this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Go back even farther and you'll get to a point where entire games were written in assembly and assets might been written with a hex editor (and even that description might be higher level than what they actually did).
My dad had a computer class in high school that involved filling in ordered punch cards and then they'd send them off to a university to run them on their mainframe and they'd send the output punch cards back. That wouldn't have even been assembly, it would have been machine code, though they probably marked the punch cards to be easier to remember what bits meant what. But it would take like a week to find out there was a mistake in the code.
Sounds crazy from where we are today, but that's all they had at the time. If you wanted to do something awesome, you could either give up, invent a better way, or just buckle down and do it the hard way.
Rollercoaster tycoon is a good example, IIRC
Afaik before the nineties most games were made in assembly, especially for consoles before PS1. The requirements were just too tight to do otherwise.
wow, sounds slightly faster than the servers I have to write selenium automation for.
good news, they asked me to get off the project.
yup. found a bunch of coke can pallets full of punch cards when clearing out a relative's house in the 80s. They were fortran code for the company he worked at, for the payroll and pension systems.