"I’ve read source code to games since then, and I’ve seen all sorts of weird stuff… I’ve seen functions with nesting levels that go past the right side of the screen, I’ve seen functions a mile long that do a million things, you know. It was an early lesson that you could do cool things with simple code."

Guilty as charged!

I used to chronically write macaroni code. So you would have like 25 lines of code that ended up being the back bone of like a dozen things that would have another dozen things stacked on top of each. Would execute super fast BUT would amount technical debt quickly and eventually said functions would become untouchable because you would risk breaking a lot of stuff build on top of stuff.

Comments would try to clear it up, but communication skills where not the best. Explain function but not workings. Things like - "Does SINE table". "Table Defrag". "Binary resolve" etc.

Get a lot of people going "What the F*K is this shit?! But... it does the job damn fast". If it was any field other that video games, I would not have lasted long and neither would the product...