I find it curious, but perhaps inevitable, that someone like John Carmack requires this introduction. If you played videogames in the 90s / early 00s or were at all interested in 3D programming, it was impossible not to have heard of him. He was (is?) probably one of the cleverest programmers of his time.
This article of his gets reposted time and time again to HN, which makes sense because it's very interesting. This is the first time I've noticed people not knowing who the author was.
I wonder if a few decades from now, tech-minded people will wonder who Linus Torvalds, Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie were. I suppose they will!
It came across as a tad condescending although I can easily believe it wasn't meant that way and you are just open mindedly sharing perspective as is the point of all this.
I reply not to just make that comment but actually to recommend a book (that many may have possibly already read) which gives a rich history well worth it.
https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le...
They dive into East and West coast history as well as the influences of gaming which I think ties to this threads closest.
Its long, engaging, and the audiobook is just a kick.
If you are on that cusp of wanting to learn a bit more of where we come from with an Americana feel, they have done a fantastic job here.
I think we're already there in a lot of cases.
Personal disclaimer: I had no idea who John Carmack was until this post. :P
I bailed out of that project as soon as humanly possible, by the way. Not just because of the ancient language, but the entire organizational structure of both the codebase and the team itself.
% finger johnc@idsoftware.com
"Soon after, and a few months before his 70th birthday, Cutler joined the team. He soon “set the bar for how hard people should work and how high they should hold the quality bar,” Multerer said. Two years later, on Nov. 22, 2013, Xbox One shipped in North America.
“Dave designed and wrote the hypervisor for Xbox One,” Multerer said, with an obvious sense of awe. “He wrote the entire bottom of the stack. Because the hypervisor is there, Xbox games can run on Windows. That’s why apps run on Xbox One. The impact of that work is phenomenal. And the amount of work he did was phenomenal.”"
https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...
Carmack definitely deserves all the praise he gets but there were a lot of other people pushing the technical boundaries in all sorts of ways.
Carmack is a smart guy but it's not like there wasn't going to be a competitive PC game industry in his absence. Ken Silverman or Tim Sweeney come to mind as alternative first-movers in the space, I don't think it would have been much later.
The games might have been less violent for a bit longer without id though.
Probably not. They were just channeling the culture which was a lot of heavy metal and horror/action movies. Personally for me in my early teens it was a nice outlet for feeling powerful in a game rather than bullying some kids at school or whatever.