For more almost 2 months now, I’ve been trying to learn making games on this:

Why (normal answer)?

I didn’t have real assembly programming experience so I have no idea how hard the ‘good old days’ actually were. (Blame my college instructor who only met us thrice, gave us passing grades and disappeared).

I want to make a video game under serious constraints as a tribute to the pioneers of the medium (see A Slow Year, Halo 2600).

Most of my games are made in Flash and even if I worked for the industry I still get weird looks when I introduce myself as game developer. “Flash? Real game developers use C++.. nay, REAL developers use assembly!”

Why (artistic/pretentious babble)?

Most of my video game stuff is a cultural commentary. My imaginary critics may claim that my games are commentary first before game, that they would be more fun if I lose all my baggage. They’d be imaginarily right, except I’m not really interested in making the next Angry Birds. The continued interest that I have for game dev, despite my bad experience professionally working in it, stems from my frustration from developers trying to make a Filipino video game. Anito was awesome and all but why did we stop there, you guys? (There are a lot of factors inhibiting us from expressing our culture genuinely. I hope I’m able to address them in this other game I’m working on.)

Also, sometime last September, I was able to play this:

Prior to playing them, I had no idea Spanish video game culture was THIS old. Then again, my knowledge of European video game history is very limited.

The design and narratives of the old games reflected the culture of their creators. They might have been trying to compete with the global market, but they worked with a very Spanish taste. Game creation then didn’t have the rigid commercial rules we have now and in effect forced their creators be very personal in their approach. This ‘authenticity’ is what I find most interesting.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see how in the middle of Martial Law and the EDSA revolution and the aswangs and manananggal some guy rage quit his Pong game and decided to make his own? How will Marcos and Communism and Eat Bulaga play into the creation of 4kb worth of digital entertainment?

Making a game in one of the earliest gaming platforms now won’t change how history was written, but I want to see how a Filipino programmer in the 80’s would have made his own video game.