The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit?
> 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?
So from what little I know of the history there were some serious personal issues going on in the team that led to ~7 of the 11-12 folk on Quake eventually leaving.
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.
> 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.
Still not quite exactly following Carmack's suggestion here... is he saying on that last point that the problems with designers/artists were due to Sandy's mistakes (i.e. not a genuine apologetic "sorry" but a "sorry you're wrong" type response)?
From various interviews with designers who were at iD during that period, it seems there was a fair amount of conflict between them. One in particular seems to be severely disliked by Sandy and others to this day. Presumably Carmack wishes he had done a better job managing those conflicts.
Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
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.
The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
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 was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.
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 :)
Quake 2 multiplayer is such a blast. The cat-and-mouse chase fights in that game is what defines the genre of "arena shooter" for me, there's still nothing else really like it.
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.
Personally I think Unreal Tournament perfected the genre when it comes to multiplayer. Q1 was a lot of spamming of grenades and so on. Q2 was better. Still a lot of chaos. UT99 was also chaos but you could combine it with perfect moves and high precision shots. Great games all of them. I used to be an elite UT99 player but as the pace kept increasing along with my age my reaction time was simple not good enough anymore. Even if tactics compensated a lot those games are not like sneaking around in CS. I mostly played CTF. Good old times.
There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.
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.
I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.
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).
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.
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.
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.
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.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).
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.
The problem with Doom 3's gameplay is it was too fucking dark and constantly having demons jump scare you or spawn behind you got stale quickly. At some point I need to give the BFG edition a try which at least addresses the "too fucking dark" aspect, but that's also now a 2012 game instead of a 2004 game.
The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
Similar. I played Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II a lot. But by the time Doom 3 came out, the gameplay just didn't interest me. I guess I got further than you, I shot a few enemies. But meh.
> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out.
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now of course lots of people will jump to my throat with tons of counter examples, to which I respond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Yeah every year almost 100 people win over a million dollars in a lottery. That's a lot of counter examples, but I don't recommend you make winning the lottery your financial strategy.
Not disagreeing with you. Successfull people tend to have IQs between 120 and 135. (citation needed) It makes sense because there are a LOT more people in that range than in the 135+ range. 120-135 is often sufficient. I suspect that something similar on the rich scale. People like Gates, Bezos and Musk were not fabulous wealthy, but they had enough to be able to bet big and take big chances.
The point they were making is that no matter how smart you are or hard you work, there are factors outside of your control that can prevent you from succeeding. That's not to say being smart or working hard doesn't improve the likelihood of success, but they're not a guarantee.
> Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
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.
Mocking effective altruism is not really a difficult or complex philosophic endeavor though, even without pointing out how it's old ideas for a new audience.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.
I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment.
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.
Humanities in academia is just as bad as human factors. The biggest thing that can help is having a shitty low paying job or two early in one's career. And then working formal a stable, normal company where there is real mentorship.
The biggest problem with humanities in academia is that they sometimes seem allergic to epistemic humility (which I guess was Feynman's critique of parts of the humanities).
When I say humanities, I mean having a humanistic attitude. Looking at the social and environmental dynamics before looking at any specific technical issue in detail. Not necessarily anything to do with academia.
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.
Which Hamming quote, btw, do you refer to? I think he mostly talks about talking with other "smart" people, and communicating what you are working on a lot (like giving talks, etc.). But, this doesn't read like much of a case for the humanities, per se.
I always thought that an Engineering degree with an MBA is a very good combination. You get very practical, useful things when you are younger. Once you have acquired enough life and work experience then you can appreciate the subtleties of cases that you study in an MBA.
You still study the humanities. I majored in software engineering, minored in business. I still took a full year of philosophy classes. Literature too.
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.”
Given the state of politics all these complaints are not really a young person problem; stubborn judges who refuse to step aside despite cancer in their geriatric years. Reps and Senators sliding into dementia live on TV!
