/vr/ - Retro Games

Post interesting articles or stories of retro game development.

Just found this one today. Its a long read, but very interesting especially considering its basically the beginning.
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/First-Hand:The_Development_of_Pong:_Early_Days_of_Atari_and_the_Video_Game_Industry

Here's one of the most interesting parts for me, as a computer science person:
>Well, finding a manufacturer was not a simple matter. Nobody was doing custom chips for other people, ASICs basics weren't involved. At the time Silicon Valley was full of semi-conductor factories. Ironically there are very few of today. AMD, Sygnetics, there were a lot of companies around. We got the design rules from about four of these companies, and we distilled a universal design rule that would work with any of them. Now, Carver Meade calls it Lambda design rules, but we did it on our own. We made one set, and we owned our own tool. People did not do that then. If you wanted a custom chip you would go to a semiconductor company and their engineers would design it, and you have to buy it from just that company. And we, for some reason, didn't do that; we designed our own chip; we had our own front end; we owned the artwork. Our first vendor, our supplier, who agreed to do it for us was AMI. Initially, we thought maybe 50,000 - 100,000 a year was a reasonable estimate of the production volume. We really didn't know. The chip ran at 3.5 megahertz. This was back in 1973, '74. CMOS was very, very slow; it was used in watches and calculators.

>The one that gets me is the popular belief that there is a microprocessor computer involved. Everybody assumes it. They want to know what was the code like for Pong. There is no code because there really was no microprocessor. The 4004 had come out, and it was an interesting device, but it certainly couldn't do anything at the video speeds that we had. So these were all just digital circuits hard-wired to make Pong.

>Can games age badly
No, anybody who states this is a blundering fucking idiot, and a dumb cunt. If you appreciated a game back in its relevancy (199X) or even (198X) but all of a sudden you don't, the game has not fucking changed. Not at all. YOU have changed.

I do agree that games face an interesting uphill battle, as they have (aesthetically/audibly) changed more rapidly in a fifteen year period than other comparable mediums (film/art/literature). Technology and video games are intricately tied, so perhaps, it is well to say the technology to express and enhance the video game medium has grown, but even this is debatable. Call of Duty Black Ops 2 beats the pants off Doom in every conceivable notion of "tech", so I guess Doom's aged badly (LOL).

One has to ask what does
>AGE BADLY
mean.
That new games have features so common place that to play the "older" versions invokes tedium or even boredom?
That visuals were terrible even -then- and you knew it -then-, but tolerated it, so it still..aged?

Video games are not fucking wine nor are they food that rots and decays. Stop being cunts, enjoy your damn vidya, or go ride a dragon dildo.