upvote
Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

On the consoles it took until PlayStation for C to take off among game devs.

Additionally many Amiga games used Blitz BASIC and AMOS.

Anyone involved in the Demoscene early days would be 100% Assembly as well.

On PC, it required until Watcom with its great MS-DOS extender for devs to finally move away from Assembly in mass.

reply
> Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

It depends: for the classic 8 bit home computers, games were mostly written in assembly. Later DOS games were commonly either written in Pascal or C, but quite a bit off Assembler code was often used for the more performance-critical code sections.

reply
> Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

I was there, Gandalf ;)

(and note how I specifically wrote "dominant high level language", not "dominant language", since assembly coding was indeed very relevant on those machines, for UI apps 100% assembly was quite rare though, and hybrid C/ASM seems to have been more common).

reply
Dominant in which part of the planet?

In my part of the Iberian Penisula it was Turbo Pascal on PC and AMOS/Blitz Basic on Amiga.

With lots of inline Assembly anyway.

reply
If id Software is any indication, apparently they wrote their games in C since their inception in 1990 with Commander Keen.
reply