Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Kohler Chris

Author:Kohler, Chris [Kohler, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2016-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

But even with development time ticking away, Miyamoto was still unimpressed with Argonaut’s design and wanted to start back at the beginning. He asked one of the developers on his internal team to create a simple game on the chip. The game simply had a triangle that represented the spaceship. Instead of flying in all directions in true 3D, the ship flew in a straight line through a tunnel. Miyamoto insisted that the game be based on this straight-line game play because it was instantly comprehensible. They had a workable game design—now, the real work began.

“They told us that this time, they would need us here permanently,” recalls Cuthbert. “So in February 1992, we got all of our bags and they put us up in a hotel downtown for a year. And we began full-on development. We pretty much worked our butts off, from nine-thirty in the morning to eleven at night.”

“None of us really had defined roles,” says Goddard. “It was just three of us programming the game, and whatever needed to be done, we just randomly picked who was going to do it. It was a unique way of developing because there was no single person working on any specific area. Every part of the game got everyone’s best effort—there were no parts that suffered because of other parts.”

To get around the Japanese programmers’ lack of expertise with the Argonaut-designed chip, the English programmers wrote a scripting system that would allow the designers to plug in their designs with a minimum of changes to the program code. It was a slick design that they were unfamiliar with, but it worked like a charm. Meanwhile, Dylan and Giles put their heads together to program the massive boss machines that were at the end of every stage, which were too complicated to be plugged in through catch-all script programming.

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