The Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has managed to lay hands on the source code for the 1986 version of Electronic Arts’ Amiga program DeluxePaint, and with EA’s permission it has made the code (all 474 KB of it) freely available for non-commercial use.
It’s a nice opportunity to look back at a seminal piece of game development history, as DeluxePaint was a big hit for EA that went on to significantly influence the field of digital art design and, by extension, game development. For example, in 1998 id’s Kevin Cloud told Gamasutra he used DeluxePaint to create all the wall textures in Quake II.
In fact, the program was initially designed by then-EA employee Dan Silva as an internal game art tool, and when it was first released for the Amiga in 1985 it became one of the company’s early success stories.
You can read more about the many iterations of DeluxePaint, download the Amiga source code and look at some of the supplementary materials the Computer History Museum has archived over on its blog.