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TechStuff Classic: The id Software Story Part Two

Published Oct 6, 2023, 8:00 AM

From humble beginnings to massive success, we follow the rest of the id Software story. When did the founders leave and why? And what's going on there now?

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio, and how the tech are you. It's time for another tech Stuff Classic episode. This is actually the conclusion of a two parter. So if you didn't listen to last week's classic, which was The ID Software Story Part one, I recommend you go do that first because this is The ID Software Story Part two and you don't want to walk into a movie right in the middle right, you want to see it from the beginning. Anyway. This episode originally published way back on April seventh, twenty seventeen. Hope you enjoy. So in our last episode, I really talked about the people responsible for forming ID Software and how they found early success with titles like Commander Keene and Wolfenstein three. Today we'd pick up where I left off with the development of the blockbuster title Doom. Now, the company was still just a small team of developers and they had a problem. There weren't enough people to work on a follow up to Wolfenstein and simultaneously work on the new Doom project. What's more, the people at ID Software all wanted to work on Doom. They wanted to work on something new rather than create a sequel to an already existing game, but there was a lot of pressure from apage to create a sequel. Wolfenstein had been the most successful title to debut on Apagee in its history, so they decided to do the reasonable thing. They outsourced Wolfenstein too. They licensed out the work to apage, which got started on the project, but after some time in development, ID Software didn't really see it progressing very well. They didn't think it was a making it a progress, so they pulled the plug on the project. Apagee ended up taking these lemons and making Lemonade later on, converting the work they had already produced into a brand new title called Rise of the Triad. Talk a little bit more about that in a second. They also hired a couple of folks in nineteen ninety three. One of them ended up making a big name for himself a little bit later on in the video game world. That would be American McGee. He's perhaps most famous for his Dark Alice in Wonderland inspired games, which he made with EA. After his tenure with ID Software ended in nineteen ninety eight, McGhee started at ID as a tech support worker and eventually worked his way up to designer, but there was a point where the company decided that McGee's work and the company's direction were no longer a good fit, and so he was let go. One thing that did make Doom possible was the evolution of computer hardware. The team had been bumping up against the upper limits of the previous generation of PCs, but over time, the really expensive Intel three eighty six microprocessor cost had started to come down, and now it was finding its way into consumer level PCs. More people were able to afford a three eighty six PC, which was better equipped to handle the demands of a BFY game engine, or at least BF at the time. Now three eighty six had been around for a while. It first launched in nineteen eighty five. This Intel microprocessor, it took about a year for manufacturing to ramp up to the levels that Intel wanted, but even when they did reach those levels, they were still really expensive, so very few people were actually able to afford them. By today's standards, a three eighty six microprocessor would probably seem pretty crude and clunky. It had only two hundred and seventy five transistors on it a little microprocessor. Now, I say only because today's microprocessors have more than a billion transistors on them, so two hundred and seventy five thousand is nothing compared to today's microprocessors. The clock rate, as in how fast the three eighty six microprocessor could work, was between twelve megahertz up to forty megahurts if you're overclocking it on the extreme end. And again, your basic smartphone today can outperform those specs. But at the time it was a state of the art machine and it was just what it needed to take the next step in game development. John Karmack, at the ripe old age of twenty one years old, began to experiment with stuff that older game engines just couldn't handle. That included creating irregular shapes in the environment, like irregular walls or floors that sloped around. He also wanted dynamic lighting and the option to move in or out doors. These were all elements that would have been really challenging back in the older Wolfenstein days that game engine just couldn't handle this kind of level of complexity. And then he also had another goal. He wanted gameplay to be immersive and fast. Fast was really important. It had to be a fast paced game and really get the player's blood pumping, so he wanted these abilities, this ability to make more complex environments, but not at the expense of the speed of the game. As Carmak worked on the engine, Romero started programming the levels and designed much of the look and sound of the game. For inspiration, the team looked at the art of hr Geiger, and that was Geiger's work that inspired the Alien film franchise, so the team