I'm surprised American McGee hasn't paid him back prior to this. I always assumed that McGee was more successful than he apparently was.
Probably due to him putting his name in front of the game's title.
Probably due to him putting his name in front of the game's title.
Regardless of whether or not McGee feels like he deserved to have been better compensated by id software for his contributions, he feels personally indebted to John Carmack for the money he borrowed.
And in the case of feeling slighted, while he could justify never paying Carmack back by saying that since Carmack was one of the founder/owners of the company that slighted him, this was just money Carmack owed him, he has not taken that tack.
It is possible to compartmentalize.
There’s usually a fairly small circle of close people that get the biggest share of the financial pie, and others don’t get very much.
I’ve seen a few situations where some friends ended up earning a regular salary at startups when the closed circle made millions. So yeah you can brag about working at $trendy_company but that doesn’t financially translate into anything special.
3/12/98
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American McGee has been let go from Id.
His past contributions include work in three of the all time great games
(DOOM 2, Quake, Quake 2), but we were not seeing what we wanted.And it is totally possible that his work wasn't sufficient to remain employed. It's possible he produced too slowly or not enough or his work needed help, etc.
Are those games still "all time great games" without McGee's contributions? Very likely. Without Carmack and Romero, that's a different story. And even though Romero had no input on Quake 2, it's built off of Quake, so it carries a lot of that with it.
And the whole question is complex. These games sold well. McGee did work for these games as an employee. Does he deserve a percentage of sales? If so, how much, etc? Or is it much the case with the people who worked on Microsoft Word. It was a job and they did their part and were paid for that part. I don't see anyone trying to get the Office team a percentage of Office sales, even though that would make some people fantastically wealthy.
That's a pretty prejudicial way to put it - he was a junior dev who got fired, how much of "Id's success" do you think he was entitled to?