Before Doom, there was Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion; before Duke Nukem came Duck Boop; and In Search of the Golden Cheese in its own strange way gave rise to Quake. Halcyon Days author James Hague's three-year retro-game categorization project recently hit the Web, and a brand-new feature is exposing some of the forgotten blunders and triumphs of the programming greats of id Software.
"Gen X people have fond memories of growing up with Commodore 64 games, Atari 2600s ... These games were historically done by one crazy guy," explains Hague. "The list is driving into the heart of bigwigs in the industry. Fifteen years ago, they were writing these games, and now they're all technology directors and heads of companies."
The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers is essentially a programming Who's Who - a roster that includes the "game-ographies" of celebrities like id co-founders John Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall, Atari 2600 designer Steve Mayer, and David Crane of Pitfall fame.
All the games indexed were conceptualized and created by a solitary programmer. Hague, himself a game programmer boasting titles like Bonk, unearthed most of the forgotten games while writing Halcyon Days, a self-produced history of the gaming industry. After being bounced around Usenet and expanded by retro gaming fans, the list found a home on the Web in August.
"The Giant List is definitely a needed historical item," says list regular John Romero. "It points out the fact that back then you could conceptualize, code, do art, etc. for a game all by yourself. Nowadays, we have larger teams of people to put these games together in a reasonable time period, and the games definitely turn out much better with more people's input and help."
Many of the games Hague unearthed have disappeared from today's gamers' radar, although some retro gaming fans are attempting to preserve favorite titles online, and others have shown up in anthologies or have been placed in the public domain. Of course, some would argue that games like Romero's 1985 effort, Bongo's Bash, which involved a little gorilla running away from four killer robots, may be best left to rest.
Memories of old games, says Romero, are generally better than the reality, "actually going back and running those old games and seeing how pathetic they are nowadays."
