> 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...
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.
This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?
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.
> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.
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.
At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
Old people need to eat their own philosophy they shove down kids throats; reality doesn't owe you what you want.
Philosophical appeals, appeals to living in the same country, have yet to stop biological self selection; physics is ageist. Set on attenuation of signal through generational churn.
Old people projecting their vanity is what teaches kids to project vanity; mirror neurons are a helluva drug.
If you want to be seen as smart perhaps don't be so obviously ignorant outside a domain of software devs.
This forums ability to keep a job and engage in capitalism is just repeating social tropes. None of you have transcended ground truth. You're all just stuck on outdated self centered circumlocution of your own literacy, a social loop of convincing yourself you're more important than you are. Which is itself endlessly old its banal, human shit
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."
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.
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.
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
> founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure)
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.
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.
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.
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.
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"
> 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.
Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.
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.
> 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.
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.
The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
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)
Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.
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.
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.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sitting here in Denmark having been affected by these geeks. They may not have built the Pantheon, but surely they have channeled a group of people’s creativity towards something we have integrated into our society?
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.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience.
We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it.
That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
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.
Clicked on link, it tried to upsell me on twitter prime or whatever it is. Closed the promotion, now I'm just sitting on twitter, not on the link I clicked on.
It's a shitty way to read anyway. An adventure game of finding the context and putting pieces together.
I didn't see Carmack was replying to Sandy until the end of the post, and then I could only find 1/3rd of Sandy's post without having to click a "153 replies" button.
Quake2 was my youth. played a lot of q2ctf and my favourite mod was KOTS(King of the Server). The female marine and the railgun was perfection. Everything else wasn't the same (and yeah the q3 railgun felt different regardless of carmack saying he didn't change anything! ;)
Didn't Adrian Carmack (the art guy; no relation) get something like 10x more equity in the company than Carmack and Romero b/c of how badly they botched their cap table?
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
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.
Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.
If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.
> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.
Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
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.
They could have, I'm not convinced they would have. It's very difficult for designers to come up with something novel and good. Most of the amazing things you with old tech are backports of ideas that only exist because people using new tech had them.
We don't need to wait for GTA 6. RDR 2 was already a serious letdown from the first game. Rockstar has lost sight of the fact that they are making games, not movies, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR 2 is significantly less fun to play than its predecessor because they are constantly trying to shove cinematic moments and immersion into the game.
This is a perfect articulation of why even 13 years later, I still have no motivation to beat GTA 5. It worked great as a quasi-movie but not a video game.
Quake is easily the most groundbreaking game released. Not only was it the first popular game with real 3D. The game play was the first that really took the precision from old games and transformed it into 3D. An excellent piece of tech that many games as of today still are children of.
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.
I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then."
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.
I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.
Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.
It is super refreshing to hear someone saying sorry. Honestly. In a manner that actually seems sincere and self reflective.
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 was interested in Quake only because of the breakthrough 3D
graphics, architecturally stunning levels, and later QuakeC.
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.
Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.
from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a position to continue to succeed. quake 2 was the misstep, it just wasn’t that great of a game, or that’s how it looked from the outside
This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.
Id was technical excellence paired with artistic blindness. As the machines progressed, the value of the technical excellence faded. What was left? A test case for OS & compiler development.
The issue wasn't artistic blindness, the id art was solid. The issue was a lack of game design. Doom worked because it was crazy fast and you could have a lot of sprites on the screen at once, so it had this crazy hectic quality. Quake's 3d engine meant you couldn't be so fast and couldn't anywhere close to the number of enemies on screen at once, so the game wanted a more soulslike design, but they stuck with the run and gun design but with spongier enemies, which just didn't feel great.
It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece.
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.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."
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, than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".
> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos
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.
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
> 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...
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.
This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?
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.
> "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
- Attributed to Nasrudin
> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.
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.
At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
Been doing this since my early 30's, and doing it currently.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
Old people need to eat their own philosophy they shove down kids throats; reality doesn't owe you what you want.
Philosophical appeals, appeals to living in the same country, have yet to stop biological self selection; physics is ageist. Set on attenuation of signal through generational churn.
Old people projecting their vanity is what teaches kids to project vanity; mirror neurons are a helluva drug.
If you want to be seen as smart perhaps don't be so obviously ignorant outside a domain of software devs.
This forums ability to keep a job and engage in capitalism is just repeating social tropes. None of you have transcended ground truth. You're all just stuck on outdated self centered circumlocution of your own literacy, a social loop of convincing yourself you're more important than you are. Which is itself endlessly old its banal, human shit
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."
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.
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)
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.
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
> founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure)
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.
I'm of the opinion that people will be more successful if you don't act like their back is against the wall even if it is
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
No, I fully agree with you.
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.
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.
Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"
Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.
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"
> 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.
Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.
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.
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
In the linked thread that John Carmack is responding to, Sandy Petersen agrees:
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.
https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034
More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".
And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.
"Sorry, Sandy"
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)
also this post was a reply to Sandy on X.
