A wild west of large corporations releasing 99% shovelware and 1% good games, alongside small companies with offices composed of autistic guys chainsmoking cigarettes while making grade AAA certified ludo.

It's relatively similar to independent developers. Small companies ensure higher quality control while preventing diminishing returns. Less is more, as they say.

>>12050737
It was like a bunch of different people and companies of various sizes making widgets for many platforms for decades, except it was video games instead of widgets.

>>12050737
Your question is really broad so you're probably going to get nothing but garbage replies on this godforsaken board, but I guess it's worth pointing out that teams were indeed much smaller back then, even as recently as the 6th gen it wasn't uncommon for big name titles to only have a ~100 person or so core team compared to the thousands and thousands of people who work on modern AAA games.

>>12050751
What is the difference between modern "indie" developers who usually have studios, teams, and publishers contracted and old companies back then?

>>12050831
What you consider "indie" isn't actually "indie" considering your quotative obstinance. I call it "bedroom" or in other words a team that fits in one bedroom comfortably. A normal bedroom, in case that's not obvious...

>>12050831
Before the modern steam/gog/itch.io where just about anyone could self publish, indie being anyone who operated without a known big name publisher, this meant you were extremely limited in sales and distribution. Nintendo, Sony, SEGA, weren't going to return your calls, if you wanted a console release you either had to show your wares to EA, Activision, Ubisoft and any other great evil to get access to console publishing. And even if you wanted to go home computer, most game stores only deal with known publisher catalogues. To be indie you basically had to be distributing shareware at cons and doing direct mail order.
These days the term has become badly distorted where basically anything that isn't Call of Battle Fortnite Season 26 and a studio of less than 500 employees gets called indie, which is stupid since the term literally means "independent" and you ain't independent if EA is deciding the milestones.

"Bedroom" coders are a different thing. A great many of the one man & a sound guy in your own house development studios during the 8-bit micro years were working on contract for Ocean, Mastertronic, and all the others I can't name off the top of my head, so they weren't by the definition of the term, independent. They were just contractors.

>>12050737
Old video game development was many layers of hell.
Let's say your 18 and hungry to be in game dev in 1990. Nobody cares about CS degrees so you skipped college, and you spent your teenage years bit banging your own machine code/assembly games on a C64 so you have some demos to show prospective employers. And this easily nets you a job. Except this job is basically the same job duplicated amongst 20-30 tiny studios freshly minted by a 29 year old industry burn out using his severance pay from the last job he was binned from. It will pay minimum wage and you'll work very LONG hours in a dingy hole of an office above a fast food takeaway place and below a dance studio for fat people.
Because your studio is an unknown all your boss will manage to get for all his whoring will be super short contracts for tricky port jobs of mediocre games, probably sports. And you'll pull many all nighters, frantically trying to turn undocumented lumps of nonsense from another architecture into something that works on a NES, slapping together anything that looks like it works so you can show the publisher at the end of the month and get a milestone check so the boss can pay rent and wages. And every time you think you might be ahead of schedule and can go home before 8pm, the boss will get a phonecall from the "hands on" guy managing the project to ask if he can just change one quick thing that will take you all weekend to do.
8 months of hard graft later, the sales guys at EA will decide the market is too saturated and they'll shelve your work. You'll still get paid, but now there's no prestige from a published title to leverage to get a better project. So it's back to the grind.
And your next project will get stalled because it's due to be released at christmas and Nintendo was notoriously slow at QA when they had their own games to release so you get a bunch of "fails" to work on last week of November and you can't go home until they are all sorted to get the next...

>>12050907
You're backwards, but only because budget comes from harder work. Capture the PC market with direct internet connection and give them free gameplay. Give them Pre-Doom. Give every other retard a fucking influencer shit ass promotion stunt. while establishing your company. Then squeeze out your mind birthed child while everyone criticizes and tramples it. The end.

>>12050918
...submission in and hope Nintendo passes it this time. Which they won't. So you miss the release window, publisher is pissed, stiffs you on your completion bonuses. Now the company you work for is running on fumes with no money and lots of debt and no longer preferred by the publisher so there's a lot of unreturned phone calls and your boss is looking like death every time the mail arrives.
Then one day you get told not to come in because the company is bust. References will be provided. Sorry.
So you do it all again at a different company. And again, most likely.
And maybe, if you can avoid total burn out, maybe you'll code your own demos in your free time and you'll be lucky to join a company that has some spare cash after lucking out on a lucrative contract. And they'll help you bring your passion project to fruition. And you'll release lemmings or worms onto the world and live off the royalties forever.
It was awesome.

