Romero and Jobs both get slammed on HN consistently. One of the things people like to point out about Jobs is that he couldn't program and never did any real engineering.
To be fair to Romero, he could actually program, make games, and design levels. It's really hard for me to accept the claim that he contributed nothing to id:
>He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D;Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D; Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.
He might have made some really poor decisions, but the guy has legitimately been developing games for 30 years. Just look at how many projects he has been involved in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
Somehow I came out of Masters of Doom with a lot less negative opinion of Romero than others did. Carmack, while clearly a genius, actually seemed like a real jerk at points.
At the time of the troubles, Romero was portrayed as the 'indispensable one' (protip, everyone can be replaced) and threw down a very public gauntlet with Daikatana. It was not well received. Which for many proved that Romero wasn't the secret sauce Carmack was. But like Jobs/Wozniak, Lennon/McCartney, Simon/Garfunkel and any of a doze pairs who often did things together that were often better than what either could do alone.
I think Jobs was more extraordinary as a businessman than Wozniak was as a programmer.
I don't think Carmack is a jerk so much as he's just, well, different. More like a machine than a human. I guess that could cause him to be heartless at times but he came off as fair.
Romero was important for ID's success, but as the story played out, Carmack was able to find success without Romero but Romero was not able to be successful without Carmack. Read into that as you will.
Over his life, Jobs has had a greater impact. But at the time Apple was formed, Wozniak singlehandedly designed and engineered a machine that was simply peerless. The Apple ][ made every other system on the market look like a toy for years while costing less to build. Jobs' contribution at the beginning was modest in comparison. (BTW Woz was never much of a programmer, just a killer electrical engineer.)
carmack sells middleware to other studios. id hasn't had a good game since quake 3 which is largely just a technology update of quake -- a game romero was integral to. he's a gifted programmer and i admire his work with armadillo aerospace but his post-quake accomplishments aren't much better than romero's. his biggest edge over romero is his humility. if romero had quietly released daiktana instead of endlessly promising how great it would be his reputation would be much the same as carmack's
To be fair to Romero, he could actually program, make games, and design levels. It's really hard for me to accept the claim that he contributed nothing to id:
>He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D;Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D; Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.
He might have made some really poor decisions, but the guy has legitimately been developing games for 30 years. Just look at how many projects he has been involved in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
Somehow I came out of Masters of Doom with a lot less negative opinion of Romero than others did. Carmack, while clearly a genius, actually seemed like a real jerk at points.