used that art to guide decisions in level and monster design. The walls in Doom sometimes have hideous faces incorporated in to them, and many of the demons look pretty monstrous as well. Romero points out that by today's standards they might seem a bit cartoony, but at the time it was considered a really etchy approach to game design. Tom Hall, who had put up some resistance during the development of Wolfenstein three D, campaigned for a rich story for Doom. He had in mind an opening scene that would set the rest of the game in motion, and in that scene, the player would be taking on the role of a soldier in the middle of a card game with the rest of his squad, and in the middle of the game a demon would burst in, killing everyone but the player, and then the game would start, and his ideas helped shape design decisions, but as he tells it all later on, the focus was really more on the technical side of making the game work and less on the narrative or story side. He'd say it would be a few years before you would see a first person shooter incorporate deep story elements, and the game he cites is really nailing it. Half Life, which was a from a totally different company. It's from Valve, that would be the first real example of that sort of thing. But he wanted it to be Doom, and he started to feel really discouraged that a lot of his ideas were being rejected. He wanted rooms to have a purpose in Doom, so that when you walked into a room in the game, you understood why the room was there. It had a reason for existing. It wasn't just one in a series of rooms that make up a level, or just a weird interchangeable environment with undefined spaces. In his Doom, you wouldn't wonder why two rooms connected together, or what purpose a weird path might serve, it would have a reason and you would understand what it was. To him, level design needed to make sense and serve the story, but the development of the game didn't really allow for his designs, and so the levels were less detailed, less logical. Hall himself designed about seven levels, according to his own estimation. He said Romero was responsible for some of the more iconic levels in Doom, particularly the ones that used multiple vertical planes. You know, multiple levels within a game level. So I'm using level in two different ways here, game levels meaning at a stage in a game, and levels within the game or within that stage rather meaning different vertical platforms. Hall's account of those days sound like they were pretty rough. He said that the team was working every day, seven days a week, for up to sixteen hours a day, and he said he was feeling increasingly isolated at that time. The rest of the team sensed this as well, and eventually, in nineteen ninety three, Romero invited Hall over for dinner and then told him they were letting him go. He was essentially fired, but they had also secured another job for him over at Apogee, so he already had a place to go. It wasn't like he was just cut loose, and in twenty fourteen said that ultimately this came as a huge relief after the Shock War off. He was the first of the four main founders of ID to leave ID Software. He would move on to Apagee and work on Rise of the Triad, which I mentioned earlier. It was the game that Wolfenstein Io would turn into. He'd work on other games too, before moving on to co found another studio. The other studio he co founded was one called ion Storm, rather infamous in video game circles, and his fellow co founder was John Romero. But we'll get to that part of the story a little later, and ion Storm could be its own episode all by itself. It was a heck of a story. I remember when all of that was unfolding. Meanwhile, in nineteen ninety three, Adrian Carmak relished the subject matter of Doom. It was kind of like the opposite of Tom Hall's reaction. He thought it was fantastic. He took great delight in designing and drawing numerous demonic critters and nightmarish environments. He was happy to move away from the more family friendly art style that Tom Hall held dear. He and Kevin Cloud, his assistant, designed tons of monsters, and then they commissioned a sculptor to come in and create three dimensional models of the monsters out of clay. Then they would paint the models and scan them in to create virtual models for the game itself. And it gave Doom a really unique look. And I realized that really unique is redundant. Someone who joined ID Software during the development of Doom was Sandy Peterson. He was a programmer who had worked for Micropros before joining ID Software. Micropros was another huge name in the computer gaming industry in the nineteen eighties. In particular, one of its founders is a real legend in games, Sid Meyer. Peterson would end up designing nineteen levels for Doom, even though he joined the project after it had already started. As the game neared completion, they had a big decision they had to make. They felt they had outgrown Apagee's business model, which involved that shareware approach to get gamers interested, followed by sending a physical copy of the full game once an order came in. Abajee only had a couple of employees handling incoming calls, and the folks over at it were getting frustrated because orders were coming in faster than apagee could respond to them, and they asked Scott Miller if he