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Chunsoft's Koichi Nakamura explains how he got started, misses the days of limitations
"I was living out in the rural areas of Shikoku [western Japan] back in high school. I didn't have anyplace to sell my games, so getting them published in magazines was the best I could do. It was over an hour by train to the nearest computer store, and that was the only one in the entire prefecture.
My friends in the school computer club taught me the basics of programming. At the time, all we had was a programmable calculator that used a language which was actually pretty close to assembly. I made my first game, Galaxy Wars, in BASIC, but it was just way too slow, so I used a BASIC compiler for the PC-8001 computer to speed it up a bit. There was only so much you could do with that, though, and the other kids in the club figured that learning full-on assembly was the only way to get things faster. One of the kids had already made a Breakout clone in assembly, so I had him make a copy of the English-language manual for the CPU and that's what I started with." - Koichi Nakamura
Mr. Nakamura also got into talking about the limitations of game systems back in the day, and how that element of surprising people with what you could pull off has now come and gone.
Check out the full interview here
My friends in the school computer club taught me the basics of programming. At the time, all we had was a programmable calculator that used a language which was actually pretty close to assembly. I made my first game, Galaxy Wars, in BASIC, but it was just way too slow, so I used a BASIC compiler for the PC-8001 computer to speed it up a bit. There was only so much you could do with that, though, and the other kids in the club figured that learning full-on assembly was the only way to get things faster. One of the kids had already made a Breakout clone in assembly, so I had him make a copy of the English-language manual for the CPU and that's what I started with." - Koichi Nakamura
Mr. Nakamura also got into talking about the limitations of game systems back in the day, and how that element of surprising people with what you could pull off has now come and gone.