9 ms·

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

571 points by shadowtree 3mo ago

https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247

s20n 3mo ago
xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
- epistasis 3mo ago
  Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.
  - curiousObject 3mo ago
    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/2069592209645785294 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
- entropicdrifter 3mo ago
  My hero. Thanks
- not_a_bot_4sho 3mo ago
  Thanks!!
- distances 3mo ago
  There's also a XCancel Firefox extension to redirect all your browsing: https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/toxcancel/ https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/toxcancel/
ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
> 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...
- bigmattystyles 3mo ago
  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.
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    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
    - bigmattystyles 3mo ago
      No, I fully agree with you.
    - pdimitar 3mo ago
      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.
    - andrekandre 3mo ago
      > You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases
  - 3mo ago
tejohnso 3mo ago
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.
- TheGRS 3mo ago
  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.
- rzzzt 3mo ago
  Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume
  - account42 3mo ago
    Shadow volumes turned out to be a dead end technology though because they can only do unrealistically hard shadows.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- kridsdale1 3mo ago
  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.
CamperBob2 3mo ago
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.
- jorl17 3mo ago
  Sandy might remember.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    Fair point, I'm going to retract that remark.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago
  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.
  - somat 3mo ago
    It is also a case of different focus. in retorspect Id had a rather narrow focus. They made solid top tech engines and their games were fun. But very simple. The build engine and later the unreal engine the focus was more on having more fleshed out systems for the game makers to take advantage of. Id's engines feel quite sterile by comparison.
- zaphar 3mo ago
  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.
legohead 3mo ago
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.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  Use xcancel, not Twitter.
  - pornel 3mo ago
    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.
lokimedes 3mo ago
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.
- Daishiman 3mo ago
  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.
  - lokimedes 3mo ago
    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.
- mikeocool 3mo ago
  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.
  - lokimedes 3mo ago
    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?
grim_io 3mo ago
Maybe peak excellence is simply not sustainable.
- logicchains 3mo ago
  Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.
  - bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    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.
    - stuxnet79 3mo ago
      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.
      - WA 3mo ago
        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.
    - newsoftheday 3mo ago
      I enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but even it had too many cut scenes, come to think of it, so did Metro Exodus.
    - mynameajeff 3mo ago
      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.
tombert 3mo ago
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.
- stuxnet79 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - tombert 3mo ago
    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.
    - lobf 3mo ago
      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.
DDayMace 3mo ago
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jacobgold 3mo ago
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 https://youtu.be/tU6v8C1pw8Y?t=675
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  >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.
  - jacobgold 3mo ago
    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".
    - Jare 3mo ago
      > 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.
georgemcbay 3mo ago
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.
_doctor_love 3mo ago
Great read. Further proof that we are all victims of each others learning experiences.
draw_down 3mo ago
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starkparker 3mo ago
"Sorry, Sandy" Sandy Petersen's side of it comes out in a few interviews, like https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU (especially 14:17 onward)
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- jpadkins 3mo ago
  also this post was a reply to Sandy on X.
  - iAmAPencilYo 3mo ago
    (not a Twitter user) I saw the post linked below Carmacks post and I had assumed it's a comment to his post!
    - account42 3mo ago
      Yes, the way twitter mixes top posting for quotes and bottom posting for replies (which shouldn't really be separate features in the first place) and top posting again for timelines is really confusing if you are not a frequent user.
- JeremyNT 3mo ago
  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?
krautburglar 3mo ago
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.
- groundzeros2015 3mo ago
  Doom 3 doesn’t look like artistic blindness.
- CuriouslyC 3mo ago
  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.
everyone 3mo ago
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.
hooo 3mo ago
Why are folks still submitting so many twitter.com links?
- ElijahLynn 3mo ago
  It will always be Twitter...
- ryandvm 3mo ago
  because X is a dumb name
  - furyofantares 3mo ago
    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 .
    - account42 3mo ago
      Unfortunately xcancel has annoying bot protection these days so for individual tweets x.com is actually more usable IMO. Not that xcancel is the only remaining working nitter instance but I'm not aware of others that both work and keep their bot checks reasonable for non-Chrome users.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- shadowtree 3mo ago
  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.
yiggnewer 3mo ago
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jimbob45 3mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832 Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
hiddencost 3mo ago
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.
LarsDu88 3mo ago
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?
- efficax 3mo ago
  he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues
  - ibejoeb 3mo ago
    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.
    - LarsDu88 3mo ago
      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!
      - bdamm 3mo ago
        Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.
      - nozzlegear 3mo ago
        > 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.
FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
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.
supertroop 3mo ago
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.
- KellyCriterion 3mo ago
  IIRC, NiN was already huge before this?
  - supertroop 3mo ago
    Yes. The downward spiral exploded into the pop scene in 94 from a goth niche to sorority girls going to nin concerts just to get drunk and scream “I want f you like an animal”. It was a weird time for us goths watching our secret club become pop. Nin rode the wave for years. The Music arc moved much more slowly then.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
AtNightWeCode 3mo ago
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.
throwaway613746 3mo ago
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casey2 3mo ago
