I love this photo of John Romero playing Minecraft with Brenda Brathwaite's kids, and I'll tell you why: It's like looking at 20 years of 3D sandbox gaming in a single photo. Romero, of course, is famed for co-creating the first-person shooter genre with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom (1992 and 1993), but to me, those games are just as important for helping launch the modding community, which was really the big start of user-generated content in 3D worlds and environments. And now nearly 20 years later, here he is playing Minecraft, today's most popular game of 3D user-generated content and world building. Brathwaite and Romero, by the way, now run Lootdrop, a social gaming company they launched shortly after creating the hit Facebook game Ravenwood Fair (which is arguably as popular as Doom.)
Also interesting: Minecraft's graphics are not that much better than Doom, but this makes no evident difference to Brenda's kids Avalon and Donovan, who represent a new generation of gamers. You have to think they'll grow up expecting similar levels of creativity and openness from the games they play in decades to come.
Re-posted with permission by Ms. Brathwaite
The graphics are far better than doom. The player and npc entities aren't flat - they're 3d.
Posted by: mgabrys | Tuesday, August 19, 2014 at 05:20 AM