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Comment by asgfoi | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be unaware of Ludum dare and similar challenges where (literally) thousands of games are created over the weekend that could easily compete with games made in the 80's.

Skill is still here, it is just muted by the modern media. Back then a any game release was huge news, today such games are made all the time every day and don't even get noticed.

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I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.

If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad. Perhaps you meant it was good compared to what happened before, or compared to what it would have been if people didn't make games. But a reasonable guess is good compared to today, which is an implicitly negative comment about today's programmers. I think the reply was quite reasonable - it doesn't make sense to glorify the past when the present has massively more of what was good about the past.

> If the early 80's was good, then something else must be bad.

If programming from one era was good, why do you think that means programming from another era "must be bad"? Why can't good programming exist in both eras?

> But a reasonable guess is good compared to today

If you insist on guessing there's more to my final sentence, why isn't a reasonable guess, "as well as non-amazing programming back then" or "just as there is amazing programming today"?

you have a zero-sum model of things that does not reflect reality well.

First, most hackathon games are terrible. They don't even rise to the level of coherence of those former games, because they're mostly thrown together into the first vaguely "game-like" thing that compiles, with half the gameplay in orders of magnitude more space.

Second, those games are only possible due to the existence of frameworks, high-level languages and the proliferation of programming knowledge over the internet. Almost no one doing a weekend hackathon is cranking out a playable game in raw assembly.

Now to be fair, most games in the 80s were terrible as well - that's part of what led to the crash, and it's just Sturgeon's Law in effect. But what's being praised here isn't really design skill so much as a level of programming skill which simply isn't strictly necessary in the modern day to create a game.

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