Fabien Sanglard

I just finished "Masters of Doom" a couple of days ago, and I've been on a sort of Doom/Quake/id/Carmack/Romero information frenzy ever since. It is beginning to consume almost too much of my time but very fulfilling since I was a huge Doom fan back when it came out (I created many levels and mods) and I also really liked the early Quake games.

So in the past weeks I read up on all the early id guys, and what became of them after they were fired or left, I did quite some (probably too much) reading on the mess that was Daikatana and how it came to be. I actually find this really interesting, to learn how a project backed with so many employees and so much money can fail so badly, there're probably lessons to learn here (I've even watched somebody play through Daikatana on Youtube).

While being on my search, I've found a lot of interesting or not so interesting things. So if you want to spend some time, here's an unordered list of trivia that I stumbled upon:

- Somebody playing through Daikatana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm3b0NJzhnQ

- Romero Himself on Daikatana, including a GB port of the game that actually got good reviews (never made it to the US though) http://rome.ro/games_daikatana.htm

- Awful public clash between John Romero and Mike Wilson (former Ion Storm Marketing guy): http://www.kotaku.com.au/2008/01/gamecock_head_tears_into_john_romero_its_getting_ugly-2/

- Ravenwood Fair is a Facebook game that Romero did a couple of years ago (so that's what he's…

I'm not sure I know any genius people let alone programmers.

And I definitely do not know of anyone who programs in VB6.

However, I am some what familiar with John Carmack. I would consider him a genius programmer. Yet he uses C++ almost exclusively. You would have to ask him if he thinks it's the most powerful language available to him. However, I would hazard a guess that his choice of C++ was incidental (http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=3086.0) -- it just happened to be the de facto lingua franca for developing graphics intensive video games.

By orhtogonality I mean to imply that attributes of one are not affected by the other. Lisp is and will continue to be a powerful language with or without genius programmers using it. In fact, if genius programmers are exceptional and rare as we say then I would imagine Lisp has developed over the last fifty years almost exclusively without the help of geniuses. Similarily, not all geniuses will think to use Lisp; yet they will still be exceptional programmers and produce exceptional software.

Update: Included link to thread about an alleged response from Carmack to an email asking about C++. Apparently he uses it and has used it since Doom3.

This business model is cool, free game digitally, but boxed it costs money. (let's ignore the "you need the original doom" stuff for the purposes of considering this business model)

Also, the company providing the actual boxes, Limited Run Games, does cool stuff. I thought a game was going to be digital only, and then found them doing a version in a real box, DRM free, no steam activation required; I thought that was cool of everyone involved.

I miss big boxes. Apparently they disappeared because Walmart wanted to make room for DVDs by removing software SKUs, so the software publishers downsized the boxes so they wouldn't have to put fewer SKUs on the shelf at Walmart. https://rome.ro/news/2018/4/18/big-box-extinction (intro) and https://rome.ro/bigbox (actual blog post w/ story)

Lastly, John Romero, if you're reading: fix your blog ^ why is the intro not included on the blog post page?