Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus

by André LaMothe, John Ratcliff, Denise Tyler

Outlines the basic and advanced principles involved in creating interactive games, including flight simulators, three-dimensional walk-through games, and various multimedia utilities, with an accompanying CD that includes shareware games and commercial demos. Original. (All Users).

Genres: Computers, Programming, Reference

746 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

Reviews

[Amy Ransohoff]

Note to self: looks old/outdated, but should have info about old-school raytracing in resource-constrained systems.

[Mark Stattelman]

I have the 1994 edition. Bought it brand new with disc. I used to stay up all night reading through this book and dreaming. I couldn't afford the compiler to run the code. Nor did I have a computer with enough memory or speed. I only had a 486sx (not even the dx with the math coprocessor).
I had an IBM PS1 Consultant. 4 or 8 megs of RAM. that I bought in '91 for like $1,200 (by the time I added all of the accessories and printer, etc.). Later added an external CD ROM drive kit that I ordered from DAK. I think I paid around $300 for that. I was proud of that computer though. First real computer that I ever owned. Windows 3.11 I believe.
Of course, I had owned a Texas Instruments TI99 back in the day. And then a Commodore 64. But like I said, the 486sx was the first "real" computer, though the others had been fun to play with.
I'll have to look, but I want to say this book came with a full copy of Doom on the disc. I never was a big Doom fan though. I did love Wolfenstein 3D. Mostly, I was interested in the code behind the games and it was sheer torture to not be able to experiment. Didn't have the big bucks.

[Hildigerr]

The book covers a range of game programming concepts, though most of them are fundamentals that any programmers should already know. The actual "tricks" are primarily dealing with nuances of targeting the DOS environment and particularly focused on Doom-style games. Granted, this book is a bit dated, it remains interesting from a historical perspective. Much of the code still runs in DOSBox, which makes it valuable as a snapshot of early game development practices.

[Mattias Sandstrom]

Bought this book used in 2026 to read about how the classics from the 90's were programmed but it's mostly technical information like VGA, the Soundblaster and interrupts, which was already easy to look up at the time and trivial now. Very few tricks and hardly guru level.

[Tim Chase]

Good, but rather dated now

[Fortyseven]

Quite outdated in 2015. Touches on older technology including simple Wolfenstein-style raycasting. There's much better educational resources out there nowadays.