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.
rustyhancock 3mo ago
> 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.
- JeremyNT 3mo ago
  Sandy's original post to which John was replying: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294#m https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
dekdrop 3mo ago
Is the domain twitter.com has problems? I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
pipeline_peak 3mo ago
What ruined the company was refusing to turn ID Tech into an ecosystem to compete with Unreal and Source Engine.
orliesaurus 3mo ago
Was john carmack the elon musk of that time (minus the political baggage Era)?
- fatbird 3mo ago
  No, Carmack is actually an incredibly smart and talented engineer.
BiscuitBadger 3mo ago
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
- BiscuitBadger 3mo ago
  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.
stephc_int13 3mo ago
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.
- sunrunner 3mo ago
  > Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic. Now what was that thing about living long enough to become the villain.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  The loss of the original team was a tremendous blow. After Quake, a common criticism of id was that they put out tech demos instead of games.
AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago
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.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  The technical innovations also began to have no impact or even an adverse one. Doom 3's push for 100% real-time stencil shadows was practically ignored by the industry when HL2 and other competitors came out. MegaTexture was actually removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.
  - kllrnohj 3mo ago
    While MegaTexture was removed from Doom Eternal because it's just not necessary in a small level-based game like that, the general idea was carried on. It's a big reason you could basically describe the entire PS4 era as the era of texture pop-in. Virtual texturing made it very easy to build massively large worlds, using GPU "page misses" to figure out what textures to stream in. The problem is, well, the player sees it. As ugly as fuck texture pop-in.
    - zeuxcg 3mo ago
      No, mega texture like approaches were almost never used outside of a couple id games. The texture pop in was mip streaming, which persists to this day but memory is a bit less scarce and disk read speeds are much better so you notice it less.
  - account42 3mo ago
    Stencil shadows never had a chance as the primary technique for games targeting realistic graphics as they inherently cannot do soft shadows.
bluedino 3mo ago
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.
- lobf 3mo ago
  Prey was vaporware? It sold a million copies on release and got a sequel... Are we talking about the same game?
  - vor_ 3mo ago
    Prey was infamously in development in various forms for over a decade.
  - Dilettante_ 3mo ago
    You actually aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)
    - lobf 3mo ago
      Yes, the 2006 one is the one I'm talking about. From the opening of the article: >Prey was a commercial success, selling more than one million copies in the first two months of its release and leading to the abortive development of its sequel Prey 2.
      - Dilettante_ 3mo ago
        Oops, I just gormlessly assumed you meant the other one because I also had the (2006) one in the "unsuccessful/failure"-Bucket in my head. Sorry about that.
curiousObject 3mo ago
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
- account42 3mo ago
  > That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine How is that telling? Source is based on Q1 instead of Q2 because Valve decided to keep working on the HL1 engine (GoldSrc) which already had extensive modifications from Q1 instead of rebasing all that work on Q2 or another engine. It's a perfectly valid decision irrespective of the quality of the Q2 engine.
cubefox 3mo ago
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.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  Megatexture caused a lot of problems. In fact, it was such a hindrance that it was removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.
  - cubefox 3mo ago
    I believe it was merely replaced with virtual textures, which is a very similar texture streaming technique. Most modern games use it now.
hugodan 3mo ago
Their more recent works are amazing pieces of entertainment: DOOM, Eternal and Dark Ages
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
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.
Waterluvian 3mo ago
I don’t believe the ends justify the means and I respect his perspective on these regrets. I wonder if he’s kind of looking back from a position of assumed success. Would Quake have succeeded on a Doom++ engine? I remember feeling that Quake was something remarkably different from Doom, mainly because it felt actually worth using the mouse with. Marathon II on the Mac introduced me to mouse movement but it was very limited and kind of fisheyed and weird. Quake just felt good with the mouse.
- _jackdk_ 3mo ago
  Speculation, as someone who grew up with some of those games: We could use Heretic/Hexen as the most direct contemporary example of a "Doom++ engine": it had keyboard look up/down, inventory, and the ability to fly up/down. Wiki reckons Heretic sold 500k units and Doom 2 sold 1.2M. Hard to say in hindsight if that was caused by less enthusiasm for a fantasy aesthetic or the decline in enthusiasm for Doom-level tech. We can also look at how far BUILD-style engines were able to push environments in 2.5d engines of the day. Duke3D had sloping floors and wildly changing terrain that was revolutionary for the time. (Remember the second level in the shareware version, where you basically blew up a building halfway through the level?) Other contemporary BUILD-style titles like Eradicator were able to add crude room-over-room by declaring floating platforms and other special entities without having to build them into truly 3D world geometry. A third point on the triangle might be Rise of the Triad, which pushed the Wolf3D engine well beyond anything a normal person would expect. Apogee were able to add keyboard look up/down and flight up/down, more verticality in levels by adding floating discs and floors (again outside of the standard level geometry). And to stretch the triangle metaphor to a tetrahedron, there's also a lot stuff from the Doom source port universe that might have been invented if Carmack & Co. had to push the Doom engine as far as it could go. When you can add new things and linedef/sector actions, that allows a lot of flexibility when you don't have to build the engine from scratch. All that makes me think that 1994 iD could probably have had a commercially successful game on a Doom++, especially if Carmack kept learning all the portability and networking stuff that made Quakeworld work during the shift to Windows 95. What's much less clear to me is whether they'd be able to catch and/or drive the wave of 3D accelerator development, and whether Epic MegaGames would have just leapfrogged them completely with Unreal. I think the Quake-on-Doom++ timeline might end with Unreal becoming the engine more people built on through the 2000s (instead of all the Q3/idTech3-based games). The talent retention could mean that iD stays competitive on worldbuilding and feel (the Doom Bible shows they had some of those ideas, but the tech wasn't ready for them), and Carmack+Abrash+... could probably catch up with Sweeney+.... We probably don't get American McGee's Alice in that timeline though. EDIT: The other thing to consider is that Descent was also bringing 6DOF (degrees of freedom) to PC gaming. While it was a portal-based engine like BUILD, it had 3D-modelled polygonal enemies etc. It was a beloved but niche title because it was so challenging to play, but it shows that there's a bunch of technical innovation around at the time, and maybe it gets a larger market share and the technical innovation happens with or without iD?
zftnb666 3mo ago
Regret is just experience that arrived too late to help.

