Programming geniuses

Like 90% of software engineers, I think that I am a better coder than 90% of programmers. This bias is very well known and is described in many sources. It is based on the fact that when I compare myself with another programmer, and if the difference is not overwhelming, I tend to ignore the facts that supports his superiority and focus on areas where I am better. It only does not work when this other programmer is obviously unprofessional, or when he is so much better than me that there is no point to argue.

In the latter case I call better programmer "a genius", simply because losing to a genius is not so bitter. During my career (15 years employed as full time programmer), I've met less than 10 "geniuses". I met a first "genius" in a University. We were studying together, and his nickname was, well, "genius". I mean ppl really called him "the genius" rather than "Max".

Why I think he had super-natural programming abilities? Once during summer 2000, we worked as part time teachers/kind of scouting leaders ("вожатые") in a summer camp for school kids who did very well in physics/math. We had a couple of old PCs but no games. So Max did the following: during one night (from ca 9PM till 8AM) he developed in Pascal a multiplayer game from scratch, including a device driver for keyboard that supported 4 ppl playing simultaneously and added quirks to graphic driver. He confessed that the game he developed earlier though, but just recalled the full text source and debugged during these hours... Anybody can repeat that?

I wish I could find "the genius" in linkedin, but I can't recall his last name.