You could pretty much say the same thing about Carmack. He just kept making the same doom and quake game over and over with better and better tech. Carmack's space company venture didn't work out, then he went to work at Oculus where he couldn't get anyone to listen to him and got frustrated and left. Now he's at some AI startup.

In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code) without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up and left.

Carmack was key for many aspects of modern VR and I'm currently still enjoying the fruits of his labours. Even a partial success is pretty good for someone like him.

Right, saying he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him is super reductionist. No one cared about hobbyist VR until Carmack started working with Luckey and got the software to run a lot faster. It was him taking it seriously that helped get the ball rolling for the VR boom.

This is a common pattern in a lot of creative industries; some people have early, groundbreaking success, but once they're successful have a tough time replicating that. Some combination of now that they're rich, no longer really the pressure to succeed as they already have, they were in the right place at the right time and no longer are, they have less pressure from other people telling them "no", they no longer have the passion of youth in their favor, they were better at the "inventing a new genre" than competing in a more mature marketplace with everyone else who has already learned from their previous success, etc.

I don't know enough about the specifics of Romero to say which it is, possibly more than one, but it doesn't seem to be unique to him, I see this kind of pattern in pop culture all the time.

This phenomena is sometimes called the "sophomore slump" [1] in some creative industries and "second-system effect" [2] in software development. To add to your excellent list of reasons why this happens, I'd also add that early success may be the result of spending much more time on the first creative effort than subsequent ones. Some musicians spend years making their first album but then have only a year or two to try to repeat the success for a second album, especially if a label wants them to release another album while they are riding high and before their fame fades (supposedly). Second-system effect refers more specifically to feature creep in second projects in a series, but you can imagine the same thinking applying to creative industries too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophomore_slump

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Also regression to the mean, pretty much all successful products are unlikely in some way or another (i.e. required "luck").

Not inconsistent with this, what seems warped to me is having these huge expectations for individuals after their first success in the first place. (Writing this thinking about someone like Romero working on something like a game; a lot doesn't carry over well to, say, music or writing.)

They needed talent to pull it off, but also lots of stars aligned for a bold experiment to work out, and true experiments don't always work out. Conversely, for each success there were many talented folks who tried good ideas and didn't see them work out. The more surprising the first success was, the more foolish you'd be to expect a repeat, it seems like.

If that's the basic problem, you can't "fix" it in the sense that you can't make someone keep churning out revolutionary new things. But you might get better outcomes and fewer embarrassing failures the more you think of individual talent as one factor. Folks still have to iterate, get feedback, work with good people, sometimes put a lot of work into an idea then see it they have to rework it, or even release some quick experiments that don't do that well. You don't maximize your odds of great results by sending someone off to work in isolation as long as they want.

One thing I see hints of here and there, but don't really have a great picture of, is the inner workings of organizations that produce new/weird but successful things more than just once. There are business, luck, and outside cultural factors of course, but internally--how do they balance single vision vs. input from many folks? Do they build a lot they throw away? Is there a lot of "playtesting" (or, more generally, going outside the team to check your direction)? Of course there's no single Right Way, especially across domains, but it could be fascinating to see a bit more how various places work.

He is a good game designer who invented some of the common tropes of FPS. After Quake and Doom he tried things that were sometimes too ambitious or just didn't work out.

First of all, most game designers don't have as much success as he had after Id. Second, how are you going to follow up games as successful as Doom.

Also don't forget Wolfenstein, Hexen..

(Full disclosure: I met him once and he was nice.)

Romero strikes me as the type who hit paydirt, and then his cocaine-fueled ego took the wheel (lol Daikatana).

He does seem cool as an older, chill guy now that he doesn't have to live with the pressures of being a hit parade.

Romero recently released a book, _Doom Guy: Life in First Person_, if you'd like a long-form answer to that question.

Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the questions you're asking.

Here's some additional HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649594

Romero seems like a guy who has a ton of fantastical designs that needs a more conservative designer to help trim them down and bring them into reality. For id Software, that was Tom Hall.

Have you seen Rise of the triad? Tom Hall also needs someone to trim him down.

One thing that kept both grounded was the brutal timing of their releases. Doom had 6 months or so, and if it failed they knew they had to go back to boring jobs.

Apart from that, Masters of doom paints doom-id culture like the 1970's rock n roll band stories. A group comes together, works as well oiled team for a while and produces genius results. But the success and differences in personal growth trajectories inevitably pull the group apart. There is typically a painfull divorse phase between the main egos. The reality was that this kind of synergy never lasts more than a few years in any case.

I think with creative work, there’s a huge amount of luck involved in what achieves popular success. And in a collaborative medium like video games, the success of the enterprise also depends on the team working well together. I think in many cases we see a great success and assume the artist behind it is a unique genius; it’s possible that we’re just seeing survivorship bias, and that there are many others who are equally talented, and could achieve the same level if they had the opportunity, the right collaborators, the right motivation, etc.

Daikatana really torpedoed his reputation, it never recovered from that.

I was just reading or watching something about this last week. I will see if I can find it.

Horribly paraphrased:

Carmack was able to pull off impressive tech without impressive level designers was the gist of it.

Romero is talented at the design side but at the time that didnt translate into better games / companies like the fundamental tech did.

Sounds like you are paraphrasing Carmacks perspective. I am pretty sure all Ids 3D games would have been duds had Carmack been in charge of game and level designs.

I was surprised too.

When I talked to fellow gamers about the awesome stuff Carmack does, they were all like "he's just a engineer, Romero is the real genius!"

But somehow I didn't see anything impressive from Romero, while Carmack was doing cool stuff all the time.

Sure, it wasn't artsy like Romero's work, but it was still impressive.

I always perceived the opposite. Carmack is the real genius, Romero is just a lucky level designer who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Many other level designers rapidly surpassed Romero.

Carmack was doing a great job until he started building rockets.

Reminds me of Notch. He took his incredible Minecraft success and pitched this new game where you’d have a space ship and a CPU with limited resources. I downloaded some tech demo and… it was just another janky Java-based FPS engine. He had that adequate but short-lived card game but that’s about it.

I’m not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know that being a success doesn’t imply generalizable skill, whether it’s a one-hit-wonder song, game, app, or business.

0x10c had serious promise. In many ways it was one of the 300 attempts at creating a successful SS13 clone (but with Mojang on it it _might_ have worked?).

Who knows.. Even Minecraft was catching lightning in a bottle. It was there just at the right moment at the right time. The odd choice of Java was just the right thing needed to make it take off. First since you could play it in the browser(remember applets?), later when easy decompilation and modding arrived.

Huh. I don’t ever remember Minecraft being playable in the browser.

That’s an incredibly compelling development loop.

The impression I got just watching as a casual player throughout the duke nukem/keen->wolf3d->doom->quake days and the subsequent breakup of id and interviews Carmack has given, is that Romero let the early fame and success get to him and lacked the self discipline to keep pulling his weight while Carmack was substantially carrying the company along from his perspective.

They had equal shares and were all very young, the only option for them at the time appeared to be parting ways. Carmack has voiced in multiple more recent interviews that in hindsight there were probably better options to make things work out, but they didn't have the maturity and experience at the time to pursue them.

Given this context I don't think it's surprising that Romero would crash and burn on his own after being pushed out of id. The self-discipline and maturity side was only more critical to success without the id team's support, not less.