How Games get Cooked

Have you ever wondered how video games are made? You can probably guess how they are produced today if you play any of the video games released in the past decade. But it took a long time for the video game production procedure to evolve to its current state.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, personal computers are not yet widely used, so video games are played on consoles that connects to TV screens. Every game is stored in a circuit boards that can be inserted into and read by the console, which then displays the game contents onto the TV screen. All the magic goes into that small circuit board.

Game engineers had to design the circuit board from scratch. And after the game is created, the manufacturer will make copies that gets shipped to the stores. One thing you might notice today if you are playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds on your phone is that they frequently get updates from the market place. None of those were available back then. Whatever the game makers ship stays the same way forever! What happens if there is a bug in the game? Well, you should return the game and probably wait for the sequel.

This production procedure is destined to bring the industry to doom. The biggest example of failure would have to be E.T., a game that is so terribly made that Atari, the developer had to dispose tens of thousands of copies to clear out storage space. The game was confusing in the sense that the player could not even tell if something is working as intended or a bug, and most of the players could not complete the game even though the game did have an ending. That is right! It is not because that the game had bug that prevents players from getting to the end, but that it was too hard for the players to figure out how to get to the end.

E.T. sounded like a disaster, right? It is said to be a big factor that contributed to the collapse of the game industry in the 1980s. Personal computer also emerged at the time, so video game companies began to go through an overhaul. The industry regained its stance around the late 1980s and early 1990s. But this time, games production are completely different. Most of the games are made on PCs, and this paradigm lasted till today.

Making video games programmatically on computers yields many advantages including easy setup, iteration, and testing. And it the production tools are more accessible, which means it is easier for people to build something on their own or in a small team than the circuit board era.

The evolution of game production process certainly has not stopped yet. There are a lot of useful tools today compare to three to five years ago. Applications like Unity3D gives anyone the ability to make a game. I am not sure where this evolution will be at in five years, but I am sure that the number of game developers will continue to grow.