From garage experiments to global phenomena - trace five decades of dreamers, builders, and the tools that brought their worlds to life.
Al Alcorn, hired by Nolan Bushnell, wired Pong together by hand. No engines, no SDKs - just soldering irons and 66 logic chips. Creating a game meant building the hardware it ran on. Only engineers could be game developers.
The NES gave developers a fixed target. No more custom cabinets - just cartridges and a dev kit that cost as much as a car. Small teams could finally ship to millions, if they could afford the entry fee and Nintendo's blessing.
3D graphics meant 3D problems - modeling, texturing, animation, cameras. Development teams ballooned. Budgets exploded. The creative barrier rose as fast as polygon counts. Making games became an industrial endeavor.
Games became platforms. Online multiplayer meant server infrastructure, matchmaking, anti-cheat, live ops. Development never ended - launch was just the beginning. The technical burden grew heavier than ever.
Unity and Unreal went free. Steam opened its doors. Suddenly anyone could ship a game. But "anyone" still meant mastering C#, shaders, netcode, and animation pipelines. The tools democratized. The complexity didn't.