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The Experiment
When John Carmack talks, the gaming world listens. Carmack, the 28-year-old cofounder of id, usually speaks his mind through his plan file, a text file diary-of-sorts that he updates on his own computer, then makes available for the world to read over the Internet. If anything, Carmack has become synonymous with first-person 3D action gaming, and rightfully so. "The dude invented this genre and made 3D action games possible," explains Tim Sweeney, developer of the Unreal engine.
Wolfenstein 3D quickly associated id with first person action games. |
The tales of id's history are well known. In the early 90s, Carmack was making $27,000 a year working at Shreveport, Louisiana developer Softdisk, walking three miles in the snow during the winter to get to work. There, he met up with John Romero and Tom Hall, two other gaming geeks, as well as artist Adrian Carmack. As they say, the rest was history: Within months, the foursome would sign a deal with Apogee Software founder Scott Miller to create shareware games and would move to Texas. The first result from the new company was a game called Commander Keen. A few products later, a little 3D action game named Wolfenstein 3D was birthed, with Miller guaranteeing $100,000 in royalties because he was so taken by Carmack's first 3D engine for a game named Hovertank.
Despite the fact it's 2 AM, John Carmack still has hours of programming ahead of him. |
Since February 1, 1990, when id was founded, Carmack hasn't stopped working on moving 3D action games forward. "I don't go a day without programming. It's what I'm all about," admits Carmack, speaking in quick, epigrammatic sentences, as if your question is a programming problem he's trying to solve with the tightest, most effective answer. Even with Quake III in the final hours of development, Carmack is quick to point out that he has a to-do list that would even make a soccer mom proud: "It's a thousand items long, about 2000 lines," he says, as if to demonstrate that his work is never done.
Inside the id offices, this is where John Carmack makes all his programming magic happen. |
Truth be told, Quake III Arena wasn't even supposed to be id's next project. After completing the well-received Quake II in late 1997, "the company meandered around for about four months doing miscellaneous stuff, and it wasn't going anywhere - there just wasn't any cohesion," says Carmack, sitting in his bare white-walled office, void of the accoutrements one might expect. (Carmack does have a cute plush penguin toy perched on his monitor, the mascot for the operating system Linux). According to others at id, the company had considered building another game similar to Quake II and had even started preliminary design work, but no one was very excited about continuing with the project.
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Widespread Misconceptions
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