This is Not a Software Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 5

and more dii cult to specify in code the art present in a game. What had
worked on the Atari VCS became untenable on the ever-expanding hard-
ware presented to game developers.
By the time Super Mario Bros. (SMB) was under production for the
NES, there were apparent distinctions being made in the division of labour
for a video game. SMB was released alongside the NES in the U.S. in 1985
(Nintendo 1985). The game is widely known to have popularized the “plat-
former” style of gameplay, although the style predates the game.
Technology eventually progressed to make some of the production
stages easier. Originally Miyamoto had to paint each character. The
colours in the painting were given numbers and the numbers were
inputted into a computer, dot by dot. He showed programmers not
only how the character looked but also how it moved and what spe-
cial traits it had (a bee, when hit, lost its wings but continued to stalk
Mario; boats made out of skulls sank into a fi re pit). The characters
and their movements were written, line-by-line, as instructions in a
computer program.
Tools were developed to eliminate much of the tedious work. Dia-
grams and drawings were translated into computer graphics with tech-
nology called Character Generator Computer Aided Design (CGCAD).
“Character banks” of images were stored along with the codes that
described them. Movement, too, was now programmable from a bank
of choices. (Shef 1993, 53-54)
Shigeru Miyamoto, credited as the primary designer of numerous games,
worked closely with software engineers. Although perhaps versed in compu-
tational logic and programming, it was not Miyamoto's job to create every
line of code that made up SMB for the NES; he was instead charged with the
creation of a virtual world that spoke to players and presented them with a
compelling play experience. He designed systems and rules for these worlds
that then had to be converted into code by a team of programmers. The cred-
its for SMB listed seven individuals involved in the creation of the entire game.
Audio, art, design, project management and programming were all elements
required for the development of this new generation of video game.
As the video game industry continued apace the rapid growth of com-
puting power, so too did the number of people involved in the development
of games. More designers, programmers and artists became involved in
the process of game development. Yet, the perception that to make games
someone ought to pursue a degree in computer science persisted. Game
development topics and websites focused almost entirely on code and
engineering. During the rapid expansion of the game industry in the early
1990s, there was a grudging acknowledgment of the “strange marriage” of
programming and art in the development of video games. Design, however,
remained largely an afterthought for many would-be game developers.