I might just be in a bad mood today but I feel this entire article is part of the problem. The way I see it this is a guy who hasn’t been relevant in ages is still getting his words amplified about a studio that can’t do anything new since 2010 being shut down by a company that owns too much.
Like every industry it seems all the money has been rolled into a few gargantuan beast umbrella companies and they smother out new and creative things with endless rehashes of the same old same old and they keep the same figureheads who might have been creative at one point on a pedestal for worship long after they should be in charge to feed an impossible infinite growth.
In all fairness to Romero, and many other heroes/legends of the ‘birth of fps’ era…
These dudes are getting old.
Getting old sucks.
Everything hurts, you’re always more tired than you used to be, you can’t pull 7 all nighters in a row anymore, it might actually kill you.
While the present circumstances are not … exactly awesome, dignified, ideal in any way…
… there would always one day need to be a changing of the guard.
All our favorite studios from the 90s/00s… they’re all mostly gone, they just have the same name sometimes, like the ship of Theseus. People leave, teams get shuffled… and the captains that are still there, are growing gray.
Don’t mourn this.
Be inspired by it.
Do what they did, but with that extra/other thing that you always thought they should have done, but never actually did.
It doesn’t have to be any graphically fancier than what they did decades ago… graphics age, gameplay is timeless.
You can do it, if you are curious, persistent… and humble.
He is still an influential professor who steers the way we teach how to make video games.
Back in the 90s I sent a fan email to John Romero, and he was gracious enough to send me a reply. I don’t think I still have an archive of my emails from that long ago, but it left me with an impression of him as being a good guy. I wouldn’t be too hard on him about “being relevant”. As one of the founding members of id software, it’s not surprising that news outlets will pick up on his comments, whether you think he deserves it or not.
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t meant to be taken as an attack on Romero as a person. I mean as a guy I actually like him. His map sale with proceeds for Ukraine was a great move and I loved it.
Even my comment about him not being relevant, he doesn’t need to be relevant. He made his mark and it was great there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that being it.
As an industry and even economy as a whole though, we focus on this myth of the individual and amplify specific people way too much. I don’t know why this article is the one that got to me because really his comments are valid, leaving a company after pouring yourself into it can be insanely hard. For some reason it just felt like a micro representation of the problem.
People hold up Musk as a genius and amplify his words and ignore every engineer actually doing the math to launch ships for SpaceX. Molyneux gets held up as a creative genius for FABLE (well, did, his image is slipping these days) but ignores all the work done by Shaw, Elfman (still love that’s his actual name), Yarwood-Lovett and the rest.
I dunno. It just got to me. Like I said could have been in a bad mood and not trying to bash Romero.
The way I see it this is a guy who hasn’t been relevant in ages is still getting his words amplified about a studio that can’t do anything new since 2010 being shut down by a company that owns too much.
Truer words have never been spoken, especially the first part.
