ABSTRACT
When digital games were first 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 finished game averaged only 8 kilobytes or less in size; on-screen characters were represented by jagged blocks of pixels, and sound effects 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 4 kilobytes in size, including all art and sound. Asteroids, released in 1979, was 8 kilobytes in total, and Pac-Man, released in 1982, was 28 kilobytes.
