[HN Gopher] Six Game Devs Speak to Computer Games Mag (1984)
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Six Game Devs Speak to Computer Games Mag (1984)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-07-11 18:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
| afavour wrote:
| A fun read. I often wish I were programming back in that era,
| instead of where we are today, tasked with implementing tracking
| pixels, banner ads and upsells. But who knows, maybe I would have
| been driven insane by the resource limitations.
| ldargin wrote:
| It's not too late to take on a daring, creative project that
| stretches reasonable resource limitations.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This was also the case with indie games around roughly
| 2008-2012. Didn't last for long though!
| glimshe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Well the sun is still going to explode one day
| misschresser wrote:
| 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.
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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.
| stevoski wrote:
| 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.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Interesting (possibly?) story about one of the devs interviewed
| here, Steve Bjork:
|
| Steve wrote a lot of software for the first computer I had access
| to which was my father's Tandy Color Computer. We didn't have
| much money so we couldn't afford luxuries like a disk drive and
| commercial software on a ROM pack was a rare gift.
|
| One of the handful of ROM paks we had was a game called
| "Popcorn". It's opening screen proudly displays "By Steve Bjork"
| ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSL4dGhJhHo ). As an 8 year old
| kid, I thought it was a funny name. I'd often call my little
| sister a "bjork" and she would predictably yell back "no, you're
| the bjork!". It was a bit of a family joke for some years.
|
| Fast forward 25ish years and I started participating in "retro
| computing", reliving some childhood memories and had fun writing
| some new software for my first love. I participated on the
| community forums, helped with some open source projects and
| eventually found that Mr. Bjork was still active and creating
| projects for this old computer. I traveled to the annual "last"
| cocofest where Tandy nerds still gather and got to meet him. He
| was extremely kind and we had interesting discussions. We even
| collaborated on some projects. It was surreal to be working with
| this "legend" from my early childhood.
|
| Sadly, Steve passed away in 2023. He was truly a sweet and
| capable man who gave a lot to the community for years after any
| commercial opportunity had passed.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It's interesting to see a mention of "The Arcade Machine" (1982)
| and its creator here. This wasn't exactly a game but rather an
| early version of what we call "fantasy consoles" (like PICO-8 and
| TIC-80) today. That is, an environment for making games by
| combining sprites, sound, and code.
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