Games are this interesting medium of art where they're really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated. There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone unless it was open-sourced.

I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to run into licensing issues when trying to go open source. The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of that specific game.

And let’s not pretend that Doom and Quake didn’t have several point releases after the fact. And that the team at id didn’t pull all-nighters to ship the games.

Those games are far simpler (by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two or three) than most of the modern AAA titles.

What was the last AAA game Carmack shipped? Rage? Hardly a smashing success, even if it was technically impressive.

I have a huge amount of respect for Carmack’s skills and work ethic and track record, but I wonder if he really has a good handle on the sheer amount of work that goes into a modern game. With often dozens of programmers, and hundreds or thousands of contributors, the coordination overhead is just massive. I think that’s why overall quality control is harder to maintain.