Lunch with Co-founder of id Software

11 June 2013

Lunch with Co-founder of id Software

Today, we had some very special guests visit the Corona office: game legends John Romero and Brenda Romero.

It was really inspiring to meet them. Together, they’ve had a profound influence on the industry that still reverberates today.

John designed such seminal games as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He co-founded id Software which holds a near mythical place in the pantheon of game development, and there helped ignite the whole first-person shooter genre. Brenda is most well-known for her work on the Wizardry series from the 1980s that served as a template for role-playing games that followed.

Here’s the awesome thing: they’re fans of Corona SDK!

It was surreal to hear John talk about the first time he discovered the auto-refresh feature of the Corona Simulator at 3 a.m., or what a “no-brainer” it is to use Corona instead of coding in Objective-C or even in Unity.

Of course, everyone has their wish list. 🙂

When he mentioned how Corona’s accessibility and immediacy brought him back to his early days of programming, I couldn’t help reminisce about my own experiences with turtle graphics on the Apple ][.

John and Brenda shared many gems about the current industry. One that stood out for me was how today’s students no longer want to work at large studios; they want to create their own games. More and more, there seems to be a decreasing desire to build 3D games. It just takes too long, and so much of what makes a game successful depends on the design and mechanics itself, not eye candy. So as an indie, you really do benefit from building ten games quickly instead of spending months (or years) on a single game.

Well, that explains why they like Corona so much!