Garry Kitchen's GameMaker

Activision Game Maker ( also published under the title Garry Kitchen 's GameMaker ) was a game development system for the home computer Commodore 64, which was developed by Garry Kitchen and published by the company Activision in 1985.

The program was divided into six sub-programs, all of which were operated via a graphical interface with the joystick:

• Scene Maker - to create the background graphics
• Sprite Maker - for creating sprites
• Music Maker - for composing background music
• Sound Maker - to the development of sound effects
• Editor - for programming the actual game

The programming language used in Game Maker, modeled on early programming languages ​​such as BASIC. Here, the user can access but on many existing graphics and sound capabilities, thus speaks to the contents developed from the different sub-programs.

Limitations

There were significant limitations in this development system. Some restrictions resulted from the architecture of the Commodore 64, others resulted from limitations of the program, as the Game Maker itself already took some resources of the computer.

• Only 8 sprites could be displayed simultaneously on the screen (C64 restriction)
• Each sprite and background could have a maximum of four colors ( from a choice of 16 colors) (C64 restriction)
• Only two different backgrounds could be used for a game ( Game Maker restriction)
• Only 3553 bytes were available for the creation of a game, including songs, sounds, sprites and program code ( Game Maker restriction)
• There was no access to the floppy disk drive of the C64 ( Game Maker restriction)

Despite the limitations of the Game Maker was at the time extensive possibilities to create your own game. To demonstrate a remake of the game was Pitfall! ( one of Activision's successful games ) created in Game Maker and settled as a demo of the software package.