Interview with Amit Patel, Creator of “Solar Realms Elite” (2013)
breakintochat.com45 points by bananaboy 8 days ago
45 points by bananaboy 8 days ago
Other awesome BBS door games, for a those that want a shot of nostalgia:
LORD, Barren Realms, Falcon's Eye, Land of Devastation, Planets: TEOS, Usurper
It was a fun era. I had a BBS all setup and ready to go, complete with insane ASCII art: the plan was to make it live once my sister went to college, giving me the second phone line entirely to myself. But in the intervening two years the internet really took off and by the time she moved out (1997) it felt like a pointless endeavor.
Amit Patel was employee #7 at Google and built many things including the little geo display in the lobby that would show live search queries as dots color coded by language.
I was lucky enough to spend ten or so hours with Amit over the span of six or eight years after he left Google. He has a fantastic ability to find the simple core of very complicated things, making it easy for others to understand. People repeatedly thought it was so impressive that I understood deep concepts so thoroughly. Then I'd say, "wait, let me draw the simple line chart on the whiteboard that Amit drew for me." Then they immediately understood it just as well as I did. My time with him always left me feeling inspired. He's a truly nice guy too.
And writing “Don’t be evil” everywhere. I suspect being the “originator” is contested; but this wonderful nerd, who made Red Blob Games, is the spirit.
Barren Realms Elite and Falcons Eye were my favourite doors games as a teen (written by his brother). Inter-BBS - playing against people in other countries - was just amazing at the time.
Interesting. I found this article that does point to Amit Patel as the originator of “Don’t be evil” at google.
“Mayer explained that Don't Be Evil was coined in 1999 by one of Google's first engineers, Amit Patel, who shared a work cubicle with Mayer. She said Patel and other early employees were resistant when staff with business skills began joining the engineer-driven company. The engineers feared they would be pressured into moving certain clients higher in search results listings or building products they did not want to build. Patel voiced his fears via the whiteboard in the conference room where Google sales people met clients. "In this incredibly neat handwriting in tiny little letters on the bottom right hand side of the white board, he wrote 'Don't Be Evil'," Mayer said. Some time later, when Google had 200-300 employees, its human resources team decided the company needed corporate values. They called a team meeting of some of Google's senior staff. After they brainstormed 10 positive corporate values, Paul Bucheit, the inventor of Gmail, suggested ditching those in favour of one that covered all angles - Don't Be Evil. "Originally Don't Be Evil was No.6 on the corporate values [list] but it's the only one that stuck because it's the catchiest and, as Paul said, encompasses everything else," said Mayer.”
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/dont-be-evil-or-dont-lose-...
We forget that many companies are founded by passionate engineers; however they may change over time.
Ah, nostalgia. I was a LORD man myself. One of my good friends from the BBS scene in my hometown (412/724) had a Telnet/SSH instance of LORD that ran for a good decade plus.
Same here, I played a lot of LORD! Only a little bit of BRE. Incidentally the author of LORD Seth Robinson continues making games long after LORD. I think he’s semiretired now but he has been working on an ai-coded photoshop clone https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy
(2013)
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