3 ms·

I'm not super familiar with the ID story (I haven't read the book), but that seems awfully simplistic. Certainly many companies have been short-sighted and miss

by hvs 12y ago

I'm not super familiar with the ID story (I haven't read the book), but that seems awfully simplistic. Certainly many companies have been short-sighted and missed opportunities (your second example is one of the most obvious ones, although HP may have just screwed that up), but a game company not wanting to use newer technology for games doesn't jive with my understanding of the game industry at any point (and I've been programming since the early 80's.) That said, you might be right, it just seems weird.

toyg 12y ago
It could have simply been a question of effort. Maybe Softdisk saw it as a speculative R&D project and didn't want to go pedal-to-the-metal committing lots of resources to it, like Carmack & Romero clearly thought they should. Also, the PC games market then was very complicated and segmented, making side-bets quite risky. I've personally never met anyone with an EGA card, whereas CGA and VGA were popular. The PC market was also smaller than other games-oriented ecosystems back then.
Kiro 12y ago
Maybe the cost of learning and adapting the new technology was too high. I know many things that could be modernized at my company but we choose not to do it right now because we need to focus on other things.
bluedino 12y ago
>> I'm not super familiar with the ID story (I haven't read the book), but that seems awfully simplistic. Softdisk (SoftDisk?) was a company who sold subscriptions similar to companies like MicroZine. Each month or two you'd receive a disk in the mail with games, utilities, and other software. The ID guys had recently moved from writing Apple ][ software to the IBM PC. When they did a demo called 'Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement', which consisted of a clone of the first level of the NES game Super Mario 3, they sent it off to Nintendo, who of course responded that they weren't interested in doing PC games. ID ended up partnering with Apogee to do their sales and distribution, when SoftDisk found out, the guys ended up having to do a handful more games for SoftDisk. To make it even worse, they took their PC's home on the nights and weekends from their desks at SoftDisk!
- th0ma5 12y ago
  Softdisk created a lot of stuff for the IBM Big Blue Disk, a software magazine like you mention. I've scoured the web, and am now polluting Google even further perhaps with this comment, but I'd love to find some of that old stuff. Lots of great memories from those demos.

by hvs 12y ago

toyg 12y ago

It could have simply been a question of effort. Maybe Softdisk saw it as a speculative R&D project and didn't want to go pedal-to-the-metal committing lots of resources to it, like Carmack & Romero clearly thought they should. Also, the PC games market then was very complicated and segmented, making side-bets quite risky. I've personally never met anyone with an EGA card, whereas CGA and VGA were popular. The PC market was also smaller than other games-oriented ecosystems back then.

Kiro 12y ago

Maybe the cost of learning and adapting the new technology was too high. I know many things that could be modernized at my company but we choose not to do it right now because we need to focus on other things.

bluedino 12y ago

>> I'm not super familiar with the ID story (I haven't read the book), but that seems awfully simplistic. Softdisk (SoftDisk?) was a company who sold subscriptions similar to companies like MicroZine. Each month or two you'd receive a disk in the mail with games, utilities, and other software. The ID guys had recently moved from writing Apple ][ software to the IBM PC. When they did a demo called 'Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement', which consisted of a clone of the first level of the NES game Super Mario 3, they sent it off to Nintendo, who of course responded that they weren't interested in doing PC games. ID ended up partnering with Apogee to do their sales and distribution, when SoftDisk found out, the guys ended up having to do a handful more games for SoftDisk. To make it even worse, they took their PC's home on the nights and weekends from their desks at SoftDisk!

th0ma5 12y ago
Softdisk created a lot of stuff for the IBM Big Blue Disk, a software magazine like you mention. I've scoured the web, and am now polluting Google even further perhaps with this comment, but I'd love to find some of that old stuff. Lots of great memories from those demos.