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.
because they're smarter than everyone else and
there is nothing of value to be learned from others
Yeah. It's absolutely unreal how often this is seen in our industry.
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.
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?
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.
> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.
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.
At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.
I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
> founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure)
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.
Everybody knows this... especially those that gaslight people into working themselves to the bone. They know that people wisen up to this so they hire younger people, before they understood the game.
Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well.
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.
The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.
Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."
I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry.
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.
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.
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.
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. 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.
Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.
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.
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.
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"
> 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.
Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming.
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 meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
Carmack is a godly programmer, but he's largely a technical guy. Everything he releases is a feat of technical engineering ("real 3D!"; "curved surfaces!"; "realistic lighting!"; "the Megatexture!"), not so much artistic achievement. We could really see that after Doom 2 when all of the creatives at Id started jumping ship. The level design that you need to reinforce the technical leaps just wasn't there anymore.
Quake 1 was worth it even if just for the multiplayer. It was so good that people were having fun online even on just the "start" map with the shareware version. Quakeworld was especially great and very playable even with a modem. Then you add the moddability (including QuakeC) and the groundbreaking renderer, it's one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming history.
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.
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world.
After reading those IdSoft histories, Quake shipped a new client server networking layer, a new quake C scripting engine, the new fully polygonal engine …
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
And this burnt the team out, made quake’s development a compromised scramble and led to Romero’s departure. That’s no way to run a company.
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.
Weird. Quake 1 was amazing. All my peers were counting the days for the release and the soundtrack hit right when nin was breaking huge. Sure the end of the game was lame, but the environment was magical. Unfortunately for a lot of people FPS games just became straight up redundant as we aged out of the genre.
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
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.
Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.
If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.
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.
It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.
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.
> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.
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.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
I think the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" campaign in particular was an incredibly bad call, especially in the "gay panic" era, and made people want to see it fail.
Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.
Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing.
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.
Young energy shouldn’t be apologized. Apparently Bill Gates had that psycho energy too, Jobs and many others too.
On a civilizational scale it seems like a net benefit that young, eager and driven people give a bit more than they wanted to in retrospect. It do indeed change things for the rest of us.
The patriotic call of armed forces has been driven by this for millennia. At least Carmack and Co. chose their own missions, most soldiers are not so lucky.
I’m sitting here in Denmark having been affected by these geeks. They may not have built the Pantheon, but surely they have channeled a group of people’s creativity towards something we have integrated into our society?
Not saying they didn't have an impact -- just that it's worth debating whether the impact is truly a net positive for society on a grand scale, particularly if we're going to give them a pass on less than stellar behavior.
Zuckerberg likely has similar tendencies, should he be given a pass for making social media such a large part of our society?
That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.
I have not reason to defend these people or their actions, but can we know their future success was not formed by their formative experiences at Id?
I think we undervalue hardship and struggle as accelerants.
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.
He's not apologizing for young energy. Young energy is a wonderful thing but without accompanying wisdom and restfulness for the vast majority of people is just spinning your wheels in place burning out and not achieving anything of importance.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience.
We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it.
That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
Clicked on link, it tried to upsell me on twitter prime or whatever it is. Closed the promotion, now I'm just sitting on twitter, not on the link I clicked on.
It's a shitty way to read anyway. An adventure game of finding the context and putting pieces together.
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.
ID dominated the PC shooter scene for 4.5 generations in a row. Insane.
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.
Thought about this last week during discussions on the Bobby Prince (RIP)...
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.
Didn't Adrian Carmack (the art guy; no relation) get something like 10x more equity in the company than Carmack and Romero b/c of how badly they botched their cap table?
IIRC, when the company was formed, everyone got an equal split. They may have issued more shares when some other key people joined. But, when someone quit or was fired, they had to forfeit all shares (got paid out based on the companies revenue over the last year).
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%.
John Carmack slaved away writing super optimized ground breaking realtime 3d game engine code that created a multibillion dollar industry.
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!
> 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!
