John Carmack: Criminal Mastermind (And Apple Fanboy)

I was in juvenile detention twice when i was 16 and 17 for truancy from high school. Turns out I was just depressed but the state felt that I deserved to be punished for it.

Bubbleman!

@Fadecy: Rival Schools for PSN/XBLA PLZ: he's lived up to his name, hasn't he?

@Hitorkey: Apart from this short episode in Carmack's life, there doesn't seem to be much that distinguishes him from being a clean-cut nerd. He went to college, done some work programming, and founded a new game company. To me that is über-geek.

There are lot's of people who have had run-ins with the police. It's just that they generally don't like to tell an awful lot of people about them.

Kotakufan777

Game designers are doing a lot of such things, they're just smart enough not to brag about it :)

I totally agree! Down with the clean cut nerd developers!

everyonesmom

Does getting in a bar brawl, held at gun point twice (with a friend kidnapped) and have a pot belly pig as a pet mark me as more colorful? and make me a better artist?

I would like to think so..

@Combine:

Don't you dare.

ST19AG_WGreymon

@undefined: This is internet. Internet is serious business.

*puts on sunglasses*

I'm sure all sorts of crazy things have been suggested -- all it takes is imagination, not a fucked-up life.

But the suits shoot them down, because they wouldn't sell. The same reason the big-budget movies are all pretty hum-drum and same-y.

A big audience is always the enemy of innovation.

erlik

@Mr. Tambourine Man: Psycho Mantis is really just based on Kojima during High School and College.

sephycloneno15

@Pepek: I was being a faux racist. Can a guy not make ridiculous comments on a blog and get ridiculed for it anymore?

Fine. BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED

@Phydeaux: So black is colorful? Then white is what? Or Yellow? Red?

And here I thought colorful meant 'more than 1 color'. Duh.

I'm going for captain Planet.

@Cavefish: A lot of people rag on Apple enthusiasts or Apple fanboys but really when you start digging into the history of the company it's easy to see why.

User Groups, Software Evangelists... it's like a religion that doesn't tell you what you can't do in life and instead provides you the tools to liberate yourself. For a cost.

@DigitalHero: It means she's black.

Duh.

{dons hood, goes back outside}

I'm a professional game designer and I've spent a night in the tank...(just one luckily) we are not all clean cut nerds.

But I agree that great art comes from euphoric experiences either good or bad. Generally pain brings the most visceral re-imaging by the artist, so painful memories are the most widely used facet of our lives we use to move people.

Anaxymander

Don't confuse weirdness with creativity. Most of the time, it's just debilitating, and detracts from the process of actually realizing a vision. The "tortured artist" concept is mostly a romantic fantasy on the part of critics, to soothe the egos of people who lack the creative spark.

As for petty crime, there's a mugshot of Bill Gates floating around the 'net. He's made a number of shrewd business decisions, but few people give him much credit for creativity.

@YardGnomeNinja: I hope it's the former, but I have a feeling it's the latter.

A great Tattoo artist once said, "Art doesn't pay the bills. Tramp stamps do." I think that could apply to everyone's lives

@Lemming: Is that sarcasm toward sarcasm, or a lack of understanding toward sarcasm?

YardGnomeNinja

@DigitalHero:

I weep for your English education.

Colourful as in a colourful character/past. How is that such a brain teaser for you lot?

Lemming

Goichi Suda was an undertaker before becoming a game designer.

We need more undertakers-turned-game-designers....

Now this is timely journalism .... just got around to reading a book that came out like 6 years ago did ya?

SuperMuchBrown

@dirtface:
"Needless to say, she is colorful."

And that vague statement is supposed to mean what?

Talking about crazy artists, my favorite stories are about Benvenuto Cellini (aptly described as a Renaissance "sculptor, goldsmith, author, soldier and hooligan"). During the siege of Rome the dude shot the Prince of Orange with a crossbow and probably killed Charles III of Bourbon with a big-ol' rock, among others.

Bakeroo

@Madball Nick:
Well I'll be damned. I never thought that an Apple computer could possibly not be Macintosh.

Oh wiki, how you enlighten me.

Cavefish

@Cavefish: It's an Apple II, not a Mac.

Narishma

@Cavefish: Always easy to spot the youngins in the crowd. The Apple II was one of the best gaming computers in it's time.

[en.wikipedia.org]

It took me years to finally stop calling the command key on a Mac "open apple".

