[jacobgold]

It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece.

Quake 1 was, in many ways, where id Software peaked. But the time Carmack spent optimizing Quake Live, based on Quake 3, ultimately made it his twitch FPS magnum opus.

Even 20 years later, there's no FPS game that comes close to the speed, mechanics, smoothness, and just overall quality: https://youtu.be/tU6v8C1pw8Y?t=675

[john_strinlai]

>It's silly to revisit your mistakes like this

revisiting mistakes (in a healthy, non-obsessive way) is not silly at all. it is great for self growth, and in this case, is a great way to pass on wisdom.

[jacobgold]

The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."

What you're saying sounds very nice and correct, except it isn’t necessarily true.

It's extremely easy to draw wrong lessons in retrospect. There are so many variables, including personalities, market conditions, timing, constraints, and accidents of history. You can't recall or even really understand these things with any level of accuracy.

What ends up being most useful is the way experience fundamentally changes you as a person, not your regretful shower thoughts posted on Twitter.

So it may seem counterintuitive, but if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s in 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".

[KaiserPro]

If we don't look back and asses what worked, and what didn't, how do we grow?

[Jare]

> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos

Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.

I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.

I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.

[jacobgold]

I agree with that. You got an old version of my comment before I clarified that, now it says:

"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid..."

[nehal3m]

I disagree, even for successful projects retrospection toward mistakes is worth the pain to learn.

[madduci]

Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.

[jacobgold]

Unreal was great single player and fun for multiplayer but there's no comparison in terms of the way the game played competitively vs Quake.

And CTF originally was from Quake 1, the threewave CTF mod by Zoid which made it into Quake 3.

Threewave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFg2PPOmA74

[wang_li]

I believe id paid him to port ctf to Quake 2 and Quake 3.