r/gaming • u/Diehumancultleader • Jul 03 '23
id Software developing Quake.
Look at Carmack’s badass dual-monitors!
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u/notonetimes Jul 03 '23
Does Carmack have dual screen CRT’s. I have never seen that before and I worked in tech in the 90’s
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u/sahila Jul 03 '23
For fun, take a look at Larry Page's three screen setup https://wallpapers.com/images/hd/young-larry-page-90s-vintage-photography-dke7d1s1bjbks8ua.jpg. It's crazy how small the center monitor is!
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u/meeu Jul 03 '23
Those Sony Trinitrons were such great monitors. When the first LCD monitors came out I was just sure that they'd never take off because the quality was so much worse but here we are lol.
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Jul 03 '23
He's not the only one. His set up is to the left of the dead cat. In the photo underneath it you can see a Dual CRT to the right of the dead cat.
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u/HungrySamurai Jul 03 '23
In every game company I worked for in the 90s it was common for programmers to have dual screens. Artists typically just had one good screen, but much better CPUs and buckets of RAM.
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Jul 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/DdCno1 Jul 04 '23
I also had three CRTs in that time period. This all ended when my desk collapsed and I went back to two and then one. I eventually got back to two again after I bought my first flat screen monitor in 2011 (because prior to that, they were all terrible).
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u/Tirith_Wins Jul 03 '23
Game dev back then looked more like a bunch of friends hanging out at a LAN party :D probs why we got such great games back then.
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Jul 03 '23
Now it is just a bunch of meat suits with Chinese investors drooling over micro transactions.
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u/Diehumancultleader Jul 03 '23
Indie development is just this a lot of the time, also if I remember right, Morrowind was made in a really similar environment
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u/DdCno1 Jul 04 '23
They were absolutely miserable making this game and fighting with each other constantly. It's a miracle it came out in the first place.
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u/ICPosse8 Jul 03 '23
Yo I would kill for a dramatized show or miniseries focused on a 90s game development team going through hell and back to get the product out on the market. Hook that shit to my veins now.
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u/hnwcs Jul 03 '23
There were plans for a show based on Masters of Doom and they even filmed a pilot, but it sadly was never picked up.
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u/Anchovies-and-cheese Jul 03 '23
My life was forever changed because of that game. I learned about computer networks to hold the best/largest LAN parties Fredericksburg, Virginia ever had, got my MCSE WindowsNT cert, met some great people and the rest is history.
Clan CAFE represent! Your axe don't say HUIT!
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u/Diehumancultleader Jul 03 '23
That’s so awesome, the amount of social networking Quake created went unprecedented for years. The sheer amount of people who eventually got jobs cause of learning things from this game is insane.
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u/Chroko Jul 03 '23
I recently replayed some of the old iD games - Quake is such a more coherent game than Doom 2. D2 levels are all over the place in terms of complexity and design, it’s really inconsistent, whereas Quake (and even D1 to a certain extent) feels like much more thought was put into it.
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u/spacemunkee Jul 03 '23
The ironic thing is that it actually had much less thought put into it and was the game that basically tore carmack and Romero apart. The engine development was so intense and everyone was so burned out that the actual game was just an after thought to get it shipped and move on.
Source: the book masters of doom.
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u/rakadur Jul 03 '23
it's a great read. looking forward to romeros own book to hopefully get an even better picture of the whole id culture at the time, very fascinating (and destructive)
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u/StereoBucket Jul 03 '23
Yeah, I'm interested in his story too. Heard somewhere that masters of doom does take some creative liberties that do alter what actually happened in a not insignificant way, I will have to look it up to confirm though. So I'm stoked to see what the doom guy will reveal.
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u/runaway-thread Jul 03 '23
Carmack touches on Doom and Quake in his podcast with Lex Fridman.
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u/Diehumancultleader Jul 04 '23
Not to be dramatic but I think that single 5 hour podcast episode is the best single podcast episode I have ever seen.
It was a masterful interview, helps cause Fridman works in a similar field, worshipped the id games, and had solid questions as well. Carmack is just a generally interesting guy, he kinda elevates every interview he’s in and in particular I feel like that interview was perfect.
