nah without him never rly stable Q1 or Q2 engine

so fu <3

Carmack did shit his way and it worked very favorably for him and us for quite awhile. He coulda prevented quake from dying out and even tried before he left. Can’t get too mad at the guy.

jc was the guy who invented the whole reason why id was so successful, his engines were blazing fast, from commander keen to rage, we saw no lag, after that it went down the drain, he knew that it was all about- optimization and reducing lag, with new team at id it's all about micro-transactions and adding crosshairs, none of them get why id was so successful, even a crap game like xonotic is tons better than some noname aaa crap engine game, all thanks to jc way of optimizing his engines down to ones and zeroes assembly level, he is a genius, and john romero knew this when he hired him to make the first 2d sidescroller engine on pc that could rival nintendo stuff.

Romero hired Carmack?

I thought they met at Softdisk and went on to found id software together.

romero assembled the team that later became id software, at least that was what he said. i also trust romero is a genious programmer, he just had rough time adapting to the pace of the industry. most of these guys simply left the company after culture changed towards selling out to corporate culture with stuff like activision puting their noses into acquiring id. romero made many games way before id, so i trust he just got bored with making games by the time quake shipped.

Yeah, that must have been while they were still at Softdisk.

It's not even debatable. The company has lost the plot after Doom 3 relased in 2004. Carmack left ID in 2013, and in that 10 years timespan the company hasn't been able to produce a good game or even just a good engine.

although it's not quite my cup of tea Rage got really good reviews at the time and was a very succesfull game in sales. That was prolly the last id product that Carmack carried.

Carmack made id and after Quake 3 he simply couldn't carry it further alone.
Such is life.
Many such cases.

He didn't run it particularly well, he also stopped them becoming an engine licensing giant earlier in their history.

Remaining an incredibly small company for the entirety of their private history was a bad move as well, could only work on one game at a time and they never got anything done on time.

Also promoting people above their competency level seems to have been a real problem, old Tim Willits and SyncError are the prominent examples we know of, that's a killer in a smaller company.

There would have been a time to ride the franchises and the engines. But what they did was to create new franchises with a new engines. (Ok Doom 3 not, but Rage)

A programmer arranging a whole company around the needs of a programmer team which in fact would be just one department in a real company.

This is just dump and totally the reason ID failed. He drove away Romero and Adrian and let Tim and Sync take it all lol. He does not even wanted to save his thing. Just leave and forget. Go to Facebook and work on engines (engines are not games). No love for the products. Only love for the technology which is totally fine but then you cannot get rid of all the rest of your team.

Carmack was able to have it his way. Congratulations Carmack you won. Which resulted in loss. Was it win or loss then? Look at Blizzard. That is what ID should have become. Giving us one (ok'ish) Doom and (ok'ish) Quake after another. They let themselves be overtaken by Epic which are not a real FPS company which is proven by the fact that they do Fortnite these days.

ID which was the thing for FPS was ruined and with it the whole FPS thing. ID conquered and owned the realm of FPS and let it die. Now it is steered by idiots (Bethesda) which will never be capable. While little indi developers are popping up trying to re-awake the real thing. But no one has a chance against a big pile of money. Also 2DG cannot innovate on FPS. What he can do is take what he knows and put it into a product which in fact needs to be an exact clone he already knows otherwise it won't work.

We will need a messiahs coming to Bethesda and recreate what once was king. Will it happen? I don't think so.

Real FPS are dead. All we got left is dumped-down–i-want-to-appeal-to-the-masses FPS.

Acti-Blizzard is shit.
Simply shit.

He does not even wanted to save his thing. Just leave and forget.

Carmack did, however, one very important thing to save all Quakes 1-4 for the community: he pushed and helped to get the source code out. It's hard to overrate the importance of his dedication and persistence towards opensourcing id's work.

Ironically, QC is likely to be the first Quake with no legacy left after they'd pull the plug. Releasing the source code and devtools would of course be too much to expect from Bethesda, but they failed even to preserve the demos from all those tournaments — all we'd have is blurry YouTube videos, until they probably be gone as well.

That seems accurate, but what do you mean by:

he also stopped them becoming an engine licensing giant earlier in their history

Romero wanted them to start seriously farming out their engine in the early days, I guess Doom or Quake era, but Carmack was against it so they didn't put any real effort into it.

I know the Quake 3 engine had a decent amount of success with it, but even half of those games are just their own franchises or Raven stuff.

It's mentioned in Masters of Doom at some point.

The nostalgia....

So John Carmack basically gave us Quake Deathmatch instead of a weird semi-RPG with a hammer guy, and then he was the one to give us Q3A, instead of another single player game.
Nice to learn, that alone was just amazing.

Doom 3 was not the success he hoped for, probably partly because he lost a little bit of his edge and genius with the Doom3 engine, which was heavily criticised for being too dark and not as performant as the competitors iirc.

Just the selling out to Zenimax and sometime later after Rage leaving for Occulus, which also proved kind of a flop, that was a bad idea.

Never sell out to big corporations period.