Oh, and Carmack does like Macs too. See his profile at Apple.com [www.apple.com]

In general though, Carmack is a fan of good technology. He ran Next hardware, dabbles with Linux, tinkers with many mobile devices, and generally has a very honest view of things. He's willing to call out the flaws he sees, and he does see plenty in both Windows and Mac platforms.

drakino

So, he stole some computers and that makes him a rebel amongst Developers?! He's got a better spark of genious than others? I kinda find this whole article a tad insulting. I have an artist friend at a major studio that brews his own beer and plays in a Metal band. My friend that I got hired at my place of employment hunts nearly all season long. Hell I've stolen stuff before and been arrested.

I've sat with some pretty recognizable names for dinner and the sotries they pull out about their younger years are pretty damned awesome.

The point is, your perception, Luke, is terribly skewed. We're not all 'clean-cut nerds'. John Carmac's genious is pretty damned unique. Him jacking some computers at a young age isn't. Most of the minds deep in the trenches right now have great stories for you and plenty high ups have had their fun. We're not all gangsters and stick-up kids, but there is 'color'. You're just deciding that there isn't.

Your Itagaki example isn't even that great as he didn't really break any normal conventions for video games. He's just had very polished iterations. I really have to disagree that me or some of my colleagues dropping acid tabs and punching cops in the face will do anything to breathe life into the industry lack of innovation.

Hitorkey

@smileboot: Yeah, but that doesn't apply to games, or even to art in general nowadays; if something is good in any way it is going to amass a following on the internet. What you're saying was true at a time when the people who propagated an artist's work were the rich; what was popular then was based on fewer people's taste. Now, with the internet, an artist can make his work available for everyone to judge. In games, this either takes for form of an indy game or a mod. In that realm, there is no inherent need for a profit; that's not the point. Yet, from that, the developers can truly become successful, because they were skilled artists who made great games.

My360broked

Wow, if idea this catches on, I might just be fucked up enough to become a game developer!

Cranker

Uh what? Everyone in the games industry is a clean-cut nerd? You clearly have never spent the day with any dev team. While there ARE many clean cut nerds, the games industry is full of weird and disturbing characters, and some of the shit that went down in the early 90s... well lets just say you need to do some research buddy.

Seriouslyno

@Omnimon: thanks man :)

You mention movie directors, but it seems that film, like games, can be lumped into the There Has To Be A Giant Horde of People And Truckloads Of Money Behind This To Make It Work category. And while there have been and will continue to be great film directors out there, they're somewhat overshadowed by the sheer volume of crap their less-skilled associates put out. And while their textbook background differs rather a lot from the textbook background of your average game designer, you still end up with a hugely consumer-driven medium dominated by a few very powerful companies whose operators, both behind and on-screen, tend to share a whole lot more than the credits, the carpet and a penchant for rehab. People are so similar they start to bleed into each other after a time.

I'd certainly agree that more colorful people with experience in the world OUTside of gaming would be welcome and, at some point, necessary. But I think that games, like films, require so much infrastructure to come into being that the industry will respond to innovation much more slowly than, say, the literature or music industries do.

@Cavefish: This was in the 1980s. Apple was king of the PC market.

This is nothing new. It's in the book Masters of Doom. Him and John Romero also stole the computers from the software company they were working for prior to forming id software to develop games. They would return the computers back early in the morning so no one would notice.

Actually, it's the fans who were doing the blackmailing. I read an interview around the time MGS2 was released that stated Kojima was getting death threats when rumours were circulating about his retirement. The psycho fans won't let him stop. It's really quite sad.

CarlinaFantazmical

While maybe not a lifetime, I'm sure many game developers endured persecution all during their school years :)

Dreamwriter

@Cavefish: No, the article says Apple II's, not Mac's.

Dreamwriter

@Greg Rassam: Your quote says nothing about programming, the word used is "developers". Are you saying Miyamoto doesn't develop games? And he did do some programming back in the day.

Dreamwriter

As a clean cut white male who likes games with guns and cars (and guns on cars!), I'm afraid I'm unable to help. Really wish I could, because I'd probably enjoy a more diverse library of games in the same way that not all my music is hard rock and not all my movies have Stallone or Arnold in them.

But that may have to wait for the next generation (of people, not hardware)

Zac Shipley

@Fede17:

A..TIME PARADOX?

@Mr. Tambourine Man: I find it coincidental that this is right underneath my comment about Hideo.

@Cavefish: You sir, are colorful...

@Mr. Tambourine Man:

Kojima went back in time and fought in WW2, making Japan win the war, creating some alternate dimension out there somewhere. Didn't you know?

There is no doubt that many of history's most influential men and women led very atypical lives, resulting in unique experiences that played major roles in pushing them to rise above the rest. These people have contiributed to our culture through literature, politics, science, music, art, and just about every other field imaginable.

