Oldstyle Game Development

Interesting quote by Ste Pickford, found via Oddbob in the indiegamer forums.

"...when John and I first met Rare in the late 80s they introduced us to the NES. We'd already developed dozens of games on the 8-bit and 16-bit home computers, and thought we knew what we were doing, but these console games represented a massive step up in user-friendliness and playability compared to what we were doing.

"Rare explained to us that every game had to be bug free, and had to be able to be completed - they even had to send a video of the game being played through to the end as part of the submission process. In those days we, the devs, never expected to be able to complete our own games. We just presumed that some expert player out there might be good enough to get to the end. Often we just made each new level more difficult than the last by increasing a value controlling speed or number of enemies, presumably until the player died or the game crashed.

"It was a real eye opener to start thinking about the actual experience of the player - the customer - rather than just showing off how many sprites we could get on the screen or what clever screen scrolling systems we could program."