The median games programmer wouldn't be able to do it in 50 years. (assuming they were locked in a room for 50 years with that same hardware, not that they got

The median games programmer wouldn't be able to do it in 50 years. (assuming they were locked in a room for 50 years with that same hardware, not that they got to see state of the art progress and upgrade their machine) The amount of innovation, from applied BSP, Zbuffer tradeoffs, light maps with interpolation, interleaved FPU corrections for texture mapping, multiplayer protocols (qtest used TCP), brush-levels, etc... Before ID software did these things, they weren't checkboxes for what to do. After, sure. But the hard part of programming is not typing. The median programmer would not have been able to do it before it had been completely irrelevant. The median games programmer could do it in 2005. In 1993-1996? Not a chance. The main competitor to Quake was Duke Nukem, which technologically was just "doom and a half". The enemies were sprites, ffs. ID software was years ahead of every other games developer. The reason other games licensed the Quake engine wasn't that it was cheaper than doing it yourself, it was that they couldn't do it. Edit: granted, I have a low opinion of the median programmer. But sometimes in life you meet people who, with things you think you're actually pretty good at, just completely mop the floor with you without even trying (or showing off). It's humbling.