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Right. id rode (and ending up being a driving force for) the emergence and adoption of x86 PCs as the dominant home computer platform with near perfect timing.

Right. id rode (and ending up being a driving force for) the emergence and adoption of x86 PCs as the dominant home computer platform with near perfect timing. If you were gaming on a PC before they showed up you were a masochist. I tend to believe many of the problems with id productions up to Carmack going off to Oculus can be seen from this early mindset. They can do focused experiences, but their practices cannot scale up, and certainly not to enable the sort of level of variety players want in big titles today. Simply practicing making lots of small games is not enough. It's like that saying about going to space: you don't get there by climbing progressively taller trees.

syntheweave 3y ago
The full story of id really has a lot to do with the group being built around some extremely motivated people who converged on the same prospects in the same place. Like, the fact that Romero was doing work for Origin and New World, two of the biggest names in that era, working on some of the biggest projects, and then decided that he would drop that to do Softdisk's diskmag stuff, is only sensible in the eyes of someone who is extremely focused on being in the room for "next big things". And that's been a hallmark of Romero's career over the long run, really. When shareware games were new, he did shareware games. When mobile gaming was new, he did mobile games. When Facebook games were new, he did Facebook games. I have not checked to see if he did VR(maybe he was already satiated with that by the id experience, which did have some dabblings in that early VR tech) but it would not surprise me at all. So in certain ways, his advice can't help, because it's advice that's about blue ocean markets where all you have to do is be there first and put in a good, serious effort. It's not about cultivating long-term fans, even though that did happen to him by chance.

syntheweave 3y ago

The full story of id really has a lot to do with the group being built around some extremely motivated people who converged on the same prospects in the same place. Like, the fact that Romero was doing work for Origin and New World, two of the biggest names in that era, working on some of the biggest projects, and then decided that he would drop that to do Softdisk's diskmag stuff, is only sensible in the eyes of someone who is extremely focused on being in the room for "next big things". And that's been a hallmark of Romero's career over the long run, really. When shareware games were new, he did shareware games. When mobile gaming was new, he did mobile games. When Facebook games were new, he did Facebook games. I have not checked to see if he did VR(maybe he was already satiated with that by the id experience, which did have some dabblings in that early VR tech) but it would not surprise me at all. So in certain ways, his advice can't help, because it's advice that's about blue ocean markets where all you have to do is be there first and put in a good, serious effort. It's not about cultivating long-term fans, even though that did happen to him by chance.