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There Is No Plan - id Software employee: "We keep thinking morale can't sink lower but the obvious incompetence of Xbox management somehow keeps driving it down worse." (aftermath.site)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

id was fractious and wracked by strife even when it was tiny any young. It worked at a time when technical proficiency and innovation was enough to amaze, enough to make a game company viable. There's no reason to suspect that Carmack is or was any kind of business visionary or talented manager.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Carmack is a clever programmer and successful engineer. That's underselling it, he's been called the best programmer of a generation.

    I don't know if that's true, but I do know while he created impressive software everybody I've talked to who has worked for or near him says he's an insufferable perfectionist who grinds people around him.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    The bones of some of his lighting algorithms are still in use to this day. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that he is an exceptional programmer.

    The best of his generation is harder to assert just because that generation had a pretty large handful of names who each truly revolutionized computing. But I do believe that without Carmack then Doom never happens, idtech never happens, the resulting 90's-2000's FPS craze never happens. Without Doom landing on the hardware of every nerd on the planet it's very likely the middle age of the video game industry went in a very different direction.

    I'd say he earned that ego, even if I wouldn't like dealing with it in a professional environment. But I think it's a reasonable thing to say that a good 75% of the next decade of game dev was primarily borne up by Carmack's bootstraps.

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