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The Making of Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64
Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."
Ghostbusters took six weeks!
And that was one of my favorites back on the C64. It was very addictive. This really shows it's the overall creativity and playability that matters most in a game, not necessarily the complexity or graphics.
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
Developers: We can use your help.
"First, if you want to design a game around a licence, you have to be very careful. The best strategy is to design an original game that would stand alone even without the licence. Our original theory was that a licensed game should be a great game first, and a licensed game second. The success of the Ghostbusters game reinforced our belief - that was clearly the right way to go."
if only others thought this way...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Back then, you played a game longer than it took the people that made it to code it!
Today, you can already feel lucky when you get a week of fun for every manyear invested.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One of the compromises made in adopting higher-level abstractions is the inability of contemporary platforms to support hard real-time programming. If you replaced the Atari 2600's 6507 CPU with a Pentium 4 and increased the RAM from 128 bytes to 1GB, but kept the original graphics system, it would actually be harder to write state-of-the-art (for Atari) games. The reason is that contemporary designs have non-determinsitic timing (at least to the extent a human could understand them) because of caches and other features. These systems were designed to make processing faster on the average, not to have consistent behavior.
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.