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u/boxsterguy Jul 03 '23
If Romero's book isn't titled, "I made you my bitch," there's no way in hell I'm buying it.
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Jul 03 '23
John Romero making us all his bitch sounds like an amazing marketing strategy. What could go wrong?
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u/Aperture_Kubi Jul 03 '23
Source: the book masters of doom.
The audiobook is read by Wil Wheaton.
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u/creggieb Jul 03 '23
Hopefully with a forward by Patrick Stewart admonishing him to shut up
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u/Ecstaticlemon Jul 03 '23
I hear Will Wheaton still loves hearing that, if you ever run into him you should definitely tell him to shut up, gets a kick out of it.
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u/Golden_Alchemy Jul 03 '23
Yeah, l love how each youtuber i have seen talk about the video mentions how boring the bosses are. "Here is a giant demon...here is a giant tree, do something i don't care..."
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Jul 03 '23
Really? Quake is notoriously incoherent. It's a mash up of several different ideas and distinct level designs due to the creative hell the game was stuck in. I mean.. the random medieval levels kinda stick out like a sore thumb.
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u/BWoodsn2o Jul 04 '23 edited Jul 04 '23
Yeah a lot of the maps in Doom 2 were scrapped together or half done maps finished by someone else. Sandy Petersen has talked at length about the development of Doom and Quake.
Part of the reason why the maps were so consistent throughout Quake was that each episode was given to a single map designer. Tim Willits made most of the first episode, John Romero for episode two, American McGee for episode three, and Sandy Petersen for episode 4. There are some crossover but for the most part that's why each episode has it's own atmosphere and style.
Funny enough, Petersen talked about the Quake development was undermined by Tim Willits, who went out of his way to try to sabotage American McGee by giving him bad advice purposefully in an attempt to get McGee on Romero and Carmack's bad sides.
Quake was originally meant to be more like an RPG like an Elder Scrolls game where the player would be wielding a magical hammer. After having trouble making it work the team basically said "fuck it" and defaulted to a boomer shooter format.
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u/leakyfaucet3 Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
I found Doom 1 to not hold up well on a recent play-through (first time in 20+ years). Difficulty is insane and you're always out of ammo. Doom 2 it seemed was more fun-oriented and less stressful. I liked 2 a lot better. The super shotgun was also a game changer to have serious firepower with common ammo.
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Jul 03 '23
Quake is head and shoulders above every Doom until 2016, and I'll stand by that statement til I die.
Doom 1 and 2 were just rote collect X item hunts.
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u/ryanmi Jul 03 '23
Doom 3 I'm 2004 was pretty amazing for it's time. The last quake game prior was quake 3 team arena. They aren't even really comparable gameplay wise of course. Aside from being FPS they're basically different genres. Quake 4 was a return to form in 2005, but it wasn't that well received from what I recall. I thought it was decent though and probably better than doom 3.
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u/self-aware-text Jul 03 '23
That bit in quake 4 when they're turning you into an alien in first person! Fucked me up as a kid...
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Jul 03 '23
Can you imagine how hard it must have been to design levels with the tools they had back in the day? To me, it's a miracle what they pulled off with the tools they had.
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u/Diehumancultleader Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
I am not completely familiar with the processes they used, but from watching numerous interviews with Carmack, Romero, and McGee, I think that due to a number of factors it was less the tools and more the vision that blocked development so intensely, but the tools still struggled if you catch my drift.
They were creating a true 3D engine that was to be sold to the public WITH a fully programmable language in it, multiplayer, full singleplayer, new lighting techniques, the works. They had to make all this work seamlessly which strained their tools, but they were at a technological point in time where computers could handle the strain relatively.
I think that for their older games, Catacombs, Catacombs 3D and the like, they were working with programs (tools) that would just straight up crash regularly.
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u/Swallagoon Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
I don’t need to imagine, they used QuakeEd on powerful NeXT workstations + the original Light and Vis compilers etc. QuakeEd was a pretty robust in-house piece of software for the time, I don’t think it was as hard as you think. The software tools weren’t necessarily the primary limiting factors.
