How Software Works

Here’s a lesson in how software development works.

Say you’d like to port a popular arcade game to your home video console. You can give a guy like Tod Frye four months to do a good-enough version of Pac-Man. It’ll sell 7 million copies, even though it looks... not great.

Or, you can wait for 30 years of refinement and improvement in understanding of Atari software development, give someone three years to develop their own version of Pac-Man and end up with a near-flawless clone of the arcade original.

It will sell zero million copies.