So why don't we have a Beethoven, Van Gogh, or John Nash in the game industry? Why are all of the major players in the field relatively straight-laced nerdy white men?

The problem is, making games still is not something that anyone can do. Anyone can write a book or paint a picture. Anyone can come up with a great idea or the next revolutionary thought-experiment. But not anybody can make a game; the tools just haven't evolved enough at this point to make game creation a reality for the masses.

Until we get a system - some kind of new interface - that makes the creation of games less a practice in programming and logic and more of an expression of ideas, we aren't going to see the next Edgar Allen Poe make his name through game design.

bdenby

@tomsamson: Best of luck! :)

@kobeashi: Eh I donno, I have done my share of medium to major criminal activities and I only fear it ever stopping my rise to the top.

trunkenmath

@Omnimon: yeah, i´m working on it :)

@dirtface: Your mother is Captain Planet!

That's so rad dude!

Cavefish

All of us have some things we're not that proud of, most of us learned our lesson and yadda yadda...

But a Mac, John? Really?

Cavefish

@Komrade Kayce - Soviet Attack Dog: Brilliant.

@Thai Tea: I think you completely missed the point. It's not rationalizing the activity, and not saying that a debt to society needed to be paid for his actions. It is saying that throughout history, those in media arts with some interesting backgrounds (not always of the illegal kind) have produced very interesting things.

I'm not so sure there's a link there, but I can't rule it out.

To say that Luke, in any way, was saying it's ok to commit a crime, is a very fundamental English reading comprehension error.

Bad-ass, John. Bad-ass.

As if you weren't already the goddamn Superman of game development (re-read his "blog" article about how he coded Wolf3D for iPhone. Seriously, this dude puts all the others to shame, doing 8 weeks' works in 4 days).

Nudgenudge

@tomsamson: That side of you that needs to pay the bills each month is never going away, so you need a business plan that attracts investment, or you need to do your time in the trenches. :p

@Komrade Kayce - Soviet Attack Dog: Gizmondo.

It's more likely than you think, motherf***a!

@Omnimon: well,the side of me that wants to realize creative ideas wants to not care about npds and sales numbers.
Then there´s the side of me that has to pay the bills each month..

You clearly don't hang around too many studios if you think the majority of game developers are "clean-cut nerds." The programmers, perhaps, but not art, not design.

jak312

@tomsamson: Would seem the issue is that you aren't quite sure who you want to be as a developer.

There's a large expanse between the Jonathan Blows of the world and the members of EA's Tiburon Studios.

It's not a judgement of either as being better, but I would venture a guess that they are in different places in their career development journeys.

If it's ok for people to be passionate about something and commit crime for it, then what is this world becoming. I'm really into playing the PS3. How would you like it if I broke into your house and steal that from you? What's wrong is wrong...I don't care what the situation is. You don't make exceptions.

Thai Tea

@Luke Plunkett: Yup-yup, got it, I was just commenting in general and name-dropping Nabokov to pretend I'm not just an immature gamer. :D

I wonder if Jaffe ever got in trouble; he does have a big mouth, after all.

Great art usually isnt profitable or recognised for great art when it is first released. And since games need to turn a profit or at the very least look like they MIGHT make a profit. Dont expect anything great anytime soon.

@Antiterra: No, of course not. I was just using extreme examples.

I´m an indy game developer and have experienced quite some crazy things in my life.
In between i wondered whether i should somehow implement some of those things into my games. But then i thought people seem to always talk about wanting this or that in games but the reality is that not those game types sell well but rather the guitar heros, maddens and carnival minigame collections.
Maybe i should reconsider things, even if npds say different..

You know, just leading interesting lives full of different experiences works, too. No need for tortured minds, childhood trauma and a history of violence, necessarily.
Every time I hear how great artists are always messed up, I remember Nabokov and how much he despised that idea. The man "merely" had an insanely eventful life.
To be honest, that image of the troubled artist is nowadays, more than anything, essentially an excuse for posers...

We were all young and stupid once. I expect he too has grown out of his Apple phase.

AncientUnknown1

there needs to be some forever twenty seven developers.

trevortibble

@dirtface: Colorful?
Like not Caucasian?

@dirtface: Burnt down one whole side of a church. Lit every single crayon painted pictures from the critters of Sunday school. Put out the fire, didn't know the material was flammable and the ember eventually lit up the whole wall while I tossed the kitchen lighter and fell asleep.

You don't know understand the wrath of the congregation till you burn down a church.

PsycheE

Dennis Dyack perpetrated a terrible act by making people watch that Valkyrie cut-scene every time they died in Too Human.

