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- Hacker News
- 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.by supertroop
- IIRC, NiN was already huge before this?
- 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.
by everyone - 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
- 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.
- 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.by lokimedes
- Why not? What if it did bad?by nilirl
- 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.by Daishiman
- That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.by thaw13579
- 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.
by mikeocool - > 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.
by rustyhancock - Sandy's original post to which John was replying: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...by JeremyNT
- 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.
- 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.by vor_
- 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.
- 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.
by georgemcbay - 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.
by Waterluvian - 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?
by _jackdk_ - I think the question isn't whether (DOOM + 1) would have succeeded, but what they would have been able to accomplish with the Quake team if they'd all had the stamina and job satisfaction to make several games over the following decade. DOOM was already a massive success and they had the money to do whatever they wanted. It's undeniable that Quake was id's most groundbreaking game, but maybe (DOOM + 5) with the same team would have been even more so.by fasterik
- > 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...
- Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."by Goronmon
- In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work
They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as:
“the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard”
So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning
- Also worth considering if there is survivorship bias in this wisdom.
Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished?
Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies.
(this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)
by avaer - The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.by dietr1ch
- 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.
- Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well.
Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.
by stvltvs - Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
by aurareturn - 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.by gtowey
- 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.
by tejohnso - > Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
It's not that the company was ruined, but that it had lost some of its creative direction after Romero left (while retaining technical excellence).
by pizza234