Very true. Atari did it deliberately with their devs. Probably to their detriment: Having big name devs with their own brands would only have brought more atten

Very true. Atari did it deliberately with their devs. Probably to their detriment: Having big name devs with their own brands would only have brought more attention to the market. Who cares if they make they own game studio? Atari would still get royalties on cartridges sold. With today's game studios though, they aren't the platform owner, so a game dev with a personal brand branching off to do their own thing is still a net loss for them. I wonder if they have rules in place about that sort of thing. I could even take the appearance of something benign & reasonable: "No one talks to the press, everything to the press comes out of PR & marketing" If that's the case, there may very well be a dozen Carmacks in the big dev studios that made something seemingly impossible happen, and without whom their games would simply have died, or been flops. Then again with that level of fame, failures hit the individual quite a bit harder than the dev teams as well. Look at someone like Warren Spector, Richard Garriot, or Dennis Dyack. I might read each of their examples as situations where their singular influence on their games and rise to fame ultimately lead to their failures & blame as well. It created a lot of pressure (somewhat self-imposed to be sure) to do something bigger & better each iteration that they eventually couldn't keep up. A situation made worse along the way by financial backers giving them too much money to develop, meaning the devs didn't have to think as critically about what to include and what to prune from games. It lead to games that were a mess of shiny features or broken promises lacking a solid core. Fame cuts both ways.