Recently uncovered cassette tape recordings of the 1989 Computer Game Developers Conference reveal how much has changed in the games industry in the last 40 years, as well as how much has stayed the same. Decades ago, Origin Systems’ Robert Garriott was already worried about the PC gaming market being oversaturated, even when a mere fraction of today’s game volume was releasing every year. And nostalgia’s pull was seemingly just as powerful in 1989 as it is in 2026, as one of the panels at the conference, titled The Golden Days of Computer Games, was asking attendees to “Return with us to the thrilling days of yesteryear (about 10 years ago).”
Steve Cartwright, an early Activision employee whose design credits include games like Seaquest and Aliens: The Computer Game, talked about getting his start in the industry in the early 1980s thanks to Activision co-founder David Crane. While the first half of the anecdote feels completely foreign today, I have a feeling the last line will hit home for most current game developers:
“I called up a friend of mine from school named Dave Crane. I said, Dave, want to go out for lunch or something? Go out, see a movie, hang out together. He said, ‘how would you like to be a game designer?’ Dave had just started a little company called Activision. I said, Dave, I don’t know anything about designing games. You should get somebody with some experience. He said, ‘there is nobody with experience.’
“I said, Dave, I don’t know anything about programming. He said, ‘it’s a 6502, you only need to know four instructions.’ I said, I don’t know, Dave, I just got a job at an engineering firm. I’m working on the design of a power supply, got a couple technicians working for me. I got a big raise. I don’t think you can match my salary. He said, ‘what’s your salary?’ I told him. He said, ‘no problem, we’ll double it.’ And, uh, those days are gone. I don’t know if the rest of the world has caught up to us or we’re vastly underpaid, but it’s not like that anymore.”
Ultima designer Richard Garriott, also on the panel, talked about the early days of selling his games in ziploc bags, and how publishers would say “forget it and close the doors” when he told them he wanted to sell the game in a box with a cloth map and detailed instruction booklets. That is, until he met Sierra On-Line’s Ken Williams, who went along with the idea to great success.
When someone in the audience asked what the PC games industry had lost since the “golden days,” M.U.L.E. designer Danielle Bunten Berry said that “I think we’ve lost the sense that we can do anything we want to.”
“My experience with publishers at this point is there’s an awful lot of ‘the market wants’ or ‘the market doesn’t want’ that wasn’t there in the early days. Then it sort of was ‘hey, that’s cool, let’s do it!’ It was much more product-oriented, much less market-oriented.”
My favorite question, though, from here in the far-flung future, goes to the person who asked what each designer would give as a piece of advice there in 1989 that everyone could look back on in 5-10 years while wondering what those good old days were all about.
“That is a very tough question,” Garriott said after a round of laughter in the room. “My personal vantage point is to really observe what is happening in the industry, in the sense of the ‘one programmer, one product, one closet, one computer, one game days’ are gone… that is not the prevalent system anymore. In this day and age, specialization is absolutely required, particularly for larger scale, epic products. … Understanding what kind of a team is for producing the game and what kind of a team can publish that game successfully—because marketing is now at least as important as the product in this day and age, probably moreso unfortunately—watching that carefully, as it will keep changing in the future, is the only way you’ll survive.”
That’s a pretty clear view of the arc of the big budget games industry over the coming decades, though thankfully modern indie development has shown it’s still possible for solo developers or small teams to produce some of PC gaming’s biggest hits.
You can listen to the whole panel recording thanks the Video Game History Foundation.
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