Posted by shadowtree 3 hours ago
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)
> 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?
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] ...
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.
Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.
The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.
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)
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).
Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
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.
There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....
> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.
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.
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.
I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)
Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.
Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high school and college, it's shocking how poorly most people treat someone just because they're standing behind the counter.
In the corporate world I find it's usually very obvious who has real life experience and who doesn't.
Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.
CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?
Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.
The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.
It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.
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.
- Attributed to Nasrudin
There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.
I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
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
Classic.
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.
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.
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)
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..
You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5.
There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle".
As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.
Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "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.
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
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.
Sandy's quote here buried unfortunately by X.
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.
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
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.
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.
Zuckerberg likely has similar tendencies, should he be given a pass for making social media such a large part of our society?
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 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.
How do you have such confidence for what works in a complex adaptive system?
Do you think society can be reduced to a model of functions and metrics?
You can only afford to use that model if it doesn't harm your experience of life. For many, it's a model that makes them invisible.
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.