It's brought up, but the main point of the video is that RollerCoaster Tycoon was one of the last major retail games made by a handful of people (Chris Sawyer for design and programming, Simon Foster for graphics, Allister Brimble for sounds/music), and managed to become the best selling computer game of 1999 despite going up against games made by teams of at least a hundred people. That's what he means by the game being "the last of its kind".
Later in the video he discusses how times have changed once more, and solo developments turning it commercial hits is still possible. I do feel Minecraft was close enough to RTC to say that it never really stopped being possible.
But in general I think the video is just remarking how the industry evolved and it became significantly harder to compete against bigger studios in the 2000s and beyond. I think it is undoubtedly true that the benchmark for many types of games has risen beyond the capabilities of the average solo developer in terms of graphics, content and gameplay scope. But many types of games do not have the burden of high end graphics and a particularly motivated individual can still make breakthroughs.
It gets easier every year now, whereas for a while it was getting harder every year.
It's still top 10 played on steam, which is incredible really, and while it might never be number 1 best seller in the short term, it's probably out-sold many of the games that did get "number 1" in the year it was released.
I really don't understand people's obsession with this fact. Every game that was developed on consoles before the playstation was also written in its machines assembly language. It was extremely normal at that time.
- It was relatively late. The heyday of coding games in assembler was years prior (maybe there were some exceptions in portable platforms?). Was there any other smash hit PC game in 1999 coded in x86 assembler?
- It's a pretty substantially complex and large-scale game, at least relatively speaking. It's one thing to write a game like Tetris in assembler, RCT is magnitudes more complicated than the vast majority of games on e.g. the SNES. Doesn't mean the games are bad or anything, and there are probably exceptions. (I know the SNES in particular has a Sim City port, though it's pretty slow.)
- It's not just about assembler really, it's about the whole mindset. RCT is very well-optimized. For example, gameplay mechanics are adapted (e.g. stretching the length of months, shaping algorithms for calculating scores and ratings, etc.) around reducing the number of multiplications, and even on fairly crummy computers of the early 2000s it was possible to have huge parks with a lot of guests running quite well. Contrasting RCT2 with RCT3 paints a pretty good picture, because if you ran both on contemporary computers for their respective releases RCT3 with its fancy 3D graphics and modern development practices couldn't handle a fraction the size of parks without becoming a laggy unplayable mess.
I admit that I think people focus on it a bit much, especially since I'm not sure most people who repeat this fact actually understand what it means. But honestly, I'm willing to be arrogant enough to say I understand, and I salute. Writing scalable and complex code that actually works in macro assembler is not at all impossible, but it's certainly not easy. It requires a discipline that is not to be taken for granted.
That said, I watched the video, and while it did talk on this point, it was largely about the death of hit games from small teams and the bedroom coder.
It may be due to the high level of bloat in contemporary software. People also find the demoscene interesting. JS1k games vs. 14mb React landing pages. Gaming isn't solely about the fantasy induced by the content. For some there is an appreciation of the underlying engineering.
I think it may have to do with the fact that most programmers today don't even know what a computer is. You can ask most "Software Engineer I's and II's" what the difference between the stack and the heap is and get some pretty strange answers. So, it is interesting for some to think about people that had some idea about it. I don't know.
yeah it's just like writing a larger program in C. It takes longer to build up the basic primitives than you may be used to, but once you get going it's just programming.
I think programmers just haven't had that experience, so it's other worldly.
This is a video game history channel that usually goes a little more in-depth than that. Good production value, a soothing voice, and a nice ride through gaming's yesteryear -- often much better than others in the "genre" on YouTube
