According to Dentsu, one of the greatest Japanese advertising agencies, The video game industry has a size larger than that of the cinema (Counting at the box office) and combined music, 184,000 million dollars, compared to 33,900 and 28,600, respectively, with a total of 3,380 million players globally with an average age of 37 years (2024 State of Gaming Report).
It is an innovative and constant state industry That in recent years it has generated sensational owners for the huge budgets of some of its titles (the nearly 800 million dollars of Star Citizen, even without an estimated launch date, or the more than 400 million Cyberpunk 2077), the bad working conditions in some of the best known studies (Crunch Time and extra hours not paid), cases of sexual harassment (being the best known of the Blizzard Activision) and the drift “woke” that certain developers have experienced, accused by the public of being more interested in promoting progressive political agendas than in developing quality products (the most famous recent case is that of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows of Ubisoft, which has a black samurai protagonist of black race). You may be interested: readings of a professional CFA: barter, money, debts and states.
The industry, dominated by DIG entertainment giantsItal like Tencent, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoftrecently made history by closing in October 2023 the greatest corporate acquisition to date, the purchase of Blizzard Activision by Microsoft for a total of 75 billion dollars, with the aim of becoming popular franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch either World of Warcraft And thus position your subscription gaming service, Xbox Game Pass, as number one globally.
The book Masters of Doom, How Two Guys Created An Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner, We are dominated at the end of the 80s and early 90s, an era dominated by the Japanese arcades and giants of the consoles, Nintendo and Sega, with their 2D platform games such as Mario and Sonic, and in which the PCs were still considered devices for technologically lower enthusiasts to consoles. The book describes the unprecedented origin, evolution and success of ID Software, the video game study founded in 1991, one of the most creative, innovative and with the greatest lasting impact on the industry and western culture, as well as the tragic relationship of its two main founders and collaborators, John Carmark, programming genius, and John Romero, creative force of the group.
In an era dominated by large business groups such as Nintendo and Sega, or developers established such as Sierra online, Activision or Electronic Arts, The two Johnas they are known, they supplied their initial lack of resources and contacts in the industry with an intense and obsessive process of self -learning, independent development and search for editors who would like to publicize their first works, eventually becoming hired by Softdisk (Shreveport, Louisiana), where both met and began to collaborate closely. Softdisk was a subscription software company aimed at the development of PCs programs, which under the group created by Romero and Carmack (The Gamer’s Edge) came to develop very popular titles.
It is in this company where both, together with some more collaborators such as Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack, begin to forge the symbiosis relationship that will lead them to create some of the most important technical and creative innovations in the industry. After a brief period working for Softdisk, Carmark manages to carry out its first great technical advance, the creation of the first 2D graphic engine for PC that allowed the Scrolling Typical side of games like Super Mario in the Nintendo/SNES, a great innovation for the time.
After offering Nintendo Make a PC version of Super Mario Bros 3 and receive the refusal Of this, they decide to work on a 2D platform project that will end up being known as Commander Keen (distributed by Apogee), one of the most successful titles in the world of Shareware for PC in the 90s, a model of low novel cost at the time based on the free distribution of a part of the game, with the aim of attracting a large number of users who would like to buy the full product after trying it.
ID Software got his first commercial success with Commander Keen, but he was not the only one. Carmack’s obsession with being the first to develop the following innovation Industry technique, together with the huge talent of Romero and the rest of the team to put into use the technology developed by the former, allowed ID software to continue reaping success after success with the new franchises that were creating.
After the success of Commander Keen, ID Software decides to break the traditional schemes (until then video games usually had a family theme based on characters like Mario and Sonic), creating in 1992 a violent video game of first -person shooting based on Nazi Germany Known as Wolfenstein 3Din which the goal was to kill as many Nazis and Hitler as possible at the final level. The innovative game system, together with the 3D design of the stages and extremely violent theme catapulted ID software to the top positions of the Shareware scene, reporting significant income to the study.
This process is repeated with Doom I and II in 1993-94, technically more advanced, with more action and more violence if possible. After its publication, the popularity of the first -person shooting games explodes feverishly in the popular culture of the US, with multimillion -dollar sales and an audience that treats John Romero, the most visible face of ID Software, as if it were a rock star. With Doom I and II ID Software creates the “Deathmatch”, or multiplayer games Through the Internet, as well as the first competitions throughout the country among fans, giving rise to modern eSports.
Finally, with the launch of Quake i and II in 1996-97after the departure of Romero and the creation of his own study, Ion Storm, for irreconcilable differences with Carmack and the rest of the team, ID software is definitively strengthened as one of the most breaking video game studies of the time, creating and perfecting a new type of technology (3D graphic engines in real time) and gender planting the multimillion -dollar and eSports franchise seed with millions of followers such as Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Rainbow Six, Fortnite, Valorant either Apex Legends.
The history of Software (currently owned by Microsoft through Zenimax Media), Carmack and Romero, does not deserve to be remembered only for being an example of passion, dedication, ambition, individual genius and, ultimately, overwhelming commercial success, contributing to create, develop and popularize a new art form that transformed popular culture and entertainment forever. Or how the combination of high expectations, a relentless rate of work and overwhelming success contributed irremediably to the Self -destruction of one of the most iconic “Dream Teams”. Its importance goes much further.
The dream of both of creating interactive virtual worlds, together with the vertiginous rate of technological advance that they imposed throughout the industry, gave rise to the race to develop 3D accelerating cards by signatures such as 3DFX, NVIDIA and ATI, so that users could enjoy advanced 3D graphics, starting a virtuous cycle of growing demand for 3D games driven by specialized graphics cards increasingly Powerful This virtuous cycle of several decades is what has allowed companies such as NVIDIA to have had the demand, income and budgets of R&D necessary to boost the development of specialized chips in mass computing in parallel, used today in data centers for applications based on artificial intelligence, such as LLMs (Large Language Models). At the same time, the technological and creative innovations of Software have sown the seed of a future world in which the physical and the virtual can be fused in a credible way, in what is currently known as augmented reality, creating a new way of understanding existence and human abilities.
It is no coincidence that Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR (currently part of Meta reality Labs), attributes the inspiration to create Oculus VR to a reading of this book and Carmark joined the company in 2013 as CTO (Chief Technology Officer), contributing once again to revolutionize Western industry and culture.
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