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

[–] Redkey@programming.dev 10 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape

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?

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

You couldn't crank your CPU in the olden days, it'd make games run in fast forward.

[–] candyman337@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game