Time marches on...

Wow... what can I say... WOW! As of the 1st of August I've been in the games industry for 20 years. 20 YEARS!! Who would have thought it. My mum said it was a waste of time and I would never amount to anything (okay, she was still right but..), and back then it was such a bedroom industry that you almost knew everyone that ever coded a game. These days, I've never heard of any of them!

*sigh* happy days. We has some great times at DMA, the early days being by far the best - it was just so much fun back then! Thats not to say some of the later days weren't good too, but hardware is just so boring these days - powerful, but boring. Just about anyone and his dog can make a reasonable game now, and that takes away much of the art that you needed to do really cool things.

I did a little test at work recently and was able to draw 1,000,000 lemmings faster than we could draw 100 on the Amiga. 1,000,000!!! That covers a 1280x1024 screen 195 times over!! or to put it another way, imagine a SNES with 3,900 parallax playfields, and STILL have enough grunt to draw 1,600 sprites! Amazing power. But what do we do with it? CPU's are now so powerful, it's like having over 500 SNES per CPU - and I have 4 cores on my machine!

So much has changed, and a little of the fun has gone. Now and then you get some of it back, a little bit of fun optimisation still brings a tear to eye as you remember the fun you used to have pouring over a few lines of assembler while trying to get a single cycle off. I sit and watch all these new boys, and shudder at the waste in their coding, memory, cpu power, disk space, network bandwidth... all of it. They don't seem to spend as much time thinking about these things as we old timers do, and the sad thing is, they probably don't have to. Sure a little more care would work wonders, but CPU's are actually made to help average coders. Thats a sad fact of life, the world is full of average or less than average coders, so all the clever folk at Intel, AMD, ARM all work away to make things run faster for them. but this leaves the few of us left struggling to find the fun we lost.

Still, it's not all bad. Some new hardware is always around the corner, and your mobile phone is now more powerful than even the old consoles. Look at the iPhone. Really nice bit of kit, and fun to code for. Languages have changed too, and I've (almost) given up assembler for the likes of C# as it's just faster to work in. I've had some hard leassons to learn here though, giving up memory management is still a sore point but it does make life simpler for most tasks, but I really miss knowing where every byte of my program has gone.

It's sad I guess. I'm a man stuck in the past. On the one hand, I'm trying to hold on to the fun I had in the very first days of coding, while on the other, I try to use all this new power as best I can, and teach these new boys thing or two while I'm at it. It's now all about bridging my experiance, learning from the past to bring forward old ideas and use them in new contexts.


So will I be here in another 20 years? Who knows... I suspect I'll still be coding in some shape or form. It still has the same lure as it did when I first sat down in front of a ZX81 and black and white portable TV as a 13 year all those moons ago. But what will change in the next 20 years? or even the next 10? More CPU cores I guess, bigger badder machines, easier to program and just perhaps, a little more fun.

Lets hope...



Anyway, heres some of my career highlights I've enjoyed...

• 1989 - Ballistix is released - My first game!
  
• 1990 - Blood Money on the C64 is released.
  
• 1991 - Lemmings
  
• 1994 - Lemmings 2 SNES
  
• 1994 - Uniracers
  
• 1995 - Writing various prototypes and trying out several game ideas.
  
• 1996 - Minus4, my first emulator!
  
• 1997 - GTA, particually the 3Dfx version.
  
• 1999 - GTA 2
  
• 1999 - I left DMA and moved to Visual Sciences at Head of Reasearch and Development.
  
• 1999 - XeO3, a small on going project begins...(still not finished!)
  
• 2000 - Internal debugger for the PS1 based on an Action replay, along with some fun on the PS2.
  
• 2000 - F1 2000 on the PS1
  
• 2001 - F1 2001 on the XBOX
  
• 2001 - I left Visual Sciences and moved to Simian Industries as Technical Manager.
  
• 2005 - Moved to Realtime Worlds after Simian went poop to prototype some ideas.
  
• 2005 - Various tech demos for an undisclosed project.
  
• 2006 - Russ joined me at RTW and my project team doubled in size.
  
• 2006 - Actually started to use C# in anger.
  
• 2006 - Huge scale tech demo. Great fun.
  
• 2008 - Rewrite and an even bigger scale demo - pretty cool.