7 ms·

> How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? Almost definitely not 10 years.

• datameta 5y ago
  I think it's more likely that we wouldn't have thought something like Doom to be possible until Carmack came along and squeezed oodles of math tricks and hacks into the game to let it run on hardware of the era. So it may as well have be an infinitely long development time for us.
• pjc50 5y ago
  If you wanted to write Doom, starting in 1993, and take 10 years, your most efficient strategy would probably be to do something else for the first nine of them and wait for the technology to change around you.
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    Waiting for the equivalent of Carmack to write and open source the underlying libraries, basically.
• knorker 5y ago
  Almost certainly you would just plain have not been able to do it at all. Not in 1993-1996. Not without it already having been done once. And if you had, it would have taken you more than 10 years to realize what the right thing is, and to solve all very complex problems that showed up on the way. Quake doesn't even have any load times! Not even with the hardware available at the time.