I’m not talking about comparison to modern expectation; I’m saying that devs were scrappier, had less established frameworks of design and technology, and still created a beautiful cultural moment
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it’s time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it’s unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it’s a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).
I’m not talking about comparison to modern expectation; I’m saying that devs were scrappier, had less established frameworks of design and technology, and still created a beautiful cultural moment
Yeah, I mostly agree with that.
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it’s time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it’s unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it’s a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).