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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
This was also the case with indie games around roughly 2008-2012. Didn't last for long though!
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.
> 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.
Well the sun is still going to explode one day
My game YOYOZO (Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023") was made in 3 weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936
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.
Except that is basically the same as winning the lottery jackpot in what regards making a living out of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I made video games on the coco in early 80's and when I saw Zaxxon on the coco I was pretty impressed (which I'm pretty sure Steve Bjork wrote).
There was a lot of graphics and movement in that game for the power of that cpu, more than the games I was writing.
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.
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.
It's not too late to take on a daring, creative project that stretches reasonable resource limitations.