Sandy Petersen's side of it comes out in a few interviews, like https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU (especially 14:17 onward)
> One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
> We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
> Sorry, Sandy.
Is he saying that it was a mistake (but not his mistake... Romero's perhaps?) to demand that game designers were also artists? And that this resulted in a loss of talent ("Sorry, Sandy") versus just encouraging more collaboration between artists and designers?
Sandy has gone into it on various podcasts and mediums. It's pretty clear he doesn't consider Carmack responsible but rather someone he refuses to name (but is quite obviously Tim Willits) that caused pretty much all the problems.
My read is Carmack is saying he is sorry he lacked the awareness and experience to manage the people stuff.
He lost his dream team, I'm sure it's something he has thought about a lot.
https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294
> How Quake ruined id Software.
> There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.
> ... [thread continues] ...
That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...
I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.
Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.
HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods
(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)
Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.
To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.
I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.
Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.
Did you think I hadn’t realised?
For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)
The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.
The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.
Go here right now and play a few games against bots and people of Quake III and UT99: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=*
There is no denying that movement and gameplay is much more enjoyable in Quake compared to UT. Even with the lack in variety on all fronts.
QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.
Q2 was always my favourite, that's where I started my multi-player journey. I only played against bots in the first Quake, and only played against my cousins at their place in Doom (they had multiple computers linked up back in the day).
Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I had slow internet and its bots were better.
Point being: Q3A was great, but in 1999 it became clear that id Software had lost their head start over other FPS developers. They were still elite, but in the early-mid 90s they were alone at the top.
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-iii-arena-review/1900...
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unreal-tournament-review/19...
https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (instant, even works on phones)
https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut (scroll down and click Create on CTF-FACE)
They even have multiplayer support.
I hope someone ports UT2K4 someday so I can play ONS-Torlan.
As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).
Our photo teacher got fed up with the whole class playing one day so he froze everyone’s inputs with the monitoring software and went around killing everyone before simultaneously shutting off all the computers.
I really miss simpler games without progression systems and loadouts and gimmicks. l would imagine the gameplay probably still holds up today, it was very fast paced.
I think the point is that Quake (1) came out within months of Activision launching Mech Warrior 2, Blizzard doing Warcraft, and even a couple years before Valve did Half Life. And Quake / Doom were so much bigger.
They had terrific success but if you were handicapping US video game companies in 1995 it would be like EA, iD (and maybe Sierra Online!). Point is they were way ahead at that point.
It's not that the company was ruined, but that it had lost some of its creative direction after Romero left (while retaining technical excellence).
Not just graphics but character acting and animation, interactive world elements, deliberately dramatic scenarios in the levels (Half Life pioneered this, but Doom3 had a lot of really good ones).
It was years ahead of what was on consoles at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJ1weGimZQ
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3vMUOayyc
Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.
In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.
That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.
As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.
I didn't love Q2, but really enjoyed Q3A.
Never liked the modern renderer versions, none of them look good to me, too flat, too polished.
Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.
I remember feeling that Quake was something remarkably different from Doom, mainly because it felt actually worth using the mouse with. Marathon II on the Mac introduced me to mouse movement but it was very limited and kind of fisheyed and weird. Quake just felt good with the mouse.
We could use Heretic/Hexen as the most direct contemporary example of a "Doom++ engine": it had keyboard look up/down, inventory, and the ability to fly up/down. Wiki reckons Heretic sold 500k units and Doom 2 sold 1.2M. Hard to say in hindsight if that was caused by less enthusiasm for a fantasy aesthetic or the decline in enthusiasm for Doom-level tech.
We can also look at how far BUILD-style engines were able to push environments in 2.5d engines of the day. Duke3D had sloping floors and wildly changing terrain that was revolutionary for the time. (Remember the second level in the shareware version, where you basically blew up a building halfway through the level?) Other contemporary BUILD-style titles like Eradicator were able to add crude room-over-room by declaring floating platforms and other special entities without having to build them into truly 3D world geometry.
A third point on the triangle might be Rise of the Triad, which pushed the Wolf3D engine well beyond anything a normal person would expect. Apogee were able to add keyboard look up/down and flight up/down, more verticality in levels by adding floating discs and floors (again outside of the standard level geometry).
And to stretch the triangle metaphor to a tetrahedron, there's also a lot stuff from the Doom source port universe that might have been invented if Carmack & Co. had to push the Doom engine as far as it could go. When you can add new things and linedef/sector actions, that allows a lot of flexibility when you don't have to build the engine from scratch.