would invest in that department and grow it, and he seemed reluctant to do that. So ID Software decided they could do this for themselves and just do what apage had been doing for them, using the Internet for distribution and keeping overhead costs low so that they don't have to worry about producing physical copies and all that kind of stuff. So they moved out to strike out on their own. Now I got more to say about this next phase in ID Software's evolution, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. During alpha testing of the Doom game, ID Software sent unfinished copies to a few playtesters to look for bugs and get feedback on how the gameplay was coming together. An early build of the game that alpha build ended up leaking onto the Internet, which got a ton of attention, despite the fact that it wasn't a complete game and ID software was genuinely worried that it could end up tanking the game. If people played something that wasn't finished, they might have an incorrect assumption of how the game's going to turn out, but actually it helped drive excitement for the title. People were really eager to get hold of the finished copy. The retail price for the game, at least at one point was a was suggested at nine dollars. That's insane, right. The game launched on a server on December tenth, nineteen ninety three, at the University of Wisconsin, and almost immediately the server crashed because so many people were dialing in to try and get a copy of this game, and since it was about midnight when the game went live, it meant there was several hours before someone could get everything back online, but that really only helped drive the demand for the game further, and soon it became a best seller. Wolfenstein three D gave birth to the first person shooter genre, but Doom defined it, and id Software built in a feature that would become standard in nearly every FPS to follow Doom, and that was the death match. That was Romero's term for a competitive match between two or more players. Using the game engine Doom, up to four people could play against each other on physically networked computers, a local area network, or a land or you could play against a single person over the internet. It was the birth of competitive multiplayer for first person shooters, and it's another reason why people cite Doom as the real father of the FPS genre. So while Wolfenstein three D did it first, Doom really got the form factor down. And before Doom, Wolfenstein was the biggest hit from ID Software with more than two hundred thousand copies sold, but within a couple of years of launch, Doom sales blew that number out of the water. By nineteen ninety five, it was estimated that ten million computers had a copy of Doom on them. Whether or not all those copies were full paid copies is another matter, because again the first few levels were offered as a shareware download. The game received positive fans loved it. The multiplayer was huge, an enormous innovation, and ID Software was the darling of the computer games industry. And it also had another big innovation built in with Doom. And this was a choice that John Carmack had made. It was incredibly accessible to the modern community. Now, a mot is someone who modifies games. They tweak code to create new types of enemies or environments, new levels, new items, new weapons. A modern friendly game is one that can transform in all sorts of ways with a minimum of fuss upon the part of the motters. They don't have to end up breaking code in order to make it happen. Now, there are a lot of titles out there today that have a reputation for supporting creative mods, such as Skyrim or a Grand Theft Auto five. Doom was an early example of this. John Carmack designed the code so that it wouldn't be too difficult for the modern community to tweak it, and in fact, this would remain one of his principles throughout his career. The result was that Doom was viewed as a must have game because even if you grew tired of the original gameplay, the modern community was always adding new stuff, which meant that you had a continuously refreshed game. You could just download the mods and incorporate it into your own copy. It was so big that during the presentation for Windows ninety five, Bill Gates had a segment in which he was keyed into the frame of a Doom game. And yes, it's just as embarrassing and awkward as you are imagining right now. Bill Gates standing there wearing a kind of a costume holding a rifle in the middle of the rifle, his hand nowhere near the stock or the trigger, talking about how he's going to enter the next Doom tournament, and then a Doom spread appears to his left. He turns, holds the rifle out still by the middle, by the way finger nowhere near the trigger, and blasts the bad guy. It's awful and you should watch it anyway. The fact that even Microsoft was acknowledging this showed what a big deal it was, and the fact that this was a game that was going mainstream. Like the Wolfenstein engine before it, a lot of other computer game companies wanted to license the technology powering Doom. It was light years ahead of anyone else, so ID Software was happy to oblige for fee. Companies could use the underlying engine for their own games, and that brought in another steady stream of revenue into the company, boosting the already