Wanna Work for Dave Taylor & American McGee?

The well known former Id developers are starting a company to develop a shooter for the X-Box. They are looking for programmers, artists, level designers, and producers, but only if you're in, or willing to move to LA. If you think you're right for this one, you should email Dave.

Comments

want ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

shouldn't this be to http://wantads.slashdot.org?

when did slashdot turn in a classified?

[tkny]

this sounds more like a want ad than 'news'.

Alice

[fazil]

At least American McGee is capable of developing a non-cookie cutter game like Alice.

I like the Guy.. I like Twisted.. I hate repetitive crap games.. the lack of creativity. Remember the 80's? When every game looked and felt different?

I find American McGee's games reminicent of those times. Creative. Different. Strange. *FUN*

Re:Alice

[donky]

Did you actually play Alice, or just look at the screenshots?

Alice was just your typical repetitive 3D shoot em up, it was even worse for the fact that it had this great story, yet all it used it for was a backdrop and to weakly link in a purpose. Sure, the level with the floating leaf looked great, but apart from that it was one of the most disinteresting, boring and repetitious games I ever played - and I played it through from start to finish.

I don't know what other games American McGee has made, but Alice was not *FUN* It was repetitive crap, with a modicum of creativity that didn't make it properly into the game.

ah

[AA0]

/. their email, why not. They are looking for employees and now you cut off their primary method to get it. Good job guys.

You could have at least put another link up for people to harass.

Re:Hiring open source programmers?

[paladin_tom]

I disagree. If someone is concerned about their project being cloned, I think junior open source programmers are the least of their worries.

Proprietary software products are often cloned by other proprietary vendors. After Doom was successful, many similar games, such as Rise of the Triad, came out from other software shops - and this was before Id open-sourced Doom. To take another example, the Windows 9x interface was largely a more Macintosh-like replacement for the interface from Windows 3.x; GNOME and KDE also use a similar interface (and I believe this chain goes all the way back to Xerox, who did a lot of research into modern GUIs). Seeing how a product works, from a user's perspective, often gives a good developer enough information as to how to create a clean-room implementation.

Furthermore, cloning a project on which you have worked is a legally risky venture, since you're (ex-)employer can point out that you have insider information as to how the product works. When people were cloning IBM's design of the PC back in the 80s, they made sure that the engineers re-implementing it had no prior exposure to the design.

As for a more modern example, consider the Mono project . These guys are re-implementing Microsoft's .NET development infrastucuture, and they're not the guys who worked on .NET for MS. Furthermore, I believe they avoided looking at MS's Shared Source implementation for BSD, specifically because Mono is to be a complete clean-room implementation.

I do not believe open source programmers are the risk you make them out to be.

Slashdotted email.

[Sivar]

"...you should email Dave."

Poor Dave.

Re:They want teams not individuals

[EvlG]

The problem with this arrangement is, these are all things most development teams are very capable of doing on their own. Presumably, Carbon6 would take a large chunk of the royalties from the game as compensation; however, what is the real benefit of working with them?

Better yet..

[Ogerman]

Why would any self-respecting geek want to write games for a proprietary Microsoft platform. For crying out loud, we need more multi-platform PC games! How about developing a highly modular Open Source game engine and then sell non-free scripting, levels, artwork, etc. (the part of game design that takes all the real time and effort) I would gladly support such an effort as compared to a game with binaries only. Then build a community around the game and encourage mods, network tournaments, etc. I guarantee you'll find a market because community is something that console systems will likely never have.

Re:Why is this different than working for others?

[Junks Jerzey]

Why is it that people feel the need to bitch about every story that's posted these days?

Okay, well, you got me there. I'll take my lumps.

My point is that people know about Dave because he had a big web persona during the fanboy glory days that followed the release of Quake, back when .plan file updates make headlines on gaming news sites.

But at the same time, Dave's game development history is pretty weak. He worked on DOOM, yes, but he was just a grunt. Abuse was written by someone else (Jonathan Clark). Golgotha was never completed. I'm not saying that Dave is a bad guy or a knucklehead or anything like that. He's certainly not the loudmouth that Brian Hook turned out to be. So we all know Dave because of his little failed company, and we're all clamoring to work for him. But who knows the names of the people who worked on Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, Age of Empires, Metal Gear Solid 2, Siphon Filter, of Medal of Honor? These are all huge, huge games, each of which sold over a million copies (with the exception of Medal of Honor; I don't know how well it did).

The bottom line is that the fanboy worldview is severely--and intentionally--limited.