Id Software

• 1. Introduction

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  id Software, a game developer based in Richardson, Texas, traces its origins to a copy of someone else's game. In September 1990, programmer John Carmack found an efficient way to scroll graphics sideways on a PC. That night he and designer Tom Hall stayed up late and rebuilt the first level of the 1988 NES hit Super Mario Bros. 3. They swapped Mario for Dangerous Dave, a character made by their colleague John Romero. They called the demo Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. A larger version, built over a week and two weekends, went off to Nintendo. According to Romero, Nintendo said the demo was impressive but "they didn't want their intellectual property on anything but their own hardware, so they told us Good Job and You Can't Do This". A working copy of the demo turned up in July 2021 and was preserved at the Museum of Play. How did a rejected imitation lead to a studio that helped create the first-person shooter? Why did the people behind it drift apart, until the last founder left in 2013? And who owns the company now?

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• 2. Ideas From the Deep

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  Shreveport, Louisiana, was where John Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero first met, in the offices of the computer company Softdisk. They made games for Softdisk's monthly publication, including Dangerous Dave. With a fellow employee, Lane Roathe, they formed a small group called Ideas from the Deep, or IFD. Romero and Roathe had come up with the name.

  In 1990, Scott Miller of Apogee Software heard about the group after playing Romero's Dangerous Dave. He wrote to Romero under the guise of several different fans. Romero eventually saw that every letter came from the same address. When he confronted Miller, Miller explained that Softdisk screened the mail it received, so the trick had been necessary. Romero was disappointed to learn he had no crowd of admirers. He and other Softdisk developers began sending ideas to Miller anyway.

  One idea became Commander Keen, a side-scrolling game that reused their Mario demo work. The first trilogy, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, was released through Apogee on the 14th of December 1990. It was one of the first MS-DOS games with smooth horizontal scrolling, and it was a very successful shareware game. After the first royalty check, Romero, John Carmack and Adrian Carmack, who is no relation, decided to start a company. They hired Hall and finished the Keen series. Then they brought in Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud and began work on Wolfenstein 3D.

  The 1st of February 1991 is the official founding date of id Software. Roathe had left the group by then, so the founders dropped the F from IFD. The remaining two letters first stood for "In Demand". By the fourth Commander Keen game, they let id stand on its own "as a cool word", according to Romero. The book Masters of Doom tells a slightly different story. In its telling, someone found "in demand" lame and suggested Sigmund Freud's concept of the id. The Wolfenstein 3D documentation even explained: "that's id, as in the id, ego, and superego in the psyche". The company writes its name in lowercase and pronounces it like "did" or "kid".

  The young company did not stay put. In September 1991 it moved to Madison, Wisconsin. On the 1st of April 1992 it moved again, to an office in Mesquite, Texas.

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• 3. Shareware to Doom

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  The first episode of a trilogy was given away free, and the other two cost money by mail order. That was how id Software, working through Apogee Software, sold Commander Keen, Wolfenstein and Doom. Only around the time of Doom II did id release games in shrink-wrapped boxes in stores, through other publishers.

  On the 5th of May 1992, id released Wolfenstein 3D. Its smooth 3D graphics were unprecedented in computer games, and many players found the violent gameplay engaging. It is often called the first true first-person shooter. Romero added par times to it, and later to Doom. That small feature, a target time for each level, is credited with starting the phenomenon of speedrunning.

  Eighteen months later, on the 10th of December 1993, id released Doom. Sandy Petersen and Dave Taylor had been hired before launch. Petersen designed 19 of the 27 levels in the original Doom and 17 of the 32 in Doom II. He also created Inferno, the third episode of the first game. Doom's science-fiction horror setting looked like nothing previously seen on personal computers or even video game consoles. It became a cultural phenomenon, was ported to numerous platforms and inspired many knock-offs. Id's shareware release made its mark on video game history.

  Romero became the face of id to Doom's fans. He worked closely with the community, and one result was the fan-made Final DOOM, published in 1996. He also created the control scheme for the first-person shooter and the abstract level design style of Doom. That style influenced many 3D games that followed. He wrote almost all the tools that let id and others make games with id's technology.

  Bobby Prince, a freelance musician, composed much of the early music in an unusual format. IMF, short for "id music file", stored the actual bytes sent to the OPL2 chip on the AdLib sound card. It resembled MIDI, in that it described notes rather than recorded sound. Apogee used it in games like Duke Nukem II. Because of its limits and low sound quality, modern games no longer use it.

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• 4. Engines and Open Source

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  The summer of 1991 brought a weekend session called "The id Summer Seminar", an idea of John Romero's. The guests were prospective buyers, among them Scott Miller, George Broussard, Ken Rogoway, Jim Norwood and Todd Replogle. One night id threw together an impromptu game, "Wac-Man", to show off the Keen engine and how it worked inside. Out of that seminar, the Keen4 engine was licensed to Apogee for Biomenace. Romero is credited with pioneering the game engine licensing business.

