14 ms·

You don't need millions of dollars

341 points by nqureshi 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
DigitalSea 13y ago
They don't make programmers like Carmack any more. When he was around, Carmack and his comrades were making the rules and paving new paths doing things that were considered impossible. These days, finding the answers is all too easy thanks to Stack Overflow and Github. I also feel as though the limits of computing in a gaming sense like Quake and Doom were will never happen ever again.
bluedino 13y ago
If you haven't read this book, go get it. It's the ultimate start-up story. They start out as the most rag-tag group of developers. They took their computers home on the weekends from their day jobs at SoftDisk to work on their own games. These weren't MacBook Airs, they were full-tower 386 desktops with CRT monitors! They packed into an apartment for their first 'real' offices. The story about them re-creating Super Mario pixel by pixel using a VHS recorder and TV is great. Then these guys spent a small fortune on NeXT workstations to create Doom/Quake! Who doesn't dream about using the most high-end tools you can get your hands on. And in the end, they all end up as famous 'rock star' millionaires driving Ferraris.
- angersock 13y ago
  It's a much more down-to-earth story about some good Texas boys kicking ass than you'll find with the people scrambling over themselves on the coasts to catch as much as they can from VCs making it rain.
FridayWithJohn 13y ago
Damnit, after reading that I simply had to buy myself a copy of that book. These two guys were my childhood heros. Although my mom hated them thanks to all the hours I spent playing Keen or Doom and "not doing my homework"
- gizmo 13y ago
  The book is really phenomenal. Highly, highly recommended.
  - DigitalJack 13y ago
    The story is great but the writing was pretty marginal. There were scene jumps that the author didn't give any sort of hint or clue about. There we're complete misattributions of who was saying what. I almost gave up on the book in the first few chapters.
altero 13y ago
I find it ridiculous how IT, the industry with lowest entry barrier that ever existed, is often marked as sexist and elitist. Wanna program? Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Ok, let's go... The Isms in tech. Sexist assholes exist in technology but are rare. I don't think I'm one, and I've only worked at one company where they were common, and that was a VC-funded company with MBA culture, and that's why there was so much sexism (among management). Plenty of these tech companies have the old, sexist MBA culture where women exist to make powerful men feel important, young, manly, etc.; but plenty more don't have that culture. There's very little explicit classism. However, there is much indirect classism as a result of the severe ageism. If you age-grade peoples' careers harshly and discount accomplishments after 35, you're favoring people who had a head start (rich kids) while downgrading the people who worked hard for decades. That's a real problem but it doesn't exist because people explicitly favor the privileged. They don't. They're just prone to the same biases as everyone else, and thus are influenced by precociousness and pedigree. This is amplified by the groupthink in the VC community, and would be substantially less of a problem if there were more independent thought. Why are many VCs ageist? (That's where the general "bro" culture comes from; it trickles down.) Because MBA culture (which is different from tech, the latter being far more evolved) is sexist and ageist, and also because a lot of these gatekeepers are middle-aged private-equity guys who did their 20s completely wrong (90-hour weeks) and are trying to live vicariously through young sociopaths whose careers they can make, in exchange for juicy tidbits about what their proteges did on the weekend ("chickenhawking"; see Michael Scott and Ryan Howard in The Office). Most VCs aren't that pathetic, but the groupthink favors the chickenhawk compliant (privileged, young, somewhat sociopathic, party-friendly) at the expense of the true technologists. The real problem is the lack of fighters in tech, which leads to conformity and groupthink among the crowd that matters (VCs, top founders). Groupthink magnifies the biases of the defective few. The real problem is that true technologists have done a poor job of protecting the culture; the real technology culture is far more meritocratic than the bastardized version the MBAs and private equity guys came up with. If we want fairness and a return to a maker-centric culture in the Valley and in the software industry in general, we can have it; but we have to get better at fighting for our own interests. End Rant.
nadam 13y ago
"The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet." Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success. As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.) I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.
- gizmo 13y ago
  Every generation faces different challenges, but the value of the internet cannot be understated. It's a resource that answers any question you may have about programming, about PC internals, or about the business and marketing parts you have to get right. You can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people who have already accomplished what you're trying to do and who blog earnestly about their experiences. You can test whether a game or app has merit with a fraction of the effort required in the 90s. And now you have millions of hours worth of open source code to build on top on. "If you build it they will come" doesn't quite work on the internet. Except maybe if your product is extraordinary. But before the internet, when it's just you in your parents' basement? Then you need a real marketing channel otherwise you stand no chance. Even the Id guys had to write shareware games for an established distributor before they figured out how to do the shareware thing. Today you can bootstrap a business worth millions based on a $8 a month VPS. As far as I can tell this hasn't been true in any other part of history or in any other field. There is still so much low-hanging fruit in software - it's crazy.