impressive cash flow from game sales. The ID crew found themselves flush with moolah, and not everyone handled success the same way. So here's a way to contrast people. Both John Carmack and Romero bought expensive sports car like Ferraris, but John Carmack limited his lavish spending, and much of his life didn't really change that significantly compared to what it was before. Meanwhile, John Romero jumped a little further into the deep end of luxury. He bought a big house, he bought more luxury cars, He started throwing big, elaborate parties, and people began to get a little worried that perhaps he was getting caught up in the lifestyle. After Doom went gold, John Carmack went back to the drawing board to create guess what yep, the next generation game engine. Essentially every time they release a game, Carmack wanted to build a better game engine for the next game. He never wanted to just rest on what he had built and then churn out sequels. He didn't find that satisfying. He wanted to make something better than what he made before, and he really wanted to crack the nut that was true three dimensional figures within a game, not three D that projects out, but figures within the game that have three dimensions within that virtual environment. Doom was a big jump from Wolfenstein. But you couldn't look up or down in Doom. You always look straight ahead, no matter where you were facing, and the critters you ran into were represented by two dimensional sprites. They weren't three dimensional virtual figures. They were kind of like flat cardboard cutout characters. What version of them you saw was dependent upon how you were facing them, but it was always flat. Carmak wanted something more sophisticated than that, and when he wanted something, essentially, he would go out and build it. Meanwhile, ID Software received a request from a game publisher to create a version of Doom for store shelves, which became Doom two. So Doom Too was the one that you could find in a box in computer game stores in the mid nineties. It was actually really similar to the first game, just with some new levels and a couple of new designs, but mainly it was Doom, just with slightly different layouts. But it was another big commercial success because it was more of what people loved. Now on the company side, ID Software had grown to the point that it could hire a few new people, and Romero cut back his work hours. He had been working fourteen or sixteen hour days and so now he moved to a more normal eight hour day, much of it spent playing Doom against ID Software fans. He also spent a lot more time in engagement with fans in general, and again people at ID Software began to worry that perhaps Romero wasn't as involved as he needed to be. When it came time to look at what came next, the group agreed upon another idea inspired by their Dungeons and Dragon sessions. So in their games they had a mighty warrior named Quake, and he was a fierce melee fighter. He used melee weapons like hammers to whack bad guys, and Carmack and Romero both thought this would be really interesting to create a three D game first person shooter, but instead of being a shooter, it's a first person melee game. You have to use a hand to hand weapon and attack enemies. It would require a new approach to game design, new enemy design in order to make it fair but challenging. It was something the team was really eager to take on because it was different enough from what they had done before to really be engaging. So they set out to make a fantasy based hand to hand first person combat game. There's only one little problem. They did not have a game engine yet, they had nothing to build upon. Because John Carmack was falling behind on delivery dates for a working game engine as he encountered unanticipated problems while building a three D engine. Meanwhile, other teams were creating concept art and level designs, but they couldn't do anything with them because there was no engine to build upon. So the company had already announced that was working on a game called Quake, and it was already starting to miss some promised release dates. And without a working game engine, it didn't make any sense to put anything out, and they couldn't really predict when something would be done because it could take ages after the game engine is done to build a brand new type of game. Remember, they'd have to design a first person melee game and then test it to make sure it was working, and then fix anything that wasn't working. This process could take another year or longer, and that's in addition to however long it was going to take Karmac to finish the three D engine. This is where things first came to a head in ID Software. Romero and Kevin Cloud both felt that it was really important to be innovative and push for new features with every new franchise, so they really wanted to incorporate this melee approach in this new game, it would mean that Romero's designs would be part of the game. It would mean that they would have something totally new to talk about. They didn't want to just keep making games in older franchises, but the rest of the team, including John Carmack himself, said that it was more important that they release another game in a timely fashion, using the Doom franchise or using the Doom engine, even because it would