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

So from what little I know of the history there were some serious personal issues going on in the team that led to ~7 of the 11-12 folk on Quake eventually leaving.

Sandy has gone into it on various podcasts and mediums. It's pretty clear he doesn't consider Carmack responsible but rather someone he refuses to name (but is quite obviously Tim Willits) that caused pretty much all the problems.

My read is Carmack is saying he is sorry he lacked the awareness and experience to manage the people stuff.

He lost his dream team, I'm sure it's something he has thought about a lot.

The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software":

https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294

> How Quake ruined id Software.

> There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.

> ... [thread continues] ...

From various interviews with designers who were at iD during that period, it seems there was a fair amount of conflict between them. One in particular seems to be severely disliked by Sandy and others to this day. Presumably Carmack wishes he had done a better job managing those conflicts.

Seems to me Carmack's saying that Romero had a better grasp of visuals than Sandy Petersen, and that Petersen was needlessly disparaged for this.

(not a Twitter user) I saw the post linked below Carmacks post and I had assumed it's a comment to his post!

The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.

HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods

(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)

I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore.

Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.

To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.

I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.

Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.

Rocket. Jump.

Both The Longest Yard and Facing Worlds can now be played instantly on the web:

https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (instant, even works on phones)

https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut (scroll down and click Create on CTF-FACE)

They even have multiplayer support.

I hope someone ports UT2K4 someday so I can play ONS-Torlan.

I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.

As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).

Shadow volumes turned out to be a dead end technology though because they can only do unrealistically hard shadows.

I think you might be misremembering Doom 3 a bit. Both it and Half Life 2 came out in the same year, and, well... just compare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJ1weGimZQ

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3vMUOayyc

Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.

Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).

In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.

That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.

As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.

I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.

I have attempted to play Doom 3 on three separate occasions in my life, and each time I gave up before ever having a chance to fire a weapon.

HL2 just on physics wins over Doom 3 any day. It's far superior in every aspect.

Exactly. And I didn't see anyone here talking about QuakeWorld, which changed the gaming experience in an unmatched way.

Yet, Quake III Arena had no single player. It was a fun MP game, I spent years playing. It's not really the same as Quake and Quake 2.

This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now of course lots of people will jump to my throat with tons of counter examples, to which I respond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

> Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.

IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.

This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.

> We never learn.

To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.

This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?

We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.

    because they're smarter than everyone else and
    there is nothing of value to be learned from others

Especially since everybody in the industry tends to be pretty smart.

When two people with intelligence within a single standard deviation of each other, each of them is going to have competencies and expertise the other does not. There are going to be specific skills where one truly is 10x or even 100x the other, but not too many efforts boil down to one specific narrow skill.

this is true in all human endeavors. Tech is not special in this regard, alas.

Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.

That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.

It's a fascinating period to learn to navigate.

It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition.

Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase).

What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer.

It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.

Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.

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

In the linked thread that John Carmack is responding to, Sandy Petersen agrees:

> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.

https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034

I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry.

The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.

We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.

But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.

The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..

Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.

Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.

> unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy.

Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years.

According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed.

> There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.

It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.

> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value

I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.

It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.

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.

Stencil shadows never had a chance as the primary technique for games targeting realistic graphics as they inherently cannot do soft shadows.

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?

I am under the impression that a big part of the current AI progress is the result of the availability of chips that were created for gaming.

personal computing is inseparable from technological progress, and has been wildly positive for humanity

>And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.

Hang out with Epstein so much that he gave his wife and STD and then hid that knowledge from her, sneaking medicine to manage it into her food?

I have not reason to defend these people or their actions, but can we know their future success was not formed by their formative experiences at Id? I think we undervalue hardship and struggle as accelerants.

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.

At least it was just a game company :)

I find that initiative and grit combined is an exceedingly rare commodity, and it do power progress. We can always be picky about the worth or risks of the projects these souls end up realizing, but the function this provides to our society is critical.

It's been on my list, but I haven't read it yet.

I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.

[1] https://sharewareheroes.com/

Yeah Romero said they signed an agreement saying that it was accurate: https://qr.ae/pFH291

I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.

Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.

I believe it was merely replaced with virtual textures, which is a very similar texture streaming technique. Most modern games use it now.

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 .

You actually aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)

Prey was infamously in development in various forms for over a decade.

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.

Well there was no "id Wives Letter"

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.

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.

Thanks. Here’s a direct xcancel link to the complete chain of Sandy’s posts that John Carmack replied to.

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together

Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.

Quake 1 was an unbelievable tech breakthrough: full 3d, quakec vm, overall engine design held up really well. It was not a perfect game but it was ok.

I still hack on the engine and its derivations from time to time.

Quake 2 was a development of that, will a deep focus on multiplayer. And it won at that. As a singlr player game it was boring but LAN play was just amazing.

So quake 3 did rethink the engine but went all in on multiplayer.

As funny as it may sound but in the end, it is quake 1 that just keeps going thanks to its easy moddabilty.

Fair point, I'm going to retract that remark.

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.

There was this obscure indy game called Half-Life, maybe you've heard of it.

iD's engines were famously known in the industry as tech demos first, first-party game platforms second. I'm not sure how the revenue picture ended up looking, though. They obviously made a lot of money from their 'tech demos.'

[dead]

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".

Unreal was great single player and fun for multiplayer but there's no comparison in terms of the way the game played competitively vs Quake.

And CTF originally was from Quake 1, the threewave CTF mod by Zoid which made it into Quake 3.

Threewave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFg2PPOmA74