Tangentially: > North Texas’ resident tech genius, John Carmack Part of me always wonders what would've happened if the Softdisk crew that founded id Software

Tangentially: > North Texas’ resident tech genius, John Carmack Part of me always wonders what would've happened if the Softdisk crew that founded id Software had done it in Shreveport, or had moved to Baton Rouge or Lafayette, instead going to Texas. When Romero says they "waded across rivers" in Masters of Doom to build games, IIRC he's talking about the bridge over Cross Lake in Shreveport being washed out. The early demos and Keen prototypes were born in Louisiana. There's always been so much creative tech talent without an outlet or upward mobility across TX/LA/MO/KS/AR/AL/MS, either native to it or hired into it. The nexus of id in the Dallas area and Origin Systems in Austin made Texas an oasis for those who could get there in the 90s/00s, but even among the few people in the surrounding states with access to pre-Internet education and resources, so many couldn't afford to pack up and move even one state over. States around Texas vetoing out every incentive to incubate anything but entry-level QA centers didn't help. So many of those people either risked it all to leave, shuffled that talent into corporate work for oil/gas/finance/Wal-Mart, or didn't do anything with it at all. We know about a lot of the people who figured it out and could leave, but I guarantee there are more Romeros and Carmacks who couldn't, who are still putting in the same kinds of workloads with the same kinds of talent to figure out how to design better oil rigs or more efficiently stock Wal-Mart warehouses.