Posted by shadowtree 8 hours ago
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.
Yes carmack may have been an asshole, but it takes a real man to recognize and own up to your own human flaws. Kudos. We need more of that in this world.
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.
I don't care for the story, and I wouldn't play Doom++. Electric polar bears and some Shrub lava mule, whatever. But swimming in deep underwater ruins with full 3-axis freedom was awesome.
I couldn't play multiplayer back then. Dialup sucked and was more expensive than AI tokens. Ethernet was still rare. Lugging a CRT monitor to friend's house was a chore reserved for a once-a-year LAN party.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
Did they really?
Did ID make more money with engine licensing than with game sales?
They needed to ship. I think Quake Engine could wait, and have Doom++ would have given them some slack
This is the opposite to the Boeing problem (shipping the rehashed product instead of the brand new thing)
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.'
Yes and Wikipedia claims it was a "heavily modified" version of the engine
And while I get the tech demo angle, doesn't mean that Quake had to be one of those
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.
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
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.
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".
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.
"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid..."
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