The interesting part of reading through the various threads Sandy Petersen's tweet spawned is that a lot of people seem to see Quake as the last great id Software game, and as someone who played a ton of their games back in the day, for me Quake 2 was the first great one and Quake III Arena was the last great one.
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.
We don't need to wait for GTA 6. RDR 2 was already a serious letdown from the first game. Rockstar has lost sight of the fact that they are making games, not movies, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR 2 is significantly less fun to play than its predecessor because they are constantly trying to shove cinematic moments and immersion into the game.
This is a perfect articulation of why even 13 years later, I still have no motivation to beat GTA 5. It worked great as a quasi-movie but not a video game.
Happened to me with GTA IV and I have been playing all games since GTA 1. Maybe I just grew too old for these story-driven games, but I never finished it and haven't touched GTA V at all. San Andreas was probably my favorite.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at all given how different people's tastes and preferences are, but I couldn't feel any less in agreement. RDR2 was an incredible experience I still haven't come close to completing purely due t my enjoyment of the immersive content you're deriding. It's not a perfect games by any means but the amount of awe I get from the systems in the game and the immersion it gives me is enough to have me extremely excited for GTA 6 as someone who was previously extremely skeptical of it living up to anywhere near its hype.
Any form of media can be criticized, that's the nature of it... but RDR 2 is widely considered to be among the best games ever made.
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.
One thing that happened much later, after Carmack himself left, was that id software stopped pushing the boundaries of engine development. Their last great innovation was magatextures, or virtual texture streaming in its more modern form.
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.
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.
I've actually been playing some Quake mods recently..
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.
They could have, I'm not convinced they would have. It's very difficult for designers to come up with something novel and good. Most of the amazing things you with old tech are backports of ideas that only exist because people using new tech had them.
Quake is easily the most groundbreaking game released. Not only was it the first popular game with real 3D. The game play was the first that really took the precision from old games and transformed it into 3D. An excellent piece of tech that many games as of today still are children of.
I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then."
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.
I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.
Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.
It is super refreshing to hear someone saying sorry. Honestly. In a manner that actually seems sincere and self reflective.
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 was interested in Quake only because of the breakthrough 3D
graphics, architecturally stunning levels, and later QuakeC.
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.
from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a position to continue to succeed. quake 2 was the misstep, it just wasn’t that great of a game, or that’s how it looked from the outside
Quake 1 was an unbelievable tech breakthrough: full 3d, quakec vm, overall engine design held up really well. It was not a perfect game but it was ok.
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.
It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.
Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
There was this obscure indy game called Half-Life, maybe you've heard of it.
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.'
This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.
Id was technical excellence paired with artistic blindness. As the machines progressed, the value of the technical excellence faded. What was left? A test case for OS & compiler development.
The issue wasn't artistic blindness, the id art was solid. The issue was a lack of game design. Doom worked because it was crazy fast and you could have a lot of sprites on the screen at once, so it had this crazy hectic quality. Quake's 3d engine meant you couldn't be so fast and couldn't anywhere close to the number of enemies on screen at once, so the game wanted a more soulslike design, but they stuck with the run and gun design but with spongier enemies, which just didn't feel great.
It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece.
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.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."
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".
> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos
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.
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
"Sorry, Sandy"
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)
The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit?
> 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?
So from what little I know of the history there were some serious personal issues going on in the team that led to ~7 of the 11-12 folk on Quake eventually leaving.
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.
The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software":
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] ...
Still not quite exactly following Carmack's suggestion here... is he saying on that last point that the problems with designers/artists were due to Sandy's mistakes (i.e. not a genuine apologetic "sorry" but a "sorry you're wrong" type response)?
He is acknowledging that it was a problem and apologizing for it happening, but is not personally taking the blame for causing said problem
> ... [thread continues] ...
That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...
https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
From various interviews with designers who were at iD during that period, it seems there was a fair amount of conflict between them. One in particular seems to be severely disliked by Sandy and others to this day. Presumably Carmack wishes he had done a better job managing those conflicts.
also this post was a reply to Sandy on X.
Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
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.
In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192...
Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.
The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
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)
Don't forget that the entire Call of Duty series also sits on Quake's shoulders.
goldsrc is based off the q1 engine.
Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.
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 :)
Quake 2 multiplayer is such a blast. The cat-and-mouse chase fights in that game is what defines the genre of "arena shooter" for me, there's still nothing else really like it.
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.
Personally I think Unreal Tournament perfected the genre when it comes to multiplayer. Q1 was a lot of spamming of grenades and so on. Q2 was better. Still a lot of chaos. UT99 was also chaos but you could combine it with perfect moves and high precision shots. Great games all of them. I used to be an elite UT99 player but as the pace kept increasing along with my age my reaction time was simple not good enough anymore. Even if tactics compensated a lot those games are not like sneaking around in CS. I mostly played CTF. Good old times.
Quake III art style and level design is disgusting, depressing and boring. But it is the better game.
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.
Rocket. Jump.
The original Team Fortress on quake.net is where I grew to appreciate the beauty.
Same here. I enjoyed Q3A, but I spent so many hours playing TF/MegaTF.
There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.
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...
Both The Longest Yard and Facing Worlds can now be played instantly on the web:
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.
I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.
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).
Quake III Arena was super fun!
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.
Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
> Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
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).
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.
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.
I think you might be misremembering Doom 3 a bit. Both it and Half Life 2 came out in the same year, and, well... just compare:
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.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).
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.
The problem with Doom 3's gameplay is it was too fucking dark and constantly having demons jump scare you or spawn behind you got stale quickly. At some point I need to give the BFG edition a try which at least addresses the "too fucking dark" aspect, but that's also now a 2012 game instead of a 2004 game.
The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
I have attempted to play Doom 3 on three separate occasions in my life, and each time I gave up before ever having a chance to fire a weapon.
Similar. I played Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II a lot. But by the time Doom 3 came out, the gameplay just didn't interest me. I guess I got further than you, I shot a few enemies. But meh.
HL2 just on physics wins over Doom 3 any day. It's far superior in every aspect.
Same feeling.
Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
Yet, Quake III Arena had no single player. It was a fun MP game, I spent years playing. It's not really the same as Quake and Quake 2.
Single player = beating the "campaign" in Nightmare difficulty with Gauntlet only :) (but I don't remember how far I got)
> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out.
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now of course lots of people will jump to my throat with tons of counter examples, to which I respond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Yeah every year almost 100 people win over a million dollars in a lottery. That's a lot of counter examples, but I don't recommend you make winning the lottery your financial strategy.
Not disagreeing with you. Successfull people tend to have IQs between 120 and 135. (citation needed) It makes sense because there are a LOT more people in that range than in the 135+ range. 120-135 is often sufficient. I suspect that something similar on the rich scale. People like Gates, Bezos and Musk were not fabulous wealthy, but they had enough to be able to bet big and take big chances.
The point they were making is that no matter how smart you are or hard you work, there are factors outside of your control that can prevent you from succeeding. That's not to say being smart or working hard doesn't improve the likelihood of success, but they're not a guarantee.
> Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
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.
Mocking effective altruism is not really a difficult or complex philosophic endeavor though, even without pointing out how it's old ideas for a new audience.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
> We never learn.
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.
> 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.
This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.
I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment.
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.
Humanities in academia is just as bad as human factors. The biggest thing that can help is having a shitty low paying job or two early in one's career. And then working formal a stable, normal company where there is real mentorship.
The biggest problem with humanities in academia is that they sometimes seem allergic to epistemic humility (which I guess was Feynman's critique of parts of the humanities).
When I say humanities, I mean having a humanistic attitude. Looking at the social and environmental dynamics before looking at any specific technical issue in detail. Not necessarily anything to do with academia.
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.
Which Hamming quote, btw, do you refer to? I think he mostly talks about talking with other "smart" people, and communicating what you are working on a lot (like giving talks, etc.). But, this doesn't read like much of a case for the humanities, per se.