All that makes me think that 1994 iD could probably have had a commercially successful game on a Doom++, especially if Carmack kept learning all the portability and networking stuff that made Quakeworld work during the shift to Windows 95. What's much less clear to me is whether they'd be able to catch and/or drive the wave of 3D accelerator development, and whether Epic MegaGames would have just leapfrogged them completely with Unreal. I think the Quake-on-Doom++ timeline might end with Unreal becoming the engine more people built on through the 2000s (instead of all the Q3/idTech3-based games). The talent retention could mean that iD stays competitive on worldbuilding and feel (the Doom Bible shows they had some of those ideas, but the tech wasn't ready for them), and Carmack+Abrash+... could probably catch up with Sweeney+.... We probably don't get American McGee's Alice in that timeline though.
EDIT: The other thing to consider is that Descent was also bringing 6DOF (degrees of freedom) to PC gaming. While it was a portal-based engine like BUILD, it had 3D-modelled polygonal enemies etc. It was a beloved but niche title because it was so challenging to play, but it shows that there's a bunch of technical innovation around at the time, and maybe it gets a larger market share and the technical innovation happens with or without iD?
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.
IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)
Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.
Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high school and college, it's shocking how poorly most people treat someone just because they're standing behind the counter.
In the corporate world I find it's usually very obvious who has real life experience and who doesn't.
You can find these easily on YouTube, there's a channel securitylectures which hosts them, and there are also official resources from the US Naval Postgraduate Academy in Monterey.
Four years is a long time, you’re not just focused on business and engineering every waking second.
I’ve talked to a lot of journalists over the years and they almost always make this point if the conversation drifts to education. After a few years I started replying with, “Yes, I’ve studied X, maybe not as in depth as you have, but I did spend a semester on it. Have you ever taken a calculus class? Physics? Computer Science? What about economics? Statistics? Industrial and organizational psychology?”
The answer is almost always no. You get tech writers who’ve never touched a compiler and business reporters that have never studied economics. Don’t even get me started on “entertainment journalists.” It’s why almost every article, no matter the topic, feels like it was written through someone viewing the world through a very particular lens.
Engineers and business people should absolutely study the humanities. And, humanities people should absolutely study science, engineering, and economics. Specialization is for insects.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
―Heinlein
Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.
CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?
Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.
The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.
It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.
To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.
There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....
> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.
Software engineers and especially architecture folks tend to have very healthy egos themselves that get in the way of the right thing happening. The worst-case scenario is when someone has a big ego and is technically correct. That can be a very tough nut to crack, and even worse if you pile on emotional and historical baggage.
I don't think we can ever eliminate the problem of bad leaders. I am not even convinced that it is desirable to do so. Everybody has to have room to grow and sometimes a person who later becomes a great leader has to learn what that means by royally fucking up early in their career. People need room to fail and that's true for leaders as well. It's problematic obviously because leaders have outsize impact relative to the general population.
Ultimately I think the real problem is much deeper than work or industry. If you go back in history, bad leaders have always been a problem. Pharaoh blamed the builders for his bad pyramid (or at least didn't think he was part of the issue). The Vasa sank because no-one could contradict or push back on the king -- when people rule by divine right, pushing back on the king is equivalent to pushing back on God. The cathedral collapsed because the bishop insisted it be the tallest one around, then later the roof collapsed, killing many people.
Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, the Quebec Bridge, Deepwater Horizon, etc. all these disasters, it's basically an infinite list. We humans have these problems with each other because we have issues with power and authority and control.
We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
- Attributed to Nasrudin
There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.
I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
because they're smarter than everyone else and
there is nothing of value to be learned from others
Especially since everybody in the industry tends to be pretty smart.
When two people with intelligence within a single standard deviation of each other, each of them is going to have competencies and expertise the other does not. There are going to be specific skills where one truly is 10x or even 100x the other, but not too many efforts boil down to one specific narrow skill.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.
It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition.
Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase).
What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer.
It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.
It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though
> You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic.
Classic.
Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished?
Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies.
(this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)
They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as:
“the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard”
So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.
The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.
We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.
But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.
The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.
Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years.
According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed.
> There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.
You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5.
There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle".
As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.
Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"
I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.
It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in.
Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
And tight objectives. Have an endgame. Know what "done" looks like, and get there, as fast as possible.
Also, only the minimal number of attendees. This helps a lot.
Of course I'm not trying to claim their opinion is wrong, it is just a matter of what you value. I was very into the online multiplayer aspects of the series (random aside that will mean nothing to most: I was the programmer for the GXMOD tournament mod for Quake 2) and while the original Quake had network multiplayer, Quake 2 really nailed it to a degree Quake 1 didn't in terms of things like multiplayer map design and weapon balance (from a multiplayer perspective).
