I love these types of videos. It continuously amazes me to learn how much ingenuity and creative coding was necessary to create video games in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s.<p>Even more amazing is that they did a lot of it without tools like version control, graphics engines, and frameworks that most programmers take for granted today.<p>Today we stand on the shoulders of the giants that created these early games.<p>For example the water effect in the video was probably the culmination of many all-hands meetings within the team that figured out how to "cheat" the system into doing it, while literally bouncing off the graphics ceiling that the console was capable of producing. Nowadays we would just send the intern off and tell them to add some water to the scene as a trivial task.
They also have a video (0:15) showing a 'secret' level select activated by physically bopping the cartridge on the head while running. It's a laugh! How did we miss this?<p><a href="https://youtu.be/h8TAuhT63lo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/h8TAuhT63lo</a>