Oddworld’s Lanning Quits – Savages EA

The reason the UK, Scandinavia and Europe were such a hotbed of programming innovation was due to home computers being the dominant form of gaming hardware in the 80s and early 90s.

From the Speccy and C64 to the ST and Amiga, home computers in the 80s and 90s came with a version of the BASIC language. This encouraged kids to learn to code and to write games for themselves. These kids went on to become the games coders of the 90s and early 00s.

By comparison, in America consoles were the dominant form of gaming hardware. No BASIC, no early wish to code.

Now PCs and Macs do not come bundled with any sort of programming language and consoles are dominant in the UK, Scandinavia and Europe. This has led to a decline in early interest in coding.

Now you usually only get to code when you decide to commit to a programming course at school, college or university. This is a much higher cost of entry into a coding career and is a larger commitment than trying coding as a hobby you can always drop because you didn't pay any extra to get into it.

I have said this before, and I'll keep saying it, the lack of a programming language at an early age is depriving the games industry, and software engineering in general, of talented developers who would code for fun.

The only thing that is stopping the copmplete collapse of the developer career path is the web. The wish to have a cool website using JavaScript, ASP or PHP is probably the only opportunity most kids get to try coding these days.

I completely agree, there's this website I still visit www.div-arena.com which was the community place for a DOS based programming language called DIV. Most of the people there now are doing Computer degrees in programming because DIV was their hobby.

But EA don't offer placements for the good of the student. They offer them for the same reasons any other company does, to try and identify and ensnare the best students before other companies get a chance...

It's all part of the capitalist mill, where individuals are just grist. There's only room for corporate profit, not altruism.

But that aside, Oddworld Inhabitant's Lorne Lanning has given SPOnG an exclusie interview to clear up what he claims was misrepresentation by Hollywood Reporter - read it here.

Bloody socialist scum. Shoot the bone-idle Unions I say, etc.

Bah, you beat me to it.

Had to share this with you, from an email from Lorne:



So Nearly pulled a Vanity Fair Toby Young!

I know, but it still gives people a way of getting in. There doesn't appear to be any other way of breaking in now.

And a lot of people seem to stay with EA before breaking off and setting up studios (which will probably then be taken over by EA sometime in the future).