#019 - retro game visual interfaces
Visual Basic, World of Warcraft, Game Boy cartridges, Zelda
This website’s design is such a vibe! It goes over the history of Visual Basic and is a love letter to visual programming and user interface design. Visual Basic allowed computer users to create their own interfaces by drag and dropping elements like buttons and dropdowns, then attaching scripts to each “gizmo”. It’s cool that the co-founder of video game company Valve was involved with this at his time at Microsoft. This was also the first time I’ve heard of the term “sneakernet” — where people walked hard disks around to each other instead of transmitting files over the internet.
Nowadays, hard disks like these cute neo retro Game Boy cartridges are shared via Kickstarter and probably delivery trucks. I really like the translucent cases. The giant Tamagotchi display, arcade cabinets and boxed floppy disks are also so cute. In particular Tamagotchi is such an interesting case where the hardware is designed in tandem with the software — like it’s a pet game so it’s egg shaped, and there are only left, right, and center buttons so the UI must be navigable linearly, etc.
Found “The WoW Diary - A Journal of Computer Game Development” while browsing the library near my parents’ place and skimmed it on the library carpet. Some endearing excerpts — quest designers that use invisible bunnies as targets spell effects, a magazine feature of the game’s interface that was so poignant many other games started to copy it, retro desk set ups, and screenshot of wowedit, their internal game editor!
I’ve never played Breath of the Wild, but its cool that the terrain designers put so much thought into the planning of the map, like arranging terrain features to encourage open exploration. Another cool thing was their “billboard” system to put spatial notes in the environment so that teams can collaborate, like mark certain areas as WIP and link out to more details. It reminds me of a 3D version of Figma’s comment feature.