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0 pointsAtlasBarfed4y ago0 comments

Your case of Carmack is illustrative.

To achieve 100x, consider what he was doing:

- writing a first person shooter (Castle Wolfenstein 3d)

- writing a first person shooter (Doom)

- writing a first person shooter (Quake)

... you get the idea.

Now, there was enormous leaps in maximal utilitilization of hardware, but do you notice a pattern? The requirements are basically fixed.

Most 10x I've achieved in a short fashion or observed was due to some similar parameters:

- the requirements were stable

- the basic problem was done before and practiced, and implementaiton was a variation/improvement of the previous

- solo or very small development team where greenfield imposed little barriers

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4 comments · 1 top-level

Jensson4y ago· 3 in thread

Commander Keen was the first side scrolling platformer for PC (side scrolling was hardware accelerated on consoles, so PC games didn't have it before this) and released 1991. Wolfenstein 3d was the first fps and released 1992. Both of those were revolutionary and combined is more than enough to put him way above most other game programmers at the time.

And you know, at the time he didn't have any experience! That was his first few years as a professional programmer! So your hypothesis that he was only effective since he worked in a domain he had tons of experience in is wrong! He had less experience than most other programmers but was way more effective in many different areas.

AtlasBarfedOP4y ago

Side scrollers have existed since the Apple II on "PCs". I highly doubt that 1991 was the first side scroller on ibm pc.

Wolfenstein was not the first 3d fps on ibmpc, and certainly not in "PC" land. Skyfox existed on the Apple II, and battlezone likely was ported at some point.

Carmack was fantastic, but again his "requirements" are static and he is a dev team of one.

mikepurvis4y ago

A lot of early jump & run games worked on a screen-by-screen basis (Prince of Persia, Lode Runner, etc) rather than actually having smooth, NES-style scrolling.

In any case, this Wikipedia article [1] backs up that the only real predecessors of Keen on PC were early-80s console ports that were extremely limited in other ways, like having boxy, low color count graphics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-scrolling_video_game#IBM_...

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kragen4y ago

Mazewar was the first FPS, but Wolf3D was a totally different class of game, and every FPS since then has been an imitation of Wolf3D. Agreed about CKeen.

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