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Blue Max (1983) was developed by Bob Polin and published by Synapse Software for Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64. You control a World War I plane in an isometric view (those of you who played Zaxxon will feel familiar with the perspective), flying over rivers, roads, and enemy...

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Technical details and the sheer amount of work (and incredible talent) that went into some 80s games completely eluded you as a kid. You simply loved the game and never thought twice about it. Now, being much older, I often find myself looking back at those classics and diving into the technical details: Who created it? How long did it take? Was it a solo project? And most mind-blowing of all: what was the actual size of the game? That last part especially makes my brain melt, and the older I get, the more it sinks in. What those early programmers achieved can only be described as pure genius (and I don’t use that word lightly). Hardware no longer feels like a limiting factor in modern gaming. We have endless megabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage space, and lightning-fast internet. Forty years ago, it was essentially the Stone Age by comparison. An average picture you save on your phone or PC has a size of around 400 kilobytes. It’s just a static image, it doesn’t do anything. Now divide that by ten and you drop to 40 kilobytes. That’s roughly the size of The Last Ninja, developed by System 3 and published almost four decades ago in 1987. It was a single 5.25" floppy disk. I still struggle to comprehend how programmers back then achieved what they did - the incredibly immersive worlds they created under such limitations. I was simply blown away by the graphics (that gorgeous isometric view on the C64, packed with amazing detail) and absolutely mesmerized by the kickass sound. What Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees conjured up musically is an iconic masterpiece that will forever be part of gaming history. And that’s not all! The game also gave you some degree of freedom. It wasn’t strictly linear. You could go back and forth, revisit locations if you missed an item, choose to fight or sneak past enemies, hunt for the right objects and levers to progress, and so on. All of that (and more) in just 40 kilobytes - less than 10% the size of a single static photo on your computer that has zero functionality. Oh, and the cherry on the cake? Often those games were created by people without formal education in the field, they were mostly self-taught. They also didn't have any software tools and libraries like today, they wrote pretty much everything from scratch, going beyond what was thought to be technically possible. As a kid you have no clue. As an adult I still don't have a clue how they did it. But I have a lot more appreciation and admiration for their work. And I am glad I experienced it then and can enjoy it even now.

exQUIZitely 🕹️

18,016 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat