Do you want your game creators focuses on twonking around in the guts of an obscure, probably poorly documented and understood one-off architecture, or worried about creating an interested and enjoyable game?
This is a false dichotomy. If anything, I could see arguments that having to squeeze out capability it's a filter to only get things in the game that pass a development budget. Not just all you can throw at it.
You have a limited budget and a limited number of employee-hours with which to create and ship a game.
Every hour spent fighting with the platform itself is very literally an hour spent not creating cool and fun stuff.
That time investment would only be worth it if a "novel" platform delivered huge gains in return for time invested. However, IMO we've long passed the point where that's feasible. CPUs and GPUs are very mature at this point: they are the result of decades of evolution and trillions of dollars of R&D.
Inventing your own radically-different, competitive, bespoke architecture for a game console at this point would require an investment orders of magnitude beyond the expected earning potential of these systems.
Agreed I used too strong of language. I should have said it could be a false dichotomy.
My perspective is colored by being a huge fan of the demo scene and loving older games. A large part about what made some of them fun was understanding just how hard they were to do. Is also, I feel, why so many games did not have as much in game help. Couldn't put it in. There is something to be said for that.
My hunch is there was a selective pressure such that only really amazing things survived. That said, how many potentially amazing things were killed fighting the platforms? Could Daikatana have been amazing with more powerful tools? I honestly don't know.
Those developers succeeded despite the struggles inherent to their given platforms.
If you watch (and pay attention to) the videos you'd see what many of those struggles were. Hardware bugs. Missing/bad documentation. Bugs in the software toolchain.
Those things don't make standout games better. They make every other game worse.
(And even the standout games would have been better -- or at least developed in less time -- had the developers not been forced to heroically struggle through those problems...)
They make them better, because had those obstacles not been there in first place, the game design decisions to be creative in spite of them would have not been taken.
For example, the shadow character in Prince of Persia.
Also, I am talking out of experience here, started coding in 1986 and was into portuguese demoscene PC/Amiga.
Having watched that I would agree that the memory limitations of the Apple II directly lead to the creation of that brilliant game feature. =)
However, I was responding to the comment chain below this comment:
"Do you want your game creators focuses on
twonking around in the guts of an obscure,
probably poorly documented and understood
one-off architecture"
This was not about hardware limitations like the RAM limits Mechner faced while writing PoP. This is about bugs and other such things.
The XOR instructions used to draw the shadow-man weren't a "wonky" feature of the Apple II hardware... it was a pretty standard and well-documented feature.
In fact, in the video, if I recall correctly, Mechner specifically mentioned seeing the XOR instruction in the documentation. It was not "poorly documented." The Apple II was quite well documented.
Also, I am talking out of experience here, started coding in 1986
and was into portuguese demoscene PC/Amiga.
I am always in awe of the demoscene... props to you.
However even though I am not a demoscene or game developer I am speaking from 20+ years software development experience. Nearly as long as you. I did not start doing this yesterday.
