to me it sounds like you have some kind of a midlife crisis.
there are a lot of exciting and adventurous things happening now. people share more ideas and code than ever before. since the communities were smaller back then maybe they felt more personal?
i think the novelty of games like doom is a bit exaggerated. there were realtime 3d games long before and when computers became fast enough to do things like texture mapping the logical progression happened.
and some things you mention are quite wrong. like:
Quote:
You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)
maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.
i agree about the team sizes though. maybe this will get better again with more sophisticated tools like jetpackmonkey said. maybe not.