I always thought that an Engineering degree with an MBA is a very good combination. You get very practical, useful things when you are younger. Once you have acquired enough life and work experience then you can appreciate the subtleties of cases that you study in an MBA.
Two degrees with practically zero education in the liberal arts, humanities, or philosophy. You're missing a big chunk there.
You still study the humanities. I majored in software engineering, minored in business. I still took a full year of philosophy classes. Literature too.
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
It's a side effect of rewarding 20-somethings with lots of money to do 'smart' things with stuff they learn in an undergraduate degree.
It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.
Given the state of politics all these complaints are not really a young person problem; stubborn judges who refuse to step aside despite cancer in their geriatric years. Reps and Senators sliding into dementia live on TV!
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.
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.
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?
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.
> "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
- Attributed to Nasrudin
> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.
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.
At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
Been doing this since my early 30's, and doing it currently.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
this is true in all human endeavors. Tech is not special in this regard, alas.
Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.
I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
> founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure)
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.
I'm of the opinion that people will be more successful if you don't act like their back is against the wall even if it is
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
No, I fully agree with you.
Everybody knows this... especially those that gaslight people into working themselves to the bone. They know that people wisen up to this so they hire younger people, before they understood the game.
Classic.
Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well.
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's a fascinating period to learn to navigate.
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.
The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.
Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.
Also worth considering if there is survivorship bias in this wisdom.
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)
Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."
I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry.
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..
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.
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.
Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. 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.
Ironically you're only listening to his words of wisdom because the team created an incredible game.
Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like
Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.
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.
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.
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"
> 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.
What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?
Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming.
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 meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work
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
In the linked thread that John Carmack is responding to, Sandy Petersen agrees:
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.
https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034
More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".
And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.
Carmack is a godly programmer, but he's largely a technical guy. Everything he releases is a feat of technical engineering ("real 3D!"; "curved surfaces!"; "realistic lighting!"; "the Megatexture!"), not so much artistic achievement. We could really see that after Doom 2 when all of the creatives at Id started jumping ship. The level design that you need to reinforce the technical leaps just wasn't there anymore.
Quake 1 was worth it even if just for the multiplayer. It was so good that people were having fun online even on just the "start" map with the shareware version. Quakeworld was especially great and very playable even with a modem. Then you add the moddability (including QuakeC) and the groundbreaking renderer, it's one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming history.
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.
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world.
Sandy's quote here buried unfortunately by X.
Sandy's original post to which John was replying: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
After reading those IdSoft histories, Quake shipped a new client server networking layer, a new quake C scripting engine, the new fully polygonal engine …
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
And this burnt the team out, made quake’s development a compromised scramble and led to Romero’s departure. That’s no way to run a company.
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.
Weird. Quake 1 was amazing. All my peers were counting the days for the release and the soundtrack hit right when nin was breaking huge. Sure the end of the game was lame, but the environment was magical. Unfortunately for a lot of people FPS games just became straight up redundant as we aged out of the genre.
Why are folks still submitting so many twitter.com links?
because X is a dumb name
Yeah but it's a lot easier to turn an x.com link into an xcancel link so you can actually read it logged out .
It will always be Twitter...
Because that is where Carmack posted his thoughts, not anywhere else. Original source.
Wether you like it or not, X/Twitter is still a primary posting ground for many key people in our industry.
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
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.
Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.
Yeah Romero said they signed an agreement saying that it was accurate: https://qr.ae/pFH291
If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.
It's been on my list, but I haven't read it yet.
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.
[1] https://sharewareheroes.com/
For anyone who wants more books that dig into the games industry, all of Jason Schreier's books are fantastic.
It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.
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.
> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.
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.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
I think the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" campaign in particular was an incredibly bad call, especially in the "gay panic" era, and made people want to see it fail.
Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.
Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing.
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.