  Each technological leap at id has come with a new engine. There was one for Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, ShadowCaster, Doom, Quake, Quake II and Quake III, plus the technology behind Doom 3. The engines are used first for id's own games and then licensed to other developers. Eurogamer.net wrote that "id Software has been synonymous with PC game engines since the concept of a detached game engine was first popularized". The Quake III engine was the most widely adopted. Id Tech 4 had far fewer licensees than Epic Games' Unreal Engine, because Doom 3 took so long to develop. Since id Tech 5, the company has used the name "id Tech" plus a version number, and older engines were renamed to fit.

  In 2011, Carmack revealed that he had no interest in selling the technology to the mass market. Beginning with Wolfenstein 3D, he had been bothered when outside companies began "pestering" him for licenses. He wanted to work on new technology, not "holding the hands" of other developers. He praised Epic Games for chasing the licensing market from Unreal Engine 3 onward. Epic's engine has outsold id's, yet Carmack said he had no regrets.

  Carmack's affinity for sharing code led him to release most major id engines under the GNU General Public License. The usual wait was five years after an engine's creation. The Quake III release slipped from the end of 2004 to August 2005, since commercial licensees still depended on the engine. On the 4th of August 2011, at the QuakeCon keynote, he announced the Doom 3 engine would follow that year. Fans have taken the code to nearly every platform, including iPods, the PSP and the Nintendo DS. GZDoom adds modern renderers and a scripting system called ZScript to Doom. DarkPlaces adds stencil shadow volumes to Quake, along with a more efficient network protocol. Yamagi Quake II, ioquake3 and dhewm3 aim to clean up code and fix bugs. Flat Rock Software released the even earlier Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D code in June 2014.

  Linux gamers have long counted id among their friends. Doom was the first id game ported to Linux, and Linux Journal readers repeatedly gave id titles its Readers' and Editors' Choice awards. Dave Taylor began the tradition of porting, and Timothee Besset took over from Quake III Arena onward. Besset said of id Tech 5, "I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done". He announced his departure from id on the 26th of January 2012.

  The support faded. On the 25th of April 2012, Carmack said there were "no plans for a native Linux client" of Rage. In February 2013 he argued that better emulation was the "proper technical direction for gaming on Linux". ZeniMax also refused to back "unofficial binaries". Even so, id was an early adopter of Stadia, a cloud gaming service running on Debian Linux servers, and of the Vulkan API. The 2016 Doom and Doom Eternal can both run through Wine and Proton.

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• 5. Quake Goes Online

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  On the 22nd of June 1996, id released Quake, the third milestone in the company's history. It paired a fully 3D engine with a distinctive art style. For sound, id recruited Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor to build effects and ambient music. As a small tribute, the band's logo appears on the ammunition boxes for the nailgun. The game also included work by Michael Abrash.

  Quake's main innovation was deathmatch over the Internet, where players fight living opponents instead of computer-controlled ones. The add-on QuakeWorld made that especially popular. At the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards in 2008, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences honored id for the pioneering work Quake represented in user-modifiable games. A first Emmy, awarded in 2007, recognized the 3D technology underlying modern shooters. Id is the only game development company ever honored twice by that body.

  Quake II followed in 1997 but is not a storyline sequel. It centers on an assault on an alien planet, Stroggos, in retaliation for attacks by the Strogg on Earth. Quake III Arena in 1999 has minimal plot. It is set in the Arena Eternal, a gladiatorial setting built by an alien race called the Vadrigar. Combatants plucked from various times and places fight there, including Doomguy. Quake IV in 2005 finishes the war between humans and Strogg. Outside developers, not id, made Quake IV and the prequel Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

  The spin-offs include Quake Mobile in 2005 and Quake Live, a browser-based modification of Quake III. Quake Arena DS was planned for the Nintendo DS and canceled.

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• 6. Those Who Left

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  Quake was considered a difficult game to make because of creative differences. Animosity grew inside the company, and a conflict between Carmack and Romero followed. Romero resigned on the 6th of August 1996. He founded Ion Storm with Hall on the 15th of November 1996. There he became infamous for Daikatana, which reviewers and gamers received negatively.

  Soon after Romero, other staff members departed. Michael Abrash returned to Microsoft and later worked with Carmack again at Reality Labs. Shawn Green joined Romero at Ion Storm. Jay Wilbur went to Epic Games in 1997, and Sandy Petersen went to Ensemble Studios the same year. Mike Wilson became CEO of Ion Storm and a year later founded Gathering of Developers, and later Devolver Digital. In July 2021, Petersen said the cause was a lack of team leader. He had volunteered for the role, citing five years as a project manager at MicroProse, but Carmack turned him down.

  Some exits happened long before Quake. In August 1993, Tom Hall was forced to resign after a dispute with Carmack over the designs of Doom. He had still managed to put teleporters in the game. He joined Apogee, where he worked on Rise of the Triad, then moved on to join Romero at Ion Storm. Hall has often said he would make another Commander Keen immediately if he could get the rights.

