The spirit of coding was different then. It felt like you could sit in a room with an idea and 4 months later have something people would be keen to play, even pay for.
What a time to be alive as a coder...
The spirit of coding was different then. It felt like you could sit in a room with an idea and 4 months later have something people would be keen to play, even pay for.
What a time to be alive as a coder...
Writing machine code without an assembler and having to reload everything from cassette every time it errored felt... sort of fun but also extremely frustrating. I think most actual commercial software was written on hardware that was out of reach for most of us.
Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.
This was also the case with indie games around roughly 2008-2012. Didn't last for long though!
And what is common between these 2 eras? I'd say that a market hungry for new content met the people who could deliver it. In both instances, technology enabled the production, consumption and distribution of the new content (the Steam era is a revolution in the ease of distribution and production, while in the 80s there was a revolution in ease of production and consumption).
Now there's a glut of content. Will another opportunity ever appear again? In both cases, the opportunity didn't look good at first.
> Will another opportunity ever appear again?
With AI we might go through an era of sameness and/or slop leaving the door open for something more genuine. Everything is cyclical.
Well the sun is still going to explode one day
indie games are still a hugely important part of the industry, Peak is a recent great example of a small team making something fast that is novel and successful.
A ton of games in the 80s did miserably. Yes, there were some big hits created by one person in four months. But there were plenty that were didn’t do well at all.