Young energy shouldn’t be apologized. Apparently Bill Gates had that psycho energy too, Jobs and many others too. On a civilizational scale it seems like a net benefit that young, eager and driven people give a bit more than they wanted to in retrospect. It do indeed change things for the rest of us. The patriotic call of armed forces has been driven by this for millennia. At least Carmack and Co. chose their own missions, most soldiers are not so lucky.
I’m not sure it’s necessarily a given that what Jobs, Gates, and Carmack created are net-positives when talking on a civilizational scale.
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.
I’m sitting here in Denmark having been affected by these geeks. They may not have built the Pantheon, but surely they have channeled a group of people’s creativity towards something we have integrated into our society?
Not saying they didn't have an impact -- just that it's worth debating whether the impact is truly a net positive for society on a grand scale, particularly if we're going to give them a pass on less than stellar behavior.
Zuckerberg likely has similar tendencies, should he be given a pass for making social media such a large part of our society?
A lot of people on HN confuse "large impact" with "positive impact."
I am under the impression that a big part of the current AI progress is the result of the availability of chips that were created for gaming.
Also worth considering (and probably waiting and seeing) if the current AI progress is a net positive for society on the grand scale.
personal computing is inseparable from technological progress, and has been wildly positive for humanity
>And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.
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 think he is talking more about the malaria foundation.
That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.
I have not reason to defend these people or their actions, but can we know their future success was not formed by their formative experiences at Id? I think we undervalue hardship and struggle as accelerants.
Why not? What if it did bad?
At least it was just a game company :)
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.
It's not being "picky" to those whose lives get worse.
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.
He's not apologizing for young energy. Young energy is a wonderful thing but without accompanying wisdom and restfulness for the vast majority of people is just spinning your wheels in place burning out and not achieving anything of importance.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience. We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it. That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
Clicked on link, it tried to upsell me on twitter prime or whatever it is. Closed the promotion, now I'm just sitting on twitter, not on the link I clicked on.
That is sad.
Use xcancel, not Twitter.
It's a shitty way to read anyway. An adventure game of finding the context and putting pieces together.
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.
ID dominated the PC shooter scene for 4.5 generations in a row. Insane.
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 vaporware? It sold a million copies on release and got a sequel... Are we talking about the same game?
You actually aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)
Quake was an incredible leap forward in desktop games.
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
Thought about this last week during discussions on the Bobby Prince (RIP)...
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.
Didn't Adrian Carmack (the art guy; no relation) get something like 10x more equity in the company than Carmack and Romero b/c of how badly they botched their cap table?
he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues
Wow. Can anyone recommend a good write-up on that history?
41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.
IIRC, when the company was formed, everyone got an equal split. They may have issued more shares when some other key people joined. But, when someone quit or was fired, they had to forfeit all shares (got paid out based on the companies revenue over the last year).
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%.
John Carmack slaved away writing super optimized ground breaking realtime 3d game engine code that created a multibillion dollar industry.
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!
> 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!
Work smarter, not harder.
Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.
The interesting part of reading through the various threads Sandy Petersen's tweet spawned is that a lot of people seem to see Quake as the last great id Software game, and as someone who played a ton of their games back in the day, for me Quake 2 was the first great one and Quake III Arena was the last great one.
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.
Their more recent works are amazing pieces of entertainment: DOOM, Eternal and Dark Ages
Is the domain twitter.com has problems? I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
Maybe peak excellence is simply not sustainable.
Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.
Well there was no "id Wives Letter"
We don't need to wait for GTA 6. RDR 2 was already a serious letdown from the first game. Rockstar has lost sight of the fact that they are making games, not movies, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR 2 is significantly less fun to play than its predecessor because they are constantly trying to shove cinematic moments and immersion into the game.
This is a perfect articulation of why even 13 years later, I still have no motivation to beat GTA 5. It worked great as a quasi-movie but not a video game.
