Written by James Richards

There is a story about the early days of id Software, the studio behind Doom and Quake. It revolves around the company’s two principal creative forces, John Romero and John Carmack. According to the legend, Carmack broke down Romero’s office door with an axe while the latter was deep in development. Another version says the weapon of choice was a chainsaw. Yet another places the entire scene in a pitch session, with the chainsaw brandished aloft to the horror and delight of company executives.

Whether this is true, or just another myth of modern gaming, this story captures what we want to believe about the golden era of 3D games: that it was a time of renegade creativity bordering on the transgressive, even dangerous.

Doom Mongers: The Early Days of id

The relationship between the two Johns has become equally mythic. Carmack is painted as the monk at the keyboard, quiet and methodical, writing engine code that made walls dissolve and monsters charge. Romero was the design rockstar with long hair, a leather jacket and mirrored sunglasses, who apparently overclocked his Ferrari because it was not fast enough already - drawing the ire of Ferrari themselves in the process. Together, they were the creative force that produced some of the most influential games in history and set the trajectory for an entire industry.

Eventually, the partnership dissolved and the two went their separate ways. But even this has the feel of an archetype: two blazing creative souls who could not exist for long in the same room without using up all the oxygen. In this sense, the axe incident becomes the perfect metaphor for creative breakdown.

Yet these stories often mask a more fundamental truth: maintaining creativity and quality at such a high level is difficult, economically and institutionally. The separation was apparently gradual, not sudden. The axe, by most accounts, was used as a last resort when a door knob broke. But this is what myth does. It takes messy, complicated facts and turns them into a memorable narrative.

After all, myths reveal more about the people repeating them than they do about the underlying facts. They are permanently flexible. They give us what we need today - something otherwise missing from our lives.

With a games industry bloated with triple-A titles that feel like increasingly soulless echoes of a forgotten dream, the legends of id Software reconnect us with a time when gaming creativity seemed raw, unstable and gloriously alive.

Miyamoto’s Forest: The Legend of Zelda

A world away from the brash, adrenaline-fuelled offices of id Software is the story of a young boy setting out on an adventure. Dusk veils the hills in shadow. Bats flicker in dark caves. For hours, the boy wanders the countryside, climbing trees and jumping streams, armed only with a lantern - and his curiosity.

Fast forward many years. The boy, now a designer at Nintendo, draws on these memories of exploration to create one of the best-selling games of all time: The Legend of Zelda.

So goes the story of Shigeru Miyamoto.

Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in video games, he is the creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, Star Fox and Pikmin.

The details of Zelda’s origins have been polished by retelling. Miyamoto has confirmed some of it in interviews, though always in modest terms. Childhood exploration did influence his sense of what makes play compelling. But fans have embroidered those memories into something approaching a pastoral myth. In their version, the woods are deeper, the caves darker, and every discovery tinged with magic.

This is not biography. It is desire: the desire to be free from adult responsibilities, the desire to inhabit that child in that forest, exploring without fear.

Nintendo, a multi-billion-dollar corporation, is built on these impressions of innocence. Its characters smile. Its worlds are inviting. Even its dangers are often more like puzzles. In that context, the forest myth feels inevitable: so much of the company’s wealth and success can be traced back to the exploration of a curious child.

Games Beyond the Screen

What these stories reveal is that players do not simply consume games. They care about how they were made. A forest becomes a metaphor for imagination. Childhood becomes a seedbed for creativity. Whether every detail is exact is beside the point. The legend explains why the games feel the way they do.

In the industry’s folklore, the creator is not a CEO in a suit. He is Peter Pan - the child who refused to grow up, and who had the audacity and talent to shape an entire world around him. This is an endlessly comforting idea: that creativity begins in small discoveries accessible to everyone, not with global ambitions. And every time a new Zelda is released, the forest feels real again.

Players are not just recipients of these myths, they are participants. They search for clues, pore over developer interviews, and reconstruct timelines from fragments of rumour. A new trailer or a stray line of dialogue can ignite speculation for weeks. Forums and fan channels become improvised archaeology sites, where every object is a shard and every shard is a clue. The pleasure is not only in playing the game but in imagining the unseen world behind it.

This is why gaming myths endure. They offer a role for the player that is larger than simple consumption. To play is to explore, and exploration extends beyond the screen. Fans step into the space between fact and fiction, filling it with their own stories. The myth becomes a collaborative work: part memory, part invention, part emotional truth. In this sense, the player is not just a fan. The player is a myth-seeker, always hunting for the door that might open, the forest that might still exist, the creator who might one day return.

