Air Strike and the Infinite Mountains

Placeholder. A stub for a maker anecdote about old game-dev craft. The bones of the story go here; Pete fills in the real memory.

Back in the Intellivision era you didn’t have room to be clever. You had a few kilobytes, a tile map, and a deadline. The constraint was the design.

The seed of this note: the trick for making a mountain range feel like it went on forever when you had nowhere near enough memory to store one. (Spoiler: you don’t store the mountains. You store a rule for making mountains, and you let the player’s eye do the rest.)

There’s a straight line from that trick to how I think about tools now — the best ones hold a rule rather than a result, and let the person supply the rest. But that’s a bigger essay, and this is just the anecdote.

More when I write it properly.

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(Related, once written: the colophon-as-personal-craft note, and whatever the “infinite mountains” idea grows into.)