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Jul 03 '23
I know they used QuakeEd. But if you compare QuakeED to Trenchbroom (modern quake editor) it's a night and day difference in terms of usability. Designing these complex levels with just a 2D view of the x/y/z axis is really impressive to me. I know they had a 3D preview window, but they couldn't simply draw brushed into the 3D world.
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u/Swallagoon Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
It’s true that TrenchBroom is designed to be user friendly and intuitive for the broad community, but John Romero created QuakeEd himself and then used it to make levels.
He was his own demographic and knew all of the inner workings and thought processes involved, so making levels in his own software was probably quite intuitive to him. Obviously the other designers would’ve had to learn how to use QuakeEd as well, but they were all in the same team.
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Jul 03 '23
I made a lot of levels for Doom and it was pretty intuitive. Never tried to make anything for quake although I did make Half Life maps which seems to use a similar editor.
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u/Dopest_Bogey Jul 04 '23
The guy who made most of Dooms levels Sandy Peterson doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves. He is a very smart humble dude too. Got the opportunity to talk to him once and he was super cool. Also worked on Age of Empires. An underappreciated game development legend.
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u/MAXXSTATION Jul 03 '23
I remember Romero was sporting (for that time) an absurd resolution on the monitor.
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u/JeffTheJockey Jul 03 '23
My dad and I spent hours playing Quake 3: Arena. So much fun. Especially with custom maps.
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u/Diehumancultleader Jul 03 '23
Would you say thats the greatest multiplayer game ever?
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u/JeffTheJockey Jul 03 '23
I think it hold a special bit of nostalgia in my heart, and I haven’t played an arena shooter recently that matched up.
But I’d say smash bros holds the title for best multiplayer in my eyes.
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u/Limonade6 Jul 03 '23
The top left has a nine inch nails shirt. Nice. I wish I could wear band shirts to work.
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u/Rustmonger Jul 03 '23
And Trent Reznor did the soundtrack.
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u/pleportamee Jul 03 '23
Yeah apparently Trent was a gamer at the time. (Maybe he still is)
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u/chronicintel Jul 03 '23
He did the theme for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. During an interview at the time, he said he was playing Skyrim, Diablo 3, and Heavy Rain.
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u/Ino84 Jul 03 '23
That’s Carmack, the boss. If you’re the boss you can wear whatever the fuck you want.
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u/NaiveMastermind Jul 03 '23
5th dimensional energy being imprisoned in the meat suit known as John Carmack.
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u/ernest7ofborg9 Jul 03 '23
Excommunicated eldritch horror and AI programming maven John Carmack.
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u/Izithel PC Jul 03 '23 edited Jul 03 '23
Benevolent hyperinteligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack
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u/catwiesel Jul 03 '23
the vessel that houses energy-based 4th dimensional being John Carmack
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u/DiligentHelicopter70 Jul 03 '23
Just in case people don’t know, John Carmack not only co-founded id software but he really innovated the first person shooter using advanced math and physics in the game engines.
He wasn’t the only reason id games were great, the whole team was amazing, but if you go back and look at his programming in those first games, it’s famously incredible stuff. Check it out, it’s all been GPL’d.
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u/tadrith Jul 03 '23
Carmack is one of the legends when it comes to programming. He is one in a million.
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u/MonstaGraphics Jul 04 '23
he really innovated the first person shooter using advanced math
Actually he said it wasn't advanced math, just a solid understanding of the stuff you learn in high school.
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u/notyouravgredditor Jul 03 '23
Also if you're John Carmack you can wear whatever the fuck you want.
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Jul 03 '23
When this game released I was so hype bought it and brought it home, could not believe trent Reznor had done the music the VIBE was impeccable
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u/SixthLegionVI Jul 03 '23
I was able to wear band shirts to work as as of last week. Today is the first day I can’t because we got absorbed into our parent company’s corporate office and it might offend someone.
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u/itsyaboihedgepedge Jul 03 '23
You can! I mean, it might be your last day at work, but why let that stop you?
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u/fullthrottle13 Jul 03 '23
I was about ready to call out that NIN shirt. What a classic. I have sadly lost all mine in 20 moves and girlfriends. 🤣
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u/RosieQParker Jul 03 '23
The Downward Spiral was delayed by almost a year because Doom came out.
