[JeremyNT]

The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit?

> One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.

> We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.

> Sorry, Sandy.

Is he saying that it was a mistake (but not his mistake... Romero's perhaps?) to demand that game designers were also artists? And that this resulted in a loss of talent ("Sorry, Sandy") versus just encouraging more collaboration between artists and designers?

[jpgvm]

So from what little I know of the history there were some serious personal issues going on in the team that led to ~7 of the 11-12 folk on Quake eventually leaving.

Sandy has gone into it on various podcasts and mediums. It's pretty clear he doesn't consider Carmack responsible but rather someone he refuses to name (but is quite obviously Tim Willits) that caused pretty much all the problems.

My read is Carmack is saying he is sorry he lacked the awareness and experience to manage the people stuff.

He lost his dream team, I'm sure it's something he has thought about a lot.

[pgl]

The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software":

https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294

> How Quake ruined id Software.

> There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.

> ... [thread continues] ...

[JeremyNT]

Still not quite exactly following Carmack's suggestion here... is he saying on that last point that the problems with designers/artists were due to Sandy's mistakes (i.e. not a genuine apologetic "sorry" but a "sorry you're wrong" type response)?

[wlesieutre]

He is acknowledging that it was a problem and apologizing for it happening, but is not personally taking the blame for causing said problem

[itishappy]

"I'm sorry we couldn't resolve things before they caused you to leave."

[TeMPOraL]

> ... [thread continues] ...

That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...

[Gracana]

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

[farnsworthfusor]

xcancel (or any other nitter) is useful here

[silotis]

From various interviews with designers who were at iD during that period, it seems there was a fair amount of conflict between them. One in particular seems to be severely disliked by Sandy and others to this day. Presumably Carmack wishes he had done a better job managing those conflicts.

[urbnspacecowboy]

Seems to me Carmack's saying that Romero had a better grasp of visuals than Sandy Petersen, and that Petersen was needlessly disparaged for this.