One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn't be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn't powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn't be fun enough.

It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

There's a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I

[–] Redkey@programming.dev 11 points 2 months ago

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

load more comments (5 replies)