571 points by shadowtree 3mo ago

https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247

s20n 3mo ago

xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247

epistasis 3mo ago
Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.
- curiousObject 3mo ago
  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/2069592209645785294 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
entropicdrifter 3mo ago
My hero. Thanks
not_a_bot_4sho 3mo ago
Thanks!!
distances 3mo ago
There's also a XCancel Firefox extension to redirect all your browsing: https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/toxcancel/ https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/toxcancel/

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago

> 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...

bigmattystyles 3mo ago
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.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  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
  - bigmattystyles 3mo ago
    No, I fully agree with you.
  - pdimitar 3mo ago
    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.
  - andrekandre 3mo ago
    > You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases
- 3mo ago

tejohnso 3mo ago

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.

TheGRS 3mo ago
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.
rzzzt 3mo ago
Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume
- account42 3mo ago
  Shadow volumes turned out to be a dead end technology though because they can only do unrealistically hard shadows.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
kridsdale1 3mo ago
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.

CamperBob2 3mo ago

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.

jorl17 3mo ago
Sandy might remember.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  Fair point, I'm going to retract that remark.
paulryanrogers 3mo ago
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.
- somat 3mo ago
  It is also a case of different focus. in retorspect Id had a rather narrow focus. They made solid top tech engines and their games were fun. But very simple. The build engine and later the unreal engine the focus was more on having more fleshed out systems for the game makers to take advantage of. Id's engines feel quite sterile by comparison.
zaphar 3mo ago
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.

legohead 3mo ago

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.

CamperBob2 3mo ago
Use xcancel, not Twitter.
- pornel 3mo ago
  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.

lokimedes 3mo ago

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.

Daishiman 3mo ago
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.
- lokimedes 3mo ago
  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.
mikeocool 3mo ago
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.
- lokimedes 3mo ago
  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?

grim_io 3mo ago

Maybe peak excellence is simply not sustainable.

logicchains 3mo ago
Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  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.
  - stuxnet79 3mo ago
    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.
    - WA 3mo ago
      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.
  - newsoftheday 3mo ago
    I enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but even it had too many cut scenes, come to think of it, so did Metro Exodus.
  - mynameajeff 3mo ago
    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.

tombert 3mo ago

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.

stuxnet79 3mo ago
> 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.
- tombert 3mo ago
  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.
  - lobf 3mo ago
    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.