jmcgough 13y ago
I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's at all curious in game history, Carmack, or game development. I read it as a teenager, and it really inspired me to become a programmer.
acoleman616 13y ago
As others have mentioned in the past, I believe this is one of the best "business" books I've ever read. Not in the traditional sense, but that only furthers my point. Absolutely phenomenal read.
danmaz74 13y ago
Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Wow, my admiration for Carmack just increased tenfold.
- dabeeeenster 13y ago
  He comes out of that book very well. Hard but fair. Romero, on the other hand...
  - jrs99 13y ago
    ...made you his bitch.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    What's he like?
    - billmalarky 13y ago
      In the book he comes off as an overly confident showman. Carmack was everything behind ID software (and to Romero's credit he pretty much admits that). That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC. So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM. Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.
      - StavrosK 13y ago
        Very interesting, it sounds like a good read. I'll buy it now, thanks.
theorique 13y ago
Amazing quote: "The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers." So inspirational.
sreyaNotfilc 13y ago
Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it? Small anecdote: I was working on software for my site yesterday and thought about Carmack and the Fez guy (Phil Fish) and how they did amazing things on a computer. And then I thought about how tough it was for me to build a software for the web. Yes, its some complex software, but we have more tools now than those before us. There's really no excuse to not get things done (if you really want it done). What I need to realize is that these guys didn't just think their way to success. They built their way to success. They had the idea, and then executed. You have to be moving and building. No one can see inside your mind. So, to show how amazing your idea really is, you'd need to literally "show" them the idea. So yes, hopefully this is my last awe inspiring story. Hopefully (not hopefully, it will be...) the next time I chime in, I'll have something to show instead of an idea baking in my head. In the words of Jobs "Real artists ship"! And I feel like I'm there.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  > Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it? If you want a good source of motivation, you might try getting a horrible job for a while. Really. I did door to door sales when I was a girl. Hours upon hours of walking around seeing people who want nothing more in their heart of hearts than for you to fuck off and die. Nothing motivated me more to put in the hours at uni - even though I didn't like what I was studying - than the prospect of going back to that soul-crushing job, nothing's motivated me more to put in the hours at things that don't really please me than that either. These days, when people tell me that something's hard, or that they have a shit job, I really have to step on my tongue to stop myself turning around and going - You don't know what a horrible job is, not really. You've been on easy street all your life.
  - FLUX-YOU 13y ago
    I have to second this. I made the best progress learning and building when I was stocking shelves at Target for $8 an hour in a rich neighborhood. I've experienced many of these sentiments. Unfortunately, I took this position after graduating.
danso 13y ago
Carmack and Woz would've made a great engineering team...amazing that such brilliant engineers were also so generous
- MikeTLive 13y ago
  Would Have? ... The future is not over yet.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jimbokun 13y ago
  Working with Jobs was probably better for Woz than working with Carmack ever could have been. Jobs had a sense of how what Woz's talent could change the world. Woz may have enjoyed showing off his projects to Carmack, but I doubt Carmack could have gotten to leave his job at HP.
- dagw 13y ago
  Carmack and Woz, without Romereo and Jobs to truly see the potential of their work, would probably still be sitting deep in the R&D department of some large engineering company.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Excellent post. I've heard of the book before but never read it - although I did just order a copy. I liked Carmack's comments on patents. Interesting that all these years later is still such a big issue in the software industry. It was also very interesting to see the comparison between shareware and in-app purchases. Never thought of that before.
nachteilig 13y ago
Carmack still hasn't managed to let me down after all of these years, and I've probably tried to keep up with his happenings since the Quake days. He's a real inspiration. If you haven't read this book already, it's really worth it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- lnanek2 13y ago
  I doubt he really needs the money at this point in his life. Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, etc. all huge traffic. So I doubt it influenced him much.
wildermuthn 13y ago