  American McGee, a level designer on Doom II, Quake and Quake II, was asked to resign after Quake II. He went to Electronic Arts and made American McGee's Alice. From 2007 to 2016 he ran the independent studio Spicy Horse in Shanghai, China.

  Adrian Carmack was forced out after Doom 3 in 2005. He refused to sell his stock at a low price to the other owners. He sued, and the lawsuit was settled during the ZeniMax acquisition in 2009.

  Romero's later ventures were wide-ranging. He co-founded The Guildhall in Dallas, chaired the CPL eSports league and created the MMORPG company Gazillion Entertainment. His Facebook game Ravenwood Fair reached 25 million monthly players in 2011. In 2015 he opened Romero Games in Galway, Ireland.

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• 7. Banned and Blamed

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  Yahoo! Games once ranked Doom among the ten most controversial games of all time. Groups of many kinds objected to its gore, occult themes and satanic imagery. The criticism grew sharper after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Its perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were avid players. Harris said the attack would be "like playing Doom". A rumor spread that he had built a Doom level modeled on the school. He did design Doom levels, but none were based on Columbine.

  Research from 2008 featured by the Greater Good Science Center pushes against the link. Harvard Medical School researchers Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner found no correlation between violent games and school shootings. The United States Secret Service and Department of Education studied 37 incidents of school violence. The most common traits among shooters were being male and having histories of depression and attempted suicide. Only one-eighth showed special interest in violent video games, far fewer than showed interest in violent books and movies.

  Wolfenstein 3D ran into legal trouble in Germany, where Nazi symbols are generally illegal. The game used the swastika and the Horst-Wessel-Lied as theme music. A court in Munich, the Amtsgericht München, ruled on the 25th of January 1994, and the PC version was withdrawn. On the 7th of December 1994 the Amtsgericht Berlin Tiergarten ordered the Atari Jaguar version confiscated. The Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle ended its outright ban in 2018, and the international version left the banned list in 2019.

  Nintendo of America took a different approach to the Super NES port. Swastikas and Nazi references were removed. Blood became sweat, and attack dogs became giant mutant rats. Two new weapons were added. Staff quoted in The Official DOOM Player Guide found it ironic that shooting people and rats was acceptable but shooting dogs was not. The Super NES version did less well than the PC original.

  A newer dispute came in May 2020, after the Doom Eternal soundtrack was released. Fans complained that the music did not match composer Mick Gordon's usual standards. Gordon confirmed on Twitter on the 19th of April that it was not his work. On the 20th of May, id's Marty Stratton posted a 2,500-word open letter on Reddit blaming Gordon for the problems. Gordon then received explicit death threats and graphic messages of intent to harm him and his family. His mental health was seriously affected.

  On the 9th of November 2022, Gordon answered with a 14,000-word article on Medium. He disputed the nine accusations in Stratton's post, which he described as "an extensive series of lies". He backed his account with photographs of emails, receipts and file metadata. He said he had not received over half his payment. He also said he was contracted just 48 hours before release, and had been offered six figures for a lifetime gag order. On the 16th of November, Bethesda released a statement backing Stratton, Chad Mossholder and the id team. It said evidence existed to rebut Gordon but did not release it.

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• 8. New Owners

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  The 24th of June 2009 brought the announcement that ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, had acquired id Software. The deal affected existing publishing arrangements, notably Rage, which had been set to go through Electronic Arts. ZeniMax received a $105 million investment from StrongMail Systems in July for the acquisition. It is unknown whether that was the exact price. Carmack ruled out larger changes, such as Bethesda using id Tech for The Elder Scrolls or swapping properties to build Doom role-playing games and first-person Fallout shooters.

  Rage had begun years earlier. Todd Hollenshead announced in May 2007 that id was starting a new series on a new engine, developed entirely in-house. Carmack showed id Tech 5 at WWDC that year. The title, Rage, was revealed at QuakeCon 2007. It was released in October 2011. On the 14th of May 2018, Bethesda announced Rage 2 as a co-development with Avalanche Studios.

  Doom returned too. The 2016 Doom came out on the 13th of May 2016 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It reached Nintendo Switch on the 10th of November 2017, with help from Panic Button. Doom Eternal was announced at E3 2018. Meanwhile MachineGames made Wolfenstein: The New Order in 2014 on id Tech 5, followed by The Old Blood in 2015 and The New Colossus in 2017.

  Id moved from its cube-shaped Mesquite office to Richardson, Texas, in the spring of 2011. President Todd Hollenshead quit on the 26th of June 2013 after 17 years. Carmack had joined Oculus VR on the 7th of August 2013 as a side project, but could not manage both. On the 22nd of November 2013 he resigned from id to work at Oculus full-time. He was the last original founder to leave. Tim Willits left in 2019. A second studio opened in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2015.

  Microsoft bought ZeniMax for US$7.5 billion in March 2021, so id became part of Microsoft Gaming. Today Marty Stratton is studio director, Hugo Martin is creative director and Kevin Cloud is executive producer. Robert Duffy served as chief technology officer from 1998 to 2024. Donna Jackson, the office manager known as the "id mom", has been there since 1994.

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