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[tommib]

Fun seems to have been replaced by profit.

I’m not saying the doom team wanted no money but I think the main thing they had was fun. Seems once money/shareholders got in the way it started to go off the rails.

John Romero went off the rails.

Also If I remember correctly the doom team had a female staff member who would take care of them in the sense she was like a surrogate mother. Making sure to remind them to eat/bath sleep etc. If I recall they had the upmost respect for her.
Donna Jackson was her name.

Though it wasn’t her job it was just they were too busy having fun making games to think about anything else.

Meet id Software’s Mother of DOOM

Celebrating 25 years of the id Mom

slayersclub.bethesda.net

She was the office manager. Where’s this quote she was telling to take a shower?

 

[jufonuk]

She was the office manager. Where’s this quote she was telling to take a shower?

I might have go that part wrong. But either way.

 

[calistan]

Sega Of Japan circa late 80's

Sega were rock stars back in the day. I visted Yu Suzuki's office once and he had all sorts of stuff from his Western celebrity fans in there - a letter from Spielberg with a picture drawn by Spielberg's daughter, a glove from Michael Jackson, a guitar signed by Eddie Van Halen.

 

[Dr.Morris79]

Best thread in ages

 

[DenchDeckard]

Can we go back to 20 people teams, please?

 

[tommib]

Can we go back to 20 people teams, please?

But how will I get my bang for the buck without a 1000+ team?

 

[digdug2]

Can we go back to 20 people teams, please?

I wish. I miss the days of a 30 dollar high quality 6-10 hour game with minimal bloat. Sure, these still exist to a degree, but most game experiences now are 40-60 hours and beyond and they're loaded to the gills with bullshit side quests, bases to clear, increasingly rare items to farm, etc. It's all so draining.

I know that many people are looking for a 70 hours AC Valhalla-esque journey, but I'm really not one of them these days.

 

[MatrixReloaded101]

Can we go back to 20 people teams, please?

AI in the future might make this possible again, be careful what you wish for lol

 

[gaming_again]

I might have go that part wrong. But either way.

Did you read the book Masters of Doom? Maybe it's in there. I have it but I've not read it (yet).

 

[jufonuk]

Did you read the book Masters of Doom? Maybe it's in there. I have it but I've not read it (yet).

I have. That’s probably where I got it from. It is a really good book. Spoiler. They make doom.

 

[Randall365]

Does anyone know if you can run GOG games on a steam deck? They have almost all Sierra classics. I don’t have a windows PC. Would the deck run them? I would get one just to play Shivers and Gabriel Knight again.

You can but it is a bit of a faff. It would be easier to buy them on Steam on sale (the Quest collections are £5 each I think (Gabriel Knight is there too), where you get cloud save support and they run quite nicely with selection screens for collections etc.

 

[AeonGaidenRaiden]

Looking at all these photos and then being reminded about the stupid modern politics, almost all studios had both women and minorities in their gang. Yet the way they talk about it nowadays as if women were never allowed and it was a white person only sport to be a game developer.

 

[Roman Empire]

Great thread

 

[CuteFaceJay]

Anyone know what these boomers are all doing now days?

 

[Sleepwalker]

I see a pattern on those dev pics from almost 30 years ago...

I see a lot of male pattern baldness

 

[MrRenegade]

Nobody had purple/red hair back then. Why is that? How is that possible? How could they live?

 

[Games of Today]

What a coincidence of a thread, I just saw this while browsing twitter:


Also since Assassin's Creed is so hot right now, here's a picture of the original dev team that made AC1:

That's hot alright.

 

[ReyBrujo]

That’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize they had whole bunch of Western devs back then. Well, I probably read about it and forgot .

Most were probably visiting because everyone knows who was the first American to ever work on a Sonic game!

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

Codemasters

 

[JohnnyTropics]

Sega Of Japan circa late 80's

If a movie ever gets made about this, Tom Cruise gonna play the guy in the front, far left.

 

[Krathoon]

Lot of dudes on those teams.

 

[GigaBowser]

 

[intbal]

I had to hunt for this one.
I remembered the image, but I couldn't recall where it came from.

Cyclone Studios (Uprising 1 & 2, Requiem: Avenging Angel)

Sorry for the low quality. If you want to see it better, this article about the studio was from the April 1997 issue of Next Generation magazine.

 

[JimRyanGOAT]

The goal should be go back to moderately sized teams, 0-100 developers MAX


Then have the rest of the work done by AI

That way you have a core group with a streamlined vision that can tap into AI to bring their work to life

Not relying on 500 different teams and engineers to do mocap, vocals, bux fixes, engine updates, etc etc etc...


