[evanjacobs]

"I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that."

So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.

Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.

[westoncb]

That comment is likely a nod to his later experience pre-hyping his game Daikatana, which he got lots of backlash for.

[whatever_dude]

> (...) he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

I think it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. You might want to change the direction into something that is not only doable but _better_. Remember Quake? It was supposed to be something completely different, based on their plans [1].

[1] https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2016/...

[sneakernets]

Given how fast id Software went from concept to finished product, it's a miracle they still have functioning spleens.

In other words, don't write a press release that will kill your team.

[rasz]

I think this was about another press release penned by him: "John Romero's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down."

[pfranz]

Maybe it's just more specific to games? I feel like games require a lot of iteration of figuring out where the fun is and balancing that with other subjective elements; not too much grind, growing and increasing challenge through the game. Tech can come in and out of the game and a lot of the "fun" is built around that--your level design will be very different if you could look up/down or jump. Just like if you lighting/shadowing method changes it would affect things. This is probably controversial, but I think some games are just fine at 30fps while certain games do benefit from 60+fps.

I think committing too much up front to tech features or a checklist pushes you to later lose face by dropping the feature or including it at the expense of fun. You might have a very clear idea of what the game is upfront, and the result might be a great game, but you're not pushing boundaries.

[crushcrashcrush]

I believe he's referencing that the game would eat into productivity hours around the world, and making bold claims like that.