By the early 1990s, gamers had become used to swapping floppy disks. Not just in the sense that they were passing them to their friends in the school playground or in offices up and down the land: we’re talking about the umpteen disks that were often needed for people to play the increasingly complex titles that were being released.
“Looking back, it was pretty crazy,” said videogame developer Graeme Devine, who began his career in 1982 porting Pole Position for Atari, aged just 16. “We all seemed very willing to slot 20 floppy disks into our computers to install and play a game, although I’d got really good at compressing PC titles so that they’d fit onto fewer disks. More disks meant increased costs, after all.”
Although this skill ensured Devine had plenty of work – “you could rewrite the BIOS really easily and fool it into thinking a floppy disk was twice as big as it actually was” – it nevertheless added to development time and still led to the need for multiple disks. Yet the games industry, despite having long made use of cartridges, appeared happy to persevere with floppies and, in doing so, wasn’t seeing the potential of another rather more shiny medium.
Meteoric rise
It was the early 1990s and Devine’s career had continued to soar. He’d created in 1987 (a game he’s currently in the midst of remaking) as well as and, among a clutch of other games for a host of 8-bit and 16-bit computers.
