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Why do JRPGs look and feel the way they do?
The common explanation for why Western and Japanese RPGs diverged is that one tradition prioritized systems and the other prioritized story. That’s not wrong exactly, but the split started long …
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How arcade games faked depth before 3D hardware.
Before polygon hardware, raster displays could draw pixels fast but couldn’t describe space. A raster screen is a grid of colored dots. It has no concept of near or far, no z-axis, no geometry. …
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Mode 7 was just a number.
Most people remember Mode 7 as a marketing term. Spinning floors. Fake 3D. The thing Nintendo put in every SNES promotional video and let the hardware box art imply was basically magic. It became a …
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Why didn't Metal Gear scroll?
If you played Metal Gear on the NES as a kid, you probably noticed something slightly off about how it moved. Every time you reached the edge of a room, the view snapped hard to the next screen. No …
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There was no physics. Every jump was a lie.
Why did jumping feel so different from one NES game to the next?
It wasn’t physics. The NES had no physics engine in the sense that we use the term today. There was no floating point unit, no …
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The NES was faking the scroll the whole time.
Sprite flicker on the NES was visible. You could see it happening, objects strobing in and out, bullets vanishing in busy scenes. The hardware limit was right there on the surface.
Scrolling was the …
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The camera was the game designer on the NES.
A lot of what made NES games feel fair or unfair, readable or chaotic, forgiving or punishing had less to do with the enemies than it did the camera.
The NES didn’t have a camera system in the …
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On the NES, flicker was a feature, not a bug.
Remember sprite flicker on the NES? Mega Man blinking in and out during a boss fight. Bullets vanishing between frames. Enemies half-disappearing when the screen got crowded. Most people assumed it …
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Castlevania knockback was part of its design.
Castlevania knockback is one of the most infamous feelings in 8-bit gaming. You take a hit, the screen twitches for a frame, and suddenly Simon is arcing backward through the air like the controller …
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The 68000 was everywhere, and that wasn't an accident.
If you played arcade or console games between the late 80s and mid 90s, you almost certainly played something running a Motorola 68000. Capcom’s CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards. SNK’s Neo Geo. …
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Pokémon's damage formula wasn't designed for the Game Boy.
My previous post on RPG math noted a pattern: early console hardware couldn’t multiply or divide natively, so early RPGs used simple formulas built around what was cheap. Addition, subtraction, …
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Why can't Mario go backwards?
Super Mario Bros. scrolls in one direction and one direction only. There’s a reason for that, and understanding why tells you something specific about how the NES rendered anything at all.
The …
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The world outside your screen didn't exist.
If you grew up in the 80s, you lived in fear of two things: nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that one bird in Ninja Gaiden that knocks you into the pit every single …
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Boss HP is a window into the CPU.
The numbers in console RPGs aren’t arbitrary. They never were. Every era of hardware left its fingerprints on how damage was calculated, how high HP could go, and what the math was even allowed …
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Metroid's corridors were a lie (and good engineering).
Before SSDs and streaming engines, NES developers were already dealing with the problem of loading screens.
Metroid did it without ever stopping the player, and without the hardware to do it …
Rick Hair
Systems Architect | Game Dev Veteran | Educator