The Coding Secrets Hidden in “Sonic the Hedgehog” [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Coding Secrets Hidden in “Sonic the Hedgehog” [video]

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32 pointsLaserDiscMan6 comments

I love these types of videos. It continuously amazes me to learn how much ingenuity and creative coding was necessary to create video games in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s.

Even more amazing is that they did a lot of it without tools like version control, graphics engines, and frameworks that most programmers take for granted today.

Today we stand on the shoulders of the giants that created these early games.

For example the water effect in the video was probably the culmination of many all-hands meetings within the team that figured out how to "cheat" the system into doing it, while literally bouncing off the graphics ceiling that the console was capable of producing. Nowadays we would just send the intern off and tell them to add some water to the scene as a trivial task.

What always amazes me is how small development teams often were, even through the N64/PS1 era. Flagship games from major publishers would have software development teams in the single digits, sometimes just 2 or 3. And they were remarkably productive. The multiplayer component for Goldeneye on N64 for example, one of its most notable features, was added by a single person in a few weeks because he had some extra time between when the game was "finished" and the date when it actually had to be finished to go to printing.

They also have a video (0:15) showing a 'secret' level select activated by physically bopping the cartridge on the head while running. It's a laugh! How did we miss this?

https://youtu.be/h8TAuhT63lo

For those who don't know, Burton explains this in depth here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA

Another one of my favorite ones describes copy protection via intentionally destroyed floppy sectors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA

Well, there goes my night, but I can't say I'm disappointed, this is awesome! Thank you for sharing, because I was busy searching "why does punching my sega...." and thinking about what other games might respond to the rubber hose treatment.

While it's a cool idea, it's less of a programming achievement like what the rest of the video shows. The game simply crashes, they just added a cheat menu instead of an error screen.

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