Today, almost anyone can develop mobile games, without particularly high costs. Decades ago, however, the situation was quite different.
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In the past, a development system could cost three, five, or even ten thousand dollars, so in the heyday of game development, only a few had the privilege of creating their own video game. Today, thanks to the amazing popularity of the mobile market, anyone can develop mobile games. Another issue, of course, is that without a suitable marketing background, the chances of success are quite small. Among other things, Gábor Kádas talked about this in the latest Vakondok werk video.
Gábor Kádas attended high school in England, where he fell in love with computer technology. At the age of 17, he was already writing small programs and games, which he sent to the English newspaper Personal Computer World, who paid 10-20 pounds for publishing such program code. After moving back home to Hungary in 1981, he saw on TV the Novotrade call for ideas for writing computer games. He lived a ten-minute walk from Novotrade’s office, so he thought he would visit them. Since he already had experience in game programming and spoke English fluently, he was immediately asked to help with the pre-selection of more than 1,000 incoming applications and the translation of the selected projects into English. After that, together with one of his friends, he started making a horse toy himself, but through Novotrade, the feedback came from England that the attic was full of such things, so Novotrade did not deal with it. Then Gábor set out to find a publisher himself, and the English Firebird bought the game, which was published under the name Super Rider in 1985. That’s when Gábor left Novotrade and started game development himself. The English publisher Firebird was so satisfied with their games that they were almost given the task of rewriting Elite, which became a world success, for another platform, but this work ultimately did not work out.
Gábor returned to England in 1986, where he studied at King’s College until 1989. After graduating from university, he moved to Canada in 1990. Here, among other jobs, he worked for two years to start developing games for American publishers again. He soon moved to California. He founded his company called Human Soft, whose American department handled the relations with publishers, while the developments themselves were carried out at his Hungarian subsidiary. Games like Fatal Abbys, a multiplayer submarine game made for SegaSoft, have come out of the hands of Hungarian developers. They also copied many well-known games for different platforms, such as Super Street Fighter II Turbo for the Amiga, or the Tomb Raider: Legend series for the Gameboy Advance. They have developed games for publishers such as Activision, Disney Interactive, Eidos or Codemasters.
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