get the game out much more quickly. So it came down to Romero and Kevin Cloud versus pretty much everybody else, and everybody else won that argument. Ultimately, they decided to drop the melee combat aspect for Quake. Instead, it would become another first person shooter, similar to Doom and Wolfenstein. However, they were going to wait for Carmak's new game engine to be finished. The big advantage here was that they had already built first person shooters. They knew how to build first person shooters, so they didn't have as much uncertainty about game mechanics. That part was easier, meant that there was going to be less on the development time once the game engine was finished. If they had gone with that melee approach, they'd have a lot more testing on their hands, so they went with the first person shooter model, and they cut out a lot of uncertainty, even though that meant refining something they had already done earlier. They had also by that time, gained a pretty substantial fan club, including some famous fans. One of those fans was Trent Resner from nine Inch Nails. He was a big fan of Doom, and so once they found out about this, they reached out to him and asked if he might be interested to become the music and audio director for Quake, and he said yes. So he ended up doing the sound design and music for Quake and turning it into an immersive audio experience on top of its visual impact. So if you ever played Quake and thought, while the sound design for this is pretty pretty special, it's because of Trent Resnor. Now, when it was finished, Quake allowed players to look in all directions. You could look up and down, which meant you had to worry about aiming up or down for the first time, because in Doom, if an enemy was in front of you and you shot at it, you were aiming at it. It didn't matter if it was on top of some stairs or at the bottom of some stairs. Your character was magically aiming up or down based upon you facing the enemy. You didn't really have to worry about aiming so much because you couldn't look up or down. And Quake it was totally different. You could look up and down, which meant that you suddenly had to worry about that aiming, and so a lot of the environments included things like balconies, stairs, raised platforms, requiring you to be to look up or down or else you would get blasted into oblivion. And Quake also built on the success of Doom's multiplayer format. With Quake, up to sixteen players could compete online simultaneously, a pretty big jump from the four or local area network players of Doom. Death matches became much more chaotic and fast paced and pretty It was such a popular mode that some fans in Texas decided that they wanted to hold a big event and invite people to come in and bring their computers with them. So if you wanted to attend, you brought your computer rig you set it up inside this big conference hall, and it would become an enormous local area network where Quake could be played with huge groups, and they called it Quake Con. It was such a big deal that even the ID Software team came out to it, and it would become so popular that they would hold it every year and ID Software would take advantage of it to use it as an event to announce upcoming titles and projects. So it became a kind of a marketing thing for ID Software, even though it was organized by fans. Very useful for a company to have the fans do allow to work for you. Quake was incredibly successful, though it had a little bit of a hiccup in its growth because of a decision that ID Software made when it came to distributing the game. They decided to offer part of the game for ten dollars, So you'd pay ten bucks and you would get access to the early part of the game. Technically, you would get the full game, but only the first few levels would be accessible. Once you completed that section, you would get informed that to unlock the rest of the game you would have to pony up the money that made up the difference in the full price tag, which was another fifty dollars. But hackers began to examine the code for Quake because they knew if you had that first part of it, you had the whole game, And eventually they figured out how to bypass the system and get access to the full game without paying that fifty dollars, and the hack spread across the internet very quickly, but it still was a success for ID Software, and it also inspired a new art form. A group of Quake players created a little comedy sketch using the game Quake. They had a group of game characters that were trying to seek out and stop someone who was cheating in the game, and it turns out that the person cheating is actually John Romero. They used the Quake game engine to tell a story, something that was pretty new at the time, and eventually people started calling this art form machinema for machine animation. If you want to hear more about this process, you should check out the episode tech Stuff Talks to Rooster Teeth, which we published originally back in February twenty twelve in and I talked to Bernie Burns, founder of Rooster Teeth, and one of the big shows they did that got them started was a series called Red Versus Blue that used the Halo game engine to animate stories. These days, Rooster Teeth does all sorts of stuff, including feature length films, So maybe sometime I can do a