> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadSounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
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.
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.
That is sad.
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.
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
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.
Sandy Petersen's side of it comes out in a few interviews, like https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU (especially 14:17 onward)
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.
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.
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.