What did he make?
Looks like he made a few Tycoon games
RollerCoaster Tycoon. The Gold edition is still worth playing today if you arenât old enough to have the privilege of playing it in your childhood. (Thereâs a Android port too.) Way better than Planet Coaster.
RCT2 isnât worth playing, though. Has much less content. The real life theme parks are cool, though.
RCT 3 was redesigned from scratch and is in 3D, which means that you can ride your creations for the first time in the series. Good for itâs time though at this point people would argue that you should just play Planet Coaster instead.
Hard work and passion.
If you lack true talent in your workforce, you canât make up for it by throwing more people and money at it.
Additionally, if you have true talent in your workforce, YOU LET THEM DO THEIR THING.
Itâs also an example of when someone with passion is not alienated from the fruits of their labor.
Youâll never be able to get an engineer to care about a product as much when at the end of the day the only thing they have to show for it is a paycheck.
Lack of Ownership of the production of your labor is a major problem with motivation in wage labor systems. Especially ones that depend on creativity and problem solving.
For those unaware. Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in. Which is why itâs so impressive that it was programmed this way. Itâs also a reason why the game ran so well on the hardware of the time.
In programming we talk about âhigh levelâ and âlow levelâ programming languages. The level does not mean difficulty, in laymenâs terms you can think about it about how âcloseâ you are to programing by typing in 1s and 0s. If youâre âlowâ you are very close to the ground level (the hardware). Obviously, no one programs in 1s and 0s because we created languages that convert human typed code into what a computer wants which is 1s and 0s.
Assembly is a very âlow levelâ programming language. Itâs essentially as âcloseâ to programing in 1s and 0s as you would ever get. It is still an important language today but no one in their right mind would ever program a game in it unless you were running with extremely strict hardware restrictions where every single bit of memory needed to be dealt with perfectly. Which is basically what Chris did.
Assembly was the language you used to write games back then. Most 8 and 16 bit console games were written in assembly. They needed low level code for the performance.
If you played sonic spinball on the genesis/mega-drive, you played a game that struggled at 20 fps because the developers chose to write in C instead of assembly to hit their deadline. That is why most games were coded in assembly in those days.
Sawyer started developing games in 1983. He would have learned assembly, and continued using the tools and techniques he was familiar with his entire career.
Assembly was pretty uncommon by 1999. RCT is uniquely made, but not because Chris Sawyer was a unique coding genius doing what no one else could, but because he was one of the few bedroom coders of the 80s who held out that long.
Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
⊠these days. I assure you all the games my mate wrote on the HP calculator back then were in Assembly. And on the PC I would certainly use C but the core of it, the displaying of pixels and low level catching of input for example, were all in assembly. But yeah, that being said, for the time, everything in assembly was a pretty crazy approach given the tools available on PC.
Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. Itâs kind of nice to do, in many ways itâs simpler than high level programming, youâve just got a lot more to keep track of.
This isnât really true on modern systems anymore. Lower level languages like C and Rust are more or less just as performant as handmade assembly.
Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little youâd write in assembler now-a-days, and youâd probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.
Yup. And our processors are a lot more powerful, so the tricks youâd do in assembly to eek out performance just donât matter anymore.
I love that youâre âfor those unawareâ for assembly but not the random dude who made a video game in 1994 over 30 years ago (that I for one have never heard of).
The dude or the game? The game, Transport Tycoon, is phenomenal, and you should try OpenTTD, which is a FOSS recreation of it by fans (not in assembly).
If people these days donât know what rollercoaster tycoon is Iâm going to start feeling way more old than I already do.
a video game
Not one, like 3 or 4 of them in Assembly, the Tycoon games.
Bro is a living legend.
I saw a great talk by John Romero a few years ago that really underscores how in the early days of computing a few mad geniuses really moved mountains.
Hereâs a video about Prince of Persia.