follow up story with somebody from there. Fascinating company, and I'm a huge fan of their work. Back to ID Software, just like Doom and Wolf and styf that Quake Engine became a sought after asset. Valve Software licensed it for their first person shooter Half Life, which Tom Hall once cited as the next real landmark in first person shooters. For its incorporated storyline. The Quake Engine would dominate in the computer industry until it was eventually conquered by the Unreal Engine. After Quake went gold, the company held internal conversations about its direction, and things really came to a head. Romero felt that they were relying too heavily on formats that they had already perfected, and he said, we should really be doing something new and innovative. We shouldn't just keep doing what we do well. John Carmack and most of the rest of BID Software felt that Romero wasn't really dedicating himself to the work anymore, and that he become too wrapped up in his own fame and lifestyle, and so the company said, hey, Romero, can you make tracks? They told him to resign, and he did. He then went on to reconnect with Tom and together they formed the company ion Storm. More on that at the end of the Episode's got kind of a sad ending. The ID Software team meanwhile, went back to work creating a sequel to Quake. Because of the hacking that they experienced when they launched the first Quake, they decided that the best way to move forward would be to partner with an established publisher. That They had been doing this on their own for a while, and when they were smaller it was easier to handle, but as they grew, they realized that they needed someone with a more established approach to publishing. But they definitely didn't want to deal with having their IP stolen anymore, so they formed a long term relationship with Activision. The first game they put out was Quake two in nineteen ninety seven, and then they immediately got to work on Quake three. We're in the home stretch here, but before I conclude the story of the ID Software Company, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. It wasn't that much longer after Romero's departure that it seemed like his accusations were really accurate ones, and John Carmack's leadership style complicated matters. He decided that Quake three would be a multiplayer only style game, online only, multiplayer only, no single player component, no monster designed, because it would only be player characters fighting each other, and the rest of the team wasn't really happy because they felt it was limited and it really meant that a lot of them didn't have much to do, but Carmack insisted that that was the approach they take. It was also said that Romero, for whatever faults he may have had, was much better at managing people than Carmack was. People felt ignored or dismissed, and morale started to dip. Quake three Arena launched in nineteen ninety nine, It of course had a brand new game engine powering it. The first Call of Duty game actually uses that Quake engine as its foundation, but that didn't help people at ID Software feel that the company wasn't just doing the same thing repeatedly. And also, the Unreal engine ended up debuting and was comparatively easy to use. If you looked at the Quake engine and the Unreal engine side by side, and you looked at the actual interfaces for the two unreal engine was very attractive, and it ended up becoming stiff competition for that Quake engine. On the game development side, things slowed down at ID Software. Now. That wasn't on purpose. John Carmack felt that the next game on the company, Dime, would have to have an even better game engine. Big surprise there. Every time it game came out, Karmac said, the next engine has to be even better. We can't just make a game on this engine. That's where he found his satisfaction in designing the latest, greatest gaming engine with new features and new capabilities, something that could really take advantage of the latest generation of hardware. But he also wanted to keep his development team at ID Software small. He felt that that made communication better. It meant that you were more nimble, you could react faster. He didn't want to see ID Software balloon into a large corporation. So there's the problem, right. There's a consequence to these two decisions, and that is it takes longer to make games because games were getting more complex. You were no longer in an era where one or two people could launch a triple A title game. You had to have a group of people working on it. The games were so much more complex that it was taking groups of experienced longer to make games, especially by restricting the size of the development team. So if you keep the development team the same while the games get more and more complex, guess what it means everything takes longer to produce. When ID Software announced in two thousand that their next game was going to be Doom three, they didn't have an idea at the time, nor did the fans, that it would take more than three years for that game to come out, which meant that when it finally did launch in two thousand and four, there had been five years between games from ID software Quake three Arena in nineteen ninety nine to Doom three in two thousand and four. Yikes. While working on the game, ID Software did something