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Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

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Talk Intermediate

Casey Muratori

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Description

Casey Muratori - The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake is a Better Software Conference 2025 talk by Casey Muratori on how object-oriented hierarchy modeling shaped game and systems software.

It contrasts Looking Glass fat-struct entity models with 1990s OOP class trees, then argues Thief: The Dark Project shipped an early commercial entity-component style using IDs looked up per system. Muratori traces why inheritance-heavy designs spread from school and business examples into games, and why data-oriented and ECS thinking better match gameplay systems. The focus is architecture history rather than graphics algorithms, with extended Q&A.

It is for intermediate programmers and engine architects who design gameplay frameworks and want historical grounding for ECS versus deep class hierarchies.

Access is a free YouTube conference recording from Better Software Conference 2025, including talk and Q&A.

It is useful when debating entity architecture and you want a long-form critique of decades of default OOP modeling in interactive software.