I would like to see 37signals put this in their next Exit Interview roundup:
"GS: When id was bought by ZeniMax in 2009, you basically said that it felt like id was becoming its own publisher. Now that you're about to ship Rage, do you guys still feel that way?
JC: It's been better than I could have expected. On a personal level, I don't have to pretend to be an executive anymore. I don't have to go to board of directors meetings or talk about board strategy things. So, I've actually gotten to program more in the last year and a half than I did the year and a half before that.
So, it's been personally good there. And one of the things that was really unexpectedly pleasant is being part of a larger family. In December, we have this big get-together where everybody shows the games in the theaters and talks about everything. And there was this sort of unexpectedly pleasant sense that this is really nice to be part of a larger family and to be able to cheer for somebody else's effort. It's awesome being a sister to [The Elder Scrolls V] Skyrim on there. So, I don't have a negative thing at all to say about how it's gone. I couldn't be happier."
He is definitely on a different level. He is like a superstar athlete at the top of his game. I expect Rage to be a hit because of the passion that John Carmack is investing in it.
While one could certainly argue that id's games haven't changed much over the years in terms of macro gameplay elements (running & shooting), I think Carmack and his cohorts at id are vastly underrated when it comes to micro gameplay design... the art of just making a game feel fun to play.
Sure, you're just running and gunning down a horde of aliens/demons in all of id's games, but doing it is a LOT more fun than in most other games in the genre. A lot of this is actually due to gameplay-via-code and thus attributable pretty directly to Carmack. Turning feels right, movement feels right (not realistic -- right, there's a difference), shooting feels right, jumping feels right. It is amazingly hard to get these micro-gameplay elements to truly feel "right", and few manage to do it as consistently as id has (some other notables here include Nintendo and Bungie).
"GS: [D]id you get a chance to look at the PlayStation Vita at all?
JC: No, but I think that Sony learned a lot from the PS3, and they've gone out of their way to make sure that the development is as easy as possible on there. However, I wouldn't want to be the executive making the decision to launch a new portable gaming machine in the post-smartphone world. I think that they've picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that. They're going to have you program for it like a console, so it's going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there.
But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they're shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it's going to look pretty pokey."
Couldn't Sony do something like the iPhone? The device could get a refresh every year or every six months, while all of the games would keep working on it.
The huge perk to console development is having a fixed set of hardware for a long period of time. You can build up technology, learn the ins and outs of optimizing on it, and build the best software possible. That's how people did crazy things with the PSX by the end of its lifecycle, same with the PS2, Xbox, etc. The longer you've been working on something, the better you're going to be with it. Switching to a short console lifecycle -- even if it's forwards-compatible -- nullifies almost the entire set of benefits to console development.
John Carmack is equally brilliant and lucky in the same way that Michael Jordan is/was. Both found their life's work at a very young age and pursued it relentlessly. Because they found what they love so young and had such incredible work ethics, they achieved incredible things that put most mere mortals to shame.
Natural talent was obviously a factor, but so was the hard work and practice that they got at ages much younger than most of their peers. Both JC and MJ spent their teens practicing when others were playing. It wasn't forced, it was what they wanted to do.
I learned to code pretty much the same way. I'm no John Carmack, but when my peers entered college and were just starting to learn Java, I had been building games and weird little projects in C++ and Java for like 6 years. I naturally had an edge after that.
Finding what you love to do early in life and practicing that like crazy is a rare and wonderful thing.
Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, John Carmack, Michael Jordan, Eminem, Metallica, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Wozniak, all seem to have this kind of thing in common.
The ride is often more enjoyable than the destination. I'm not talking specifically about Outliers but in general, I think the essence of any good book could probably be distilled down to a paragraph.
Jobs e.g. certainly had put in >10k in developing and selling electronic devices when he founded NeXT. But I'd argue it took him a couple more years to become as good and successful as he is now. Another example is Johann Sebastian Bach. Many think, that his last work was his best.
Mastery is a strange term. For example, most people would recognize that to be a professional athlete you must have mastered that sport. Yet, at the same time, within that professional level there are often a select few all-stars or champions that stand out amongst the field.
So, Steve Jobs in charge during the Mac era vs Steve Jobs as CEO of Pixar vs Steve Jobs CEO of Next vs. Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple during the iMac/iPod/iPhone era is certainly different levels of mastery. At what point did Steve Jobs "master" the art of running a company? You can certainly look back a decade or more and see him doing much the same things then as he is now. Yet, he clearly is a more successful CEO now than 10 or 20 years ago.
Perhaps mastery would be better defined as attaining a level of capability in all the required skills required of a particular job/skillset. Mastery is often the point of diminishing returns where you spend minimal time learning new skills and most of your time refining your skills and methods further.
Yet, he clearly is a more successful CEO now
than 10 or 20 years ago
That's mostly because success is a strange beast with many variables, including luck and timing. If he's more successful than 10-20 years ago, that doesn't mean that 20 years ago he wasn't more capable than he is now.
Also, if you measure success by how much money he makes, then Pixar was his biggest success, an investment that started in 1986 and ended in 2006 - paying serious dividends as Jobs became a major stockholder of Disney.
You have to remember what the meaning of "doing well" there is:
They want the AAA titles that are going to go out
in many, many millions of units. And I'm like,
"Hey, we made a half a million dollars here, a
half a million dollars there, it pays everybody's
salaries"
Pardon me if I'm wrong but, they limited the game (number of monsters on screen) to be able to run 60fps on console. So they do make compromise for PC gaming just because they have to work about the console version also.
I guess the good news in that is that they will work for doom4 to run in30fps on console.
It seems that even John "my hobby is rocket science" Carmack is beginning to fail at scale. He mentions that he can't say "let's rewrite this from scratch" any more.
Also interesting is the contrast with 3DRealms. Whereas Broussard simply ran out of money, Carmack saw the writing on the wall and sold id before Rage sunk them.
It isn't so much that he fails at scale as it is that at this point, the majority of effort that goes into any big game is in the content/art and not in the code.
The reason he can't say "let's rewrite this from scratch" anymore is partly because of the size/complexity of the code, but a lot more because he can't make any sudden changes that will cause the artists to have to restructure their existing work significantly... that's where the scale failure occurs.
"GS: When id was bought by ZeniMax in 2009, you basically said that it felt like id was becoming its own publisher. Now that you're about to ship Rage, do you guys still feel that way?
JC: It's been better than I could have expected. On a personal level, I don't have to pretend to be an executive anymore. I don't have to go to board of directors meetings or talk about board strategy things. So, I've actually gotten to program more in the last year and a half than I did the year and a half before that.
So, it's been personally good there. And one of the things that was really unexpectedly pleasant is being part of a larger family. In December, we have this big get-together where everybody shows the games in the theaters and talks about everything. And there was this sort of unexpectedly pleasant sense that this is really nice to be part of a larger family and to be able to cheer for somebody else's effort. It's awesome being a sister to [The Elder Scrolls V] Skyrim on there. So, I don't have a negative thing at all to say about how it's gone. I couldn't be happier."