It's surprising! There was that line in the Tetris movie where the Henk Rogers character (magically) deduces that Super Mario Land was written in C, and I was like "pfft, no way." But apparently it was! And @dylancuthbert.bsky.social wrote some of Star Fox in C as well I think, or some of its tools.
Obviously the GameBoy version of Tetris was written in machine code. :)
Tools yes, and c++ for tools on StarFox 2
Disclaimer: I was a kid at the time, not a dev, but I am heavily into reverse engineering and retrogame history. My understanding is that the great majority of games were written in ASM because that was really just the only way you were going to make full use of the hardware. But programming...
Games of the 16 bit era* to be clear...
in C was certainly an option. The Sierra C compiler was offered by Sega in their Cross Products dev kits for the Mega Drive, and we know that the Sega Channel BIOS was written in C. I seem to recall hearing about other games for the MD written in C, but they aren't coming to mind right now.
I think the biggest issue at the time is that the output machine code generated just wouldn't have been optimized enough to be acceptable for fast gameplay. But modern C compilers have much more RAM to work with and have had an additional 30 years or so of optimizations. So, I primarily use C when..
I do Mega CD development. Of course, ASM and C can be mixed pretty easily, so you can write your parts that need to be fast (VBLANK interval, memory transfers, etc) in asm specifically. It's worked pretty well for me.
There are still drawbacks to C when doing dev on oldschool embedded devices like the MD/MCD, of course, and you still need to write lean, efficient C code to start with, but I think C is great for modern retrodev, or maybe for prototyping before optimizing it into ASM.
Sonic Spinball is perhaps the most famous of them (or perhaps infamous). Don't remember any others offhand, but I'm sure there are more.
Mega Man: The Wily Wars was written in C, and it shows.
Isn't that quite early for C++ in game dev?
Yes it felt early! The c++ syntax was actually quite sane back then! Haha
What, you don't like lambda capture syntax and template errors that are 3 pages long? :-)
Haha, yes this was well before templates
Do you have a source for this outside of the Tetris Movie? A whole Gameboy launch title written in C sounds crazy to me.