Leftnt_Sharpe

@Combine: WHERES MAH SKULL, COLONEL!?

pandafresh

I highly suggest that everyone at least give it a glance of "Masters of Doom" on their next visit to B&N/Bookstores.

The time in juvie, early stint of Romero and Carmack, the money, the cars, and everything you wanted to know about the before and after of Id.

PsycheE

You called John Carmack an Apple fanboy. Hahahahahaha.

One night in college I got busted for shooting off a fire extinguisher all over three flights of stairs in a dorm and later for trying to steal a stupid police buggy. Maybe I'll wind up to be a legendary game developer too! lol.

kobeashi

@Combine:
Ah see whut u did thar

@fruitsofherwomb: Miyamoto is a game producer which falls into game development in general.

Greg Rassam

@RyuuzakiBjorn: Metal Gear Solid: Blood on The Sand.

@dirtface: Colorful? You mean like a rainbow or what?

eh, i dunno. games are much more of an ensemble effort than "ONE MAN'S VISION" anymore.

although we do know what happened to that guy and nintendo...that got pretty crazy.

curly haired boy

"An artist - and really, the great developers like Carmack, Miyamoto, and Ken Levine are just that "

Miyamoto doesn't program, he designs.

@RyuuzakiBjorn: Thuggin' has changed...

Well, wether you think it shows in his games or not I already miss Itagaki not working on anything. Love him or hate him, he always made things interesting. The new Team Ninja head seems capable enough, but he seems much more soft-spoken than Itagaki(doesn't take much to be that though) which makes reading interviews with him a lot less interesting. I miss finding out what crazy thing Itagaki will say next. Ah well, somebody's gotta hire him soon, right?

When my mother was fourteen, she broke into a church to steal audio/visual equipment and computers.

Needless to say, she is colorful.

dirtface

@RyuuzakiBjorn:

Those death threats he got were nothing to do with Metal Gear.

He be workin on the wrong side of the tracks, yo.

Kojima is...you know, crazy.
I'm sure he already killed someone with his bare hands, somebody at Konami found out about it, and now they're blackmailing Hideo into making more , unwanted METAL GEAR games.

Well if you only just know this, you'll have no idea about Hideo Kojima's secret Gang-life living in the hood, trying to get rich or die trying.

[z.about.com]

Criminals?

In MY software development?

Carmack is a very gifted coder, and who hasn't done embarrassing things before? That's why I never understand the sensationalism surrounding things like politicians who threw a a picture of themselves piss drunk up on their Facebook page. That crap is private, and it shouldn't matter.

I think it's less a matter of people requiring color and more a matter of color being accepted... you know, so long as it doesn't involve murder or worse obviously :P

@bdenby: Are you sure about that? Your generalizing too much on the aspects of painting, writing and the theoretical sciences.
Think of it this way, few people make games because its like learning a new language, like french or spanish. They enter unfamiliar territory and it makes them uneasy.
But people learn. They adapt. It may not true for your country but in mine the information technology industry is booming. There are entire universities devoted to software development. Writing and Drawing have actually become more of a 'challenge' for them. What with the proliferation of texting (bad syntax) and Photoshop (skill in drawing is now not necessary)

So, I believe that the only reason not 'everyone' makes games is they choose not too.

@Fede17:

Hey let's all act like Kojima! "I'm NEVER going to make Metal Gear 6 after MGS5 comes out."

*6 months later*

Ok guys, I'm serious this time. SERIOUS. No more Metal Gear after MGS6. PROMISE.

infinitysend

@FireSketch: as in the genius musicians that died young like jim morrison, jimi hendrix, kurt cobain. my point being that there are no extreme developers like these guys were to music.

trevortibble

@trevortibble: What does that even mean? xD

FireSketch

@Leftnt_Sharpe: Hell, I'll build my own dungeon just for him and the guys who insisted upon Assassins Creed cutscenes.

@Koztah: The EULA is no different than the MS one.

You're going to use your machine at a nuclear power facility? Really?

And if they don't grant you permission, that's going to stop you? It's to limit their liability. Geez.

Knock yourself out on building a x86 box, though. I've done it on a P4, it's a pain in the ass.

Most of these crazy artists worked independently. Problem with large scale game development is that you need to be able to co-ordinate a large team. And your underlings may not respond well to crazy.

PeggyEinnorb

@Leftnt_Sharpe: Fuck yes. He should be put in jail for that shit. Or whoeves idea it was. I honestly havent played it anymore because i dont want to die and wait for that crap to be over. Best 14$ i ever wasted yo.

Detre

I blew up my dad's car, does that count?

