A platform-jumping prince – History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports

> "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner."

This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?feature=shared - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.

> This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

It's not just that. It's anything creative, really. It can be a tech startup, it can be a book... you name it. The thing is that creators become blinded by their own perception as they lose the ability to see flaws.

The longer they work on a thing, the less they are able to understand that other people might not understand a lot of things. I experienced it myself few times with my coding projects. It's actually quite bad as you just cannot fix a problem as you do not see it. Even if someone points it out to you, it takes quite some time to admit it is a problem.

This is why having teams of people is useful. Single startup founders, game designers, writers... have inherent blind spots in their entire work.

One trick when doing music mixing is to play the mix from some really low-end speakers. In one studio they had a small radio someone could have in their kitchen. There are a lot of reasons to do this but you also get some perspective this way since you become deaf to your own work indeed very quickly.