[pjmlp]

During 8 bit days, all games that mattered were written in Assembly.

During the 16 bit days, Pascal, Basic, C, Modula-2, AMOS were the "Unity" of early 90's game developers, with serious games still being written in Assembly.

The switch to C occurred much later at the end of MS-DOS lifetime, when 386 and 486 were widespread enough, thanks success like Doom and Abrash books.

Easy to check from pouet, hugi, breakout, Assembly or GDC postmortem archives.

[BubRoss]

The person you replied to said that C was the language of choice for speed and not rivaled by pascal or basic. What games were written in pascal or basic and known to be competitive with other high end games of the time?

[pjmlp]

This kind of speed?

"Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."

-- Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Back to your games list,

Most strategy games from SSI used compiled Basic and Pascal based engines. Only at the very end did they switch to C / C++.

Apogee has written several games in Turbo Pascal.

The games released by Oliver Twins on the BBC Micro, using a mix of Basic and Assembly. Which then eventually found Blitz Games Studios.

If one considers OS having the same performance requirements as games, Apple's Lisa and Mac OSes, written in a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly.

Also related to games, Adobe Photoshop was initially written in Pascal before going cross platform.

EDIT: Forgot to add some demos as well,

Demos from Denthor, tpolm.

Anything from Triton and first games from their Starbreeze studio.

[MaxBarraclough]

> C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.

How is C to blame for universities not teaching compilers?

[BubRoss]

You didn't list any actual game titles, just game makers.

Also quoting someone saying that C destroyed the ability to make compiler optimizations is a little strange when that has been at the core of most software for decades. It's bizarre how much you try to argue about things with mountains of evidence to the contrary.

[beagle3]

While I don't necessarily agree with his claims, it is true that there's a huge gap of about 10-15 years between when FORTRAN compilers did some optimizations and when C compilers were able to do them (and only if you properly annotated things with __restrict, etc). I used FORTRAN77 compilers in the early 1990s that did vectorization / pipelining of the kind C compilers started doing in the last decade.

The main reason, though, is that in FORTRAN, the aliasing rules allow the compiler to assume basically anything, whereas C has sequence points and a (super weak) memory model which don't. But I wouldn't say it is C's fault.

[pjmlp]

Apparently going into the history of the games produced by those game makers is asking too much.

That someone has done more for improving the computing world than either of us ever will.

See that is is the thing with online forums, I tell my point of view and personal lifetime experience, someone like you will dismiss it, then I reply, you dimiss it again as not fitting your view of the world, ask for yet another set of whatever stuff, and I will just watch Netflix for what I care, as I have better things to do with my life than win online discussions.

[BubRoss]

Saying C stops optimizations is a preposterous claim in the modern era, credentials of someone quoted from decades ago have nothing to do with that.

It's hilarious that you would try to make that claim and then expect someone to buy into it.

Write whatever you want on your resume, it doesn't change reality.