Carmack's story continues at Oculus. He might be famous among the gaming world (might not), but it won't be long until he's famous throughout the world. VR's coming.
varelse 13y ago
As much as I admire John Carmack's bootstrapped success (and on this axis the guy is just awesome), given how he handled the poor health of his cat, I don't think I'd ever work with or for him. It just doesn't sit right with me.
- _random_ 13y ago
  You would've been fine! As long as you don't pee around the office.
  - varelse 13y ago
    Here's what really puzzles me. John Carmack was a legend by the time of the Mitzi incident. Instead of dumping the poor creature at the animal shelter like he did, he could have auctioned off "John Carmack's frickin' cat" to his legion of admirers, giving it a new home. Or he could have taken it to a vet and probably found out it had bladder stones which could have been removed by a ~$1,000 procedure, but I digress. And that I think is part of why I'm not rich like he is...
jokoon 13y ago
And here I am, with good ideas about making a persistent online single infinite world, all the tools, but not actually working on it daily. The weird thing, is that many other companies have the actual skills to do what I want to do, but they don't. Clearly my project is either stupid or I'm very lazy, or nobody is innovating and that's what kill the market.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Yes you do, unless you intend to rent forever.
everyone 13y ago
"You know how game companies spent the last 5 years figuring out that free games with 100% in-app purchases are the optimum (and maybe, only) business model for games today? " What!!??
Apocryphon 13y ago
Shareware seems more like Kickstarter to me, in terms of sentiment. You get niche, hobbyist communities excited about your product, and pool up money through grassroots efforts. Though perhaps shareware's most direct descendent today is when creators release albums or ebooks and add a tip jar for suggested donations.
drakaal 13y ago
You do need millions of dollars. Building a Game today is not what it was when Wolf 3d was made. The number of textures the depth of the story, the voice acting, the quality of physics that players expect to day is very different. You can't write a Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo, in you spare time between classes at school, or even by yourself living in your mom's basement over a year. The speed at which game tech advances is such that a one to 5 man shop can't create a game worth million in the time it takes to be obsolete. Yes, there will be exceptions like Angry Birds. But most people aren't going to be that company that just nails game play at the right time. And most those won't be as much developers as designers.
- fsckin 13y ago
  >Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo Portal might not be a good example to use here. It's essentially version 1.0 of Narbacular Drop, which was made by a small team of students at DigiPen. Valve picked up the team and the retail version of the game never had more than 10 people working on it at a time.
  - drakaal 13y ago
    10 people for a year is $1m. And they used digital Assets from Valve, and a lot of voice work and music work that they had to buy.
10098 13y ago
> today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success That is a lie. To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time, one must possess raw undiluted talent and no amount of tools, libraries or online resources are going to help. If it was that easy, we'd see masterpieces pop up every few months. But instead the market is flooded with mediocrity. Which really should come as no surprise, because we know that 90% of everything is crap. That includes people: most people (including myself), unfortunately, aren't half as smart and talented as they think they are. Which is why we struggle to create things that could be considered merely "good", and "great" is completely outside of our reach.
- altero 13y ago
  BS. You do not need "raw undiluted talent" to create stuff like Instagram. Most successful games today are light years behind 20 years old counterparts.
  - 10098 13y ago
    Please read my comment more carefully. > To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time... Most of the games are by no means as important as Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake were when they first came out. id software laid the foundation for the modern FPS genre and defined the way the industry evolved for years to come. Instagram is just a dumbed-down flickr with a mobile app.
    - baq 13y ago
      My personal favorite modern parallel is SpaceX vs Facebook. Social network that sells ads vs the stars.
- manuelflara 13y ago
  It says "to achieve success" (think Candy Crush et al), not "to create a masterpiece".
  - 13y ago
Sam121 13y ago
One of the best game i ever play in my childhood and complete it with in 3 days, still remember the stage 3 when i have to touch space bar for open the gate and simultaneous monster came. it was scary for me. Mainly i like to target the oil drums :). Mine favorite weapon was the machine gun which was available in the middle chamber with a protected suit
perlpimp 13y ago
Just to the point, I am located in Russia where print copy of this book would appear in 6months to year if at all. Technology allowed me purchase this book and read it right away. It is all about focus and determination nowadays, just like it always was. And way back it took some real patience and a highly structured approach to achieve any kind of success. And now you can the cake and eat it too - compared to effort you needed to expend in nineties to create something. Information wasn't just everywhere, tracing compiler bugs could make you go down one or other rabbit hole for days if not week or two.

