[Nition]

Not to diminish the achievement, but worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects.

I have a personal theory the that the average 10x programmer is say 2.5x smarter than average, but also 4x more focused on work, netting a 2.5x4=10x total when you remove all the procrastination and general fumbling around of the average developer.

[JackFr]

> worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine,

The 10x productivity comes in large part from the code they DON'T write.

[jacquesm]

And from writing things the right way the first time around rather than on iteration #3 or so.

[karatestomp]

Environment and control (true ownership) can easily turn 1x into 10x, I'd say. Not saying I could churn out Rollercoaster Tycoon but I bet I'd look, by every metric both reasonable and unreasonable, a hell of a lot more productive working on a game solo with 100% control of all decisions and not having to fret about having something to report in standup every day versus... normal work.

[passivepinetree]

There’s an easy way to find out if that’s true, and it’s to making a similarly successful solo project by yourself!

[karatestomp]

Productively building and finding the right thing to build to be successful are different things, and one can be good at either while being terrible at the other.

[ClumsyPilot]

Please dont say that, it's very, very easy to produce beautiful code that will never make any money!

[thombat]

That 4x more focused means "it ain't me, coz right now I'm commenting on HN" ...

[Nition]

Exactly!

[catalogia]

The praise given to him for Rollercoaster Tycoon could easily also be given to him for Transport Tycoon, which was also a great game. The community really took it to amazing heights with OpenTTD, but the original was great.

[_pmf_]

> so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects.

That makes him twice as productive, not half.

[steveeq1]

Or he's using better tools and languages. (ie, smalltalk vs javascript)

[yesbabyyes]

One of the premises of this thread was him writing the game in x86 assembly.