Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev360 | Hacker News Reader

I was actually going through a list last night of Amiga/Atari games. Lots of memories.. Beverly Hills Cop, Barbarian, Commando, Leisure Suit Larry etc.

Did any of these game developers make money from the games? All I can remember was borrowing floppy disks from friends or downloading from BBS, we barely had places that sold games in Sweden.

View on HN

It was easier to make money back then. The barrier to entry making a game was higher since to get good performance you needed to write in assembly language. You had to rtfm as there was no internet to ask questions on. So a smallish number of developers were going after a booming demand for games. My first game in the industry was on Amiga and PC and made a decent profit for the company I worked for despite that I basically taught myself to program making it.

I remember an interview with the developer of the Amiga port of Great Giana Sisters and he said he couldn't live from it but the paycheck was good enough for a decent car. But remember that this was obviously contract work.

On the Amiga you had an impressive range of freeware developers to commercial developers. The commercialization had already reached levels where companies had their own development teams but you also still had companies that just paid some developers to develop a game for them.

I'm sure they made a pretty decent living, by any reasonable standard. The thing is, in the last decade or two, the bar has risen far, and people talk about "did they make money" as in "did they make 100 million or more", which is sadly way beyond what is needed to live a very good life. (I think it is sad only because the people who make 5 million over 25 years think they need to make more, and don't enjoy it as much).

Check out the documentary From Bedrooms To Billions - it goes into good detail about the early home computer game development scene, well worth a watch.

Will check that out!

They did make money, but in the later years most of them moved on to consoles where money was at.

Electronic Arts made a little bit of money, I think.

Sjötofta BBS, ah the memories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com