341 points by nqureshi 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

They don't make programmers like Carmack any more. When he was around, Carmack and his comrades were making the rules and paving new paths doing things that were considered impossible. These days, finding the answers is all too easy thanks to Stack Overflow and Github. I also feel as though the limits of computing in a gaming sense like Quake and Doom were will never happen ever again.

bluedino 13y ago

If you haven't read this book, go get it. It's the ultimate start-up story. They start out as the most rag-tag group of developers. They took their computers home on the weekends from their day jobs at SoftDisk to work on their own games. These weren't MacBook Airs, they were full-tower 386 desktops with CRT monitors! They packed into an apartment for their first 'real' offices. The story about them re-creating Super Mario pixel by pixel using a VHS recorder and TV is great. Then these guys spent a small fortune on NeXT workstations to create Doom/Quake! Who doesn't dream about using the most high-end tools you can get your hands on. And in the end, they all end up as famous 'rock star' millionaires driving Ferraris.

angersock 13y ago
It's a much more down-to-earth story about some good Texas boys kicking ass than you'll find with the people scrambling over themselves on the coasts to catch as much as they can from VCs making it rain.

FridayWithJohn 13y ago

Damnit, after reading that I simply had to buy myself a copy of that book. These two guys were my childhood heros. Although my mom hated them thanks to all the hours I spent playing Keen or Doom and "not doing my homework"

gizmo 13y ago
The book is really phenomenal. Highly, highly recommended.
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  The story is great but the writing was pretty marginal. There were scene jumps that the author didn't give any sort of hint or clue about. There we're complete misattributions of who was saying what. I almost gave up on the book in the first few chapters.

altero 13y ago

I find it ridiculous how IT, the industry with lowest entry barrier that ever existed, is often marked as sexist and elitist. Wanna program? Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours.

michaelochurch 13y ago
Ok, let's go... The Isms in tech. Sexist assholes exist in technology but are rare. I don't think I'm one, and I've only worked at one company where they were common, and that was a VC-funded company with MBA culture, and that's why there was so much sexism (among management). Plenty of these tech companies have the old, sexist MBA culture where women exist to make powerful men feel important, young, manly, etc.; but plenty more don't have that culture. There's very little explicit classism. However, there is much indirect classism as a result of the severe ageism. If you age-grade peoples' careers harshly and discount accomplishments after 35, you're favoring people who had a head start (rich kids) while downgrading the people who worked hard for decades. That's a real problem but it doesn't exist because people explicitly favor the privileged. They don't. They're just prone to the same biases as everyone else, and thus are influenced by precociousness and pedigree. This is amplified by the groupthink in the VC community, and would be substantially less of a problem if there were more independent thought. Why are many VCs ageist? (That's where the general "bro" culture comes from; it trickles down.) Because MBA culture (which is different from tech, the latter being far more evolved) is sexist and ageist, and also because a lot of these gatekeepers are middle-aged private-equity guys who did their 20s completely wrong (90-hour weeks) and are trying to live vicariously through young sociopaths whose careers they can make, in exchange for juicy tidbits about what their proteges did on the weekend ("chickenhawking"; see Michael Scott and Ryan Howard in The Office). Most VCs aren't that pathetic, but the groupthink favors the chickenhawk compliant (privileged, young, somewhat sociopathic, party-friendly) at the expense of the true technologists. The real problem is the lack of fighters in tech, which leads to conformity and groupthink among the crowd that matters (VCs, top founders). Groupthink magnifies the biases of the defective few. The real problem is that true technologists have done a poor job of protecting the culture; the real technology culture is far more meritocratic than the bastardized version the MBAs and private equity guys came up with. If we want fairness and a return to a maker-centric culture in the Valley and in the software industry in general, we can have it; but we have to get better at fighting for our own interests. End Rant.

nadam 13y ago

"The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet." Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success. As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.) I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.

gizmo 13y ago
Every generation faces different challenges, but the value of the internet cannot be understated. It's a resource that answers any question you may have about programming, about PC internals, or about the business and marketing parts you have to get right. You can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people who have already accomplished what you're trying to do and who blog earnestly about their experiences. You can test whether a game or app has merit with a fraction of the effort required in the 90s. And now you have millions of hours worth of open source code to build on top on. "If you build it they will come" doesn't quite work on the internet. Except maybe if your product is extraordinary. But before the internet, when it's just you in your parents' basement? Then you need a real marketing channel otherwise you stand no chance. Even the Id guys had to write shareware games for an established distributor before they figured out how to do the shareware thing. Today you can bootstrap a business worth millions based on a $8 a month VPS. As far as I can tell this hasn't been true in any other part of history or in any other field. There is still so much low-hanging fruit in software - it's crazy.

