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.
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.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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)
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.
Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume
> 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).
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.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Their more recent works are amazing pieces of entertainment: DOOM, Eternal and Dark Ages
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.
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
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.
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.
Why are folks still submitting so many twitter.com links?
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?
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.
Is the domain twitter.com has problems? I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
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.
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.
Maybe peak excellence is simply not sustainable.
What ruined the company was refusing to turn ID Tech into an ecosystem to compete with Unreal and Source Engine.
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.
Great read. Further proof that we are all victims of each others learning experiences.
Was john carmack the elon musk of that time (minus the political baggage Era)?
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.
xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
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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.
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