that they had not done before. They began to license out their actual game intellectual property to other game studios. Not Apage, you know, that's who they used to work with, but to other game studios in general. So they allowed other developers to create games and franchises that they had themselves designed. So the first of those was returned to Castle Wolfenstein, which was developed by gray Matter Interactive and Nerve Software. That game received some mixed reviews, especially for the single player campaign, but the multiplayer aspect was generally praised. Activision wanted an expansion pack for the game, and they ended up working with a company called Splash Damage to design that expansion pack. But boy were they not happy when they saw the single player component to Wolfenstein Enemy Territory that was the expansion pack. Activision said that the single player campaign was not good enough to publish ouch, but the multiplayer was seen to be really, really fun and enjoyable and it worked fine, so Activision released it for free. Here's the crazy thing. You could download the multiplayer expansion and play it even if you didn't own the original game, which means Activision gave away a free multiplayer game. Why. Oh, I couldn't find an answer to that. I guess maybe at the time, no one really thought it through. Doom three debuted in two thousand and four to mixed reviews. It looked really pretty, The new game engine was phenomenal. It had amazing lighting effects, lots of dynamic lighting in that game, but many people felt that the actual design of the enemies and the gameplay was pretty derivative. Enemies tend to come straight at you once they spot you. There wasn't a whole lot of variety to it. There was a game mechanic that required you to switch between a flashlight and your guns, which irritated people so much that someone created a mod that allowed you to have a flashlight taped to your gun, because they said, if you're on Mars, you probably have tape. I think that's reasonable. I remember playing this game and I did it without the mod, and I hated that fact that you had to switch between your flashlight and your gun. The whole idea was to make it more exciting and to ramp up the tension, but ultimately it just made me ticked off. Anyway, the game was a huge hit, end up becoming the top selling title in ID Software's history, partly because it was available on multiple platforms like consoles in the PC. In two thousand and five, Adrian Carmack left the company, which meant that the only original founder remaining with the company was John Carmack. And remember Adrian Carmack and John Carmack not related. Adrian Carmack later sued ID Software. He alleged that he was forced out of the company by the other co owners so that they could get shares of ownership of the company. So, according to Carmack, Adriancarmak, that is, Activision had made an offer to purchase the Doom Quake and Wolfenstein intellectual properties for about fifteen million dollars, but he was rejected, or rather Activision was rejected by id and then the other co owners of the company tried to pressure Adrian Karmak to sell his shares back to them for eleven million dollars. He said, well, that severely undervalues the shares that I own. I own forty one percent of ID Software. It's way too little money for so valuable a property. Then they gave him an offer of twenty million, according to Adrian Karmak, and then they terminated him once he did not agree to sell at that price. Ultimately, the lawsuit that he leveled against ID Software never went anywhere, and that's most likely because Activision never actually purchased ID Software, so it all remained hypothetical in the first place. In two thousand and five, a major major event happened, not just for ID Software, but I would say the world. That's when the rock Dwayne Johnson himself starred in the film version of Doom. I guess you could say it was inspired by the game. It wasn't really connected to Doom that much. There's a first person perspective section in the film that's meant to be a nod to the original source material. It's a really cheesy movie. I saw it for free at a pre screening and asked for my money back. It stands at nineteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Just a reminder, though, that the percentage on Rotten Tomatoes tells you how many critics gave it a negative or a positive review. So a nineteen percent movie isn't necessarily worse than, say, a thirty percent movie. It just means fewer critics gave it a positive review. If it's a movie that's right in the middle somewhere, then it could go either way, right Like, if it's a one out of ten scale and everyone gives it a four, the percentage could be really low, but you I would still say it's a better movie than something that warrants a one. All that being said, Doom the movie is awful. Don't watch it. It's terrible. Nineteen percent is being generous. So John Carmack had decided that he's going to work on another game, which means, yep, you guessed it. He wanted to make an all new gaming engine. Big surprise there, and so that meant there'd be more years between games. Meanwhile, there were rumors that other companies besides Activision were interested in ID Software. They were still licensing out properties like Quake and Wolfenstein to other