jmcgough 13y ago

I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's at all curious in game history, Carmack, or game development. I read it as a teenager, and it really inspired me to become a programmer.

acoleman616 13y ago

As others have mentioned in the past, I believe this is one of the best "business" books I've ever read. Not in the traditional sense, but that only furthers my point. Absolutely phenomenal read.

danmaz74 13y ago

Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Wow, my admiration for Carmack just increased tenfold.

dabeeeenster 13y ago
He comes out of that book very well. Hard but fair. Romero, on the other hand...
- jrs99 13y ago
  ...made you his bitch.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  What's he like?
  - billmalarky 13y ago
    In the book he comes off as an overly confident showman. Carmack was everything behind ID software (and to Romero's credit he pretty much admits that). That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC. So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM. Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      Very interesting, it sounds like a good read. I'll buy it now, thanks.

theorique 13y ago

Amazing quote: "The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers." So inspirational.

sreyaNotfilc 13y ago

Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it? Small anecdote: I was working on software for my site yesterday and thought about Carmack and the Fez guy (Phil Fish) and how they did amazing things on a computer. And then I thought about how tough it was for me to build a software for the web. Yes, its some complex software, but we have more tools now than those before us. There's really no excuse to not get things done (if you really want it done). What I need to realize is that these guys didn't just think their way to success. They built their way to success. They had the idea, and then executed. You have to be moving and building. No one can see inside your mind. So, to show how amazing your idea really is, you'd need to literally "show" them the idea. So yes, hopefully this is my last awe inspiring story. Hopefully (not hopefully, it will be...) the next time I chime in, I'll have something to show instead of an idea baking in my head. In the words of Jobs "Real artists ship"! And I feel like I'm there.

6d0debc071 13y ago
> Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it? If you want a good source of motivation, you might try getting a horrible job for a while. Really. I did door to door sales when I was a girl. Hours upon hours of walking around seeing people who want nothing more in their heart of hearts than for you to fuck off and die. Nothing motivated me more to put in the hours at uni - even though I didn't like what I was studying - than the prospect of going back to that soul-crushing job, nothing's motivated me more to put in the hours at things that don't really please me than that either. These days, when people tell me that something's hard, or that they have a shit job, I really have to step on my tongue to stop myself turning around and going - You don't know what a horrible job is, not really. You've been on easy street all your life.
- FLUX-YOU 13y ago
  I have to second this. I made the best progress learning and building when I was stocking shelves at Target for $8 an hour in a rich neighborhood. I've experienced many of these sentiments. Unfortunately, I took this position after graduating.

danso 13y ago

Carmack and Woz would've made a great engineering team...amazing that such brilliant engineers were also so generous

MikeTLive 13y ago
Would Have? ... The future is not over yet.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jimbokun 13y ago
Working with Jobs was probably better for Woz than working with Carmack ever could have been. Jobs had a sense of how what Woz's talent could change the world. Woz may have enjoyed showing off his projects to Carmack, but I doubt Carmack could have gotten to leave his job at HP.
dagw 13y ago
Carmack and Woz, without Romereo and Jobs to truly see the potential of their work, would probably still be sitting deep in the R&D department of some large engineering company.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Excellent post. I've heard of the book before but never read it - although I did just order a copy. I liked Carmack's comments on patents. Interesting that all these years later is still such a big issue in the software industry. It was also very interesting to see the comparison between shareware and in-app purchases. Never thought of that before.

nachteilig 13y ago

Carmack still hasn't managed to let me down after all of these years, and I've probably tried to keep up with his happenings since the Quake days. He's a real inspiration. If you haven't read this book already, it's really worth it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lnanek2 13y ago
I doubt he really needs the money at this point in his life. Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, etc. all huge traffic. So I doubt it influenced him much.

wildermuthn 13y ago

Carmack's story continues at Oculus. He might be famous among the gaming world (might not), but it won't be long until he's famous throughout the world. VR's coming.

varelse 13y ago

As much as I admire John Carmack's bootstrapped success (and on this axis the guy is just awesome), given how he handled the poor health of his cat, I don't think I'd ever work with or for him. It just doesn't sit right with me.

