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Copying is the way design works
What exists in the space between riffing and ripping
Working through the night, Carmack coaxed his PC into scrolling and animating the world of Super Mario; Hall jumped back and forth between a TV screen and his computer, playing the Nintendo version, pausing to copy the images pixel-for-pixel. Starting with Carmack’s code for scrolling and animating the screen, the coders — calling themselves Ideas from the Deep, keeping the game a secret from their day jobs at Softdisk — put their Super Mario copy through a complete metamorphosis. I don’t fancy myself to be the van Gogh of design, to be anywhere on the level of Stallman or Carmack in my approach to copying, possessing even one-one-hundredth of Steve Jobs’ ability to steal artfully, or to be in any way comparable to Charles or Ray Eames.
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