I have worked with several excellent, standout programmers at video game studios that had similar qualities. I'm talking in this case about ICs, not managers or leads.

- Whimsical, child like attitude. "Sure, I can do that" was almost always the answer.

- Would come in on the weekend when nobody was there and you'd see them cooking. Then on Monday, they'd reveal their work and it'd be something that seemed impossible last week.

- Had deep understanding of the hardware so that diving in and writing some specific assembly-like (or literal assembly) code was part of their toolkit.

- Were treated as a Goose That Laid The Golden Egg by management. Could do whatever they wanted, but they loved to work and code so it wasn't ever out of balance.

- After a few years of working at the studio they started to have mental health issues because there was a never ending stream of needs and problems, many of which were solved with them. Planning projects started to include several technical miracles they would pull off. It started to be expected.

Nowadays writing straight to the metal in video games is less common, so I think these types of guys have largely migrated to other fields. We used to write our own engines and there was more need for them. Now there's a lot more use of third party engines so there's less opportunity (and need).