151–160 of 213 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NES set an awful precedent that we're still dealing with today.
What precedent was that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM
Did I guess correctly?
Sidenote, somehow googling "youtube video nintendo marketing video game crash analysis boys" had the video I was thinking of at the very top.
Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have ma…
On a project like this, adding people to it will make it later. The 2600 is a different beast from something that you can divide-and-conquer using APIs and so forth. A typical commercial 2600 game is a holistic, byte-shaved monster piece of spaghetti code, full of tricky timing and other traps. Hard to imagine that any collaboration would have resulted in a better game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have ma…
Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.
Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division).
Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is very tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game).
If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.
If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad. Perhaps you meant it was good compared to what happened before, or compared to what it would have been if people didn't make games. But a reasonable guess is good compared to today, which is an implicitly negative comment about today's programmers. I think the reply was quite reasonable - it doesn't make sense to glorify the past when the present has massiv…
If programming from one era was good, why do you think that means programming from another era "must be bad"? Why can't good programming exist in both eras?
> But a reasonable guess is good compared to today
If you insist on guessing there's more to my final sentence, why isn't a reasonable guess, "as well as non-amazing programming back then" or "just as there is amazing programming today"?
Another contender for the title of worst video game: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was critically panned. The game's criticism is largely directed at its "blatantly unfinished"[2] state: lack of collision detection and frequent violation of the laws of physics, frequent and major software bugs, poor visuals, and severe lack of functionality. As a result, the game is now widely regarded as one of the worst video game…
There's a long list on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_fo... A close friend of mine worked on PaintBrawl, which made the list (#2.11). PaintBrawl is a first person shooter but used paintball guns since WalMart wouldn't carry violent video games in the 90s.
Some amazing takeaways from the article: - 5 weeks development time, one person. - 5 mio 1980-USD marketing budget. - 4 mio units produced - 1.5 mio units sold The units probably listed at 15-20 USD (corresponding to 50-60 USD at today's prices) and cost around 5-6 USD to produce. Amazing facts if you have any idea on how the game industry work today. In particular the little resources spent at development stands out…
Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!
> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex." Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
Have a look at .kkrieger - a beautiful 3D ego shooter from 2004 in 96 kilobytes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger Screenshot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#/media/File:Kkrieger...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind. Perhaps they could have ma…
Atari didn't have source control. AFAIK, it just didn't exist. The VAX or DG mini that most people used for cross-development was probably being backed up at least weekly, but if you accidentally wiped out something important, like all of your source code, you were likely hosed. On a project like this, adding people to it will make it later. The 2600 is a different beast from something that you can divide-and-conquer…