For as long as the market for video games has existed, there have been folk interested in breaking into the business. But this compulsion to contribute to the medium was once tempered by means of access to the necessary tools and training; held closely as “trade secrets” by hardware manufacturers, or made prohibitively expensive to those not already established in the industry. The solution for some was to simply turn to the home computer ecosystem, where access was widely open and welcoming. Others still chose to overcome obstacles on consoles by developing and publishing games outside of the licensing system, effectively producing bootleg and pirate software. And then there were those fortunate few who could afford to overcome the hurdles set in place by the console manufacturers, and pay to get their mitts on proper software development kits. With an SDK in hand, the world of games creation software was your oyster.
But not just anyone could get their hands on a development kit for any given console, though. As mentioned earlier, some were just too costly for the standard enthusiast. Other hardware manufacturers required some amount of “credentials” on the part of would-be developers before they might even consider handing over their toolkits. In these ways, many a creative individual had their game ideas stymied or stifled, in service of the best-laid plans by hardware producers to keep the market from being flooded. This was until one brave manufacturer decided to take the plunge, and offer interested individuals a consumer-grade SDK for their current console offering. In June of 1996, Sony began to sell a product by the name of “Net Yaroze,” allowing amateur developers to experiment with none other than the PlayStation’s hardware.
The years that followed saw a small boon to independent game development, and a proliferation of homebrew PlayStation software. But with only the occasional spilling over of these niche creations into the mainstream consciousness – typically in the form of the odd appearance on a magazine demo disc – the Net Yaroze community existed in relative obscurity for a roughly eight-year run. In spite of this imposed isolation, the impact the toolkit would have on the lives of some of its members could be measured for years to come — with a small handful of titles being developed into full-on retail products, and several developers going on to fully pursue careers in the games industry.
In this article, we’ll be providing a brief overview of the Net Yaroze’s history, serving as a prelude to a series wherein we’ll be reviewing a range of available software from its user-created library. Before we begin that process of powering through 300+ titles; I feel it’s important to understand the intended application and limitations of the toolkit at hand, so as to appreciate what these amateur developers were made to work with. In the coming months, we may come to mock some of the more ill-advised / incomplete entries to the Net Yaroze software catalogue. But as we remind ourselves of the state of independent games development in the mid-90s and the hurdles that came with it, we’ll have to bear one of the platform’s unofficial taglines firmly in mind: “If you can build a better game…”
