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Sep 01
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Aug 05
“ What saved the [Atari] VCS, ironically, was the lack of a frame buffer. Yes, the system could only display two sprites at any given moment. But once the electron beam had drawn a sprite, the program could shift the position of said sprite horizontally and redraw it. But because the sprite had already been drawn on the screen, the original one would not disappear until the electron gun came back around to redraw the screen. By doing this, programmers could create rows and rows of sprites — perfect for Space Invaders‘ rows of aliens. Eventually, use of these techniques allowed designers to create scenes on the VCS that were significantly more detailed than the hardware maker had ever imagined.
Aug 04
“ Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.
— Fred Brooks, Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything (via wka)
“ You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
— Fred Brooks, Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything (via wka)
Aug 01
The Scout: The Mast Brothers (via Poshy)
Obsessive craftspeople like the Mast Brothers are a big part of the reasons I’m inspired by living in Brooklyn.
“ In 1984 Peter Harrap came up with Wanted: Monty Mole, a strange take on one of the most divisive events in British history: the Miner’s Strike…The defeat of the striking miners broke the union movement’s grip on the levers of power in the U.K. Harrap’s game, released at the height of the strike, cast players as a mole who breaks the picket lines to get coal direct from a fictional secret mine owned by Scargill. The game’s theme attracted widespread media interest but it was more absurd than political — Scargill’s mine was packed with bizarre enemies such as hairspray cans, leaping sharks and bathroom taps.
— Sinclair ZX80 and the Dawn of ‘Surreal’ U.K. Game Industry
I love the notion that video games in the UK were, for a time, such an accessible, idiosyncratic medium that people were using them to make absurdist, Monty Python-esque social commentary. Today’s video game industry seems worlds apart from such eccentricity, although indie iOS efforts like The Incident and Mimeo and the Kelptopus King make it easy for me to imagine a return to those days.
“ There were no tools to speak of so everything was entered as numbers in the assembler/editor. Later on I turned the numbers for command codes into macros to make entering and reading the sequences of notes a little easier but that’s as sophisticated as it got. I worked out tunes on a little Yamaha keyboard and typed in the pitches and durations. Often I’d work out timings on some squared graph paper, mostly by trial and error.
— NES Composer Neil Baldwin, in “How NES Music Was Made” (via Dave Dribin)
Jul 12
I’m reading The Design of Design right now and find myself wanting to quote everything Fred Brooks says. I think he qualifies as one of my personal gurus.