Stockholm, Sweden
Joined September 2009
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Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
The "social media amplification" is because this is, without doubt, one of the dumbest security flaws we've ever seen in this industry. Frankly, the criticism has been pretty proportionate to the potential impact of this, and I find that statement hugely tone deaf.
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
the good thing about the eMudhra CA private key mess is that we can finally use https on localhost
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing.
Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.
By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended.
That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number.
I also don’t think piracy is what “gutted” id - id is still around and still making games. Piracy may have cost money, but it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways.
So yes: pay developers. Buy the games you love. Support the people who make them.
But history is messier than “pirates killed the companies.” Sometimes the same free distribution that looked like lost sales was also the thing that made the game impossible to ignore.
F*ck pirates, as a man who designed video games from 1988 through 2012.
70-90% of Doom's players pirated it. If not for that we would literally have had so much more for our workspace and upcoming projects - Quake may not have gutted id Software. At least 50% of Age of Empires was pirated which helped lead to our MicroSoft buyout and eventual demise.
And your excuses of "we have to try before we buy" are complete bullsh*t. Doom let you play a full 9 levels free. Age of Empires let you play a battle free to see how it worked. We bent over backwards to ensure you'd know what you were getting into.
Damn pirates are the guys who killed game companies. like Atari, Amiga, Cinemaware, 3D Realms (Duke Nukem!)
And if you're NOT a pirate, I salute you. You are a gentleman and if you ever see me at a convention, walk up and say, "Hey Sandy, I never pirated a game." and I'll buy you a drink.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Much of the data and reasoning in this post is inaccurate and has been corrected by John Romero.
x.com/romero/status/…
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
id still goes on, and so does Wolf, DOOM, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really.
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
How Quake ruined id Software.
There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.
All the team did a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right. But at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, and I think it broke us spiritually.
1/3
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
As a software engineer I have to unfortunately inform you that if medicine was held to the standard of software engineering there would be mass death.
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
We're not shoving a Pride rainbow in your face. We're celebrating the LGBTQ+ community who have been historically excluded from the sport we all love so much.
Perhaps it's time to educate yourself on what Pride Night actually stands for.
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
Vicious Self-Degradation
> you Google
> Quora spots query and id’s as frequent
> Quora uses ChatGPT to generate answer
> ChatGPT hallucinates
> Google picks up Quora answer as highest probability correct answer
> ChatGPT hallucination is now canonical Google answer
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
William Karlsson just gave one of the greatest speeches ever, absolute all-timer
#VegasBorn
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
But Provorov obviously does not respect “everyone”. If he did respect everyone, he would have taken part in warm-up and worn the Pride Night jersey. Don’t hide behind religion.
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
I resigned from Meta, and my internal post got leaked to the press, resulting in some fragmented quotes. Here is the full thing: facebook.com/permalink.php?s…
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
I built MeeGo for Nokia, ran WebOS for HP and killed Firefox OS at Mozilla. I’d know everything that could go wrong with it :-)
Nick Leppänen Larsson retweeted
Statement from Maple Leafs President and Alternate Governor Brendan Shanahan on the passing of Börje Salming:
