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

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)

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.

Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...

Sandy's quote here buried unfortunately by X.

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

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.

But Sandy Peterson is probably right, saying that it ‘Ruined’ the company - as an artistic creative force anyway.

The breakup of the brilliant and well-balanced ID Software team was caused by the trauma of developing Quake.

Romero and others were forced out or quit. This cut the heart out of the team, despite all of Carmack’s drive and technical brilliance

That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine

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.

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.

Now cutting edge graphical features are mostly pushed by Epic and their Unreal engine. Like ray-traced global illumination, virtual shadow maps, virtual geometry, and fast ray-traced direct illumination.

But id software's games themselves arguably improved after Carmack left, despite not pushing technical boundaries. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom TDA all were received very favorably at the time. Not sure whether this had anything to do with Carmack leaving though.

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.

The company was successful, had one of the most prestigious brand in the game industry, was early enough to capitalize on the rise of PC gaming, incredible talents and tech.

Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.

And it seems that both the early success and stall were the responsibility of one very talented but somewhat obtuse nerd.

Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.

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.

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.

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