Happy Birthday id Software

It's id Software's 19th birthday today. It makes me wonder: how many people working at id right now actually know that?

Next year will be two decades of Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. How many game companies still standing can boast 20 years? Not many. And most companies that live past 20 years are so far removed from their origins that they're not even the same company.

John Carmack and Kevin Cloud, two of id's earliest team members, and John as a co-founder, are still with the company, and working hard on RAGE and Doom 4. John is right down in the pit with the development team, where all the action happens. Kevin manages, as always, exceptionally well on multiple fronts. I salute their efforts to continue the dynasty.

It all started on February 1, 1991. John, Adrian and I left our jobs at Softdisk (R.I.P.) and began work immediately on Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion at the id lake house in Shreveport, Louisiana. Tom Hall needed to stay a few months longer at Softdisk, to help them ease his transition out of the Apple II team. But after work, he'd come over and help out.

Those were prolific years. The years 1990 and 1991 saw us develop almost 20 games with wildly different play styles and themes. The Keens, The Dangerous Daves, the Rescue Rovers, the Catacombs, and more. There were a lot of them and all were fun. Wolfenstein 3D begat the first-person shooter genre in 1992, and id hasn't looked back.

Congratulations on 19 years, id!

GameTales: Cray 6400

At id, we were always looking for a better way to develop our games. In the beginning we developed games for DOS machines on DOS machines. In 1991, John Carmack investigated the NeXTSTEP operating system, and decided that cross-development on a superior platform would result in a better game and a better development experience. We all converted over to NeXTSTEP at the end of 1992, after Spear of Destiny.

Because we were developing on such powerful machines in an amazing operating system, development of Doom went faster than normal. The level editor that I wrote, DoomEd, was far beyond anything that ever appeared on DOS, even in the years after Doom's release. We could run Doom in a window and debug its code right alongside it in SuperDebugger. It was bliss.

While developing Quake, we continued to use NeXTSTEP and we upgraded our machines to faster ones with Intel processors and a couple with PowerPC's in them. NeXTSTEP could run on about 4 chip architectures back then and compile code for all of them so we could run QuakeEd, for example, on an Intel-chipped NeXTSTEP machine even if it was developed on a 68000 chip machine.

Simply put, NeXTSTEP was awesome for many years and nothing could touch it. That remains true today after NeXTSTEP's transformation into macOS.

During Quake's development, John Carmack started thinking about what might be better than NeXTSTEP. The idea of the entire development team working inside the same machine seemed pretty interesting. The machine would be insanely fast, so it would have to be a supercomputer for all of us to work on it at once. That means it would be able to crunch whatever crazy data we needed to create our upcoming worlds.

John decided that a Cray 6400 series supercomputer would be pretty cool to check out and see if we could all move over to it. Each person would have a hardware interface board that had keyboard and mouse inputs with video output on it. We would route all the cables to our desks and all be working together inside a Cray supercomputer.

We started getting pretty excited about the idea, so Jay Wilbur contacted Cray to see about getting a deal on a 6400. Jay got them to agree to sell us one for $500k if we put Cray supercomputers inside Quake, somewhere in the environment, possibly all over the place if it made sense.

John and I were all for this idea, so we said, "Let's do this." and I started experimenting with how a C-shaped Cray would look inside Quake. How it needed to be lit. How big it should be. What kind of textures we should use. Where it would go, and why it would be there.

I thought that powering the slipgates would probably require a supercomputer. So I should probably have a Cray connected to every slipgate, since the military-themed areas are supposed to be modern day settings.

After getting settled on the idea, and thinking the Crays would only be in select areas, disaster struck.

Cray was bought by SGI, Silicon Graphics, Inc., in February 1996.

All pending deals were canceled; our supercomputer dream crushed.

I changed the Quake slipgates to be smaller and simpler than the Cray-powered versions. As an homage to the Cray Dream we had, I put a roomful of computers in my only deathmatch map, The Abandoned Base, DM3.

Shortly after I released Quake on June 22, 1996, John decided that developing on Windows NT 3.1 was the way to go. His first project was porting QuakeEd over to Win32. I left id on August 6, 1996.

GameTales: Axe Attack!

Heeeeeeere's Johnny!

It was dark in my office in 1995, warm, and I was busy programming QuakeEd. I had my stereo playing Great White, Ratt, George Lynch and all other manner of hair metal. I was in my element - in the zone.

At some point, I needed to go to the bathroom. I went to my door, turned the knob, and nothing. The door wouldn't open, the knob turning and turning. I was thinking, "Seriously?" The building materials were not grade-A, apparently, at our building in Mesquite, Texas.

I needed to get out, the pressure now mounting. I called John Carmack on his phone extension, 13.

"Dude, I'm stuck in my office. My doorknob doesn't work anymore. I think you should chop down this shitty door."