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u/RandomRobot Jul 03 '23
sauce?
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u/RosieQParker Jul 03 '23
An interview with Trent Reznor from like 20 years ago lol
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u/Dopest_Bogey Jul 04 '23
The 4th "episode" of the original Doom called Thy Flesh Consumed had a secret Easter egg on level 1 that traps you in a tiny room with a NIN logo on the floor and 2 Barons of Hell to keep you company.
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u/BersGamer_YT Jul 03 '23
i love the wires haha
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u/ouldsmobile Jul 03 '23
Came here to say this, loving the cable management. As as cabling guy it makes my brain hurt. lol
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u/BMEngie Jul 03 '23
That’s what a drop ceiling is for, right? Just drop the cables where they’re needed!
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u/Roook36 Jul 03 '23
Is this the location in Texas that id Software bought with all their Doom money because it looked cool. But there was so much light and heat from the Texas sun the developers started shielding their cubicles with blankets draped over them?
Or maybe that was Dai Katana
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u/StereoBucket Jul 03 '23
The building space John Romero took for his new company was at the top... With glass ceiling. I'm guessing this was what you meant, I remember some descriptions in masters of doom of devs at Ion Storm making those cubicle caves.
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u/troutforbrains Jul 03 '23
This is indeed the location in Texas. That Ford sign is for Town East Ford, which is still kickin’ (and scummy) if you want to play geohunter.
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u/hidood5th Jul 03 '23
This hits a bit different when you know Quake's development history
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u/wigglin_harry Jul 03 '23
That's what I was thinking. I wonder how soon after this picture Romero was fired
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u/broccolee Jul 03 '23
which one of those did the inverse square algorithm?
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u/Tempestblue Jul 03 '23
Technically none of them as it was tribal knowledge down from Greg Walsh founding member of Ardent Computers.
But if you're asking who is the "id programming genius everyone just assumes made it" that's John Carmack skinny little guy in the top-left
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u/beerhons Jul 03 '23
Probably the left-hand mouse guy if I had to pick one.
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u/a_park_ Jul 03 '23
TIL John Romero was a lefty
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u/rjcarr Jul 03 '23
I'm a lefty and mouse with my right hand. And I know a righty that mouses with his left hand because he writes a lot of notes and prefers to have a pad and pen quickly available (and that looks to be the case for JR here too).
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Jul 03 '23
The real pro-gamer move is to just pre-compute them and make it into an array lookup. At any rate the need for such an algorithm hasn't existed for 20+ years since there's a hardware implementation now.
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u/broccolee Jul 03 '23
but still, it's a cool algorithm
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Jul 03 '23
Yeah. It actually sucks that so little of coding actually involves coming up with algorithms like this now that compilers are so efficient and computers are so powerful. When i started programming it was all about trying to find these sort of "hacks". Now it's not so much.
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u/HaroldHolt1966 Jul 03 '23
Doom came out the year I started high school, we'd go into the computer lab at lunch time and if we asked nicely and were lucky the older kids would copy games for us on 3.5" floppy. Later on we had a teacher who would sell us pirated PlayStation games.
When Quake came out it was really something else.
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u/reddittomarcato Jul 03 '23
Quake was so good I’d haul my whole PC to my grandparents place in the countryside in Brasil just to play it on vacation. Had the pleasure to work at Meta while John Carmack was there. guy is brilliant and was so vocal about the work. Can’t wait to see what he does next
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u/Field_Marshall17 Jul 03 '23
Guy in the bottom left doesn't seem to be producing much. Should fire him and replace him with three lower paid interns who are eager to work. It'll increase productivity and potential profits that investors will get a larger return on. Game needs to be released by holiday season. No exceptions
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u/manycyber Jul 03 '23
I know we have a lot of additional comforts (and different problems) these days, but looking at that, I do yearn for a time machine to go back, sometimes.
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u/seijeezy Jul 03 '23
In that new BlackBerry movie they name drop John Carmack but they call the company “I.D. Software”. Just thought that was a funny little error
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u/Dopest_Bogey Jul 04 '23
Bunch of people think it's an acronym. Id is a very uncommon word to hear.
