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Comment by ErikAugust | Hacker News Reader

"That is unbelievable--but I think we have lost the idea of the software artist. When the machines were much smaller, I did my game essentially as a one-man team. I did all the art. I did all the programming. I had one other engineer help me with some of the music. I have a friend working with EA today and he is probably working in a team of 120 engineers.”

“Electronic Arts treated the programmer as an artist," he says. "They were the first people to do that.”

First time I've read someone explain this concept...

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I'm pretty old myself, started coding with Commodore Pet, 16Kb of memory, C-casette for mass memory. Cost something like $1000 at a time.

You can still do somewhat impressive things yourself because the tools have gotten so much better. One thing I've been stringing along the years is a sokobon puzzle game called Robo-E. I've now implemented it in Java ME (originally for Nokia J2ME phones with 64Kb of memory), then in Javascript + C++ for symbian and Meego, now in Objective-C + C++ for iOS. The iOS version is 17Mb, compared to 48Kb of the original J2ME version, so it is over 300 times bigger just because tools, and hardware has gotten so much more capable.

Modelling tools, programming tools, everything is just so much more capable of nowadays.

Sorry for rambling, I guess I'm getting old :)

Speaking of which, here's David Maynard himself posing (lower-right) in EA's first software-artist-themed "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" advertisement:

http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F

+1 to you for remembering the original Electronic Arts. It's been such a long long time, hasn't it?

I might argue that it was Activision that did it first - certainly for consoles (Atari, etc). They were the first company to explicitly name the programmers ("David Crane's Pitfall!", etc). But EA took it to the next level, and seemed to get behind 'teams' early on - Ozark Softscape, for example.

We still have a strong artist/guru/crusader mythology within hacker/programmer culture. From the inside, we like to think of ourselves as ninjas (XKCD has a comic about Lisp paren being like ancient swords), artists (EA), and at times, knights (white hat, black hat, ...), and even information crusaders. From the outside, however, we are pretty much universally viewed as antisocial janitors (at least in business relationships), and no one wants a janitor who thinks he/she's an "artist."

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