The Making of Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 89
Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."
6 weeks?! (Score:5, Interesting)
And that was one of my favorites back on the C64. It was very addictive. This really shows it's the overall creativity and playability that matters most in a game, not necessarily the complexity or graphics.
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
"Ghostbusters! Ahahahahaha!!!" (Score:3, Interesting)
The game gets a bad rep nowadays, usually because of the botched NES port made by a team of crack-smoking monkeys, but the original will always be one of my all-time favorite computer games.
Re:I remember this game. (Score:3, Interesting)
It was an awesome game, but very challenging. I remember finally getting the hang of it after a few weeks. You really had to think fast to decide where to drive to next, around the city.
I remember the marshmallow man would show up, too... What did you have to do with him again? I think you had to place a bait somewhere so he didn't smash a building.
I also remember listening to the intro sequence for 30 mins straight, watching that bouncing ball. That was some fantastic C64 music!
Game Remake (Score:2, Interesting)
Was pretty amazed to discover that someone made a remake of the game for Windows.
http://files.filefront.com/Ghostbusters/;6357091;/ fileinfo.html [filefront.com]
I didn't enjoy it quite as much but that's because somethings seem different than what I remember of the game play. Anyone else try this remake? Would love to get opinions on this.
a lesson for today (Score:5, Interesting)
if only others thought this way...
Little Computer People was AMAZING (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, back in the days... (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, you can already feel lucky when you get a week of fun for every manyear invested.
Re:Time (Score:3, Interesting)
You make it sound like Crane and all his peers are retired or dead, but we're not.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer (although unfamous and less accomplished than Crane), I can tell you that today's challenges are just different from the ones we faced back then.
For the 2600 we had to have very precise timing (sometimes to an accuracy of 1 CPU cyle) in our display routines, but we never had to worry about programming style, compiler bugs, and (thank God) we didn't have to integrate a lot of third-party libraries into our games.
It seems like integration of other people's code is becoming a greater and greater part of software "development". It's becoming rather boring in a way even as the amount of "stuff" you need to understand get's larger and larger.
Re:Time (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.