Is something wrong with it?

Might be. According to my initial question - does that make me an exception or is it normal?

I was an intern at a game company last year. I showed the CEO some of the stuff that is going on in the demoscene. He got really worried and told me to not show that to any of his staff. He was afraid that it intimidates his highly paid coders and designers. I found that rather disturbing. How are you going to kill Hollywood if you are afraid of algorithms?

What you can do within severe constraints can be very impressive.

Particular impressive results may not fit into severe constraints.

Do not confuse the two.

Even a small "that's great, but it needs to do..." can change 4KB into 4GB.

Any game coder worth his salt knows fractals. Many veterans from the demoscene ended up in the game industry at some point. In the 90s most wizkids dreamt of living off making games, and many demosceners made intros to cracked games.

Good game coders like Carmack have little to feel intimidated about.

Your point is good but saying that Carmack shouldn't feel intimidated is probably not helpful. ;)

As a coder I too feel intimidated by these impossible 4 KB Demos. It is also important to remind oneself that the optimizations to do this stuff are mostly meaningless for making a game. You are mostly constrained by time in a project, and shouldn't distract oneself in being cute with neat tricks.

The funny thing is that many game programmers I know grew up watching demos if not making them. Who hasn't seen at least one Future Crew demo?

s/intimidate/inspire/g

I was an intern in a startup that tried exactly this. It was a lot of fun. We got a ton of VC cash to burn and so why not do it in a nice environment? In the end, the company failed. We all got too much into a "holiday" mood. The webdesigner won a surf contest. The CEO started an affair with not one, but two of the female employes. We all got fat from eating delicious food from the 5-Star hotel and high class Restaurants near by.

Moral of the story? Stay frugal even when you dont have to. It might be better for the company.

We didn't and still don't have "tons of VC cash" to burn - only our own savings accounts at that time, so no 5-star hotels or high class restaurants for us.

Also, I would not say we had a holiday mood at all during our time there. We started working the same day we arrived, but being in Hawaii had so many unexpected positive effects on productivity and product vision, we really wanted to share.

And, I could never win a surf contest.

As a travel booking startup I think Hawaii is a really clever move, you're surrounded entirely with your target customers. Very smart

I'm guessing you're with Simplehoney, by that post -- can you confirm that the site is supposed to be up?

I'm eager to sign up, but it's not responding at all to me.

Sorry but to me the moral of the story was not stay frugal, but to stay focused on the product or company vision.

I think the moral of that story is to take VC money and move to Hawaii. Sure beats working alone from my apartment, and I bet everyone was on salary too.

I was an intern at a Startup in Silicon Valley and experienced something very similar. I got screwed over an even higher amount. The CEO argued, that the reward does not apply to interns. I took him to court and won. Emails are legally binding just as any other expression of intent.