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Comment by ndepoel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if it would've been John Carmack in this particular case. He was more concerned with the engine and rendering side of things, less with the gameplay logic stuff. More likely it would've been either John Romero or John Cash who wrote this code, but it's hard to say for sure. Best thing we can hope for is that John Romero pitches in with his impeccable memory :D

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You can read Carmack's .plan archive from 1996 here, if you're so inclined:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...

It's a _fascinating_ snapshot into Quake's development.

I have no idea if his .plan is a record of what he, specifically, was doing, or if he was just capturing what the programming team was doing, but at the very least, it makes clear that he was aware of huge amounts of very highly specific game code issues as they were being worked on and was almost certainly deeply involved.

Wow, this link is something else - you can track what problems he tackled and what he worked on DAILY.

Guessing you're on the younger side? I used to read these voraciously as a 11 year old. Felt like a magic window into the game industry.

Hello fellow I-was-once-11-and-fascinated-by-.plan! I wasn't sure if I was the only one. St Louis in 2000 made it seem like there were only a handful of people interested in programming at all.

Hmm... 11 would put me at 19999, so I must've been more like 12 or 13. I remember that's when I started taking gamedev seriously.

So the only requirement to work at iD back in the day was to be called John?

That’s what my buddy said, yeah. Good old John Manyjohns.

For those who haven’t seen Buckaroo Banzai—all the people working at Yoyodyne Propulsion are named John. It’s a plot point.

Or Carmack.

It seems like Amazon has the same idea when promoting people named Andy or Jeff to executive roles.

"Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well."

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