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> John Romero, the (in)famous game designer. This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled prog

by kqr 5y ago

> John Romero, the (in)famous game designer. This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled programmer. He just didn't measure up to Carmack in terms of pure graphics--technical solutions. But since when is that a fair comparison for anyone? I think the primary reason the original Quake idea never bore out (not at id, and not at the studio Romero started after id) was that Romero had some misconceptions about how easy it would be to create a highly complex game by just throwing more manpower at it.

redisman 5y ago
Quake was a huge cultural hit and basically kickstarted the multiplayer shooter genre which has ever since been probably the most popular genre for decades. I’m not sure what these takes about it being a failure are
- Fuzzwah 5y ago
  The previous comments were focused on the single player game. As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Yeah I probably only played through the campaign twice and some thousands of hours in LAN and online and with various mods
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack. So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.
- kqr 5y ago
  Sure, it's impossible to distinguish between "great at X" and "having a lucky streak at X" for anyone. From my understanding, though, Romero could -- and did -- crank out good, smaller games on demand early in his career, far more than is easily attributable to lucky streak. The problems, as I see it, only began when he wanted to make bigger games and thought the way to do it was by hiring lots of people and somehow his dream would get well executed by this ill-thought-out organisation.

by kqr 5y ago

redisman 5y ago

Quake was a huge cultural hit and basically kickstarted the multiplayer shooter genre which has ever since been probably the most popular genre for decades. I’m not sure what these takes about it being a failure are

Fuzzwah 5y ago
The previous comments were focused on the single player game. As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
- redisman 5y ago
  Yeah I probably only played through the campaign twice and some thousands of hours in LAN and online and with various mods

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack. So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.

kqr 5y ago
Sure, it's impossible to distinguish between "great at X" and "having a lucky streak at X" for anyone. From my understanding, though, Romero could -- and did -- crank out good, smaller games on demand early in his career, far more than is easily attributable to lucky streak. The problems, as I see it, only began when he wanted to make bigger games and thought the way to do it was by hiring lots of people and somehow his dream would get well executed by this ill-thought-out organisation.