Plan for Phil Carlisle

Have you ever had this sort of weird opinion of someone formed from pretty much NO real information, only to have revise it after hearing something interesting about them?

I'm unabashedly (is that a word) opinionated about game development and developers. I have opinions about some people (Tom will tell you about my Peter Molyneux hate-fixation), without really knowing anything about them.

I had this weird take on a guy called Noah Fahlstein until today, about 10 minutes ago I updated my mental mapping of him.

See, I have this issue with people who are "famous for being famous", I have an aversion to people who once did something interesting and now are living on those past glories.

Ive worked with enough of them to have SOME support with my own little cognitive model of the world, but sometimes that gets shaken.

So, by a roundabout route this morning, I came across this really interesting (from a computer games historical perspective) site:

www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000021.html

Whats interesting is that Noah and the rest at lucasarts were doing MMO's back in 1985!

Lets get this into perspective. I was just a kid messing around with 6502 assembler on my Atari 400 and these guys were making an MMO!

Now, grizzled and bitter as I am, you sometimes have to admit (albiet grudgingly) that people DO deserve your respect, because theyre the reason why youre doing what you do. Of course its easy with guys you meet, like Jeff and a few others. But sometimes its nice to get this mental checkpoint deal and rethink your misconceptions.

For the record, I still think PM is resting on his (admittedly very nicely feathered) laurels of past victories. But I'll revize his mental picture once Ive actually met him (how likely is that?).

So, I'm really hoping that sometime I get to meet people like Noah and lots of the early "veterans" in person.. must be just amazing listening to thier stories.