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by superasn 4750 days ago
Love how most games were mainly a one man show back in the 80s. Jordan Mechner, John Carmack could be used as aliases for the games. Btw, I read a very similar article about Doom / sometime ago about the Magical Square Root Implementation In Quake III, another interesting read[1]

[1] http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/9
5 comments
glurgh 4750 days ago
Carmack's famous games were not developed solo - he developed the breakthrough enabling technology that made the game possible - full-screen sidescrolling on a PC, 3D stuff, etc.

Mechner's games stand out in part because he seems to have done just about everything himself and, especially for the time all the parts are outstanding - the design, the artwork, the 'art direction', the animation, the gameplay. And then he went off and churned them out in 6502 assembly.

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laurent123456 4750 days ago
Another World by Eric Chahi, also reviewed by Sanglard [1] is a great example too. I love how he made all the game engine fits in only 20 KB, with the bulk of the game written in opcodes, interpreted by a VM. That made it very easy to port the game to any platform since there was only 20 KB to convert.

[1] http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php

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vidarh 4750 days ago
Very early 80's maybe, but even a couple of years in most popular games had teams working on them, though not very large ones.

A lot of musicians doing game-music for the Commodore 64, for example, were popular enough in their own right that sometimes publishers would hire them knowing their names would be sufficient to guarantee sales for otherwise mediocre titles. Some of them even perform their 80's game music live today, and there's a whole scene doing remixes of the music.

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jmileham 4750 days ago
Cool. In the comments from that post, there's another article that traces that inverse square root implementation back even further - almost 20 years back at this point:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

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goostavos 4750 days ago
That was interesting! Has he ever said how he came up with the number?
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_j5l3 4750 days ago
It's posted pretty regularly on HN. http://blog.dave.io/2011/10/0x5f3759df-true-magic-number/
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