Comment by jupiter90000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jupiter90000 | Hacker News Reader

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I used to love this game and all but forgot about it til I saw this pop up here. When I was about 12yo or so I emailed Infogrames asking about the game's development as I was interested in games programming back then, one of the developers emailed back and forth with me a few times, pretty cool.

Back then the cool library I found for developing games was Allegro for the DJGPP C/C++ development env for DOS. My brother and I started creating video games. It was so much fun trying to figure everything out and research things online. I seem to remember Yahoo kind of had curated directories of sites related to games programming.

My brother ended up working in the games industry for years, whereas somehow I ended up doing more web and data programming stuff. It pays better but sometimes I get excited about what it may have been like going the route of games dev. Ah, life.

Thanks for bringing up Allegro - I have many fond memories of playing around with it in my teens. I'm amazed to see that it's still under active development!

I also got into programming via games (probably like most people) and every time I meet a game programmer I'm happy I didn't end up going that route. I much prefer building apps and solving IRL problems with startups rather than being on a massive game dev team writing C++ for a mid-tier salary.

Besides there seems to be more than enough smart people making games. Not so in the thousands of industries open to business and consumer software which is pretty awful on average.

> one of the developers

Wasn't the game developed by a single dev (Frédéric Reynald)?

Here is a list of credits, and to be honest I can't recall who it was: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-dark/credits

yes it was Frederick Raynal who made it. I don't think he was alone, a team called Adeline Software (a wink at Delphine Software) worked on it for the first episode at least.

It's all laid out in the article. Adeline was the Delphine studio Raynal joined when leaving Infogrames, after Alone in the Dark was published.

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