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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

This was what passed for an "AAA" game in 1980

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_I:_The_First_Age_of_Dar...

it was coded up in about a year by two people who threw in just about every idea they got.

1980 wasn't about 30 years ago, though. 30 years ago is 1992 which is Wolfenstein 3D, Civilization, and Final Fantasy type games. It's on the cusp of games like Warcraft, C&C, Ultima Online, Quake, Diablo, and Everquest. Games that are, more or less, like what we have now but with much much worse graphics.

In 1992 (and pretty much in a good part of the 90s) it was still possible and practical to build a small dev team (under 10) and push out incredible titles. IIRC Both ID Software and the team that worked on Diablo were relatively small-ish.

Nowadays we have to look to indie studios.

You're not going to be believe this, but I'm still working on Ultima IV. I come back to it every 3-4 years and spin up a new player and start over. I love it, but never can seem to commit enough time to build up all my virtues.

It was also very unforgiving - one mistake and you were back to rebuilding that virtue.

I recall that on one of my play-throughs as a kid, I got everything done except my characters needed to be level 8. So I un-virtuously tweaked the save file. (I think that was Ultima IV, but it's been a while.)

I also tweaked a later Ultima to not need the floppy disk in the drive. The budget copy protection had added itself to the executable and stored the real start address in a bad sector on disk, so I just patched the real start address back into the EXE header.

I read somewhere that Ultima V is the last Ultima that Lord British did the majority programming work. For Ultima VI he was convinced that he need a full team to get it done.

I still think it should be rather doable (and should be done by any aspiring game programmers) for a one man team to complete a Ultima V spin-off (same graphics, same complexity but on modern platforms) nowadays. Modern computers, languages and game engines abstract away a lot of the difficulties.

Completely agreed. The tile based graphics that pushed the limits of a mid-80's computer (and in some cases required special hardware) can now be done off the cuff with totally naive code in a matter of a couple hours:

https://github.com/mschaef/waka-waka-land

There's lots more room these days for developing the story, etc. if that's the level of production values you wish to achieve.

I actually got turned down by Chuckles for my first 'real' programming job ... They wanted someone that actually played the games :-) It was a neat experience interviewing though - I was really surprised they had offices in New Hampshire.

I grew up in Manchester, it was years after I left that I realized Origin games had a development office right by the airport.

This guy? Chuck "Chuckles" Beuche?

they interview him on the "Apple Time Warp" series. He wrote "Caverns of Calisito" at origin. The optimizations they came up with to make things work was crazy. (I think they were drawing every third line to speed things up and had self modifying code).

https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/

or youtube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA/vid...

good resource on Apple programing 40ish years ago.

And now we have AAA games that take 6+ years to make and still ship unfinished and broken. What a weird time we live in.

Ultima I was a phenomenal game, but also incredibly hard by today's standards

Throwing up another Ultima memory...

I've got great memories of Ultima II on C64 and some Apple II as well. It was far more expansive than I, but still relatively fast. I remember when III came out, it was just... comparatively slow as molasses. It was more involved, but to the point where it became a multi day event, and it was too easy to lose interest waiting for things to load. II was a great combination of size/breadth/complexity and speed.

Then I got Bard's Tale... :)

speaking of Ultima www.uooutlands.com/

Been playing this recently. It is Ultima Online but with all the right choices rather than all the wrong choices post 1999 the development studio made. Anyone who enjoys Online RPGs should certainly give it a try. The graphics don't do the game justice at all but the quality of the game makes up for this and then some.

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