Dave Taylor, whom the article calls the "spackle coder" is a really brilliant and interesting guy. He was my roommate for awhile and I heard some fascinating stories (he did the sound engine for Quake which involved a lot of time spent with Trent Reznor). My favorite was when I asked him what kinds of (presumably brutal) music everyone was listening to during the creation of Doom. The most commonly listened-to artist: Sarah McLachlan.
What's amazing to me is that both Doom and the first web server were created on NeXT workstations. It's also interesting to see that while everyone a few years ago was rushing to learn Objective-C that Carmack was coding with it in 1992. Looking back on it maybe Steve Job's "lost years" were in fact his most productive (especially given that Pixar made Toy Story during this era).
Indeed. Oversimplifying a bit, modern Apple is largely NeXT stuff running on more affordable hardware. NeXT was very forward thinking, so this is far from a criticism to Apple.
This is a pattern I've spotted quite often, interesting ideas brilliant people have but that can only be executed many years later, when technology catches up.
It also changed my perception of both John Carmack and John Romero. The latter sometimes gets picked on for not being the engine guy and for Daikatana, but Johnwas writing level editors, compression apps, and massive amounts of tooling work allowing Carmack to focus exclusively on the engine. He also waded through a flooded lake to get to work one day.
I used to see Sandy Petersen from time to time at roleplaying games conventions, in the UK and Germany. He had a black t-shirt withe the DOOM logo on the front and "Wrote it!" On the back.
The soundtrack didn't make a huge amount of money, and wasn't highly visible, would be the real reasons, as far as I can see. Also, arguably, the Blurred Lines lawsuit sets a new precedent for this kind of thing.
The story goes that Bobby Prince, being a lawyer, knew just how much he could copy without infringing, but that seems pretty tenuous in some of these cases.
One thing that's clear when reading game source code is that they hard code a lot more than I would writing system or application software. That's to be expected given the nature of the beast, but it's still one of the first obvious differences.
And this also perfectly explains why computers don't feel exponentially faster than 20 years ago. We're always taught to add abstractions all the time.
