Taito Men Talk Legendary Games

Edge Online has a piece talking with two of the men behind the classic games of Taito company, makers of Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. From the article: "Q: How difficult was it to make the game back then? A: It was very a difficult process. The hardest part was the development of a microcomputer. Microcomputers were hardly used at that time in Japan, so we had to create one from scratch. I could almost say developing the microcomputer was harder than developing the game itself. These days, we have personal computers to rely on, but there was no programming environment back then. So I had to create everything by myself. I created a development device, wrote a part of the game that runs on it, and then created more devices along the way."

Comments

Programming Games Then VS Now

[rubberbando]

In the article, it is mentioned how it was very difficult to be designing the hardware and software from scratch.

These days, we have IDEs, RAD tools, and even Drag n' Drop programming kits.

It really made me realize how spoiled we are as programmers these days which in turn, makes me really admire the hard work and dedication of our fore-programmers.

Retro-gaming Collections

[rubberbando]

I am really loving the release of all of these retro game collections.

I really hope to see more in the near future.

For years, if someone wanted to play some old skool games, they had to resort to emulation. But emulation comes with several of its own issues such as legality, stability, and availability of the roms. Plus you were usually limited to playing them on your PC instead of in front of your TV.

It is refreshing that we can now relive some of classic moments in gaming history using only our current gen console and a tv. The best part is it even comes at quite a bargain. (usually at less than a $1 per game).