I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are.
Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got:
"Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on reddit while they're coding. They might screw around interminably at other times - they might work only a few hours a day - but while they work, they're working, and that's it.
They also get things done because they understand what the hell's going on, at least one or two layers of abstraction below the one they're officially working on. Stevey claims that his understanding stops at transistors - transistors are black boxes, but he gets what has to happen at the layers of abstraction above that, from the machine code to the guts of the interpreter.
Haha Steve Yegge, hilarious! I'd agree he's a good programmer. A guy I knew at Google interviewed him and he was rejected after the hiring committee meeting. He had to try again 6 months later to get in.
I "worked" on Wyvern in high school (in that I played a lot of Wyvern and made a few terribly shitty game areas and ended up being an administrator, or "Wizard" in classical MUD parlance).
You know how Dwarf Fortress, that ASCII game, simulates a whole lot of ridiculous detail? Over-the-top, "the goblin's spear strikes the baby dwarf in the back upper left tooth and it really hurts so he cries for mommy"? Wyvern didn't quite have that, but the API implied most of the functionality for it.
You didn't have inventory slots, you had body parts, which brought with them the ability to wear or wield certain other items.
You could've written Wyvern in a much simpler fashion. A bright high schooler could make a game that had all of Wyvern's functionality at the end of its life. It's the mountain of "do a lot of other shit later" that got in the way.
And that's what he's writing about in that blog post - not that he's perfect and Java sucks, but that he was trying to employ industry best practices and make everything perfect without compromises. It's not very hackerish, and sure, it was stupid. But the guy wasn't doing this for his day job and didn't have defined deadlines. He was a programmer, in other words, not a project manager.
And that's where he fell down. Project management, not programming. And if you read back through his massive wall-of-text blog archives, you can see him mature as a programmer and project management.
(Please note that I am an avowed fanboi, if you didn't catch that already, and as such everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.)
Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got:
"Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on reddit while they're coding. They might screw around interminably at other times - they might work only a few hours a day - but while they work, they're working, and that's it.
They also get things done because they understand what the hell's going on, at least one or two layers of abstraction below the one they're officially working on. Stevey claims that his understanding stops at transistors - transistors are black boxes, but he gets what has to happen at the layers of abstraction above that, from the machine code to the guts of the interpreter.
Particularly delicious? Steve Yegge worked at Geoworks (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...), and he attributes their defeat by the likes of Microsoft not to superior marketing, but to the value of abstractions.