atari

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 postmortem of Diablo covers how it went from a turn-based claymation DOS concept to a real-time action RPG, plus the story of Blizzard North and development anecdotes.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.

Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Timothy Cain's 2012 GDC postmortem of the original Fallout, covering how he helped build the game and set the template for open-world RPGs. He talks through production, design and programming decisions.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 post-mortem of the original Diablo, covering how it evolved from a turn-based claymation DOS game into the genre-defining action RPG. It includes development anecdotes and lessons learned.

Frederick Raynal gives a GDC postmortem of Alone in the Dark, the game that helped create the survival horror genre. He covers how the team built it and shows some of the old tools used.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

John Romero's 2016 GDC Europe talk recounts the early days of id Software and the programming principles behind Doom and Quake, including fast iteration and keeping the game bootable.

Chris Crawford's 'Dragon Speech' from the first Game Developers Conference, in which he reflects on his dream for game design as an art form. This is a cleaned-up version of the old recording.