Comment by jeremycw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremycw | Hacker News Reader

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> The major argument is somewhat philosophical. I don’t like what people expect out of CD games. Does anyone think that the cheeseball dialog in crash and burn is a GOOD addition? It turns my stomach. People expect CD games to have tons of digitized speech and video, and the 3DO is going to be strongly associated with it. The joke here is that if we ever do a CD version of DOOM, you are going to get the game and “The Making of DOOM” a one hour feature film. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting all this media into their games, and it often actually detracts from it. We don’t want to be part of this crowd.

> I would rather cut down to the essentials and fit on a cartridge than uselessly bulk up on a CD. I have a minimalist sense of aesthetics in game design.

It's kind of surprising to see John Carmack have what amounts to a "640k ought to be enough for everyone" moment here. As a guy that I see as somewhat of a futurist, developing on the edge of technology, it seems strange to see him be so dismissive to the potential of the massive storage space of CDs at the time.

It seems more like a stylistic choice and preference of prioritizing gameplay over other elements of a game.

It's in line with similar other comments he's made, e.g. "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important."

It's not so much that he didn't think CDs brought advantages and new options to games, but that the aspects of games that they were commonly used for were, at that time, unappealing to the kinds of games he liked to play and make.

It seems to me his main problem is that the medium brings expectations, and those expectations aren't healthy for the game itself.

The same way that online updating/patching is inherently superior to master-copy, but it also generates a culture of poor QA if you're not specifically fighting it.

Or another way: now that we have 1TB HDDs, game data is actually becoming 10% logic, and 90% assets -- namely cutscenes and voice acting and etc. The problem Carmack was complaining about has only intensified since.

It's a assessment calibrated towards his goals at the time, which were focused on getting fast real-time images. It was only a little over a decade later that he was getting excited about "Megatextures" because he saw the possibility of streaming everything in - but he was always firm about getting the result at a high framerate, in a way that produced few compromises for game design.

And this is a good quality for developers generally speaking and game developers especially. It's easy for a game to get away from a principled result and just throw in even more smoke and mirrors because the justifications come so easily: "It's just a game", "nobody will notice" etc. And that is exactly the kind of justification that crept in with CD-driven game design that focused only on quantity of bits used. A lot of what filled the CD in 90's games was bad cinema and bad pre-rendered CGI.

That quote not being true aside, john carmack seems to be focusing much more on interactivity instead of mixing so much passive entertainment into a game just because it is newly possible.

I think he was absolutely right and it is impressive that he didn't get distracted from the what made video games desirable just because there were new possibilities.

> it seems strange to see him be so dismissive to the potential of the massive storage space of CDs at the time.

Sure you had all that raw storage but remember, the 3DO and PlayStation had just 2MB of main memory and 1MB of video RAM. So although the developers had a ton of space, there wasn't much they could reasonably do with it game asset wise. But media streaming from the disc was doable so that enabled high quality prerecorded sound tracks as well as video cut-scenes. Video cut scenes were always a bit painful or needless filler but some of the recorded sound tracks on CD games were really nice to have (Sonic CD is a good example IMO.)

Most of the voice acting of that time was terrible. It does sound a bit "old man yelling at clouds" but if you were there, you might understand

Indeed, he's references the 3DO console, and a similar statement could be made about SegaCD. The prevailing type of game enabled by that hardware was the Full Motion Video (FMV) genre with titles like Sewer Shark and Night Trap. They focused on the video over the gameplay, and the result was often a choose-your-own schlocky B-movie. They generally had poor reviews.

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