months later have something people would be keen to play, even pay for. What a time to be alive as a coder...

ido 1y ago
This was also the case with indie games around roughly 2008-2012. Didn't last for long though!
- glimshe 1y ago
  And what is common between these 2 eras? I'd say that a market hungry for new content met the people who could deliver it. In both instances, technology enabled the production, consumption and distribution of the new content (the Steam era is a revolution in the ease of distribution and production, while in the 80s there was a revolution in ease of production and consumption). Now there's a glut of content. Will another opportunity ever appear again? In both cases, the opportunity didn't look good at first.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    > Will another opportunity ever appear again? With AI we might go through an era of sameness and/or slop leaving the door open for something more genuine. Everything is cyclical.
    - DiscourseFan 1y ago
      Well the sun is still going to explode one day
- misschresser 1y ago
  indie games are still a hugely important part of the industry, Peak is a recent great example of a small team making something fast that is novel and successful.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Except that is basically the same as winning the lottery jackpot in what regards making a living out of it.
- msephton 1y ago
  My game YOYOZO (Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023") was made in 3 weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936
Joeboy 1y ago
Writing machine code without an assembler and having to reload everything from cassette every time it errored felt... sort of fun but also extremely frustrating. I think most actual commercial software was written on hardware that was out of reach for most of us. Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.
- RaftPeople 1y ago
  > Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model. Ya, I was a teenager at the time wanting to buy a computer but apple was about $1200. The color computer was only $399, so I saved for a long time then bought one and learned programming and how to make video games.
stevoski 1y ago
A ton of games in the 80s did miserably. Yes, there were some big hits created by one person in four months. But there were plenty that were didn’t do well at all.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Indeed, but they weren't being released at the same rate as they are nowadays worldwide via digital stores. As gamer in the 1980's, I only cares about what could actually get on a few shops around my hometown, and they were mostly games coming out from UK, and Iberian Penisula. With the Amiga, German and French studios also became relevant. Everything else was almost inexistent. Also arcades had what they had, owners weren't changing games all the time.
pjmlp 1y ago
Depends, we only had the local library, some books we could acquire and computer magazines listings as source of knowledge. I certainly did not felt that great manually translating Z80 opcodes into DATA entries, to be loaded via RANDOMISE USR instructions. Got a bit better with hexdump editors, but good luck tracking down checksum errors. Finally, debugging meant manually simulating the execution on paper, with arrows and boxes, to try to get a feeling of what could be root cause for the error. Yeah, what a time.

ido 1y ago

This was also the case with indie games around roughly 2008-2012. Didn't last for long though!

glimshe 1y ago
And what is common between these 2 eras? I'd say that a market hungry for new content met the people who could deliver it. In both instances, technology enabled the production, consumption and distribution of the new content (the Steam era is a revolution in the ease of distribution and production, while in the 80s there was a revolution in ease of production and consumption). Now there's a glut of content. Will another opportunity ever appear again? In both cases, the opportunity didn't look good at first.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  > Will another opportunity ever appear again? With AI we might go through an era of sameness and/or slop leaving the door open for something more genuine. Everything is cyclical.
  - DiscourseFan 1y ago
    Well the sun is still going to explode one day
misschresser 1y ago
indie games are still a hugely important part of the industry, Peak is a recent great example of a small team making something fast that is novel and successful.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Except that is basically the same as winning the lottery jackpot in what regards making a living out of it.
msephton 1y ago
My game YOYOZO (Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023") was made in 3 weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936

Joeboy 1y ago

Writing machine code without an assembler and having to reload everything from cassette every time it errored felt... sort of fun but also extremely frustrating. I think most actual commercial software was written on hardware that was out of reach for most of us. Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.

RaftPeople 1y ago
> Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model. Ya, I was a teenager at the time wanting to buy a computer but apple was about $1200. The color computer was only $399, so I saved for a long time then bought one and learned programming and how to make video games.

stevoski 1y ago

A ton of games in the 80s did miserably. Yes, there were some big hits created by one person in four months. But there were plenty that were didn’t do well at all.

pjmlp 1y ago
Indeed, but they weren't being released at the same rate as they are nowadays worldwide via digital stores. As gamer in the 1980's, I only cares about what could actually get on a few shops around my hometown, and they were mostly games coming out from UK, and Iberian Penisula. With the Amiga, German and French studios also became relevant. Everything else was almost inexistent. Also arcades had what they had, owners weren't changing games all the time.

pjmlp 1y ago

Depends, we only had the local library, some books we could acquire and computer magazines listings as source of knowledge. I certainly did not felt that great manually translating Z80 opcodes into DATA entries, to be loaded via RANDOMISE USR instructions. Got a bit better with hexdump editors, but good luck tracking down checksum errors. Finally, debugging meant manually simulating the execution on paper, with arrows and boxes, to try to get a feeling of what could be root cause for the error. Yeah, what a time.