I'm not sure he sold out. He just always followed the tech, which is what he had real passion for. If I recall correctly, Doom 3 was all about showing off his dynamic shadows. Then Rage was about his megatextures, and then he moved on to VR stuff, which took him to Oculus.

He could have done that at Id. He didn't because he was well aware he couldn't deliver anymore, either games or engines, and so he jumped the sinking ship for a cozy spot in a office where he's mostly there for publicity rather than getting anything done.

I think he was doing that while at id, but for Oculus. That would be why he got sued. If he started his VR work after leaving, Zenimax wouldn't have had a case. His new masters at the time probably weren't interested in VR.

While the doom 3 engine was not anymore as outstanding and ahead of its competitors, at its release it was still the best engine ... but the gameplay led by tim willits was just mediocre at best ... and therefore its just a mediocre game ... and mediocre for a triple a title is a failure ... they got their copies sold because of the big name and expectations, but the whole brand definitely took damage ... and you cant count on reviews of professional reviewers, they dont really give a hyped game a bad review if there are no major programming bugs in it ... I highly doubt these professional reviewers can enjoy a game ... they couldnt make a distinction between half-life 2 and doom 3, because their brain is overplayed and not receptive to the nuances in gameplay

I admire the guy too much to shit on, he should go and work at spaceX or setup his own thing and just do mad experiments.

I'm sure he's doing loads of big things in VR, but tons of people hate VR. Guy has nothing to prove.

Most people hate vr because it's expensive, bulky, clunky and in the end, essentially lame.

When was the latest big boom of vr? 3 years ago, 4? When everyone was blabbering how "this time, it's for real" and how in a couple years everyone would want a headset. 3 years later, steam surveys says less than 2 % of gamers own a headset. And less than that use it regularly.

The best part is that it was supposed to be driven by porn. Prectically, nobody wants to use a headset to browse porn, exactly like nobody wants to fuck plastic dolls or 1000 $ mechanical wankers.

I lent a headset once (Oculus Go) for 3 months period, used it maybe for 2 days, its nice to try it out, but its not for much more ... and you still get nausea from it and resolution just isnt good enough ...
when resolution quadruples and nausea is eliminated, vr is the next thing, but right now its just not usable, causes eyepain because of low resolution and additonally you get nausea from it, which lasts until the next day ... and these marketing fuckers from oculus, et al know all that, but they still try to sell it to you like it would be ready to use and fun without any negative consequences ... its maybe nice for trying it out 2-3 hours and thats it, give the technoloy another 5-10 years and maybe then they can tell there products are ready ...

Here's the true story:

Carmack was the tech guy, Romero/Willits were the gameplay guys. The tech was the primary reason for all of Id Software's early success plus the fact their early games were distributed as shareware. Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were right at the bleeding edge of tech with each release up through Quake 3. After Quake 3, that's when they began to lose their competitive edge when it came to tech.

Doom 3 (id Tech 4) was released in 2004 and had pretty great tech but limitations at release. And 2004 was also the year that Valve released Half-Life 2 which basically was the end of Id Software's tech dominance. Between 2002-2006, there were other engines such as Epic's Unreal Engine and CryTek's Cryengine. Other engines were becoming much more popular with developers, especially Unreal Engines 2 and 3, which had a number of commercially successful games running on those engines. Probably part of that has to do with the SDKs released and how easy it was to make games run on multiple platforms.

Rage (id Tech 5) didn't come out until 2011 and, by that point, id Software had fallen so far behind that the writing was on the wall. I think Carmack decided to sell the company at that point because, in addition to being the lead programmer, he was also doing a lot of administrative stuff, too, for id Software. He said in an interview about the sale to Zenimax that he was hoping it would free up his time to get back to the tech instead of worrying about the business side of things.

Yea thats the point. Competition in the engine market became more fierce and just because Carmack can do it does not mean that nobody else can do it. Carmack was one of the first guys who wanted it badly enough and then there was his team who did amazing games with his tech. Without them i guess the story would have looked differently.

When the market became more competitive it got more important to score in other fields but the engine alone. A wise business man would have known this. Carmack instead "decided" to get rid of his team thinking he can beat the future just with superior engines. He was wronk and that is why it is his fault.

In the beginning you are right. The engines was one of four big corner stones: Engine, Gameplay, Visuals, Sound

But in my opinion it is far from Carmack owned that thing alone apart from having his team.

>> Carmack was the tech guy, Romero/Willits were the gameplay guys. The tech was the primary reason for all of Id Software's early success

I disagree. Play community Doom or Duke Nukem maps. Or look at community weapons or textures. It is just not the same as the original. People do not get it right.

It is also super important that the graphics are master, the maps are master, the gameplay is master and the sounds are master. Look at the crippled plasma guns of all the newer Dooms and then look at the plasma of the original Doom. Its like wtf. The original plasma you can feel it in your hands. The new plasmas is more like shooting cotton wool. Similar with the super shotgun.

Tech is as important but for sure not enough, not at all. Those days it was. Equally important as the other factors. Today maybe there is less to impress then in those days. The thing that will always stay as important as back then is gameplay, graphics, sound, level design.