Cave Story, great unique platformer made by one person that accumulated a large community and ended up being put on various consoles
That was an excellent game.
Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
181–190 of 375 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#182I'd say literature come to mind the most. A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics
This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.
It might be profit margins. TV writers make more, and have writing teams. Book authors make less, so maybe it’s hard to split that and still live off of it.
And they do already split some of the work for the text with people like editors.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#183ColorFORTH deserves a mention, to say the least!
Chuck Moore devising his own programming language, which runs bare metal on x86 chips, in which he wrote a VLSI design program, to make chips, which run his programming language: it's safe to say this is the most control over a computing stack which a single human has at this moment in history.
Which is not to say GreenArrays is a one-man show, or detract from the hard work everyone else involved has done. I've not spoken to every one of them, but I can't imagine those I have disagreeing with me.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#184I'd say literature come to mind the most. A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics
This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.
The RAM of a collaborative group can't store a whole story very well. Even a single author has trouble keeping all of the loose ends tied together, but when you have to traipse over everything in a conversation at There is another example of this effect: mathematical proofs typically have just a few contributors, and very often one. But mathematics has an overall consistency that allows different people's proofs to be simply glued together at the "edges", unlike literature where that doesn't work at all.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#185Craigslist started as a mailing list managed by Craig.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#186The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy Shaw [1] in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and is found all around the world. It is a design that's simple, passive, robust, cheap and very effective, making it one of the all-time great inventions [1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea
It also has the distinction of being the cheapest way that anyone can verify that human artifacts are on the Moon, by bouncing a laser off one of several retroreflectors left behind by the Apollo missions.
You can't quite prove from there that humans were down there as well, but let's say it pushes the balance of evidence in the right direction.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#187git comes to mind
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#188Dust: An Elysian Tail - a metroidvania game
"Aside from voice acting, soundtrack, and parts of the story, Dust was designed and programmed entirely by Dodrill. A self-taught illustrator and animator, he had previously done artwork and cinematics on Epic Games' Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and was in the process of creating an independent animated film, Elysian Tail.[14] He assumed it would take three months to complete the game; it actually took over three-and-a-half years. He originally envisioned the game as an 8-bit-style platformer, similar to earlier entries in the Castlevania series. Inspirations for the final game came from such titles as Metroid, Golden Axe, and Ys I & II, which Dodrill cites as his favorite games."
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#189My sites https://nomadlist.com and https://remoteok.com are single person creations. And exist about 8 and 7 years now! :)