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Comment by dham | Hacker News Reader

Mugen along with Don Miguel translations of RPG Maker and 2d fighter maker 95 is how I got into programming. I'm guessing 99% of web developers today probably wanted to be game developers.

All I wanted to do was make Dragon Ball Z games. At the time 1998/1999 there were only Japanese versions of DBZ games as illegal roms. I created a few DBZ characters for Mugen, 2d Fighter maker 2nd and made an RPG maker game.

I used to collaborate with other creators over AIM making characters and other things. Some people would rip sprites and edit them and I would code them. The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old

I remember liking Mugen over Fighter Maker at the time because a character could be backed up to a floppy disk where as I had to use my dads zip drive to back up a Fighter Maker character.

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> The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old

+1. Companies were surprised that remote work "works". But many of us were basically doing remote work as hobbies during the 90s (or earlier). Not to mention the countless amazing open source projects done entirely remotely.

I feel like the same logic could apply to doing work without meetings. Somehow open source and hobby projects produce amazing work without constant pointless meetings, and yet managers think work would grind to a halt without them.

you can extend the same logic to what are managers in OS/hobby projects.

And what "project management" method is used.

For me it was DarkBasic that got me into coding.

I discovered it in a game magazine and immediately downloaded it and it was a whole new world. It had its own weird GUI that was rendered in full screen, and there are almost NO youtube videos of some of the impressive demos like the 3D FPS Yeti game and others.

My early teen years were filled daydreaming of games I could make on it and thinking it was easy because well, Basic, I ended up spending most summers just running other peoples code, creating levels that never saw any use.

edit: nope I was wrong! found this old footage, brings me back memories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiKLEtSg9io

Oh yea DarkBasic. Good times. Do you remember the jetski game it came with. I never really made anything with it. Just got bits and pieces of stuff. I bought a license for Blitz Max and Blitz Basic also.

I went whole hog down the Blitz route: basic, plus, 3D, max, and finally monkey. I'm actually back to using BlitzMax for a project right now! Weird nostalgia plus re-learning.

Do you remember which magazine?

wow, I had never heard of this, this looks like it would certainly have been captivating at the time to a certain kind of budding coder. (I was a very anti-Windows Mac guy at the time, and also 28, so that probably explains why I never heard of it)

> Don Miguel translations of RPG Maker (…) is how I got into programming.

Same here, but I never finished any game. I spent most of my time dissecting other people’s projects and engines. With some creativity you could do impressive stuff despite the limitations.

We probably crossed paths back then - I had made a few characters myself and collated a few packs of neo-geo characters that weren’t in KOF. Even ran a community website briefly.

It was also for me about the same time I was getting into development in a big way.

I miss those days of the web. Looking back on it now, I expect a lot of people that were around before the September that never ended were saying the same of the rest of us in 98/99, but those to me really were the glory days.

I’m relieved that Reddit still exists, as it’s about the closest thing to a collection of those early niche communities that we have left.

Do you by any chance remember a 2D bootleg dragonball game called "Vegetas Wrath"? It was a one player side scrolling beat 'em up, and I think it used sprites pulled from SNES games like Hyper Dimension and Butoden.

I remember playing it some time in the early 2000s when DBZ was big here in NZ (a few years behind the states, as normal).

Ha, an RPG Maker forum was the first online community I really became a part of, I want to say I was 10ish? I never really made anything of note, but it introduced me to programming, web & graphic design, and introduced me to people from all over the world.

I still remember my very first introduction to programming was setting a variable to flag if a chest had been opened or not.

Oh man Don Miguel's RPG Maker translation, I remember including on CD's I burn with friends who didn't have internet access along with music and a few 100MB divx movies

I'll have to thank you for contributing to my childhood memories I guess. Used to play DBZ Mugen edition with my brother for hours.

Out of curiosity: Ever played Dragon Ball Z: Buu Yuu Retsuden on the Sega Genesis?

Yes most of all the Nes, Snes, Gameboy and Sega Genesis ones. I remember the one on Genesis was sprite ripped quite a bit and edited. One of my favorite games to just play was Dragonball Z legends on Sega Saturn. Although it was hard to get to work when I was first getting into it.

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