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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the early days of PC gaming - where one kid could program the most popular game and make a fortune off it without Apple/Steam/etc taking all the profits in an commoditized market of games; but also where they had to be written in assembler by hand, a single PC would cost your life savings, and distributing a game could require a (third) mortgage on your house... They were interesting times, but as a consumer I definitely prefer now.

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Can you name an example of a child video game prodigy who made millions making a game by themselves?

I knew that it was much easier to make a fully formed game as an individual developer back then obviously, but I've never heard of anyone who profited from it like that. I thought independent developers were much better off today with the ability to make a game like "Flappy Bird" and have it distributed and advertised for you by companies like Apple.

this post may supply [0] some context

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

I seem to recall seeing a number of examples on filfre.net, and other games like _Prince of Persia_ were largely one-man jobs (he got some help with animation and whatnot, but it was essentially a one-man thing, judging from the famous developer diary). One problem is that people don't always cite exact dollar amounts, and when they do, they don't inflation-adjust - if you made 'only' $300k off a computer game in 1980, well, that's a million dollars now right there.

One example might be Jordan Mechner, who wrote Karateka between the ages of 18 and 20, which went on to sell 500,000 copies. One of his journal entries mentions he got 15% royalty, and one of his videos mentions that the original retail price was $34.95, so he may have made a couple million from it.

http://archive.beefjack.com/features/matt-smith-the-fall-of-...

Richard Garriott?

Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember. Not sure how much they made but they did evetually parlay the start into millions (at least for Don) http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/video-games-video-kids-stri...

Andy Gavin & Jason Rubin who created Naughty Dog started in high school, though the millions may not have come until later.

You are forgetting the street bazars existing since the C64/Spectrum days, with endless printouts letting everyone chose which games to have, without that kid getting any money from those bootleg sales.

Anybody who went through the effort of typing in (and debugging) the source code of programs by hand probably deserved a copy of it. And hopefully learned a lot in the process.

(Though this wouldn't apply to the later versions where you were just typing checksummed data. That is just a lower bandwidth, more labor intensive channel of binary data transfer)

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