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Comment by mickeyp | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe, just maybe, these guys made great games because they were surrounded by great people. That QA guy who gave key insights into how tedious certain game mechanics were; the "bad executive" they all hated who reined in their unreachable goals; that one developer who applied his good game design senses despite not being a designated designer.

I find the notion of auteur "game developers" somewhat puzzling. I say that as someone who played, and still play, these games when they came out. Most of these guys haven't made great games in a long, long while. Obsidian's only decent game in a long while is Pentiment, and that for all intents was a passion project.

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Spector has acknowledged that. Reminds me of this funny opening line.

> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/12/deus-ex-2

Especially funny because by his own admission, Spector wasn't even a major contributor to the development of Thief.

The other factor that might be in play is that the people who made great games got lucky and didn't really know exactly what made their games so good and aren't able to recapture the magic.

It's a combination of all those things really. There's also a lot of people in commercial game development that get stuck in their thesis of success when the market has moved on.

In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.

And then you have Jeff Vogel, who has spent roughly 2/3 of his career literally remaking the games he first released 30 years ago. And I've literally bought them all.

Even that might be subject to shifting market trends as his audience ages eventually but it's definitely been a nice sticky niche.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's both. As with basically all things like this in life. Obviously, you need a great leader, and you need a great team.

Like look at Hidetaka Miyazaki's work on Demon's Souls and then go and tell me that the leader doesn't matter.

yeah, it's meaningful when you can tell a particular designer's touch on a game

It certainly is synergistic though I also think it has to do with being at the right place at the right time. New technology, new industry, new ideas - pure excitement for all involved.

I feel as the industry ages out the "fresh new excitement cutting edge" environment you thrived in is now mainstream. It's procedural and boring so you feel forced to churn out another "cutting edge" mainstream thing. You burn out trying to blend in with the furniture.

Perhaps if you keep finding new cutting edge things to do you can stay on top but most people are ensnared by their zeitgeist.

What you're describing is the inability to maintain quality over a career, which is a separate issue from whether auteurs exist. Often it's because fame and success remove the constraints that were forcing the work to be tight and focused. I don't think the idea of a game auteur is any less real than that of a film auteur. Both are made by large teams, but the best works are often a single person's vision.

I think it is other way round. Some people are able to maintain quality over a career and that proves they are the 'auteurs' of those things.

And some other people cant reproduce the former success, which makes it much more likely the reasons for success were well beyond their control.

An auteur is just the "author", the primary creative force behind a project. Sustained success is orthogonal to that and depends on the person. Francis Ford Coppola didn't make anything of note after the 1970s, but he was still the auteur behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

You are absolutely spot on. I’ve worked on a number of game development teams, and it was always clear to me that the game was created by the whole team.

Great gameplay ideas came from programmers, artists, designers, marketing people, testers, and many others. All those ideas were then brought together into one unified product.

The intern who didn't know it was impossible so did it anyway.

exhibit B: Chris Roberts. pretty sure this guy needs a studio counterpart that gives him limits, or else nothing ever gets actually finished.

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