In any case, I respect Carmack's reply here not so much for the insight (which is also nice) but for the clear, direct empathetic apology at the end. He could have leaned on the fact that he was 24-25 when this all happened and that would have been a perfectly reasonable explanation, but the simple and direct apology is much more respectable.
The single player was weaker than the multiplayer, but still enjoyable with its strange variety of map atmospheres.
I'm glad Quake happened even if it made id Software a worse company thereafter. I would understand if the people involved feel differently though.
The problem is, well, the player sees it. As ugly as fuck texture pop-in.
Sandy's quote here buried unfortunately by X.
Though Carmack certainly gets credit for keeping me entertained for a good portion of my youth.
And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.
Zuckerberg likely has similar tendencies, should he be given a pass for making social media such a large part of our society?
Hang out with Epstein so much that he gave his wife and STD and then hid that knowledge from her, sneaking medicine to manage it into her food?
I find that initiative and grit combined is an exceedingly rare commodity, and it do power progress. We can always be picky about the worth or risks of the projects these souls end up realizing, but the function this provides to our society is critical.
How do you have such confidence for what works in a complex adaptive system?
Do you think society can be reduced to a model of functions and metrics?
You can only afford to use that model if it doesn't harm your experience of life. For many, it's a model that makes them invisible.
This was far too ambitious and bottlenecked everything on Carmack’s graphics work. The rest of the team was left to create Doom II and Ultimate doom while Carmack worked, but even then it wasn’t enough to ease the bottleneck.
doom II could have been a quake C scriptable, client server game that shipped slightly later as a step between Doom engine and Quake engine instead of the four or so year technical delay between Doom and Quake
Anyway, listen to Xalavier Nelson of strange scaffold talks on sustainable indie game development. It makes no sense to compromise a company for the sake of shipping a single game.
Arcane dimensions
Brutalist Jams 1,2,3
Call of the Machine
Alkaline
But when it came out I found Quake dissapointing. I still feel that DOOM is a more fun game. It's just always way more fun to kill 10 weak enemies rather than one super tanky one. Also the art style of DOOM is more varied and vivid and fun and heavy metal.. Quake is so dull and dour and brown. Even the movement in Quake seems a bit off imo, its too easy for your great honking non-rotating cube hitbox to get hung up on tiny bits of geometry (I know its actually a point, but it works out the same a non rotating cuboid).. Also making new maps and enemies and content just seems so easy in DOOM.. There is some great modern Quake content (mentioned above) but the amount of stuff for DOOM dwarfs it.
I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fuck himself about midway through the project. Quake is my favorite FPS from that era, and my favorite id game in general, but it sounded like a pain in the ass to work on.
I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.
Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.
The N64 version is irredeemably bad, but in 2026 I don't really see any reason to play the N64 version.
Agreed that the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" was a pretty questionable marketing strategy. I guess it did get peoples' attention, but I don't think it was the attention that they wanted.
The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.
Now cutting edge graphical features are mostly pushed by Epic and their Unreal engine. Like ray-traced global illumination, virtual shadow maps, virtual geometry, and fast ray-traced direct illumination.
But id software's games themselves arguably improved after Carmack left, despite not pushing technical boundaries. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom TDA all were received very favorably at the time. Not sure whether this had anything to do with Carmack leaving though.
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
But Sandy Peterson is probably right, saying that it ‘Ruined’ the company - as an artistic creative force anyway.
The breakup of the brilliant and well-balanced ID Software team was caused by the trauma of developing Quake.
Romero and others were forced out or quit. This cut the heart out of the team, despite all of Carmack’s drive and technical brilliance
That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine
How is that telling? Source is based on Q1 instead of Q2 because Valve decided to keep working on the HL1 engine (GoldSrc) which already had extensive modifications from Q1 instead of rebasing all that work on Q2 or another engine. It's a perfectly valid decision irrespective of the quality of the Q2 engine.
Wether you like it or not, X/Twitter is still a primary posting ground for many key people in our industry.
Wolf, Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3 Arena
Dark Forces was great, but that tech was too late so it never went anywhere. Duke3D showed up, and while it was entertaining, it was clearly a level below what ID could do. 3D Realms fumbled that tech, then got caught up with the ultimate vaporware, Prey, and it took Epic stepping in with Unreal that finally dethroned ID.
Sandy talks up the people that left ID during that time, but did anyone (other than him) do anything noteworthy in the gaming industry? Romero was responsible for Daikatana of all things, Michael Abrash was never a 'game programmer', despite having a very successful career in Xbox, VR, etc. No idea about the other guys.
>Prey was a commercial success, selling more than one million copies in the first two months of its release and leading to the abortive development of its sequel Prey 2.
