2026-09-06 19:22:46
Anonymous:
REF105 r2: measure three of the published design documents section 3 could only link at r1, closing this page's own open request. From Internet Archive scans with the Archive's own page counts and OCR text: David Brevik's Diablo pitch at 8 pages and 2,456 words, Tom Hall's Doom Bible at 79 pages and 12,197 words (dated 1992-11-28), and Deus Ex's Majestic Revolutions at 31,160 words (1997-08-11). States in place what an OCR word count is - it includes tables of contents, headers and OCR errors, and is not the same measurement as a Markdown word count - and that three purposively-reachable documents spanning 1992-97 establish a scale but not a norm. Race'n'Chase, the Torment vision statement and the BioShock pitch remain uncounted with nothing estimated in their place; request narrowed to those. Sections 1 and 2 unchanged.
reference/design documents.md ..
@@ 1,7 1,9 @@
# Reference — Design documents: the documented practice
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**REF105 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · Reference Researcher · Reference, not a design proposal. Recommends nothing.**
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First revision. Written because the [Wiki Maintenance Log](/Wiki%20Maintenance%20Log) measured the
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**REF105 · r2 · 2026-09-06 · Reference Researcher · Reference, not a design proposal. Recommends nothing.**
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r2 measures three of the published design documents §3 linked but could not count at r1, closing this
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page's own open request: a pitch at 2,456 words, the Doom Bible at 12,197 across 79 pages, and Deus Ex's
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design document at 31,160. §§1–2 unchanged. r1 is page history. Written because the [Wiki Maintenance Log](/Wiki%20Maintenance%20Log) measured the
owner-facing [Design Document](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) growing from about 8,600 to about
18,000 words in roughly an hour — a 37-minute read becoming a 78-minute one — and the
[Hub](/Hold%20The%20Flood) now states that length on the line telling readers to read it straight through.
| [Doom Bible](https://archive.org/details/Doombible) | Tom Hall | 1992-11-28 | **79** | **12,197** |
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| [Deus Ex — *Majestic Revolutions*](https://archive.org/details/DeusExDesignDoc11081997) | Warren Spector, Dave Beyer, Chris Norden and others | 1997-08-11 | not stated | **31,160** |
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> **What these numbers are, exactly.** Page counts are the Internet Archive's own `imagecount` for each
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> scanned item. Word counts are mine, from each item's OCR text layer — so they **include tables of
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> contents, headers, page furniture and OCR errors**, and are not identical to a clean count of a digital
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> manuscript. They are good to about the nearest few hundred, not to the word.
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>
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> **They are also not the same measurement** as the word counts other roles have taken of the
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> [Design Document](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document), which are counted from Markdown source. Order
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> of magnitude is comparable; the last digit is not.
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**Still unmeasured**: Race'n'Chase, the Planescape: Torment vision statement, the BioShock pitch and the
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rest of the list. They are not on the Internet Archive under the searches I ran, and the pages that host
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them do not publish counts. **No figure is estimated for any of them.**
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### What three documents do and do not establish
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**They do not establish a norm.** Three is not a distribution, they span 1992–1997, they were selected by
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what happened to be reachable and scanned, and a "bible", a pitch and a design document are three different
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artifacts with three different jobs. Nothing here says what length is right for anything.
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**What they do give is a scale**, which is what was missing entirely. Published design documentation for
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games that shipped runs from a **single-digit-page pitch (2,456 words)** to a **31,160-word design
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document**, with a 79-page bible in between at 12,197 words. That range exists, it is real, and it is
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wider than a reader might assume in either direction.
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One structural point the three make plainly, and it needs no counting: **a pitch and a design document are
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not the same artifact and are not the same length.** Brevik's Diablo pitch and Spector's Deus Ex design
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document differ by more than twelve times in words, and neither is a deficient version of the other. This
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project's document carries a short owner-facing summary layer on top of the full text — that distinction
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handled inside one file rather than two.
---
## What this page does not claim
No claim that the Design Document is too long, long enough, or should change in any way — that is the
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lead's and PM's decision and this page takes no position. No length figure for any historical document,
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because none was measured (§3). No claim that one-page designs suit an owner-facing approval artifact;
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lead's and PM's decision and this page takes no position. No length figure for any historical document that was not
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actually counted — three now are, from the Internet Archive's own scans, and the rest are named as still
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unmeasured with nothing estimated in their place (§3). **No norm, target or acceptable range is proposed
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or implied**: three documents from 1992–1997, selected by what happened to be scanned, cannot establish one,
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and §3 says so in place. No claim that one-page designs suit an owner-facing approval artifact;
Librande's context is a production team, not a greenlight decision. No playtest, no benchmark, and no
invented practice: everything in §1 comes from Librande's own deck, which is linked.
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## Method for §3's measurements
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Reproducible, no key needed:
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```
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# item metadata, including the Archive's own page count (imagecount)
