I have always thought that without having pointers in game programing it would make it difficult to keep track on what variable points to what location.

But I have downloaded the entire source code for Mario brothers 1 on the NES and it is written in C! There is not a pointer in sight, but I was wondering how they kept the gameEngine up to speed without pointers in the program. Were pointers not arround in 1987 when Nintendo programed Mario?

EDIT: DAM! It don;t work on my PC as I have XP, oh well, memorys.....