Comment Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score 5, Informative) 225
This is the opposoite of how Carmack tells it in his recent interview:
That was a decade-long fight inside id, really, about how open we should be with the technology and with the modifiability. The two things people were concerned about were, as you say: won’t people be able to make levels and sell them in competition to us? And there were certainly some specific cases, like the whole D-Zone game that came out with the package of a million or whatever different levels somebody could find scraped off the BBSes and put out there. We know some of those things sold really large numbers. So there was definitely an element of bitterness inside some corners of the company about that. I don’t think that they ever took anything from us; it’s not like we had a competing package.
But then the other side of it was the technological evolution question, where people said, aren’t we giving away some of our secrets? When we released our source code to the builder and those different aspects. And certainly tons of people learned from that, and did go on to build things, and you know, there’s an argument to be made that the company could have perhaps held onto a lead and an edge in the market better without doing that. But I think we came out net positive.
I was really happy a decade later when Kevin Cloud, one of my partners, said that I had been right to be pushing for doing that. Because he had been looking at it not so much from the community and technological openness standpoint, but as a business risk. Coolly looked back at over the years, I think we benefited more than it might have hurt us. But in truth, I was just doing that at the time because it was something that felt really right to me.
I still remember, at the time I was commenting about how I remembered being a teenager sector-editing Ultima II on my Apple II, to go ahead and hack things in to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever, and I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing.
