Thread by @zarkonnen_com

I'm reading and watching stuff about 80s and early 90s game development, and it's stuff like this:

"Spluvix Games was founded by high school buddies John and George in George's parents' basement.

In their first year, they programmed five games, including Spling! and Gorgon, which each sold about 100k copies at $70 each. So they hired about fifty more people and moved the company to a business park near Santa Clara.

They made games for the Apple II, Commodore, and Cromvax XQ17. Cromvax left the microcomputer business in '89 and went back to making bathtubs.

As for me: After high school, I worked as a used car salesman and pearl diver before getting a job selling imported Japanese POS systems in Minnesota.

I was 22 and newly married when I saw a newspaper ad from Spluvix and applied.

I drove down to Santa Clara and visited them in their offices. Of course, everyone smoked, including the dog and most office plants. I was hired on the spot. So my wife and I moved into a beach-front condo nearby.

The newly enlarged company required middle management, so they hired Shivering Steve, an obvious serial killer. Steve forbade us from sleeping or going to the bathroom, which was maybe harsh, but Spluvix did make 9 games that year.

I taught myself Cromvax assembly code by reading the manual back to front. My first game, Plop!, sold pretty well, so it was followed by Plop! 2!, Super Plop! and PlopMania all in that same year.

In Plop! you control a piece of cheese that is also a used car salesman. You have to jump on cars to avoid triangles. It's a beloved classic.

I made five more games for Spluvix, including Rodeo Ron and ZigZog. I was paid $10k a year, which was enough for us to buy a house in the suburbs and raise our three children.

In '92, Spluvix entered an agreement with a French occult society to co-produce an ambitious FMV game called "Atmospheres". The game took five million dollars and three years to make, shipped on six CDs, and sold 71 copies.

Spluvix was then bought by Activision. Shivering Steve eventually went off to found QuasarCom, a top five mobile free-to-play games company."

And nowadays it's more like:

"Our team consists of five people with masters degrees from good universities, which we were able to parlay into a series of unpaid internships at Ubisoft. Eventually, some of us got actual jobs there!

After seven years of working QA at minimum wage, we decided we wanted to go Indie, so we convinced our parents to re-mortgage their houses and started working on our game. Remotely from our bedrooms, of course.

Our game "Harmonies of Edernity" is a 2D legacy roguelike soulslike about sad feelings, featuring full voice acting, 173 beautiful illustrations, and nine characters to choose from, all with detailed tragic backstories.

After five years of development, supported by a generous government grant of $500 and a stick of gum, we released our game on Steam, where it sold 71 copies. We are now all unemployed, in debt, and applying to any and all jobs we can find."

Addendum about the Italian Plop! games: Because of a quirk in distribution arrangements, Castello S.r.l. retained full rights to Plop! in Italy. They created two additional games, "Il Castello di Plop!", a reskin of PlopMania, and "Il Mondo di Plop!" which was a wholly new game.

In these games, Plop is the name of the main character, who is unnamed in the originals.

Il Mondo di Plop! was later translated into English and sold in some countries as "Plop 2". This is the version of Plop! modern readers are most likely familiar with.

Oh wow, this thread is doing numbers. Check out my game, I guess?

store.steampowered.com/app/342560/Air…