Someone surely has to make a movie about id. Maybe around the visionary development and growth around Wolfenstein and then Doom and mix in some of the industry response and mainstream media drama/backlash/violence fears etc. Like in the style of the Social Network, Blackberry movie whatever (the latter which spoofed/recreated the iconic id team photo in the film). I mean there's plenty of source material/books to pull from. Maybe Carmack and Romero are holding on to the rights for their later years.
Is there going to be someone out there who doesn't like it? Sure, take absolutely any game whatsoever and there's someone out there who will tell you it's not good... but by any reasonable measure: critical reception, awards, lasting cultural impact, influence on future games, it's almost across the board on the positive end of the spectrum. You're of course free to dislike it, but claiming it to be a "serious letdown" treats your singular point of view as if it were a consensus, when the actual consensus is overwhelmingly the opposite.
41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.
Eventually a bunch of people left and I think only two founders remained (Carmack and Carmack).
Since the stakes were reabsorbed, it makes sense why he ended up with 41%.
Adrian Carmack mostly took photographs of clay scultures (and in some cases actual plastic toys, in the case of the chainsaw and pistol used in the original Doom), and digitized them in Corel. Something any half-way decent art student could do (not to discount the iconic visual style of Commander Keen and Doom!)
It was Adrian who walked away with 41% of the >100 million dollars company!
> It was Adrian who walked away with 41% of the >100 million dollars company!
Work smarter, not harder.
That is sad.
I didn't see Carmack was replying to Sandy until the end of the post, and then I could only find 1/3rd of Sandy's post without having to click a "153 replies" button.
The company was successful, had one of the most prestigious brand in the game industry, was early enough to capitalize on the rise of PC gaming, incredible talents and tech.
Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.
And it seems that both the early success and stall were the responsibility of one very talented but somewhat obtuse nerd.
Now what was that thing about living long enough to become the villain.
https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.
Doom++ was already well under way in the form of Ken Silverman's Build engine. Duke Nukem 3D beat Quake to market by ~6 months as I recall. A shorter timeline on the latter would have put them in direct competition with each other, damaging both.
It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines. He did just that, and shouldn't apologize or second-guess himself.
Yes carmack may have been an asshole, but it takes a real man to recognize and own up to your own human flaws. Kudos. We need more of that in this world.
I still hack on the engine and its derivations from time to time.
Quake 2 was a development of that, will a deep focus on multiplayer. And it won at that. As a singlr player game it was boring but LAN play was just amazing.
So quake 3 did rethink the engine but went all in on multiplayer.
As funny as it may sound but in the end, it is quake 1 that just keeps going thanks to its easy moddabilty.
I don't care for the story, and I wouldn't play Doom++. Electric polar bears and some Shrub lava mule, whatever. But swimming in deep underwater ruins with full 3-axis freedom was awesome.
I couldn't play multiplayer back then. Dialup sucked and was more expensive than AI tokens. Ethernet was still rare. Lugging a CRT monitor to friend's house was a chore reserved for a once-a-year LAN party.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
Did they really?
Did ID make more money with engine licensing than with game sales?
They needed to ship. I think Quake Engine could wait, and have Doom++ would have given them some slack
This is the opposite to the Boeing problem (shipping the rehashed product instead of the brand new thing)
iD's engines were famously known in the industry as tech demos first, first-party game platforms second. I'm not sure how the revenue picture ended up looking, though. They obviously made a lot of money from their 'tech demos.'
Yes and Wikipedia claims it was a "heavily modified" version of the engine
And while I get the tech demo angle, doesn't mean that Quake had to be one of those
Quake 1 was, in many ways, where id Software peaked. But the time Carmack spent optimizing Quake Live, based on Quake 3, ultimately made it his twitch FPS magnum opus.
Even 20 years later, there's no FPS game that comes close to the speed, mechanics, smoothness, and just overall quality: https://youtu.be/tU6v8C1pw8Y?t=675
revisiting mistakes (in a healthy, non-obsessive way) is not silly at all. it is great for self growth, and in this case, is a great way to pass on wisdom.
What you're saying sounds very nice and correct, except it isn’t necessarily true.
It's extremely easy to draw wrong lessons in retrospect. There are so many variables, including personalities, market conditions, timing, constraints, and accidents of history. You can't recall or even really understand these things with any level of accuracy.
What ends up being most useful is the way experience fundamentally changes you as a person, not your regretful shower thoughts posted on Twitter.
So it may seem counterintuitive, but if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s in 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".
Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.
I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.
I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.
"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid..."
And CTF originally was from Quake 1, the threewave CTF mod by Zoid which made it into Quake 3.
Threewave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFg2PPOmA74