Re:Quake on the Game Boy Advance [video]
by djmips on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @01:08PM
(#31742541)
This was often by necessity, I worked on some of these ports and we would just get the game on whatever machine it was coming from (cart, disk, arcade machine) and then we would literally reverse engineer it as best we could - which usually meant just playing it a lot and video taping and making notes. Then we would re-implement / draw / compose a work-alike version on the target platform.
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As a kid, I always thought the developers of these ports were simply not very good.
But once I started writing my own code and working in the industry, I realized that you guys were insanely talented people working under ridiculously punishing deadlines and (as you said) zero access to the original source code, assets, etc.
Not familiar with your work in particular but in general, what a heroic and underappreciated game dev niche. Much respect for all that the unheralded port programmers managed to accomplish against the odds.
Yes, also factor in a lot of us were like 19 years old and this was our first project and also we were the lead or only programmer. :D