To celebrate the video game industry’s illustrious past, the 2011 Game Developers Conference hosted a series of talks by famous game designers, dissecting their most classic achievements. Lectures featured such luminaries as Sim City creator Will Wright discussing his first game, Raid On Bungeling Bay, and Ron Gilbert reminiscing about his game-changing point-and-click adventure game Maniac Mansion.
There’s plenty to watch here, and plenty to learn. Check it here.
Part of the on-going Game Developers Conference is a series of lectures highlighting gaming’s past. Yesterday’s lecture featured David Braben, who along with Ian Bell developed the space trading game Elite for the BBC Micro computer in 1984, and multiple platforms soon after.
Elite was a watershed game, that laid the foundation for a genre now known as 4X: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. Other entries into this field of games that followed in the space wake of Elite include: Star Control 2 (Accolade, 1992), X: Beyond the Frontier (1999), Freelancer (Microsoft, 2003), and EVE Online (Crucial, 2003).
Armed with a B&W wireframe graphics engine and the mathematical algorithms to create an almost endless number of galaxies to explore, Braben and his Elite proved the sky was definitely NOT the limit for computer games.
