Finishing the Game I Started 35 Years Ago
I'm gonna finish programming a game I started almost 35 years ago! Well, at least I'm gonna try. Let me fill you in.
How it all started
It's 1991. 10-year-old me is obsessed with computers, especially programming, but like every kid, I also loved games. And one day, I got my hands on a copy of the Back to the Future II game. I know the movie's not everyone's favorite, but come on: It's in the future (at least it was in 1991), it's got flying cars, and most importantly: hoverboards!
I popped the disk in, fired it up, watched the intro, got ready for action and then... it just froze. I tried it again, and again, but it kept freezing. Now, the thing is: I didn't exactly buy this copy, which might explain why it didn't work. But just to make sure, I took it to a friend's house to try it on his computer.
But it didn't run on it either. So what do you do in this situation? You do the only logical thing. You ask your friend, "Hey, why don't we just make a Back to the Future game ourselves?" I was always trying to get people to code with me, but they either weren't interested or lost interest pretty quickly. I never got why nobody was as excited about programming as I was.
Anyway, my friend told his dad about my idea, and his dad was like:
But I was no rookie. I'd spent about a year learning Pascal from a book my brother gave me, and I'd already built a game: Tic-tac-toe. With VGA graphics, an "AI" opponent, and a two-player mode. Why the hell would two people sit in front of a computer to play tic-tac-toe? My parents didn't get what I was doing and how it wasn't a complete waste of time.
But I didn't care what my parents thought or what my friend's dad thought. I was determined to do it. So I started - without a concept or a plan. First thing, draw Marty McFly. I didn't know about sprites, so I used basic shapes. Head: that's a circle. Torso: rectangle. Legs: more rectangles. You get the idea. I added keyboard controls to move him around, tried it out, and realized... it was shit. It was slow, it was flickery, it wasn't fun.
I didn't know it at the time, but redrawing the entire screen every frame using those slow procedures was a terrible idea. What I'd learned from my book worked for tic-tac-toe, but not for an action game. I kept working on it, and tried to speed it up somehow but nothing got it anywhere close to the smoothness of a real game. I was stuck. I hated to admit it, but my friend's dad was right.
Fast Forward
A few years ago, I got a message on social media from someone I hadn't heard from in decades. We exchanged a few messages, and then he asked, "Hey, do you want to make a Back to the Future game?" Yep, it was my childhood friend. Now, wouldn't it be cool if we actually did it after all this time?
Well, that would've been too cool to be true, and it didn't happen. The conversation quickly fizzled out, like many reconnections on social media do. I'm still glad he reached out, because he brought back a memory that had been buried for years. And from that moment on, it kept resurfacing. This nagging thought:
Could I have done it if I'd been more experienced or if I'd just had access to the right resources?
Well, it wasn't that nagging, because it still took a couple of years to finally say, "Fuck it. I'm gonna find out! I'm gonna go Back to the Pascal!"
Now
And here I am. 35 years later. 25 years of professional experience. A stack of books I didn't have back in the day. And, of course, the internet.
Still, decades of developing business applications don't make you a game programmer. Books don't magically make you smart. And the internet... oh, well... But I wanna do my 10-year-old self justice and finally prove my friend's dad wrong. I mean, it doesn't really prove anything, but it does sound like a fun project.
And to stay true to myself, I still don't have a concept. Unfortunately, I also don't have all that free time anymore, but I do have a 386, a 14" CRT, and a copy of Turbo Pascal. Just like back in the day. And I'm going to spend about an hour a day on this machine, working on that game, or what will hopefully, eventually become a game, and I'm going to turn it into a weekly vlog. Each week, I'll show you what I've been working on. I'll push the code and executables to my GitHub repo, so you can follow along, or run the latest version, or... I don't know. It's a pretty niche thing, and I don't know if anyone is actually interested in it, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
So if you’re down for some retro game programming, feel free to join me on this journey.