Rise of the Game Engines

Abstract

Almost all games developed today are not built from scratch but by using powerful middleware tools, commonly named “game engines”. These provide programmers, artists and designers with a set of commonly used features and systems already implemented and ready to be reused to craft an original concept, considerably speeding up the development process. On the other hand, back in the 1980s, most games were developed in assembly language starting from zero and, while the various computer architectures were much easier to understand and master than modern counterparts, this barrier still made game development hard, especially for non technical people. Nonetheless, being creative and able to express ideas by writing their own programs and games, was always one of the main reasons or, sometimes, main excuses, used by kids to ask parents for investing in one of those new 8-bit technological marvels. This hunger for creativity didn’t pass unnoticed and it wasn’t too long before some of the leading developers in the newborn computer game industry decided to release the first tools offering users a shortcut for simplifying game development.