this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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For those unaware. Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in. Which is why it's so impressive that it was programmed this way. It's also a reason why the game ran so well on the hardware of the time.
In programming we talk about "high level" and "low level" programming languages. The level does not mean difficulty, in laymen's terms you can think about it about how "close" you are to programing by typing in 1s and 0s. If you're "low" you are very close to the ground level (the hardware). Obviously, no one programs in 1s and 0s because we created languages that convert human typed code into what a computer wants which is 1s and 0s.
Assembly is a very "low level" programming language. It's essentially as "close" to programing in 1s and 0s as you would ever get. It is still an important language today but no one in their right mind would ever program a game in it unless you were running with extremely strict hardware restrictions where every single bit of memory needed to be dealt with perfectly. Which is basically what Chris did.
Sawyer started writing games in Z80 assembly. Assembly language was definitely something you would use to program games back in those days.