Assembly line: An urge to preserve game history brought a 40-year vet back to the industry

gamedeveloper.com:

A good programmer is careful to add comments and clarification to their code. From the sound of things, legendary games industry programmer Randy Linden extends this practice to conversations.

“Does that make sense?” Linden frequently asks this question while recounting his 40-year career. He offers this question kindly, thick with a native Toronto accent, from his home office in the Seattle area, and he saves the question for the thickest technical breakdowns—the ones that arguably changed the game industry forever.

There was the time he built his first emulation software suite, and quite possibly the first commercial emulator ever sold, to run Commodore 64 software on the newer Amiga. (Linden would later become famous for Bleem, another emulation suite which raised Sony’s legal eyebrows.)

There was the time he somehow pushed the underpowered Super Nintendo to natively render the id Software classic DOOM, all without referencing that game’s source code. And there was the time he not only ported an astonishing Quake proof-of-concept to the anemic Game Boy Advance (again, without any source code from id Software) but also made his own Quake-like shooter entirely in Assembly language, entirely by himself, which he ported to equally ill-fitting platforms: the Nokia Symbian, the Amazon Fire TV, even the iPod Video (whose screen real estate was crowded out by a click wheel, remember those?).

By the end of a two-hour conversation, Linden lists enough experience, and politely checks in enough times, to fill multiple chapters of a book on a golden age of computer programming—one where the Assembly programming language reigned and Linden swam deftly through its seas. Modern game design doesn’t necessarily require the level of