Valve the Secretive Studio

If the myths of id Software are about rockstar bad boys, and the myth of Nintendo is child-like wonder, then Valve has its own mystique entirely. Nobody knows exactly what goes on inside the company, and that is the point.

In the folklore of PC gaming, Valve is a place of unlabelled doors, constant experimentation and projects wreathed in mystery. Former employees describe a flat organisational structure with no managers, where staff work for themselves and each other. Fans imagine hidden labs and servers packed with prototypes.

Valve has never encouraged these stories, nor gone out of its way to deny them. The company simply does not talk very much. There are announcements when products ship and interviews when something major happens, but there is no steady feed of PR. The silence creates appetite. It also creates mystery. Remove the official explanation and people will supply their own.

The main legend concerns a game that has not been released. Half-Life 3 has become the most famous absence in gaming. It is the Schrödinger’s cat of PC games: both alive and dead, always in development and never arriving. Fans collect clues. They find significance in timestamps, leaked textures and chance comments. Entire communities have formed around the question of what Valve might be doing when nobody is looking.

Of course, Valve is not naïve about this studied silence. Mystery, after all, can be a brand. By refusing to explain itself, Valve has become a kind of modern castle. Every corridor may contain a secret. Every office might be a dungeon. The lack of detail makes the imagination work harder, which in turn produces loyalty. People do not just play Valve’s games; they speculate about those yet to be released, stoking the idea that a great work is being built somewhere out of sight.

What makes this myth durable is that it fits the tone of the company’s output. Half-Life was set in a secret facility named (exquisitely) Black Mesa, where scientists accidentally open a portal to another dimension. Players often watched action through windows or screens, unable to intervene. The architecture hinted at a larger hidden world beyond reach. Portal, released in 2007, is perfectly Valve: a mysterious test facility where players are forced to progress through seemingly endless challenges. The underlying question remains: why? What is the larger purpose? In that sense, the games are puzzles - just like the studio.

Whether Valve is truly manager-free, whether secret projects really exist, whether Half-Life 3 is on a whiteboard somewhere - none of this is the point. The point is that people believe it could be true. The company’s reticence leaves a blank space where stories can grow. In a world of marketing calendars and constant communication, that blank space feels rare.

Every time a rumour appears - a filename, a screenshot, a patent - the old excitement returns. It is not nostalgia. It is a kind of faith. A door might open. Something extraordinary could still be happening on the other side.

The Curse of the Game

Of course, myths can also work in the other direction. Every industry has its cursed project. In film, it is Apocalypse Now: a production that drifted from schedule to storm, eaten by weather, accident and ambition, until the whole thing took on the logic of a fever dream. In music, it is Smile by The Beach Boys - a record so elaborate and unstable that it was abandoned, pieced back together, whispered about for decades and finally released in fragments.

In gaming, the correlate is the cursed studio - where development stretches into years, teams change, engines are replaced, and a once-straight timeline begins to loop back on itself. The most famous example is Duke Nukem Forever. Announced in 1997 and eventually released in 2011, it became a myth long before it became a product.

Such stories begin innocently. A sequel is planned. A few prototypes are shown. Then something happens. New technology appears. A new platform launches. The scope grows. The studio rewrites code, replaces tools, adds features. Months become years. Rumours multiply. Fans speak of haunted code, bad luck or creative purgatory.

Often the truth is more mundane. Projects of this scale are vulnerable to changes in leadership, budget and technology. The work is difficult and often invisible until it fails. Yet the myth of a cursed project gives the chaos narrative shape. In the folklore of development, the doomed game is not the result of management or circumstance. It is the result of a hex.

Duke Nukem Forever became a punchline because the name itself invited repetition. Forever. Each promised reveal turned into another wait. Each delay made the joke sharper. The game eventually shipped, but by then it had been eclipsed by its own mythology. The legend had eaten the work.

This pattern is not unique. In more recent years, Cyberpunk 2077 acquired a similar aura. Announced with extraordinary ambition, hyped with enormous confidence, and released in a state that forced apologies and refunds, it became a study in narrative collapse. Social media did not merely criticise the game; it dramatised its failure. Bugs became omens, glitches became parables. The story was irresistible: a cursed work trying to break free of its own hype.

None of this is fair to the teams who spent years building systems, art and design. But it is emotionally satisfying. A cursed studio implies that something larger than project management is at work. It gives fans a way to talk about disappointment without spreadsheets. When a game takes too long, when it misses expectations, when it collapses under its own ambition, folklore supplies an explanation.

In industry circles, this pattern is recognised and feared. Developers speak of feature creep, technical debt, design paralysis. Yet publicly, the language becomes supernatural.