_random_ 13y ago
You would've been fine! As long as you don't pee around the office.
- varelse 13y ago
  Here's what really puzzles me. John Carmack was a legend by the time of the Mitzi incident. Instead of dumping the poor creature at the animal shelter like he did, he could have auctioned off "John Carmack's frickin' cat" to his legion of admirers, giving it a new home. Or he could have taken it to a vet and probably found out it had bladder stones which could have been removed by a ~$1,000 procedure, but I digress. And that I think is part of why I'm not rich like he is...

jokoon 13y ago

And here I am, with good ideas about making a persistent online single infinite world, all the tools, but not actually working on it daily. The weird thing, is that many other companies have the actual skills to do what I want to do, but they don't. Clearly my project is either stupid or I'm very lazy, or nobody is innovating and that's what kill the market.

ffrryuu 13y ago

Yes you do, unless you intend to rent forever.

everyone 13y ago

"You know how game companies spent the last 5 years figuring out that free games with 100% in-app purchases are the optimum (and maybe, only) business model for games today? " What!!??

Apocryphon 13y ago

Shareware seems more like Kickstarter to me, in terms of sentiment. You get niche, hobbyist communities excited about your product, and pool up money through grassroots efforts. Though perhaps shareware's most direct descendent today is when creators release albums or ebooks and add a tip jar for suggested donations.

drakaal 13y ago

You do need millions of dollars. Building a Game today is not what it was when Wolf 3d was made. The number of textures the depth of the story, the voice acting, the quality of physics that players expect to day is very different. You can't write a Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo, in you spare time between classes at school, or even by yourself living in your mom's basement over a year. The speed at which game tech advances is such that a one to 5 man shop can't create a game worth million in the time it takes to be obsolete. Yes, there will be exceptions like Angry Birds. But most people aren't going to be that company that just nails game play at the right time. And most those won't be as much developers as designers.

fsckin 13y ago
>Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo Portal might not be a good example to use here. It's essentially version 1.0 of Narbacular Drop, which was made by a small team of students at DigiPen. Valve picked up the team and the retail version of the game never had more than 10 people working on it at a time.
- drakaal 13y ago
  10 people for a year is $1m. And they used digital Assets from Valve, and a lot of voice work and music work that they had to buy.

10098 13y ago

> today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success That is a lie. To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time, one must possess raw undiluted talent and no amount of tools, libraries or online resources are going to help. If it was that easy, we'd see masterpieces pop up every few months. But instead the market is flooded with mediocrity. Which really should come as no surprise, because we know that 90% of everything is crap. That includes people: most people (including myself), unfortunately, aren't half as smart and talented as they think they are. Which is why we struggle to create things that could be considered merely "good", and "great" is completely outside of our reach.

altero 13y ago
BS. You do not need "raw undiluted talent" to create stuff like Instagram. Most successful games today are light years behind 20 years old counterparts.
- 10098 13y ago
  Please read my comment more carefully. > To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time... Most of the games are by no means as important as Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake were when they first came out. id software laid the foundation for the modern FPS genre and defined the way the industry evolved for years to come. Instagram is just a dumbed-down flickr with a mobile app.
  - baq 13y ago
    My personal favorite modern parallel is SpaceX vs Facebook. Social network that sells ads vs the stars.
manuelflara 13y ago
It says "to achieve success" (think Candy Crush et al), not "to create a masterpiece".
- 13y ago

Sam121 13y ago

One of the best game i ever play in my childhood and complete it with in 3 days, still remember the stage 3 when i have to touch space bar for open the gate and simultaneous monster came. it was scary for me. Mainly i like to target the oil drums :). Mine favorite weapon was the machine gun which was available in the middle chamber with a protected suit

perlpimp 13y ago

Just to the point, I am located in Russia where print copy of this book would appear in 6months to year if at all. Technology allowed me purchase this book and read it right away. It is all about focus and determination nowadays, just like it always was. And way back it took some real patience and a highly structured approach to achieve any kind of success. And now you can the cake and eat it too - compared to effort you needed to expend in nineties to create something. Information wasn't just everywhere, tracing compiler bugs could make you go down one or other rabbit hole for days if not week or two.