I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available.
- Physical logic gate era of gaming.
- Assembly era
- C era
- OOP era
- Interpreted languages and game logic living in scripts on top of c++ engines
- Fully Gen-AI era?
FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.
Zork comes to mind. I am pretty sure there are plenty more really early.
> Fully Gen-AI era?
Yeah, no.
Your historic accounting is not to be trusted by any means if “gen-AI era” is something that you really believe is happening.
It's happening whether you like it not, because billionaires love gen-AI and they're the ones who decide what gets made.