DDayMace 3mo ago

[dead]

jacobgold 3mo ago

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 https://youtu.be/tU6v8C1pw8Y?t=675

john_strinlai 3mo ago
>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.
- jacobgold 3mo ago
  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".
  - Jare 3mo ago
    > 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.

georgemcbay 3mo ago

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.

_doctor_love 3mo ago

Great read. Further proof that we are all victims of each others learning experiences.

draw_down 3mo ago

[dead]

starkparker 3mo ago

"Sorry, Sandy" Sandy Petersen's side of it comes out in a few interviews, like https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU (especially 14:17 onward)

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
jpadkins 3mo ago
also this post was a reply to Sandy on X.
- iAmAPencilYo 3mo ago
  (not a Twitter user) I saw the post linked below Carmacks post and I had assumed it's a comment to his post!
  - account42 3mo ago
    Yes, the way twitter mixes top posting for quotes and bottom posting for replies (which shouldn't really be separate features in the first place) and top posting again for timelines is really confusing if you are not a frequent user.
JeremyNT 3mo ago
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?

krautburglar 3mo ago

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.

groundzeros2015 3mo ago
Doom 3 doesn’t look like artistic blindness.
CuriouslyC 3mo ago
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.

everyone 3mo ago

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.

hooo 3mo ago

Why are folks still submitting so many twitter.com links?

ElijahLynn 3mo ago
It will always be Twitter...
ryandvm 3mo ago
because X is a dumb name
- furyofantares 3mo ago
  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 .
  - account42 3mo ago
    Unfortunately xcancel has annoying bot protection these days so for individual tweets x.com is actually more usable IMO. Not that xcancel is the only remaining working nitter instance but I'm not aware of others that both work and keep their bot checks reasonable for non-Chrome users.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
shadowtree 3mo ago
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.

yiggnewer 3mo ago

[dead]

jimbob45 3mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832 Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.

hiddencost 3mo ago

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.

LarsDu88 3mo ago

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?

efficax 3mo ago
he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues
- ibejoeb 3mo ago
  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.
  - LarsDu88 3mo ago
    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!
    - bdamm 3mo ago
      Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.
    - nozzlegear 3mo ago
      > 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.

FartyMcFarter 3mo ago

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.

supertroop 3mo ago

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.

KellyCriterion 3mo ago
IIRC, NiN was already huge before this?
- supertroop 3mo ago
  Yes. The downward spiral exploded into the pop scene in 94 from a goth niche to sorority girls going to nin concerts just to get drunk and scream “I want f you like an animal”. It was a weird time for us goths watching our secret club become pop. Nin rode the wave for years. The Music arc moved much more slowly then.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

AtNightWeCode 3mo ago

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.

throwaway613746 3mo ago

[dead]

casey2 3mo ago

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.

rustyhancock 3mo ago

> 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.

JeremyNT 3mo ago
Sandy's original post to which John was replying: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294#m https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

dekdrop 3mo ago

Is the domain twitter.com has problems? I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.

pipeline_peak 3mo ago

What ruined the company was refusing to turn ID Tech into an ecosystem to compete with Unreal and Source Engine.

orliesaurus 3mo ago

Was john carmack the elon musk of that time (minus the political baggage Era)?

fatbird 3mo ago
No, Carmack is actually an incredibly smart and talented engineer.

BiscuitBadger 3mo ago

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

BiscuitBadger 3mo ago
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.

stephc_int13 3mo ago

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.

sunrunner 3mo ago
> Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic. Now what was that thing about living long enough to become the villain.
vor_ 3mo ago
The loss of the original team was a tremendous blow. After Quake, a common criticism of id was that they put out tech demos instead of games.

AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago

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.

vor_ 3mo ago
The technical innovations also began to have no impact or even an adverse one. Doom 3's push for 100% real-time stencil shadows was practically ignored by the industry when HL2 and other competitors came out. MegaTexture was actually removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.
- kllrnohj 3mo ago
  While MegaTexture was removed from Doom Eternal because it's just not necessary in a small level-based game like that, the general idea was carried on. It's a big reason you could basically describe the entire PS4 era as the era of texture pop-in. Virtual texturing made it very easy to build massively large worlds, using GPU "page misses" to figure out what textures to stream in. The problem is, well, the player sees it. As ugly as fuck texture pop-in.
  - zeuxcg 3mo ago
    No, mega texture like approaches were almost never used outside of a couple id games. The texture pop in was mip streaming, which persists to this day but memory is a bit less scarce and disk read speeds are much better so you notice it less.
- account42 3mo ago
  Stencil shadows never had a chance as the primary technique for games targeting realistic graphics as they inherently cannot do soft shadows.

