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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language.

Until then, only arcades had already made the switch.

On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.

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I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available.

- Physical logic gate era of gaming.

- Assembly era

- C era

- OOP era

- Interpreted languages and game logic living in scripts on top of c++ engines

- Fully Gen-AI era?

> Fully Gen-AI era?

Yeah, no.

Your historic accounting is not to be trusted by any means if “gen-AI era” is something that you really believe is happening.

It's happening whether you like it not, because billionaires love gen-AI and they're the ones who decide what gets made.

They don't decide what gets played.

Hey, that rhymes

They decide what gets played legally. They decide what gets advertised - legally. They control your children's eyeballs since birth. Your children won't be told how to pirate Mario 64 or that it even exists. They control all the game reviews too.

Also the era exists whether or not you play the games from the era.

FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.

Zork comes to mind. I am pretty sure there are plenty more really early.

Though for Infocom, portability was secondary benefit. The primary purpose of the Z-machine was smaller code size, compared to assembly or a high-level language compiled to machine code.

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