> 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.
xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.
Thanks. Here’s a direct xcancel link to the complete chain of Sandy’s posts that John Carmack replied to.
https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together
My hero. Thanks
Thanks!!
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.
In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192...
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 true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
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)
goldsrc is based off the q1 engine.
Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
Rocket. Jump.
The original Team Fortress on quake.net is where I grew to appreciate the beauty.
> 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).
Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.
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.
I think you might be misremembering Doom 3 a bit. Both it and Half Life 2 came out in the same year, and, well... just compare:
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.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
Same feeling.
Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
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.
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.
Why not? What if it did bad?
At least it was just a game company :)
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.
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.
I’m sitting here in Denmark having been affected by these geeks. They may not have built the Pantheon, but surely they have channeled a group of people’s creativity towards something we have integrated into our society?
>And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.
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?
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.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience. We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it. That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
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.
Is the domain twitter.com has problems? I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
Clicked on link, it tried to upsell me on twitter prime or whatever it is. Closed the promotion, now I'm just sitting on twitter, not on the link I clicked on.
That is sad.
Use xcancel, not Twitter.
It's a shitty way to read anyway. An adventure game of finding the context and putting pieces together.
I didn't see Carmack was replying to Sandy until the end of the post, and then I could only find 1/3rd of Sandy's post without having to click a "153 replies" button.
Quake2 was my youth. played a lot of q2ctf and my favourite mod was KOTS(King of the Server). The female marine and the railgun was perfection. Everything else wasn't the same (and yeah the q3 railgun felt different regardless of carmack saying he didn't change anything! ;)
Didn't Adrian Carmack (the art guy; no relation) get something like 10x more equity in the company than Carmack and Romero b/c of how badly they botched their cap table?
he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues
Wow. Can anyone recommend a good write-up on that history?
41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.
What ruined the company was refusing to turn ID Tech into an ecosystem to compete with Unreal.
Was john carmack the elon musk of that time (minus the political baggage Era)?
Why are folks still submitting so many twitter.com links?
It will always be Twitter...
because X is a dumb name
Yeah but it's a lot easier to turn an x.com link into an xcancel link so you can actually read it logged out .
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
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.
Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.
If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.
> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.
Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
They could have, I'm not convinced they would have. It's very difficult for designers to come up with something novel and good. Most of the amazing things you with old tech are backports of ideas that only exist because people using new tech had them.
Maybe peak excellence is simply not sustainable.
Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.
We don't need to wait for GTA 6. RDR 2 was already a serious letdown from the first game. Rockstar has lost sight of the fact that they are making games, not movies, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR 2 is significantly less fun to play than its predecessor because they are constantly trying to shove cinematic moments and immersion into the game.
This is a perfect articulation of why even 13 years later, I still have no motivation to beat GTA 5. It worked great as a quasi-movie but not a video game.
I enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but even it had too many cut scenes, come to think of it, so did Metro Exodus.
Quake is easily the most groundbreaking game released. Not only was it the first popular game with real 3D. The game play was the first that really took the precision from old games and transformed it into 3D. An excellent piece of tech that many games as of today still are children of.
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.
Great read. Further proof that we are all victims of each others learning experiences.
I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then."
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.
I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.
Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.
It is super refreshing to hear someone saying sorry. Honestly. In a manner that actually seems sincere and self reflective.
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 was interested in Quake only because of the breakthrough 3D graphics, architecturally stunning levels, and later QuakeC.
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.
Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.
Sandy might remember.
Fair point, I'm going to retract that remark.
Might matter a lot to sandy. I think it says a lot that decades later one of the things he remembers is someone he (or the larger company) hurt.
from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a position to continue to succeed. quake 2 was the misstep, it just wasn’t that great of a game, or that’s how it looked from the outside
Id software would've benefitted from the income of another release. I thoroughly enjoyed Build games before and long after Quake.
Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
> It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines.
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)
This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.
Id was technical excellence paired with artistic blindness. As the machines progressed, the value of the technical excellence faded. What was left? A test case for OS & compiler development.
The issue wasn't artistic blindness, the id art was solid. The issue was a lack of game design. Doom worked because it was crazy fast and you could have a lot of sprites on the screen at once, so it had this crazy hectic quality. Quake's 3d engine meant you couldn't be so fast and couldn't anywhere close to the number of enemies on screen at once, so the game wanted a more soulslike design, but they stuck with the run and gun design but with spongier enemies, which just didn't feel great.
Doom 3 doesn’t look like artistic blindness.
It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece.
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
>It's silly to revisit your mistakes like this
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.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."
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, than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".
> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos
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.
I agree with that. You got an old version of my comment before I clarified that, now it says:
"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, than trying to avoid..."
I disagree, even for successful projects retrospection toward mistakes is worth the pain to learn.
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
Unreal was great single player and fun for multiplayer but there's no comparison in terms of the way the game played competitively vs Quake.
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
I believe id paid him to port ctf to Quake 2 and Quake 3.