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Comment by silvester23 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really no expert on game designers but from the top of my head I can think of at least one that I would describe as genius, namely Chris Sawyer who made Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon almost single-handedly.

If that's not genius, I don't know what is.

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He coded those games single-handedly AND in x86 assembly. Yep, that's a good example of a genius, right there.

Braben too, for similar reasons.

Braben & Bell, no?

For the original yeah, but Frontier seemed an even bigger achievement by Braben alone. Last game I can remember fitting on a single floppy.

Frontier was a massive game, and I was in awe at how he packed so much in a single floppy.

Has there been any interviews or analysis how he managed to do this and where he is now? He just seems to be disappeared.

Noclip did a documentary[1] on RCT and successor games, and tried to interview Chris. The response passed through his representative is stated in the 2nd to last segment (The Legacy of RCT at 30m55) in the video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts4BD8AqD9g

Not to dismiss his achievement, but, why do people always think programming in assembly is ultra hard? This was just how we wrote games back in the day. I still know people using Assembly for a wide range of development, it's not particularly harder than any other programming. A bit tedious, yes, but with FASM and Fresh it's a lot better.

Perhaps it's a matter of framing: it's hard compared to more high level languages, which don't need so much self-discipline.

> This was just how we wrote games back in the day.

Most games written in assembly were not at the scale of Transport Tycoon, though.

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