Beyond 100,000 Sprites: Game Design and Technology
From the side-scrolling mania of early platformers like Defender and Super Mario Brothers, to John Carmack’s invention of 3D first-person perspective and the birth of a PC game called Doom, game design and technological innovation have long gone hand in hand. But what are the particular technologies used by designers to expand and enrich the experience of gaming? More specifically, how have the limits of technology been harnessed by designers to transform the challenge of constraint into the play of possibility?
This essay was published last year as part of Macromedia's Think Tank series, edited by Alice Twemlow and David Womack. I have been doing a lot of recent writing around games and technology and thought this essay was worth revisiting. Download file