Let me pour some more AI fuel on the fire! :) Let me tell you a horror story about developers losing their jobs because of new technology 27 years ago! Back in 1999, I was working at a newly founded startup on a small indie game called Mafia. As a 2D texture artist. I spent entire days in Photoshop, manually painting textures of bricks, doors, and windows on a tiny tablet. The average texture was 256x256 pixels. Whole open world had to fit into 32MB of VRAM. Oh and of course, motherfuckers using tablets were cheaters, the true artists were using mouse! Or Kempston Joysticks! Just like in the good old Art Studio days! The tedious work really pissed me off. Boring, repetitive, uncreative. One day I got fed up, grabbed an ANALOG camera, and headed into town to take pictures of walls and windows. I sent the celluloid film to a lab to be developed, and when the photos came back a week later, I scanned them and turned them into textures in no time. Much better textures than anyone had made before. You can’t imagine the backlash! “That looks awful!” “It has no soul!” “We’re going to lose our jobs!” “I don’t like it!” The only one who liked it was our future art director, Pavel. We bought one of the first digital cameras on the market and headed to Vienna with it to photograph the game’s final level. We created an almost perfect replica of the real building. We never could have pulled that off with hand-drawn textures. No one lost their job. We made a game faster, cheaper, and with better graphics. Even so, it took us 4 years, and about 30 people worked on it. It became one of the first and most expensive open-world games in the world. Oh and we also developed our own motion capture technology, because it was too expensive to buy one. And it was considered as cheating as well. Animators will lose their jobs! They didnt. It is one of the most scarce professions today. One of the games I worked on was cancelled because of the lack of good animators. Since then, the technology has become exponentially more complex. Creating a texture today is more complicated than ever before. In reality, every surface has several textures now. It’s become a science in and of itself. Creating a game like Mafia still takes at least four years, but today, instead of thirty people, hundreds—or even thousands—are working on it. And most of that work is a boring, repetitive routine. Creating normal maps is neither an art nor a creative. Would I like it if making a game like Mafia could be done by just 30 people again instead of 1,000? Absolutely! Would I like it if, thanks to technology, it could be done faster than in 4 years? Definitely! Would I like to focus on my artisic vision rather than technological limitations of gaming engine or hardware? Sure! And one more very nasty and sarcastic comment. Making a “game” in an outdated RPG Maker using methods from 1990 for hardware from 2026 is probably similar to buying a jigsaw puzzle with a Picasso painting and thinking that once you put it together, you’re just as good as Picasso. Back then, the people who were making those old 8bit pixel art RPGs were pushing the boundaries of what was possible in uncharted territory; they were doing things no one had done before, figuring out how to achieve the impossible, and how to cram it all into the tiny memory of the first consoles and computers. The graphics for Super Mario Bros. on the NES are only 8 KB!!!! The ZX Spectrum 48 didn’t have a sound chip, and when it beeped with its one channel beeper, it couldn’t do anything else—and yet people managed to play seven-channel music on it! People like that don’t protest against new technologies today. People like that are the ones creating them. I was there back then, so I know.