Legendary game designer John Romero’s memoir is a generous feat
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Well that explains something.
I saw Romero give a (fantastic) talk at Strange Loop last year. What completely blew me away was the Q and A afterwards. For like half an hour, people would ask him all sorts of random questions and for every one, he had an unbelievably detailed answer.
At one point, someone asked about the Id's transition from having all employees be equal partners to hiring employees with a salary and how that worked out around compensation. With zero hesitation, he just started walking through, "Well, in $year we all made $x and then when we hired $employee, we paid him $y but then later we updated it to $z..." And he just kept going with concrete dates and numbers for anything. It was like a total Rain Man experience, and every question was like that.
It's like his entire past is an open book exam. For someone who can barely remember what he did last week, I'm jealous.
I appreciate that although he defends his thought process, he does express that he (and his colleagues) could have maybe approached some problems differently given more wisdom and experience. I can’t imagine having had the success and the pressure they faced in my 20’s.
Verge had an excerpt of it a few weeks ago too:
https://www.theverge.com/23796894/john-romero-id-software-co...