I’m sure all these people were talented, but it reinforces my own belief that the most important things are passion and focus. I feel like the tech world fixates on 10x programmers like Carmack, but motivated people can pull off amazing things.
Specific job skills can be taught or learned. If you have the right attitude, positive outlook, and are inherently someone who learns things, you can be very successful in most jobs.
Too often, hiring filters for specific job skills/credentials. Because these are supposed to be a proxy for the softer skills. It's not as effective, but much easier to deploy at scale, I think.
On the flip-side, there are a lot of people dealing with trauma of one kind of another. Outwardly, they may seem to be negative or acerbic or closed-minded, when, internally, they are trying mightily to get their passion and earnestness to break through a wall of their own bitterness or anxiety.
I don't know that recruiting or management have reliable methods of dealing with either pro-socially.
As a testament to their (the original id software team that had both Johns) great efforts and legacy, they pretty much invented the concept of a game engine to start with. At that time, most games were written as a one and done type of a package deal.
Given that the team wanted to push the technical edge with the games consistently, they wanted to have some reusable/modifiable core that they could use across multiple projects, have visual level editors, etc., they converged on “accidentally” creating a game engine and coining that term. I forgot which game was the one that led to the creation of it for them, iirc it was one of the earlier Commander Keen games, but my memory might be failing me here. They didn’t even have the goal of creating a game engine, they just ended up getting there and then realizing what they did as they were trying to build their reusable “toolset.”
Very true -- You can create an amazing game engine (carmack) but it wont sell unless you have talented people pushing it capabilities (romero)
From memory, referring to Doom and Quake 1, Romero built the level editor for said games. Quake, I believe, was created on NextStep machines. Romero (and others) were also the ideas of creating the world.