>>12050737
>What was retro video game development like?
>>12050891
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n79SYpEVMgM
>>12050867
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFN9UBTlc_I

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>>12050926
Any concrete example of the kind of things Nintendo would say to make games fail cert?
Didn't they have a guideline for this in the NES days? Here is one for SNES.

>>12050991
The line about "vowels in passwords" is pretty funny btw because I'm sure it all stems from "ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHERFUCKER" which was their own doing, but then everyone else had to pay the price.

>>12050831
These days the vast majority of "indies" games that you can buy on Steam/GoG don't even have an office. The guy running the show is doing it from his home and then maybe only has 1 or 2 real employees and everyone else is contracted from all over the world and are also doing it from their homes. Most of them even have another job on the side, it's only easy for artists to find a lot of work. They're passion projects more than anything.
This description even includes games that sold hundreds of thousands of copies (which, even with a great contract, wouldn't net that much money for most of the contracted guys, only enough to pay the bills for a while, depending on how much work they did on the game). I believe even something like Nightdive who works with big name publishers fits this description.

Back in the early 90's even small dev teams needed an office and the operating cost of that and being forced to find employees in their own country

>>12050991
nintendo were always cancer to deal with

>>12050918
>>12050926
Many such cases. Wanabe video game devs have long been the lowest man on the totem pole. And I only say that because the human centipede isn't retro. Much like today, every no-skill kid imagined they were going to become a legendary game developer. In reality only a tiny fraction ever made as much as they would have at a real job.
I worked on a lot of games, but only as a side gig from my actual job as a real programmer. It was paid extremely well, because I have some very unique skills that were exceptionally rare at the time. But the average wanabe game dev code monkey would have made more at Mc Donalds.

>>12050831
Then: men with wives and families.
Now: trannies with discord.

>>12051114
you wish fag

>>12051134
I wish what? Are you a bot?

>>12050737
Lots of assembly language and finishing games in 6 months.

>>12051114
>then: virgin boys

>>12051147
>things I dislike are things I think about
cmon

https://youtu.be/LgrCxb718BA&t=239

>>12050737
>What was retro video game development like?
Short and sweet, which is whydevs were able to get new full-length games out every single year.

It was nothing like now where it takes up to a decade to get one single game out.

>>12050737

the development pipeline was much more narrow and practically neanderthal in technology if contrasted to now. Half the time, development including developing your own tools from scratch to develop the game.

>>12051009
To me, indies now are no different than games being made 40 years ago in terms of team, size and scope besides the budget. They usually are a studio or have an HQ, have a decent budget, staff, etc. Indies 20 years ago seemed to all have been made by 1-5 people at most and had no publisher.

>>12050742
Nowadays (not retro) it's 99.9999% shovelware. So that, if a game comes out that is not shovelware, it's a five sigma event.

>>12053667
>To me
Not retro

>>12053731
>>12055038
samefag

>>12055864
copefag

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Faery Tale adventure.

This guy made the largest fantasy adventure games of the 1980s (in terms of world/map size totally 17,000 screens), he did it solo and invented the tools needed to make a game like that.
>did all the art himself
>not satisfied with the sound design tools available for amiga, he created his own during the games development
>created a title based map editor tool and other bespoke software needed to make a massive game world
>wrote the music for the game, which is remembered as some of the better 80s RPG/adventure music for the amiga (which isn't saying much sadly)
>did most of this just for the love of the Amiga and to help show off what it could do
A one man game with just a marketing team involved for the photo shoot for the packaging (but he made his own black knight armor for the photo shoot).

His own blog tells the story of how this all happened, it is pretty crazy. The game was ported to Genesis and it is one of the better genesis adventure games.
https://dreamertalin.medium.com/the-faery-tale-adventure-a-personal-history-4fae0617a18d

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>>12056204
Very underrate game for 1987. This released the same year as Zelda 1 in the west. Genesis port in 1991.

>>12056204
And it was garbage. Simping will never change that.