He gave a talk at the tech company I worked for's annual all-company gathering in ~2019, and it was basically just a speech about how we're all dumb and he's the only one who knows what he's doing. It was almost worth it to watch everyone rolling their eyes at him.

have you built anything comparable to his accomplishments?

I have my fair share of crazy takes too

I can’t make professional looking cakes. I can make a regular cake. But I can sure tell you how wrong you are if you think cakes are just water, flour and eggs and shouldn’t cost $50.

Wait, you add flour and eggs to your cake water?

and yet, if that same chef is an award winning baker with decades of experience producing not only elite cakes, but also the machinery to bake elite cakes, who's more likely to be correct? the amateur? nah.

Yes, because the professional is saying something wrong and the amateur is saying something right.

If there is some uncertainty in the answer, maybe you have a point. But people can just be wrong.

and yet it's the amateur claiming there is no uncertainty. no offence but i don't see why your opinion would hold any water here.

I'm sure award-winning bakers produce a somewhat steady output of elite cakes, not only 2 cakes that each took a team to make, and one machine that's still just a prototype. Doesn't feel like an apt comparison here.

that's an absurd take. Rockstar has only produced a handful of elite cakes with a massive team, are they not an elite game studio? volume isn't in question here. 3 elite cakes produced by a tiny studio is elite. braid, the witness, and ootss is an elite catalog of indie games. don't let your hate of the man blind you.

I don't know the man, let alone hate him. But after reading the comments here and looking up his career, it certainly sounds like the teams he was part of built elite things, while he speaks as though he single-handledly built elite things - there's quite some difference there.

Probably bad example. Producing machinery to bake elite cakes would be getting as deep into artisanal crafting as you can get.

Professional cooking is not any less art (as opposed to a quality process) than amateur. I'd instead listen to the chemical process engineers in food space, who - guess what - may just say the cakes shouldn't cost anywhere near to $50 :).

It's hard to argue with analogies, but I'll give you mine.

It is more like the guy who can paint very good landscapes would start criticising every oscar category from producing to sound design, telling that they have 0 idea what they are doing, and he would do it better. "Why the credits of Transformers are 5 minutes long with hundreds of people, you don't need more than 50 people to make such movie"... This is how Blow often sounds to me.

But they basically are, and in this household we bake a lot. It's not really on topic, but why TH should a cake cost 50 bucks? In an industrial environment they should take maybe 10 minutes of manual labor, if that much.

I think the idea is: He has not made anything comparable to the stuff he talks about. But he thinks he has. And he makes others believe he has.

All of Braid, The Witness, and Order of the Sinking Star are excellent video games. Granted, that's 3 pieces of software over about 20 years (as well as his programming language, which is perhaps interesting but still unfinished and unproven), but it's still the case that Blow has actually produced valuable software artifacts I am happy to have paid money for. This isn't to say that his opinions about software are necessarily correct, especially software that isn't similar to video games; but I don't think it's fair to say that he's accomplished nothing comparable to what he talks about.

His games don't do anything revolutionary. Writing game engines the way he does is mostly refining existing ideas. I learned a lot from the RAD Game Tools people, but shipping 3 relatively small games in 20 years is the opposite of credibility here. Software moves at a much greater pace.

which are... what? 2 indie games and an obscure language? why do we care exactly?

Three. Three indie games. "Braid" in 2008, "The Witness" in 2016 and "Order of the Sinking Star" in 2027.

It appears to be taking Jon longer to make each game three years to make Braid, seven years to make The Witness, more than a decade to make OOTSS, though doubtless he will say that Jai (or whatever he decides that language should be called) held up OOTSS and somehow it would simultaneously have taken longer in C++ and yet it took so long because he didn't want to use C++.

He's such a blowhard that it's entertaining to watch his videos just for me to hate him.

Obligatory watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWqnz-7iQbY

Dude mixed japanese mini game concepts with mario and thinks he is a spiritual guru.

I was totally unaware of all that, thanks!

Ohhhhh, Blow's personality, at least at the time of Braid, seemed to include a desire to connect to other people but on his own terms.

He is the clearest example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

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Please don't. I worked on databases, and elitism of gamedev folks often makes me smile.

People there will cheat every way possible to get their framerate/performance/cpy cycles. Yes, it's often amusing to read about really clever and interesting approaches, hacks or even framings of the problem. Like even one of Blow's presentations, where he was explaning how Braid did time reversal. Naive intuition tells: "make everything deterministic", Blow's answer: "how about just tracking state of everything".

But gamedev is not "orders of magnitude complex than any other software". State of the art databases need to be fast and correct. Even that alone makes them far more complex than "state of the art games".

And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

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> State of the art databases need to be fast and correct

SOTA games need that too. Games need to deal with physics, audio, rendering, networking, anti-cheat etc. at the same time. All very performance sensitive

Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

I just can't let this pass... what happens if there is a bug in a game? Nothing of consequence. What happens if there is a bug in a database? Real-world consequences. A rendering glitch or an object behaving oddly in some cases is not a big deal. A database losing a record or computing something incorrectly... BIG F'ING DEAL! I cannot understand how you can even suggest these are equivalent.

> Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

Yes, absolutely. The postgres codebase has been around a long time and continues to be changed and accumulate functionality that all needs to work together. Just look at the details in the recent stories about all the issues that were found and the need to slip the schedule.

> And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

Robotics! Take all the problems of games and databases and put them on wheels.

> State of the art games are orders of magnitude more complex than any other software

This is an absurd claim that gamedev folk like to tell themselves. Having seen the mess of several engine codebases, incl AAA engines and the memory leaking unoptimized state of many games, I don't think so.

There's many safety critical real time systems that are both more complex and approached with a lot more thorough design. Let's just say I would not trust a Jonathan Blow to put people on the moon.

That's not to say gamedev isn't challenging, but it's not quite as complex as the industry would like to think.

Most games are basically throwaway projects. You write it once, maybe put out a DLC, and then you move on to the next one. There's no incentive to keep the codebase maintainable long term, because there is no long term (unless you're making something like WoW). Games also aren't deterministic by nature, so some glitches and imprecisions won't even register as bugs to players.

I'd argue a database engine is far more complex than a game engine. It has to be 100% reliable, and the codebase needs to be clean enough to stay maintainable for decades.

> State of the art games are orders of magnitude more complex than any other software.

Tell that to the FAA.

I am a professional game developer and Blow doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to AI. He simply doesn't have sufficient experience using AI. And he doesn't have sufficient experience working in a project that is not his own zen garden that he is in total control of.