in my growing years in 1990s, i used to play a lot of games like dangerous daves, mario, sports games like fifa, cricket, racing games, shooting games and many more and always wanted to develop some games. it was that passion which made me go into computer engineering and learn languagues like c/c++ in the 1st place. i used to think when studying that after passing out, i will be developing some operating system, text/image editors or working in development of some computerized devices, etc and later on after some years of work experience, i would create games. even as a final year project in engineering, i built a game

and that time i saw that in my batch, others creating their final year projects created games, applications similar to ms-paint, notepad, chat applications similar to gtalk, file convertors, etc. none of my batchmates created these stupid web based forms as no one was interested in them

then we got into jobs and were selected in various software companies out here in india and me and lot of my batchmates getting into this stupid, boring web based forms development for some CRUD operation working on a small part of a monstrous multi-threaded distributed enterprise application architected by an inexperienced halfwit architect wannabe who got the job by sticking with the company since he was an intern

some of them got interested in the web-based application development as were told that these technologies like spring, hibernate, etc are “latest” technologies with “a lot of scope” but i think whats latest in them. we arent creating any softwares which do anything or would be useful for anyone. creating them wont be taking us anywhere or make us big. and we are just working on a small part of a monstrous multi-threaded distributed enterprise application architected by an inexperienced halfwit architect wannabe who got the job by sticking with the company since he was an intern

i now feel after working for almost 2.5 years in software industry that we anything which can be useful. and also the final year project we made was the best project i worked on as it was coded by our hearts and driven by our passion creating something for which i studied computer engineering and learn languages like c/c++. and not coded after being forced to work day & night creating stupid web-based forms for large scale enterprise applications

I love games since I got my first atari and coded something from a book my dad gave me. Now I work at a multinational company helping a bank trying to implement “a monstrous multi-threaded distributed enterprise application architected by an inexperienced halfwit architect wannabe who got the job by sticking with the company since he was an intern.”

Thank you, I’ll keep up with your blog, tutorials, and join you in this journey I don’t think I’ll get rich or quit my job to make games, but I’ll enjoy the work you tell us to do and learn all that I can.

Again, thank you for writing this.

Can’t believe everything you mentioned, I guess I must have downloaded your demo in early 90s! remember Future Crew??!
like you did, I wrote all the tools and libraries for mode13h, I was fortunate enough released a tetris clone as freeware. During my 2nd game development, a incident with BOSD wiped out everything, this included all my new development in mode X and image rotation functions, it was all gone… then nothing was ever released and I never touched game development again.

I ended in IT of big corps just like most of you guys. Over the years, I got disappointed with the trend how software development headed in general, it made a lot of sloppy programmers, producing bloated buggy software. I moved on my passion to distance running, that is marathon and ultra, never thought about game development again.

It’s cool that you end up as an unix admin, for sure you still code/script more than I do. Send me your demos if you still have them.

Words cannot express how much this article touched my heart, I was a little surprised but gladly to learn there are some percentage of us still exist today. Almost everything you said is what I felt, except for me it was more like 20 years ago..

You can rarely find people like us in corp environment where bloated software and unnecessary complex infrastructure are created, many so called “developers/software engineer” today have no idea what optimization is like what we had to do in the days of writing 8086 assembler squeezing things into 65536.

I was a little fortunate that I made a freeware release of a tetris clone for DOS 20 years ago. Unfortunately, during the development of my 2nd game, everything was lost due to a BOSD, but that was another story. Then life moves on, got busy with everything just like you and everyone else, family, responsibilities and being an adult. There was never a 2nd game.

Thank you for creating this and I will be trying to catch up on Android development!

Excellent quotes from you – so true
“First of all I know no great coder who is not interested in games”
“All this by doing boring web stuff or working on a small part of a monstrous multi-threaded distributed enterprise application architected by an inexperienced halfwit architect wannabe who got the job by sticking with the company since he was an intern.”
“Actually this is why I ended up a coder, to make games not to configure some frameworks (yes, that is not programming, it is mostly configuration).”

The paragraphs 3 to 5 almost define my life.

I started programming in BASIC when I was 9, in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. After I created a couple of simple games, I moved quickly to Z80 assembler (I was 10), but then (1992) the 8-bit platforms like the Spectrum died. It was the first time I lost the train, because in the 8 bit times, ANYBODY could create a game just alone, and that game could be as good as any commercial game in the market, because the machine was limiting all us (48KB RAM, 3.5Mhz).

Then I moved to the PC. 386 and 486 PCs. Mode 13h (320x200x256 or MCGA). TurboC++, TASM, DJGPP, PMODE/W … It was superb. LINEAR VIDEOMEMORY (0xA000) to work with. I created lots of “small demos”: fire, copperbars, snow, scrollers … and again focused on creating a game. Created lot of tools and libraries (map editor, tools for fitting sprites as tilesets, libs to draw fonts, blit sprites, palette efects, etc…).

At this time, a single programmer could still create games as good as the professional games. Shareware was the demonstration.

Meanwhile I was “learning” and creating my libs, the combo CDROM + SVGA appeared and then the games transformed: those game didn’t fit in a floppy anymore. 320×200 games appeared as “old” and SVGA games required lots of resources. People wanted games with orchestral music, 3d models, thousands of graphics created by real artists … games out of my possibilites.

My dream of creating videogames was crushed just in that moment. I could compete with something like Maniac Mansion, but I could not compete with something like Quake, as an example. It was the second time I missed the train.

Now I’m an UNIX system administration, and I still program … in python, in C, in bash… just for “work purposes”. Parsing logs, creating monitoring scripts, automate server or services deployment… very different from “my dream”. And now, married and with 2 babies, I can barely sleep at night a couple of hours before going again to work.

My last train is coming: any of “crowdfunding” + “mobile(android/ios)” + “steam” + “humblebundle” + “HTML5/JS (browser) games” can help me to accomplish my dream. But I’m starting to feel that some of those markets start to be saturated (thousands of games on ios/android, as an example), so it’s now or never.

Thanks for creating this website and for this entry.