Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

With Video Games, “Old” is Kind of a Relative Thing, Right?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 27, 2010

April 2, 1996… I was sitting on a bus at CGDC (before it was renamed “GDC”) getting ready to go to Microsoft’s big DirectX party (turned out to be a big toga party). I overheard snippets of conversations around me. A couple of seats behind me, I heard this exchange:

Developer 1: So what have you worked on?

Developer 2: I worked on Pitfall.

Developer 1: Wow! Really? I loved that game!

I didn’t hear the rest of it, but I don’t think that Developer 2 was actually David Crane. He sounded too young. It was probably someone who worked on Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, which had been released about 18 months earlier.  Still, considering the number of game development luminaries in attendance, the possibility that Crane may have been among us was tantalizing. I mean – that game was a very old classic at the time. The history! Why, at the time, Pitfall was… about fourteen years old! Ancient history by video game standards!

I thought about that this weekend, and then had a shocking revelation.

My first game, Twisted Metal, is about to turn fifteen years old.

Yeah. Okay. I’m feeling very old and unproductive now.


Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



  • Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

    15 years ago?!? Isn’t that, like, before the invention of electricity? 😉

    I think the appropriate response is, “ow, my hip….”

  • Andy_Panthro said,

    One of the first “games” I ever played is 27 years old…

    http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/adventures-in-math

    That’s the same age as me! Scary.

  • Spaceman Spiff said,

    I got to meet David Crane at a classic video games conference about 10 years. I swear he’s 6-foot 6″ tall… Was a helluva nice guy. Ask him how they did the sound for Atari 2600 Pitfall II – absolutely crazy stuff…

  • sascha/hdrs said,

    Old games are like old cars: They have class! Something that most modern games lack.

  • Spaceman Spiff said,

    sascha — trust me.. there are plenty of ’78 Vegas out there in the old game world…

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