"I'll be right over."

I heard a noise on the wall, which had to be John getting his $5,000 custom axe off its mount. He walked in front of my door and tried the knob. Sure enough, the knob doomed the door to a swift death. John was telling the others in the office nearby that he was about to rescue me from my new prison.

Good thing I decided to stand with my back against the same wall as the door.

BAM! The first swing came through the center of the door, just a little, and sprayed wood fragments across the room, bouncing off the opposite wall.

BAM! More wood, splintering and flying. I would have been injured if I were standing in the middle of my room.

After about twelve good swings, the center of the door was completely obliterated, and I could climb through easily. I ran to the bathroom as everyone was laughing about the violence that just took place.

When I got back, I got the doorknob off and swung the door fully open. Later on, we tapped the hinges out and put the door in the storage room. A new door appeared the next day.

The story about the axe attack got around. Magazine journos that came by for interviews wanted to see the door that Carmack destroyed. We showed them. We took pictures with the door, some of which were published. The ruined door became an iconic item almost as venerable as the DOOM chainsaw.

Alas, no one at id thought the door that important, and it was taken to the scrapheap during our office remodel of 1996.

GameTales: The Bilestoad

We were in Quake development. It was at the beginning when things were going smoothly, not the last seven months that turned work into a very dark place (from December 1995 on). But, I digress.

Michael Abrash, the legendary programmer, was working at id and occupying the space where Tom Hall, followed by Sandy Petersen, resided - out in the open in the black id cube building in Mesquite, Texas. One day, Michael had a visitor by the name of Ken Demarest. Ken has been in the game industry for many years, starting in 1990 at Origin Systems, and who, eight years after this story, worked at my Ion Storm Austin office.

Ken and Michael were talking about old games. Little-known to many, Michael Abrash co-programmed the PC game, Snack Attack II, with his friend Dan Illowsky, who was already a well-known Apple II programmer due to Snack Attack's popularity as a great Pac-Man clone.

Michael was talking about Snack Attack II, published in 1982, and Ken said, "Oh, we're gonna start bringing up old games, eh?" Of course, anyone talking about old games has my interest, so I came out of my office and exclaimed surprise at learning that Michael had programmed Snack Attack II with the added surprise that I had no idea there was a sequel to the Apple II version!

Ken then mentioned the old Ultimas, and I replied that I had played all of them and beaten 1 through 5 (Ultima 8 had been released the year before, in 1994). I told Ken, "Look, pulling out Ultima as an old game to impress me doesn't work because it's too big and popular. Everyone knows about Ultima. Have you ever heard of The Tarturian? Now that's a rare game!"

Ken hadn't heard of The Tarturian, so I told him a little bit about it. I said I had a metric ton of Apple II games and knew them all very well. Then, the following exchange happened:

Ken: "You know, I'd be really impressed if you had The Bilestoad."

Me: "I have it."

Ken: "I mean the original retail version."

Me: "I have the original 1982 gold label retail floppy."

Ken: "Seriously? I'd be really impressed if you had it here."

Me: "I do. In fact, I am going to blow you away. Right now, in my office, The Bilestoad is currently running on my Apple IIe."

Ken: "Seriously? Holy shit, I gotta see this!"

Ken follows me into my office, and on my original computer desk from 1985, was my Apple IIe with The Bilestoad running in demo mode - silicon knights hacking away at each other with digital axes, replete with pixelated blood spilling on the green field.

Ken: "Now that is impressive."

Food for thought: Why did I have my Apple IIe running that day, and why did I put in The Bilestoad and leave it running in demo mode? Ken is the one who brought the game up, not me.

My life is full of seemingly impossible coincidences.

History Lesson:

The Bilestoad was Marc Goodman's hack-em-up Apple II action game that became a classic because of its violence and bloodshed. The game was so controversial that Marc used a nom de plume, Mangrove Earthshoe, so he could continue publishing games under his name free of stigma due to The Bilestoad. Unfortunately, this was his last game.

It's hard to detect, but Marc was attempting to play the song "Fur Elise" while simultaneously running a game. On the Apple II, this was one of the most difficult programming tasks, and very few programmers got it working right. The absolute master of this technique was Jim Nitchals, triumphantly displayed in his 1982 game Microwave.

There's an excellent interview that James Hague did with Marc Goodman here.

Subnodule Gone Live

The box cover for Subnodule, renamed in this collection as Sub Hunt.

I spent some time last weekend and created the entry for my game, Subnodule. I've received some emails recently asking me about more information concerning its development. The resulting article is a template for how I plan to address each of my games - there are lots of links, music, pictures, and as much recollection about the game's development as I could dredge up.

The Games link at the top of my pages will take you to the list of games with which I'm credited. There are other game links there you should check out as well.