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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

During the previous century of human civilization, computer games were primitive enough that their entire codebase would fit into a few pages of a magazine. You could play the game by manually retyping the codebase into a text editor.

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This is how I learnt loads of great magazines in the 80's in the UK with code in, you spent hours typing it in. It didn't work and you fixed it (that's how I learnt to debug!). The next week the corrections were usually published, good times.

This was later, but I learned a lot from Game Developer magazine. The entire archive is available for free.

https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

Exactly the same for me, I reckon a lot of 80s kids in the UK who had the right amount of attention span to do it were the same. I remember trying to input the massive list of hex for Tim Follin's 3 channel sound routine that I somehow managed to mistype a part of AND mistype the checksum so that it validated! Cue instant crash every time and disassembling was beyond me at that point.

In the 90s I got an Amiga and discovered the demoscene (basically showing off as mentioned in another comment).

Fast forward another decade and bored at my parents after finishing Uni I dragged my Speccy out of storage and managed to get the Tim Follin music routine running! And found an assembler and did some Z80 assembler demo effects for the lulz.

As you said: good times.

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