When the game finally appears - whether as disappointment, redemption or something in between - the myth remains. People remember the delays more vividly than the details. The cursed studio becomes a cautionary tale, retold at conferences and in meeting rooms, a reminder that nothing is guaranteed. Success is not inevitable. Sometimes the hardest thing in games is finishing.

Vanishing Founders

Every culture has a story about the hero who departs at the moment of triumph. In games, that story belongs to Markus Persson. After creating Minecraft - one of the most successful titles in history - he stepped away from the spotlight. There were parties, headlines and an eye-watering acquisition price. Then there was silence. The founder was gone, the kingdom left behind.

People repeat this legend because it has the shape of an archetype: the wizard who leaves his tower, the king who abdicates, the artist who publishes the masterpiece and then disappears. The emotional logic is impossible to resist. Great creation followed by departure invites melancholy. It allows players to imagine that the thing they love was made by someone who gave everything - who could not stay.

In interviews, Persson has described exhaustion and unease after the deal. The pressure had become too much. He wanted a different life. There is no scandal and no villain here - only the human cost of success. Yet the mythology expands around the absence. Fans project meaning onto the empty throne. The missing founder becomes part of the narrative texture of the game itself.

This pattern appears across the industry in quieter ways. Founders leave companies they built. Visionaries step down. The work continues without them. In Silicon Valley, the stories are practical: strategy, succession, shareholder value. In games, the stories become wistful. Creators are imagined as solitary figures carrying too much magic to remain among ordinary mortals.

Gamers are legend makers as much as legend players; we absorb the archetypes of our favourite titles and assign them to the creators themselves.

The Billionaire Monk

There is a related motif that sometimes enters these conversations: the billionaire monk. The figure who sleeps on the factory floor, eats instant noodles in a glass office or works under a neon lamp for seventy hours a week. Whether any detail is perfectly accurate is secondary. The image of sacrifice gives shape to our admiration. Wealth combined with ascetic habits feels paradoxical and therefore intriguing. We want to believe that creativity requires purity, that genius costs something.

In the case of the vanished founder, the paradox is inverted. The cost arrives after the achievement. The success is real, the fortune immense, and then the retreat follows. It feels like a fable for an industry built on obsession: the idea that making something extraordinary may require stepping back from it. Players speak of Persson with sympathy, even when they disagree with him. They recognise the emotional weight of building a world that millions inhabit.

What purpose does the myth of the vanished founder serve? Perhaps it reminds us that games are not only made for profit or acclaim. They are made by people whose relationships with their creations are complicated. Sometimes the right decision is to leave.

The story persists because it gives shape to a fear that many creators share: that the thing you build may outgrow you. The game continues, the studio thrives, the players remain, and the founder becomes a name in the credits. In an industry obsessed with launches and updates, this quiet ending feels strangely profound. It suggests that greatness and disappearance can coexist.

In the folklore of games, the empty throne is never forgotten. It reminds us that every world, no matter how brightly lit, begins with someone sitting alone at a desk, imagining it. And sometimes, when the work is done and the kingdom is established, that person steps away. The game becomes communal. The legend stays behind.

Why Gaming Myths Remain

None of these legends are precise histories. They are fragments, exaggerations, memories and wishful thinking. Yet they have survived because they are emotionally satisfying. Games are built from tools, engines and schedules, but those are not the things people like to talk about. They want to talk about fast cars, childhood forests, locked doors, cursed code and the founder who walks away.

In each case, the myth matches the mood of the work. Doom feels like it was made at full speed, with loud music and no brakes. The world of Zelda evokes twilight on a hillside, curiosity and enchantment. Valve feels like an unknowable entity - a laboratory-castle whose corridors may or may not conceal hidden rooms. When Persson steps away from Minecraft, it creates a melancholy that the game itself sometimes echoes: a sense of freedom laced with solitude.

This is not about accuracy. It is about meaning. Games are abstract until they are given a story. The legends that surround them provide context, emotion and narrative shape. They turn labour into adventure and deadlines into destiny. A rumour about an axe or a cave can do more than a press release. It can make the work feel human.

The industry is not naïve. Developers know that myths can distort, mislead or overshadow the effort of hundreds of people whose names will never appear in folklore. But they also recognise something important: the stories are how players understand the culture. The legend is a language. It tells us how a game should feel before we touch the controller.

In the end, the myths sit beside the reality. They do not replace it. Every great game begins with rooms full of people solving problems, writing code, drawing art. Yet long after the documents are archived and the servers are shut down, what remains in memory is something else: a door that might open, a child in a forest, a partnership that burned bright, a throne left empty.

Technology imagines itself as rational, but its culture is romantic. Every age needs its myths, and these are ours.