ABSTRACT
When digital games were fi rst commercialized in the 1970s, one person, with a decent knowledge of programming, could create the entire product. That person would act as game designer, producer, programmer, and even graphic artist and sound designer. A fi nished game averaged only eight kilobytes or less in size; on-screen characters were represented by jagged blocks of pixels, and sound eff ects consisted of generic “beeps” or “bonks” generated from the sound card. To give you a sense of the state of the art, the arcade classic Space Invaders, from 1978, was four kilobytes in size, including all art and sound. Asteroids, released in 1979, was eight kilobytes in total, and Pac-Man, released in 1982, was 28 kilobytes.
