How the Sony PlayStation Net Yaroze DevKit brought Indie Game Development to Consoles | MVG

The Story of the Sony PlayStation Net Yaroze - The Consumer grade Development Kit that was sold in 1997 and how it brought Indie development to video games for an affordable price.

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#NetYaroze #GameDev #PlayStation

[ModernVintageGamer]

Wanted to give a huge thanks to Ben James, John Biank, Robert Dale Smith and the rest of you who reached out and told me your Net Yaroze Story. If you worked on the Net Yaroze, let me know in the comments or send me an email. Id love to hear your story. Enjoy the video !

[JimPTheOne]

Yes! I remember buying the official PlayStation magazine and sometimes had full games built from yaroze in their monthly demo disc.

[Lee.Moriya]

Me and my brother must have had several dozen PS1 demo discs from magazines in the UK and some of the Net Yaroze games were our most played. Hours of entertainment crammed into these small games for the price of a magazine meant we played a lot of them. The demo discs were always a lot easier to justify to our parents than a full game was, so shoutout for to these devs, big part of my childhood right here.

[catbutler]

That brings back memories. I had a Skywalker serial cable and a modded PlayStation so I could do my coursework at home instead of the computing labs. I'm pretty sure we were already working with OpenGL so having to deal with fixed point arithmetic for 3D transformations was a real eye opener.

[stormwatcheagle]

Sony: Creates affordable SDK for hobbyists to break into console game development
Also Sony: Takes Linux support off of PS3 due to fear of hobbyists breaking into console

[milkdribbly]

My older brother bought this when it came out and I remember tinkering with it. I didn't get very far (I was still a kid at the time) but remember compiling simple code with it. I am a programmer by profession today so I guess it helped push me along towards my career. I still have it and the SDK package on display in my house. Beautiful piece of hardware.

[StarkRG]

17:04 "Sony has never been afraid to experiment with their hardware and open it up to the hobbyist bedroom coder." Well, they weren't until they removed "Other OS" from the PS3.

[noiJadisCailleach]

This is my 1st time hearing and knowing about Net Yaroze...
Or even the fact that there was a "bedroom coder" kind of movement back in the 80s? Incredible. Just incredible!

Damn, if only we had money to buy stuff like this at the time... I could've started breaking in making games sooner.
In any case, this is really incredible!

[mattdhargett]

I love you highlighting developers by name, and saying where they are now. This kind of investigation made my bump my Patreon subscription :) I’d love to see interviews/stories from the emulation/modding scene, even if the video/audio is obscured for privacy.

[jamesstewart]

I've actually been thinking about Net Yaroze lately with the official release of Dreams on the PS4. It feels like creation tools has always gone hand in hand with Sony Playstation (minus the PS2 but that had Linux support) - Net Yaroze, Little Big Planet, Dreams. It feels like sony has always wanted to give people a chance to create something Digitially depending on knowledge and patience.

[MrMario]

Best showcase of Net Yaroze games I've seen.

[amshermansen]

10:30 - Oh my god! I remember Blitter Boy! It was on one of the demo discs, along with a bunch of other games.
12:30 - Terra too! Oh my gosh. So much nostalgia.

[MrRaivokasMagma]

I remember playing demo discs, that came with Finnish version of PlayStation magazines. I always wondered what were those games, that felt different from the rest. Nice to know they were indies. Also, didn't know Devil Dice was originally Net Yaroze game! I bet our demo disc had retail version for sure, but that has stuck in my mind for years.

[SwordsmanOrion]

I really wanted one of these when I was in high school... but it was a good thing that it was so expensive and so hard to get one for a casual player. Because this would have been way way beyond my abilities to handle. I would not have been able to do anything with this, I didn't understand what it really took to create a game back then. It would have been wasted money for me.

[TonyBMan]

2:20....when I heard that ancient PlayStation boot SFX, I actually rewound it just to hear that delicious ear candy again.
Man that is a fucking legendary console.

[DJHeero]

I always had a huge fascination with the Net Yaroze when I heard about it from one of my Playstation Underground discs... unfortunately I was only a kid when it came out and we didnt exactly have 750 dollars to spend on it so all I could do was admire it and play the demos they displayed... but I loved the games that were made and the stories behind Net Yaroze and it was always in the back of my mind since.

[Epic_C]

I wish I would of had something like this as a kid to tinker around with. Even if I probably wouldn't have made a game worth while, just having it to learn some of the basics of programming would have been very interesting.

[frognik]

Here in Australia and other PAL regions the ps2 came with a disk that contained YABasic which I believe was to get around import taxes by classing the ps2 as a computer.
It was actually pretty terrible and slow but still making and sharing rudimentary games that ran on the ps2 was fun.
There was no support for external files so images had to be converted to data statements in the code but from memory it did have pretty fast (Gouraud?) shaded polygon support.
I also remember there was an emulated version of the yabasic elf with a few extra features to speed up coding and directly convert images to data statements etc.

[reagandow]

Wow! This is one of your all time best episodes. Very interesting and I’d really like to see that Vita episode or any other episode you can design on this type of stuff. Thanks MVG.

[TechGamesAU]

2mb is rough but people still pulled off some amazing games. I particularly remember ‘adventure game’. I might have the name wrong but it was a really funny parody of RPGs, and fully 3D.