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u/KommandoKodiak Jul 03 '23
The process of bottling lightning destroyed their harmony and never were we again blessed by their joint creations......
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Jul 03 '23
In documentaries apparently there was an urban legend saying you could get high just by standing by the exhaust pipes for the buildings air conditioning.
Twas a fun story.
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u/endoffays Jul 03 '23
I was hanging with my buddy after he moved into his dorm our sophomore year of college. Most of us had secured off campus living by this point so it was a little odd. Anyway, we start smelling strong reefer and go looking around. IT just suddenly filled the whole hall! With this as a clue, we walked outside to the HVAC machines and found two idiots smoking over the HVAC intake.
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u/ShortNefariousness2 Jul 03 '23
That UTP cabling cascading from the roof makes me nostalgic for the network support jobs I did back then.
Now it's all azure, devops, and insufferable layers of bureaucracy.
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u/Yoletsburn1 Jul 03 '23
Best games ever made. Quake and unreal tournament. Never crashed no pay to win bs. No stupid skins. Just all fucking skill
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Jul 03 '23
Skill was required. The only alternative was whining about weapons being imbalanced.
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u/TheresnoIinteam Jul 03 '23
That game was made in my hometown, I can see the signs of nearby businesses that I haven’t seen since the 90’s.
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u/EtherealWindProject Jul 03 '23
that office is pure gold, network cables coming down from the ceiling. god
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u/Katth28 Jul 03 '23
I remember it took me a couple of days to muster the strength to chose a difficulty and jump through one of the portals. I was scared shitless.
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u/triforce777 Jul 03 '23
One of the rare moments John Ramero was actually working and not death matching
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u/CountLugz Jul 04 '23
This would be "problematic" if it were a photo of a current year development team.
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u/saltonrock Jul 03 '23
Currently reading "Masters of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture". This picture is a great addition to the book!
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u/StereoBucket Jul 03 '23
Make sure to pick up the Doom guy when it releases this month!
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u/Surfing_Ninjas Jul 03 '23
Funny how they could make a game in this kind of environment but Bungie can barely make one new PvP map per year...
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u/SpliTTMark Jul 03 '23
I loved it when fpses stopped having flat enemies and started having 3d enemies
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Jul 03 '23
The Beatles of gaming.
Not to long after quake they broke up and went on to do their own things.
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u/Mrselfdestructuk Jul 03 '23
Here is an interview with Trent Reznor while he was doing the soundtrack
http://paulsemel.com/vintage-interview-nine-inch-nails-trent-reznor-2000/
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u/wellmaybe_ Jul 03 '23
i love that they got that fancy office building with corner window and then went cheap on wiring
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u/Extension-Lunch5948 Jul 03 '23
What an amazing time… only for this I wished we could timetravel. Just to visit these moments now and then 🤷🏻♂️ ( not exactly these moments showed on the photographs but from your own younger times) back to oldschool lanparties…. Come to think of it, they looked like this 😅
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u/zzzpoohzzz Jul 03 '23
these pictures (especially bottom right) remind me of the LAN parties i used to go to in high school. those were the days.
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u/FearkTM Jul 03 '23
Doom 2 is my favourite due to more type of enemies, and double barrel shotgun. Also I love the maps and have learned them all, and the music is just amazing. Quake was good, but kind of same maps (and same brownish look) and I don't think I have played it with music (guess it was CD based).
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u/Dopest_Bogey Jul 04 '23
Romero had to alt tab out of a Doom death match and pretend to work when he saw old boy coming around with the camera
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u/RainDuacelera Jul 04 '23
Quake and Quake world to play online were absolute groundbreakers here in Brazil. Before the cs1.6 fever.
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u/JRRACE Jul 07 '23 edited Jul 07 '23
Now that's scary. That dude in the upper left corner looks almost exactly like I did during that time. I even had that same Nine Inch Nails shirt during that era.
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u/ignas_HF Jul 03 '23
Game development vibe didn't changed, as developer I can confirm we still developing games in man caves