@torqtorqtorq

2 years ago

This is by far the greatest video I've ever seen to explain why game dev on the NES was so hard and why Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami were such masters of their craft. It reminds me of writing music in the .MOD format in the early 90s, where we had to get deeply creative with the use of our 4 tracks and would pitch shift, arpeggiate, and slide samples to turn them into different instruments. Very often the bass line and all percussion would be sharing a track, and only one or the other could play at any given moment in the song. This led to the introduction of things like a "C note bass + snare" sample to use at the exact moment the bass needed to play a C and the snare needed to hit. It was a trade-off; to get those sounds at the same moment, we had to give up a few KB of memory. All in the name of adhering to the 8-bit limitation and keeping the file size as low as possible because, on a 2400 baud modem in 1992, 300KB of song would take a minimum of 21 minutes to download, and you'd only have 60 minutes in your BBS login per day. Adding a 12KB sample meant adding a full minute to the eventual download, so we aimed to keep those file sizes as low as possible. Even writing music for the NES was like this; 5 tracks, and each track dedicated to a different waveform with a digitized sample track. Putting in a short voice sample (like "no way, dude!" in Skate or Die) could eat up 10% or more of your total allotted game memory. The connected world today is so much better in so many ways, but I still love the nostalgia behind cracking those limitations and finding all the creative ways to make it happen. It was natural puzzle-solving at its finest.

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