this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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I bet he did PI planning for a week. Created 132 user stories. Decided on 2 week sprints at a velocity of 27 story points. Had daily 1 hour stand-ups. Weekly 2 hour sprint retro meetings. Per sprint a 3 hour sprint review meetings and a 6 hour grooming session with his cat. Not to forget the bi-weekly 2 hour sprint refinement meetings. And each sprint had a 4 hour backlog meeting on the potty. All by himself.
Are 1 hour (or anything close to it) really a thing that happens? No wonder people hate on scrum then. It's called a stand up because no one wants to stand still for more than 10 minutes and would like to get out of there asap. 😐
I've read a lot of stories about it, because I'm a fan of the game and also used to dabble in assembly myself. His motivation isn't as crazy as it's often presented.
He used assembly because he had always programmed in assembly on a variety of hardware. He basically had every typical function documented or memorized from other projects. Just as any programmer can remember the statements in a language, he had blocks of assembly code that he could put together to do the same things. Like functions, right? If it's made right and you know what it does, then you don't even need to look at what's between the brackets.
At the time he wrote RCT, he simply couldn't be bothered to start a new collection of scripts in a different language.
It still likely would have been faster for him to write anything new in a new language. And, there wouldn't have been anything stopping him from using existing assembly code in conjunction with another language.
I would say his motivation was pretty crazy. One person making a well designed and polished video game is a pretty incredible feat regardless of the language.
For those unaware. Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in. Which is why it's so impressive that it was programmed this way. It's also a reason why the game ran so well on the hardware of the time.
In programming we talk about "high level" and "low level" programming languages. The level does not mean difficulty, in laymen's terms you can think about it about how "close" you are to programing by typing in 1s and 0s. If you're "low" you are very close to the ground level (the hardware). Obviously, no one programs in 1s and 0s because we created languages that convert human typed code into what a computer wants which is 1s and 0s.
Assembly is a very "low level" programming language. It's essentially as "close" to programing in 1s and 0s as you would ever get. It is still an important language today but no one in their right mind would ever program a game in it unless you were running with extremely strict hardware restrictions where every single bit of memory needed to be dealt with perfectly. Which is basically what Chris did.
I love that you're "for those unaware" for assembly but not the random dude who made a video game in 1994 over 30 years ago (that I for one have never heard of).
If people these days don't know what rollercoaster tycoon is I'm going to start feeling way more old than I already do.
I know what Rollercoaster Tycoon is, I just can't identify random game developers by their vacation photos.
That's not the first game.
Also what the other guy said.
The dude or the game? The game, Transport Tycoon, is phenomenal, and you should try OpenTTD, which is a FOSS recreation of it by fans (not in assembly).
The fact that the OpenTTD devs made it compatible down to the save files and textures is nothing short of incredible. Like how much time and dedication does that take?
a video game
Not one, like 3 or 4 of them in Assembly, the Tycoon games.
Bro is a living legend.
Clearly not super well known.
Right? My first question was "Who the fuck is Chris Sawyer?"
Tom's brother
No lie, I almost typed Tom Sawyer when writing my previous comment.
Sawyer started writing games in Z80 assembly. Assembly language was definitely something you would use to program games back in those days.
Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. It's kind of nice to do, in many ways it's simpler than high level programming, you've just got a lot more to keep track of.
This isn't really true on modern systems anymore. Lower level languages like C and Rust are more or less just as performant as handmade assembly.
Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little you'd write in assembler now-a-days, and you'd probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.
No disrespect, but I love that folks from the UK always say "assembleuh" like they were on their way to saying "assembly" and got spooked halfway through
Yup. And our processors are a lot more powerful, so the tricks you'd do in assembly to eek out performance just don't matter anymore.
I know it's a typo but "eek out performance" has made me picture someone programming a little ghost to spook the rest of the code into running faster
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Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
... these days. I assure you all the games my mate wrote on the HP calculator back then were in Assembly. And on the PC I would certainly use C but the core of it, the displaying of pixels and low level catching of input for example, were all in assembly. But yeah, that being said, for the time, everything in assembly was a pretty crazy approach given the tools available on PC.
Assembly was the language you used to write games back then. Most 8 and 16 bit console games were written in assembly. They needed low level code for the performance.
If you played sonic spinball on the genesis/mega-drive, you played a game that struggled at 20 fps because the developers chose to write in C instead of assembly to hit their deadline. That is why most games were coded in assembly in those days.
Sawyer started developing games in 1983. He would have learned assembly, and continued using the tools and techniques he was familiar with his entire career.
Assembly was pretty uncommon by 1999. RCT is uniquely made, but not because Chris Sawyer was a unique coding genius doing what no one else could, but because he was one of the few bedroom coders of the 80s who held out that long.
He loved the project, not the money.
I've thought of this when considering if anti-piracy measures will ever defeat pirates. Anti-piracy engineers are paid to work 40 hours a week. The pirates love it just for the fun and challenge and there are more of them and they work longer hours.
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He looks like a young Monty Burns
Who?
C. Montgomery Burns
Oh.
Don't see the resemblance. His skin isn't even yellow
If you lack true talent in your workforce, you can't make up for it by throwing more people and money at it.
Additionally, if you have true talent in your workforce, YOU LET THEM DO THEIR THING.
It's also an example of when someone with passion is not alienated from the fruits of their labor.
You'll never be able to get an engineer to care about a product as much when at the end of the day the only thing they have to show for it is a paycheck.
Lack of Ownership of the production of your labor is a major problem with motivation in wage labor systems. Especially ones that depend on creativity and problem solving.
I saw a great talk by John Romero a few years ago that really underscores how in the early days of computing a few mad geniuses really moved mountains.
What did he make?
RollerCoaster Tycoon. The Gold edition is still worth playing today if you aren't old enough to have the privilege of playing it in your childhood. (There's a Android port too.) Way better than Planet Coaster.
RCT2 isn't worth playing, though. Has much less content. The real life theme parks are cool, though.
RCT 3 was redesigned from scratch and is in 3D, which means that you can ride your creations for the first time in the series. Good for it's time though at this point people would argue that you should just play Planet Coaster instead.
I think rollercoaster tycoon? not sure though
Transport Tycoon and RollarCoaster Tycoon (1 & 2)
He also wrote the PC ports of Elite 1 and 2, which were amongst the most innovative and technically complex games of their time.
Transport Tycoon, which I've spent an insane amount of time playing, as well as roller coaster tycoon.
Such incredibly fun games.
Hard work and passion.
He must have pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
He is clearly a rivertaur.