Why were old games programmed in assembly when higher level languages existed?

Question

I noticed that most if not all Nes / Atari, etc games were coded in assembly, however at that time, C, COBOL, and FORTRAN existed which I would think would make it easier to code right? So then why did they choose assembly over these available higher level languages?

Answer 1

Those games had 8-bit CPU chips and microscopic memories, like, 2kB. This answer would take up over half the RAM.

Compiled code was out of the question. Even on 8-bit CPU's with "large" memories, like "64K" (whee!) compiled code was difficult to use; it was not routinely seen until 16-bit microprocessors appeared.

Also, the only potentially useful language was C and it had not yet taken over the world. There were few if any C compilers for 8-bit micros at that time.

But C wouldn't have helped that much. Those games had horribly cheap hacks in them that pretty much required timing-specific instruction loops ... e.g., a sprite's Y-coordinate might depend on WHEN (in the video scan) its control register was written. (Shudder...)

Now there was a nice interpreted-bytecode language around that time or perhaps a little bit later: UCSD Pascal running on the UCSD P-System. Although I'm not a big Pascal fan, it was way ahead of everything else for those early processors. It wouldn't fit on a game or run fast enough for game play, though.