One small change has to go through management followed by 3-5 teams. A simple line of code can take months just to enter production because of the bloat

 

[Badlucktroll]

 

[Gamerguy84]

Just a couple observations. I dont see any purple hair activists heros to save us all. And I laugh at black and white pics that had to originally be color.

 

[Edgelord79]

Roberta Williams (right) with fellow On-Line Systems employees Maria Stahl (left) and Diane Siegal (middle) at a celebration of the company's first anniversary in 1981.

Roberta Williams
Game Designer & Co-owner of Sierra On-Line
1979-1998

King’s Quest
Mystery House
Phantasmagoria

My favourite. Her and Ken Williams were the best. Hands down my favourite childhood games came from them.

 

[Jesb]

We need that again where teams were smaller. It was a time when it was probably a good profession to get into. Not so much anymore. It was a time when you hired talent and that’s all that mattered. Not anymore.

 

[Hawking Radiation]

Not sure if posted yet but

ENSEMBLE STUDIOS (Age of Empires 1 development team)

 

[Shits_McGiggles]

What a coincidence of a thread, I just saw this while browsing twitter:


Also since Assassin's Creed is so hot right now, here's a picture of the original dev team that made AC1:

The amount of narcissism Jade Raymond exudes in this picture is embarrassing.

 

[RaduN]

It's funny how some of you would want way less people to work on a game nowadays, to go back to those candid times when creativity this, creativity that, but at the same time you're the exact same people that nitpick every fucking rock and fill the forums with posts criticising even the smallest aspects of the toilet paper found in that secret room you unlock after 89 hours of doing unique, perfectly designed missions in the post game scenario.

You either want creativity and 2 years dev time but not perrrfect everything, or you want to look under every rock and see the ants crawling, in which case the output of a smaller team would be ..around one game every lifetime.

 

[Shadowstar39]

It gets even funnier when you consider that the actual creator of AC is just hanging out far back to the left (the guy with the glasses and green shirt)

Yeah it's ridiculous. Jade is just a producer not a creative. Don't know why she gets shove in the front. What pisses me off is people on here and elsewhere saying "jade Raymond's" game or studio... No she didn't code or design shit.

 

[Shadowstar39]

It's not that women can't do it, they change the environment. It's the effect they have on men in a space. Imagine a room full of programming nerds. Now imagine it with a few women sprinkled in. Entirely different mood, vibe, etc. Guys get uptight, get weird, get thirsty etc. Destroys open creativity.

Seen this first hand at my old company. Boss hired attractive 24 year bombshell he knew. We were a 6 guy team. Everyone was now going out of their way to try to impress her, even married guys it was crazy. She changed the tone, hated us talking about video games and dnd, or sports. Wanted to hire more women. They tried 5 different women but non could hack it. They eventually had to hire a dude in the spot. She left and went to new York to do her sex and the city career, and things settled down back to normalcy there. So yeah I know this is true.

People who think men and women are the same, interchangeable don't understand physiology and attraction. It changes a man's behavior and other women. Its not a problem for large companies in a corporate culture where there is already a mix of men and women, but for small startups in the tech industry or construction where it's mostly dudes, yeah it can throw everything out of wack if not managed by a competent boss (ours was not that he hired her because he had a crush on her since high school the ass).

 

[Rocco Schiavone]

 

[StueyDuck]

Passionate developers who actually cared about the products they were making.

The industry severely lacks these types. You see it a bit in the indie scene, but it should be that way.

The worst thing to happen to games was becoming so mainstream and so profitable that the "I want this jobs because it pays the most" people started applying and the suits started controlling things

 

[Hypereides]

Saw this vid recently. It really grew in views. This guy just calls it as it is and, yeah, there's a definite trend in emasculation. The industry needs to balance this out. It skewed itself way too far to one side where stoic and giga fictional masculine archetype characters are considered "toxic" or whatever in the industry for some asinine reason.

It's funny how some of you would want way less people to work on a game nowadays, to go back to those candid times when creativity this, creativity that, but at the same time you're the exact same people that nitpick every fucking rock and fill the forums with posts criticising even the smallest aspects of the toilet paper found in that secret room you unlock after 89 hours of doing unique, perfectly designed missions in the post game scenario.

You either want creativity and 2 years dev time but not perrrfect everything, or you want to look under every rock and see the ants crawling, in which case the output of a smaller team would be ..around one game every lifetime.

Those people are not really worth giving attention to. The types that flip their shit over a short pop-up in texture tend to be as obnoxious as the eternally offended blue haired folks. No game is or will be "perfect", flawless, or bugfree. I've personally seen/experienced bugs in supposed 10/10s or 9/10s. Some people need to readjust their perceptions and expectations.