To dream the impossible dream
(media.scored.co)
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When this comic was first published (1990), it took a lot more effort to make computer games work, so there was a lot more overlap between gamers and people who knew how computers worked. The "Gamer to IT/CS pipeline" was real.
So it wasn't so much "Looking for Good Mario Player" as much as "Looking for someone who can modify a graphics card driver's INF file to recognize your unsupported graphics card so you can play this game" or "Looking for someone who can develop a keygen for this game".
From what little I've seen the modern "Gamer to IT/CS pipeline" seems to be filled with people developing server emulators for games which require an online server. Whether this is a harder or easier problem than the one my generation was faced with is hard to say.
There is still the gamer to QA pipeline, as hex debugging hasn't actually gone out of fashion. But it's nowhere near as prevalent as it was back in the 1990s, since that's how all "cheats" used to work for things like GameShark.
Server emulation is a whole other beast that requires a completely different skillset. It's not something that's as common to the average gamer today as modding was back in the day; seemed like every other Quake player new enough C# to make simple conversion mods, and it seemed like every other TEN session was running some custom Quake server mod, like Quake Cars or whatever.