My first game
At PAX East, there was a panel where a bunch of devs talked about their first games. They asked me and a few others to send in a video… and this is what I sent them.
The saga of how I managed to make it, though, is a little more intricate, involving copying all my Atari 8-bit floppies to PC. I used the USB SIO2PC interface from Atarimax to connect the floppy drive direct to the PC. I then captured video directly within Altirra. Some of the disks were dead, alas, but I was able to recover about a half dozen games and partial games that I wrote when I was 14 and 15. Maybe at some point I’ll do posts on them.
You also get to see a glimpse of what was my real bootcamp in game design. It wasn’t the videogames. Frankly, I wasn’t a good enough programmer to make great games, really, and so a lot of the games were clone-like in a lot of ways. A truly ridiculous amount of them consist of nothing more than the title screen. No, it was the boardgames I did as a kid that in retrospect really taught me the basics… I must have made several dozen, and they’d get playtested during recess periods at school. At some point, I will definitely do a post about those. I still have many of them.
16 Responses to “My first game”
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I was going to post my video of your video on display at PAX, but this is better. Thanks again for doing this. 😀
Bah, here’s the direct link to the video: http://youtu.be/4Qudl9M8jvs
Are you kidding? It was a blast to do! And I still want to see your vid of the vid. 🙂
Wait, you kept your old shit someplace to show it in video? *Jealous* I cant even find my stuff anymore 🙁
Charming.
RT @raphkoster: Hey look, video of the first games I ever made. Blog: My first game: http://t.co/bsJ9NgkyqE
Jame Scholl liked this on Facebook.
Tom Kent liked this on Facebook.
yup!It is still hooked up and functional. I wasn’t going to give up being able to play MULE!
Another Atarian! *high fives*
My first graphic game was in Atari Basic on the Atari 400 — I called it Sneak Thief. Before that, I ripped off the D&D combat system to do simple text combat on the TI Pocket Computer. It was an adventure back then. I think we all wanted to be Lord British. Or at least Chuckles.
Luis Nok Outumuro liked this on Facebook.
Nice. My first game was also 2-player Tron light cycles, for all the same reasons. This was on the Apple ][+. Your sound was way better though… also, your collection/preservation skills are infinitely better… I have none of that stuff.
[…] he explains on his blog, he was inspired to write the game mostly by his forays into board game […]
RT @raphkoster: Hey look, video of the first games I ever made. Blog: My first game: http://t.co/bsJ9NgkyqE
Great Game! Too bad i missed the good old Atari times. My first game was a disc and had something to do with underwater ships on Windows 95 :).