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Comment by snvsn | Hacker News Reader

"Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture" has an excellent account of how Romero and Carmack built these games.

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I've tried using that book to explain to people how "real" software development works. How the inception of the real cool shit, the stuff that spawns a company, is almost always 2, 3 or a small handful of people working late, night after night, living on pizzas and cola, churning code. And how that apparent anarchy is a more productive environment that ten pointy headed bosses plugging away at their gantt charts and a hundred 9 to 5 developers carrying out their orders.

I’m still in shock they started out in a basement in Shreveport. Shreveport! The tech industry in Louisiana these days consists largely of ghoulish “insourcers” like Perficient, DXC, EA, IBM and CGI or zombies like GE Digital.

Not that I want to be seen defending pointy headed bosses, but I think there's a fair amount of survivorship bias in your statement. How many groups of 2-3 people have worked late, lived on pizza and coke and produced absolute garbage? Quite a few, but you never hear about them because they aren't notable.

You don't have to get into pointy headed boss territory to be a successful programmer and leave the office at a respectable time every day.

Are many successful game programmers in corporate environments leaving the office at a respectable time every day? I definitely don't get that impression at all.

At least in a 2/3 man team surviving on pizza and Coke you're not lining someone else's pockets with millions of dollars only to be thrown out onto the street at the end of the process.

It's a bit hagiographic, but it's overall a very good book.

I had to look that one up.

hagiography (webster):

1 : biography of saints or venerated persons

2 : idealizing or idolizing biography

Yep, he's right

It is? I thought Romero sounded like a nutcase!

If him blasting music and destroying things with various weapons while devs were trying to code and running ads telling customers he was "about to make you his bitch" was a hagiographic gloss, then reality must have been truly dark.

I think the "bitch" part was later, when his own company was developing "Daikatana", which was a famous disaster. Maybe he was more reasonable earlier on.

That advertising campaign wasn't Romero's idea; it was the idea of someone else at Ion Storm. Romero was initially a bit hesitant on the slogan but caved to pressure.

At least that was how it was presented in (iirc) Masters of Doom, who knows what the actual truth is.

Ah, good to know. It's been a couple of years since I read the book and I may also have misremembered something about the ad. I definitely had the impression that the guy would have been a very difficult coworker, boss or roommate, and he was all three for parts of the team at various times!

Romero hated that ad. Some weasley manager pressured him into running it.

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