as i get further into my third decade in game development i get more and more sentimental. photos of old teams, people i'll never meet who poured their talents into something long ago, can really get me feelin' melancholy. share your favs, if you like.

given how much early game developers had to struggle for even a bit of public credit, it feels rare to see a team photo make it onto the back of an actual box. but that's what happened with Zarth, a PC-88 game from 1984 i hadn't heard of before today. good job getting some recognition, team Zarth, wherever the hell yall are today.

photo from this piece

at this point nearly all old photos of early 1980s Britsoft game devs are a pointer to the same emotional space in my brain, the final shot of Control with the smoke rising from the chimney, but every member of joy division was 16 years old, and their manager is some 42 year old furniture-salesman-turned-videogames-entrepreneur named Dennis who was exploiting them all horribly, and they were just kids having fun, packed 5 to an office and thinking nothing of working 20 hour days slinging Z80 assembly to get a sequel to Adventures Of Wobbly Wibbly In Thatcherland out in six weeks, and one of them died tragically, a few burnt out, some of them grew up and stayed in the business and are senior engineering directors at Sony now, and the rest drifted off to other worlds entirely. there, but for the grace of god and ~10 years and the width of the atlantic ocean, go i.