I remember when games were all just blocky pixels. Before the polygons took over, in the years before high-definition graphics, ragdoll physics and rim lighting, videogames were little more than a collection of garish dots, a handful of kilobytes crammed onto floppy discs and audio cassettes.
In the early 1980s England of my youth, the advent of cheap computers such as the ZX Spectrum gave rise to the bedroom coder; a lone enthusiast whose midnight programming efforts were sold in small advertisements in the back of magazines or picked up by tiny publishing houses. Most of the games from that era were clones of popular arcade machines of the day, usually clumsily wrought versions of Breakout or Space Invaders, but some were startling in their scope and innovation. Programmer Sandy White wrote one of the earliest graphics engines to create an entire isometric 3D city in Ant Attack, while Ian Bell and David Braben crammed a galaxy of planets into a mere 14kb for their seminal sandbox epic Elite.
The Escapist : Videogames: A Modern Folly
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