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So many great responses in this thread, but I’ll just throw it out there that the original Pokémon games for GameBoy were in hand-written assembly specific to the GameBoy. I would imagine “back then” the programmers had limited memory and thus more obvious constraints. It’s probably possible to recreate this level of efficiency nowadays but both the number of platforms and the expectations of gaming have exploded since the 90s. Not to mention the question if it is even profitable to do so. Back then, it wasn’t a matter of “efficient,” it was “will this run at all on the amount of memory we have?”

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As far as I remember, Pokemon Gold/Silver were given to some special assembly optimization guru after the game was pretty much finished.

He was able to squeeze out so much memory that the Kanto region of the original games was more or less added as an afterthought.

And it was totally worth it, having the entire first game available in the sequel, just set a couple of years in the future, seeing how the world changed by "your" actions in the first games, blew the minds of many ten-year olds at the time.

Wow, thank you for this info, I didn’t know that. It’s fascinating what they did back then.

I am glad you found that interesting.

If you want to look the story up: The "assembly optimization guru" was Satoru Iwata, who would later become CEO of Nintendo of America, and who unfortunately died of cancer a couple of years ago.

Also the gameboy is effectively a game engine in hardware form. It's way easier to write the little bit of code to glue the hardware objects to your internal entities/game logic than to write engines from scratch on modern hardware.

Disagree. The Game Boy will take sections of RAM and render them to backgrounds and/or sprites. That's it.

Any connection between those hardware elements and objects in a game's state, as well as updates to that state, must be maintained and implemented by software, and that software is the game engine.

For example, on the NES, the hardware can display 64 8x8x2bpp sprites, on a roughly 64x64 tile background where 1/4 of it is visible at any given time. Mario Bros' uses the hardware to "draw" Mario as 8 sprites by adjusting registers per frame, but things like what happens when movement commands are received, when Mario hits bricks and other objects, does not involve the PPU at all.

This holds true for 99% of Game Boy games fyi. Afaik not many games were written in C during the actual release years.

This is also the reason they are so many weird bugs in the original Pokemon games; they reused storage and parts of code for different things, but if you exercise that in a specific order it starts doing weird things instead.

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