Sense and Sensibility: “quality of programming has gone down”

A sensible remark from the founder of Sensible Software? Judge for yourselves: Jon Hare, one of the moving forces behind games like Sensible World of Soccer, says that he honestly believes that the “quality of programming has gone down.” Read the whole story in the full article.

Jon Hare has been around for quite a while. He was one of the co-founders of Sensible Software – the studio behind the Sensible World of Soccer – back in 1986 and since then has had a solid and prolific career in the video game industry.

His standing with the industry is one of the reasons his opinion carries a lot of weight and why ears perked up when he remarked in an interview that he “honestly believe[s] that the quality of programming has gone down.”

The reason for this, he believes, is that today’s current games need larger teams to work on it as compared to before, when developers could “virtually [do] the big games on their own”:

It was a different environment back then because the hardware was more stable. You didn’t need loads of people running the graphics, programs just ran at 60 frames per second – so the onus was on the creative and not about fighting with the display.

You had a smaller team and that meant you started to get some of the subtle little things done that made such a difference to the final game.

Basically, the rise of the video game industry had an unexpected consequence, which leads us to one of the current issues with game development: gameplay versus graphics.

He adds that mediums like WiiWare and Xbox Live (whose games require smaller teams to develop) are “the best chance we have of seeing new and original games coming out.” Perhaps this may extend to indie and homebrew game developers as well.