I want to make a game But I wonder how game developers worked in the 1990s, how they made games, how they learning before the Internet became as widespread as it is today.

etc.

how do they know how to build game mechanics as character ability power up system?

how they know to reverse engineering game competitor company.

what book I should read?

As far as I know (not being a programmer myself), books on the subject started appearing in the early 2000s. Up to that point, it was “learn by doing” and tips from one another.

The first book that came to mind was Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus: Lamothe, Andre, Ratcliff, John, Tyler, Denise: 9780672305078: Amazon.com: Books, which was geared toward beginners/students/amateurs. There were others, but that's the best selling pre-2000. After that point in time, game development became a hot topic in the book publishing world. Even GameDev.net has a series - Beginning Game Programming: A GameDev.net Collection (Course Technology Cengage Learning): 9781598638059: Computer Science Books @ Amazon.com.

Otherwise, in the professional realm a lot was “learn by doing” as Tom said, or through word of mouth on early Usenet/IRC/websites (pre-GameDev.net in 1999 - see About GameDev.net).

Computers in that era didn't have an OS like we have today. The machine booted, and you were dropped in a command shell or in an interactive BASIC interpreter. You basically programmed directly at the metal. Video memory was directly accessible, by writing in a known address range you could make pixels appear at the screen in various colors. The “OS” had a corner in the memory too for its data, but nothing prevented you from poking around there. Lua, Python, C#, C++ didn't exist, ANSI-C was just invented (K&R book about that was in 1989 iirc). Assembly language of course did exist (with books) and was used.

Monthly computer magazines were published for all types of home computers. Tips and tricks were exchanged in that way, also program listings were printed in those magazines that you could then enter at your own computer. Studying those listings, and trying things for yourself is how you learned. There was also technical documentation about the computer.

If you want to enjoy that stuff, today there is a retro-computing movement, that lives in that era, except with slight more modern hardware but still no OS, etc.

Alberth said:
Computers in that era didn't have an OS like we have today.

In the 1990s there was MSDOS, Several versions of Windows, and of MacOS. And that's not all the operating systems of the nineties, most likely.

Like Linux, for instance.

Tom Sloper said:

Alberth said:
Computers in that era didn't have an OS like we have today.

In the 1990s there was MSDOS, Several versions of Windows, and of MacOS. And that's not all the operating systems of the nineties, most likely.

Like Linux, for instance.

Yep. There were things like Windows 95, Win 98, and at the time I was still using a Commodore Amiga (AmigaOS) .

To deal with the original question “what game dev books was I reading in the 90s?”

Back in that era, one of my favorites was : The Black Art of 3D Game Programming by André LaMothe.

Abrash was the guy who did the Windows NT graphics subsystem and worked on Quake.

https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-book/184404919

There are a couple of" history of video games" books, that track the rise of the medium and genre.

Just google for them.

GeneralJist said:

There are a couple of" history of video games" books

That's not what the OP is looking for.

Thanks all