@Phydeaux:

Actually, it does tell you what you can't do. Apple EULAs are amongst the most restrictive.

I will never buy a Mac. I will, however, build one.

Koztah

@Thai Tea:

A much bigger wrong is being passionate about something and doing nothing about it.

Koztah

@Leftnt_Sharpe: Too true. There needs to be a court at the Hague specifically for developers who insist on un-skippable, repetitive cutscenes in their games.

@drakino:
To be fair, yes this was before my time. My first computer was a 486, being 10-12 years of age, I'm now 28.

So my question is now as follows, when you use the expression "spot the youngins in the crowd" on a gaming blog, you mean just about 95%+ of us?

Yeah, I can see how that would be easy.

Cavefish

@Cavefish: Swamp Gas, Swamp Gas.

Cavefish

@drakino: Our school had a room with 10 Apple computers, but they had a desktop interface (Windows-ish), and looks a whole lot more advanced than what I can see from pictures of Apple II's. It had only one button mouse though, and we played a game called Swamp Thing. That was years before I got my 486.

Cavefish

@Cavefish: Your 28 and you never gamed on an Apple II? I'm not that much older, and remember playing things like Oregon Trail and such on one during my first years of school. I suppose in the mid to late 80s, it really depended on what schools did with the older Apple II systems as Macs and PCs began their popularity rise.

drakino

@Cavefish: That's funny, I'm 28 and my first computers were, in order: Commodore Vic-20, Apple II, Macintosh 512k, MacXL... I didn't have a PC until the mid-90s.

Oh well, we can't all be expected to program in C, and crack shareware unlock codes before we hit double digits.

I guess he should have additionally qualified 'youngins' with another term...don't ask me what though, I don't want to lose commenting privs again. ;(

TheBakachan

@PsycheE: Heh totally, that book was awesome. I loved how he went to hotels in lasvegas with computers. The best part of the book was when they hired a stripper to deliver a pizza to carmack topless and he didn't even look up from his screen and sent her away.

sereal

@surft: I think what he's referring to is that most other crafts can be done by one or two people - in lesser time and practically no budget.

Just take the comparison of Watchmen the graphic novel and Watchmen the movie - one took 2 men and "no" money to produce (in terms of resources), the other took several million dollars and a full film crew a very long time to produce even though they had alot of work done for them in the reference material.

When it comes to writers or painters - writers use the language they are taught while growing up and the tools of painting aren't very complex to utilise.

Now apply that to games - indie games can be made by one or two people with practically no resources (ignoring the need of computers..), but it's still extremely hard and unlike writing or painting it's not very accessible to a random person.

The reason 'everyone' can't make games might be partly because they choose not to, but the difference between making games and writing/painting is that even if they chose to make games - it's much less likely that they'd succeed in comparison to other crafts.

@TheBakachan: Mine in order would be a pong-computer, nes and snes before a PC.

A lot of my friends had Commodore/Amiga. My parents didn't have that amount of money though.
While a lot my friends turned out programmers, I'd turn out a gamer (or as they'd refer to it: a lamer). :P

Cavefish

Or, more people can start paying for offbeat games instead of only what's been media blitzed down their throat as being "omg must-have game".

Spunkydoodle

@infinitysend:
keep making them for all I care, its one of the only decent stealth games out there

anduin1

@dev: Exactly. When someone wants to write something, he picks up a pen. When an artist wants to paint, he grabs a brush. If someone wants to make a game, he must gather the necessary tools (a computer, the right software, etc.), choose what language to use, learn the technique (through schooling or self-study)...

In other words, the process of game design caters to a certain demographic of people: those with enough money, enough patience, the right skills, the right interests, and the prerequisite background to make interactive electronic entertainment.

You don't need a degree to write poetry: just look at Emily Dickinson. In order to propose the next great scientific theory, you only need a clever mind and an understanding of the current laws to come up with a clever thought experiment (i.e. Albert Einstein coming up with the special theory of relativity while daydreaming at his patent office clerk job). With game design, special training is required; the designer must learn how to use tools that serve a specific purpose, resulting in experience that largely cannot be transferred to other fields (kind of like learning to use a slide rule - a skill that is useful only for an extremely limited set of applications, and that was eventually rendered obsolete).

In other words, at this point in time "white nerdy males" are the ideal candidates for game design, simply because the conventional traits used to describe a "white nerdy male" matches most closely with those traits required in the game development field.

I like the example concerning Watchmen. Here, there is an instance where a creative work has been expressed through two different mediums, and the medium through which the work was more easily created by less people and for less money is generally regarded as the one with the higher artistic merit.

bdenby