alt Hacker NewsIf you like this sort of content, I recently found Sandy Petersen (Call of Cthulu, Doom, Age of Empire, Halo) is extremely active on X. Lots of interesting tidbits about game design https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu
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Some people are a different level of productive, and game development sure was different back in the day:
> During his (Sandy Petersen) interview, John Romero (of id Software) introduced him to DoomEd and simply asked him to build a level. Romero was ultimately happy with the results, so Petersen was brought on to production for Doom. The level from Petersen's interview eventually became "E2M6". He was a fast level designer and produced all maps for the third episode of Doom, Inferno. Petersen designed 17 levels for Doom II, a little over half of the 32 total.
Sweet cheese and crackers, you weren't kidding about "extremely active". He's posting like once a minute.
Mark Darrah worked on a bunch of classic RPGs and has an interesting retrospectives series as well: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN8wmKeck6fe0jtibONfIWzpY...
The Anthem one is very long, but is a really fascinating portrait of cultural misfunction. The biggest factor to me was the entire design was dictated by the 'ghost' of Casey Hudson. His initial high-level vision was sacrosanct, but he also was not around to actually clarify anything or take feedback from development since he had already left the studio.