Back in the 90s I sent a fan email to John Romero, and he was gracious enough to send me a reply. I don’t think I still have an archive of my emails from that long ago, but it left me with an impression of him as being a good guy. I wouldn’t be too hard on him about “being relevant”. As one of the founding members of id software, it’s not surprising that news outlets will pick up on his comments, whether you think he deserves it or not.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 5 days ago
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t meant to be taken as an attack on Romero as a person. I mean as a guy I actually like him. His map sale with proceeds for Ukraine was a great move and I loved it.
Even my comment about him not being relevant, he doesn’t need to be relevant. He made his mark and it was great there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that being it.
As an industry and even economy as a whole though, we focus on this myth of the individual and amplify specific people way too much. I don’t know why this article is the one that got to me because really his comments are valid, leaving a company after pouring yourself into it can be insanely hard. For some reason it just felt like a micro representation of the problem.
People hold up Musk as a genius and amplify his words and ignore every engineer actually doing the math to launch ships for SpaceX. Molyneux gets held up as a creative genius for FABLE (well, did, his image is slipping these days) but ignores all the work done by Shaw, Elfman (still love that’s his actual name), Yarwood-Lovett and the rest.
I dunno. It just got to me. Like I said could have been in a bad mood and not trying to bash Romero.