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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

Only 9% of game developers are 50 years or older.

The answer to this is dead simple.

Let's take a developer who has made it a lifelong career. They started post college at age 22. This means they began working in games in 1996 or before and are still at it. The number of game developer from this time is miniscule compared to today, which itself might result in 9% or less. Additionally, games being the difficult industry it is, there are any number of reasons for someone to leave the industry well before age discrimination becomes a factor.

Or the case of a developer moving over later in their careers. Surely this is an extremely rare occurrence as the pay and ability to do things like raise a family will keep them in more traditional (stable) jobs.

There aren't many 50+ developers (and that number is turning into 55+ way too fast for me) today because there just weren't that many 20 year old developers in the 90's.

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> there just weren't that many 20 year old developers in the 90's.

John Carmack was 21 in 1992 when Wolf3D came out, Romero was 25

Tim Sweeney was 21 in 1991 when he released ZZT

Ken Silverman was 21 in 1996 when Duke Nukem 3D was released, Todd Replogle was 27

Cliff Bleszinski (19) and Arjan Brusse (22) released Jazz Jackrabbit in 1994

Shawn Hargreaves (sp?) was in his 20's in the 1990's when he created Allegro and went on to Probe entertainment etc.

The games industry seemed to be dominated by 20-somethings in the 1990's

I could go on all day. Also, hundreds of teenage 'bedroom coders' were doing ports of coin-ops to home PC's.

I think they mean there are way more 20-somethings now than there were in the 90s so proportionally over the growth of the industry older developers are naturally going to be underrepresented.

I'm not so sure. Go back to the 70's and 80's. The creator of Pacman was 25. David Crane was still in his 20's when he started Activision. Trip Hawkins was 29 when he started Activision. Will Wright started at 24. Mark Turmell (NBA Jam, Smash TV) was hired at Midway when he was 26 and was selling games as a teenager. Miyamoto joined Nintendo at 25.

A huge amount of these guys were having games published when they were teens.

I think you’ve misunderstood what people are talking about.

There are way more 20 somethings entering directly into tech now than in the 90's. In the 90's something like computer science was much smaller. Other nearby disciplines were nowhere near as computer oriented as they are now. And people outside of that didn't have the internet-can-teach-you-anything as a resource.

That all changed in the late 90's as the whole population came online.

Yes that’s what I’m saying.

I think I put my reply in the wrong place...yes, we agree.

That's a nice nostalgic list, but it sort of proves the point, doesn't it? There were so few that we remember most of them. Today there are 300k game devs in the US.

They aren't remembered for being young, but for working on the top games of the time.

Single data points are not statistics. Fact is, the number of 20 something developers today far exceeds the number of developers of the 1990s.

Nothing you said here is incorrect, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of discrimination. In my experience, it makes discrimination even more likely when the discriminated class is smaller due to other nondiscriminatory reasons. It is a lot easier to discriminate against a handful of people than a larger group and it is a lot harder to stand up against discrimination when you don't have a lot of peers.

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