One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
To be fair, unlocking the frame rate on console-to-PC ports still fast-forwards many games including Nier: Automata or breaks the physics like in Skyrim.
It doesn’t have to be this way, any more, but it still is because… Lack of expertise?
I really can’t think of anything else?
Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There’s a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
You couldn’t crank your CPU in the olden days, it’d make games run in fast forward.
To be fair, unlocking the frame rate on console-to-PC ports still fast-forwards many games including Nier: Automata or breaks the physics like in Skyrim.
It doesn’t have to be this way, any more, but it still is because… Lack of expertise? I really can’t think of anything else?
Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game