I looked at some "Game Developer" magazines (available at gamehistory.org ) from the 90s, and it was interesting to see articles reacting to things like DirectX or the Super Game Boy like it's new. It does seem to be very Windows and MS-DOS focused, which is understandable considering console manufacturers treat their console details as secret (though there is an article from someone at Nintendo in the November 1999 issue that goes deep into Nintendo 64 RSP details), though the articles that talk about things like collision or path finding from a 90s hardware perspective can be homebrew-relevant. There's also stuff in the articles that touch on online gaming as a new thing, and people reacting to talk about game ratings and censorship that was going on in the 90s. A bunch of the early-ish issues have articles that are just someone digging into random games' files and publishing reverse engineered information about them and their file formats haha.

Makes me feel kind of bad seeing studios talk about how they're focusing really hard on the Atari Jaguar or 3DO, given how both were discontinued pretty quickly. It really seems like there was a mess of a bunch of different platforms in the 90s, though that's also kind of charming.

There's also a lot of ads for very expensive libraries and text editors and such, in the hundreds of dollars range. And I thought Unity addons were bad. Game dev is much more accessible in 2025 than in 1995. I'm also glad that publishers are no longer necessary to get a game out there, and I can just toss stuff on itch.io if I want.