Beamer wrote on Dec 9, 2018, 18:54:

BIGtrouble77 wrote on Dec 9, 2018, 16:36:
WaltC nailed it. The guy is just a glorified level designer. I'd love to hear what his former coworkers (like at Midway) have to say about his coding ability.

He's a game designer, not an engineer. He doesn't need to be adept at coding. No single person is adept at every aspect of designing video games anymore - there's a reason many have over 400 people working on them. I'd imagine most Michelin star chefs can't raise cows.

Not defending him, but his fame comes from coming up with a killer idea for a game, not from actually coding it. Carmack did the bulk of the coding. Romero just gave Doom the concept that made it Doom. We can argue which is more important, and almost all of us would agree it's Carmack (which makes sense, he's a generational talent), but Doom wouldn't have been Doom without either.