Happened to me with GTA IV and I have been playing all games since GTA 1. Maybe I just grew too old for these story-driven games, but I never finished it and haven't touched GTA V at all. San Andreas was probably my favorite.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at all given how different people's tastes and preferences are, but I couldn't feel any less in agreement. RDR2 was an incredible experience I still haven't come close to completing purely due t my enjoyment of the immersive content you're deriding. It's not a perfect games by any means but the amount of awe I get from the systems in the game and the immersion it gives me is enough to have me extremely excited for GTA 6 as someone who was previously extremely skeptical of it living up to anywhere near its hype.
Any form of media can be criticized, that's the nature of it... but RDR 2 is widely considered to be among the best games ever made.
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.
I enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but even it had too many cut scenes, come to think of it, so did Metro Exodus.
One thing that happened much later, after Carmack himself left, was that id software stopped pushing the boundaries of engine development. Their last great innovation was magatextures, or virtual texture streaming in its more modern form.
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.
The trajectory of id software is interesting.
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.
> Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.
Now what was that thing about living long enough to become the villain.
I've actually been playing some Quake mods recently..
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.
Great read. Further proof that we are all victims of each others learning experiences.
What ruined the company was refusing to turn ID Tech into an ecosystem to compete with Unreal and Source Engine.
They could have, I'm not convinced they would have. It's very difficult for designers to come up with something novel and good. Most of the amazing things you with old tech are backports of ideas that only exist because people using new tech had them.
Quake is easily the most groundbreaking game released. Not only was it the first popular game with real 3D. The game play was the first that really took the precision from old games and transformed it into 3D. An excellent piece of tech that many games as of today still are children of.
I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then."
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.
I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.
Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.
It is super refreshing to hear someone saying sorry. Honestly. In a manner that actually seems sincere and self reflective.
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 was interested in Quake only because of the breakthrough 3D graphics, architecturally stunning levels, and later QuakeC.
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.
from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a position to continue to succeed. quake 2 was the misstep, it just wasn’t that great of a game, or that’s how it looked from the outside
Quake 1 was an unbelievable tech breakthrough: full 3d, quakec vm, overall engine design held up really well. It was not a perfect game but it was ok.
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.
Sandy might remember.
Fair point, I'm going to retract that remark.
It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.
Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
Might matter a lot to sandy. I think it says a lot that decades later one of the things he remembers is someone he (or the larger company) hurt.
Id software would've benefitted from the income of another release. I thoroughly enjoyed Build games before and long after Quake.
Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
> It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines.
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)
There was this obscure indy game called Half-Life, maybe you've heard of it.
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.'
> There was this obscure indy game called Half-Life,
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
Was john carmack the elon musk of that time (minus the political baggage Era)?
xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.
Thanks. Here’s a direct xcancel link to the complete chain of Sandy’s posts that John Carmack replied to.
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
There's also a XCancel Firefox extension to redirect all your browsing: https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/toxcancel/
My hero. Thanks
Thanks!!
This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.
Id was technical excellence paired with artistic blindness. As the machines progressed, the value of the technical excellence faded. What was left? A test case for OS & compiler development.
The issue wasn't artistic blindness, the id art was solid. The issue was a lack of game design. Doom worked because it was crazy fast and you could have a lot of sprites on the screen at once, so it had this crazy hectic quality. Quake's 3d engine meant you couldn't be so fast and couldn't anywhere close to the number of enemies on screen at once, so the game wanted a more soulslike design, but they stuck with the run and gun design but with spongier enemies, which just didn't feel great.
Doom 3 doesn’t look like artistic blindness.
It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece.
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
>It's silly to revisit your mistakes like this
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.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."
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".
If we don't look back and asses what worked, and what didn't, how do we grow?
> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos
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.
I agree with that. You got an old version of my comment before I clarified that, now it says:
"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid..."
I disagree, even for successful projects retrospection toward mistakes is worth the pain to learn.
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
Unreal was great single player and fun for multiplayer but there's no comparison in terms of the way the game played competitively vs Quake.
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
I believe id paid him to port ctf to Quake 2 and Quake 3.