bluedino 3mo ago

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.

lobf 3mo ago
Prey was vaporware? It sold a million copies on release and got a sequel... Are we talking about the same game?
- vor_ 3mo ago
  Prey was infamously in development in various forms for over a decade.
- Dilettante_ 3mo ago
  You actually aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)
  - lobf 3mo ago
    Yes, the 2006 one is the one I'm talking about. From the opening of the article: >Prey was a commercial success, selling more than one million copies in the first two months of its release and leading to the abortive development of its sequel Prey 2.
    - Dilettante_ 3mo ago
      Oops, I just gormlessly assumed you meant the other one because I also had the (2006) one in the "unsuccessful/failure"-Bucket in my head. Sorry about that.

curiousObject 3mo ago

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

account42 3mo ago
> That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine How is that telling? Source is based on Q1 instead of Q2 because Valve decided to keep working on the HL1 engine (GoldSrc) which already had extensive modifications from Q1 instead of rebasing all that work on Q2 or another engine. It's a perfectly valid decision irrespective of the quality of the Q2 engine.

cubefox 3mo ago

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.

vor_ 3mo ago
Megatexture caused a lot of problems. In fact, it was such a hindrance that it was removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.
- cubefox 3mo ago
  I believe it was merely replaced with virtual textures, which is a very similar texture streaming technique. Most modern games use it now.

hugodan 3mo ago

Their more recent works are amazing pieces of entertainment: DOOM, Eternal and Dark Ages

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

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.

Waterluvian 3mo ago

I don’t believe the ends justify the means and I respect his perspective on these regrets. I wonder if he’s kind of looking back from a position of assumed success. Would Quake have succeeded on a Doom++ engine? I remember feeling that Quake was something remarkably different from Doom, mainly because it felt actually worth using the mouse with. Marathon II on the Mac introduced me to mouse movement but it was very limited and kind of fisheyed and weird. Quake just felt good with the mouse.

_jackdk_ 3mo ago
Speculation, as someone who grew up with some of those games: We could use Heretic/Hexen as the most direct contemporary example of a "Doom++ engine": it had keyboard look up/down, inventory, and the ability to fly up/down. Wiki reckons Heretic sold 500k units and Doom 2 sold 1.2M. Hard to say in hindsight if that was caused by less enthusiasm for a fantasy aesthetic or the decline in enthusiasm for Doom-level tech. We can also look at how far BUILD-style engines were able to push environments in 2.5d engines of the day. Duke3D had sloping floors and wildly changing terrain that was revolutionary for the time. (Remember the second level in the shareware version, where you basically blew up a building halfway through the level?) Other contemporary BUILD-style titles like Eradicator were able to add crude room-over-room by declaring floating platforms and other special entities without having to build them into truly 3D world geometry. A third point on the triangle might be Rise of the Triad, which pushed the Wolf3D engine well beyond anything a normal person would expect. Apogee were able to add keyboard look up/down and flight up/down, more verticality in levels by adding floating discs and floors (again outside of the standard level geometry). And to stretch the triangle metaphor to a tetrahedron, there's also a lot stuff from the Doom source port universe that might have been invented if Carmack & Co. had to push the Doom engine as far as it could go. When you can add new things and linedef/sector actions, that allows a lot of flexibility when you don't have to build the engine from scratch. All that makes me think that 1994 iD could probably have had a commercially successful game on a Doom++, especially if Carmack kept learning all the portability and networking stuff that made Quakeworld work during the shift to Windows 95. What's much less clear to me is whether they'd be able to catch and/or drive the wave of 3D accelerator development, and whether Epic MegaGames would have just leapfrogged them completely with Unreal. I think the Quake-on-Doom++ timeline might end with Unreal becoming the engine more people built on through the 2000s (instead of all the Q3/idTech3-based games). The talent retention could mean that iD stays competitive on worldbuilding and feel (the Doom Bible shows they had some of those ideas, but the tech wasn't ready for them), and Carmack+Abrash+... could probably catch up with Sweeney+.... We probably don't get American McGee's Alice in that timeline though. EDIT: The other thing to consider is that Descent was also bringing 6DOF (degrees of freedom) to PC gaming. While it was a portal-based engine like BUILD, it had 3D-modelled polygonal enemies etc. It was a beloved but niche title because it was so challenging to play, but it shows that there's a bunch of technical innovation around at the time, and maybe it gets a larger market share and the technical innovation happens with or without iD?

zftnb666 3mo ago

Regret is just experience that arrived too late to help.