Port of “Out of this World” to JavaScript
I’ve been in the games and tech industry for a long time – over twenty years now. And one thing I really love about this business is how technology continually advances. Back when I was a kid my Dad bought a then-amazing, 20 megabyte HardCard for our IBM PC clone. Today I have an eight gigabyte USB memory stick “key” from LaCie on my keychain; that’s a 400-fold increase in capacity, now jingling in my pocket for something like $20. Similarly, I love seeing games and game technology platforms advance.
An industry friend Mark Deloura (now over at Google) recently pointed out a fantastic Javascript implementation of what was once the coolest, best looking PC game on the planet: Another World (or Out of this World in the US.) This came from the days when French game companies were known for doing weird but cool titles that didn’t sell – was sort of artsy niche that wasn’t taken too seriously. Those days are now long past (thank you UbiSoft!), but I still think it’s astounding to find what was once a full, high-end, cream of the crop game now running purely in Javascript in a browser window. As the author says, “No plugins, no ActiveX, no Flash. Just need a modern browser…”
Does make one wonder what the next wave of games will look like. The actual hardware platform is becoming less important. What really matters is “enough” horsepower to run the games, a robust development environment, display surface(s) to show them, and connectivity to your social graph and the network. The next decade is going to significantly change how people think about and play games much more so than the last… it’s going to be an amazing time!
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Chris