companies. Reviews mostly criticized the style of play, echoing the concerns Romero had expressed years earlier saying you guys are stuck in a rut. Carmak, in the meantime, started looking into mobile games and how he might make a big impact there. One of the projects from his initiative was called Orcs and Elves, which was the first new intellectual property involving ID Software in years, and it was for mobile platforms. In two thousand and nine, a company called Zenemax Media approached ID Software in an acquisition deal, which the company ultimately accepted. Zenemax Media also owned another big name in computer games, Bethesda. That's the company behind games like the most recent incarnation of the Fallout series and the Elder Scrolls franchise. Now what set Zenomax Media apart from other suitors was it had a reputation for letting subsidiary companies follow their own paths in a more or less hands off approach. This gave ID Software the resources they would need to develop two games simultaneously, so they could actually work on two titles at the same time for the first time ever. Really. One of those two titles was Rage and the other was a new incarnation of Doom. Both games would end up using Carmac's next game engine, called id Tech five. Rage launched in twenty eleven. Totally new franchise. It set in a post apocalyptic world and features players driving around, shooting its stuff and generally causing mayhem. The team at ID Software called it an open but directed world, meaning the player didn't have absolute freedom to do everything, but had a lot more options available with some guidance of what was to come next. The game received good reviews but failed to make a big impact on the market, possibly because by twenty eleven the computer and video game industries were way more competitive than they had been a few years earlier. John Carmack also co founded a new company called Armadillo Aerospace. His gig over there is to design spacecraft which is a pretty nifty side project for a computer game designer. On November twenty second, twenty thirteen, he resigned from ID Software. Carmack had expressed excitement an interest in the Oculus virtual reality platform. He had joined the company earlier in twenty thirteen, and then realized that he was going to have to switch to full time over at Oculus and leave ID Software. His twenty two year tenure at ID Software came to an end, and for the first time in its history, ID Software no longer had a founding member on staff. Carmack had said, I wanted to remain a technical advisor for ID but it just didn't work out, probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging. ID Software's new version of Doom took a little longer to come out than they anticipated. It launched just last year on May thirteenth, twenty sixteen. It's the fourth game in the Doom franchise and technically is a second reboot of the series. The setting is a research facility on Mars where a portal to Hell has opened up, and the player takes on the role of the Doom Slagh. It featured some old school shooter mechanics such as the fact that your health does not regenerate over time. You have to find health packs and you don't have to worry about reloading weapons, but you can run out of ammunition. And it also brings back deathmatch modes. ID Software as the company continues to work on new games on various platforms. But let's talk about the old founders and some of their coworkers. Where are they now? John Romero went on to found other studios like ion Storm, which he left in two thousand and one. After he left, the Dallas office closed, and then about four years later, the Austin office for ion Storm closed. That's a whole story in itself. He also worked at Midway for a while and Gazillion before he founded a new social gaming company called loot Drop, and he and his wife, Brenda Romero do a lot of advocacy work for education. John Carmack is with Oculus, which is part of Facebook. He continues to be big advocate for virtual reality in general and is still quite outspoken in the world of tech. Tom Hall, who was the first of the founders to leave ID Software, co founded ion Storm with Romero. Obviously that did not last. He also has worked at Midway Games along with Romero and at Loot Drop along with Romero. Adrian Karmak got out of the game business after all his contentious departure, at least for a while. He returned fairly recently. In April twenty sixteen, John Romero released a video teasing a new first person shooter and announced that Adrian Carmack was involved in the project. It was called black Room, and it was all attached to a Kickstarter campaign, but the campaign was canceled in just four days before it could reach its seven hundred thousand dollars goal. It had hit one hundred and thirty one thousand before Romero canceled the Kickstarter campaign. He said that he was canceling it until they could produce a working to show gamers what the finished product would be like, so that people weren't just backing an idea that may not ever materialize. Sandy Peterson had left ID Software in nineteen ninety seven. He joined a company called Ensemble Studios in nineteen ninety seven and got involved in a little game called Age of Empires, which met with some success. These days, he tends to work on cool board games. There's one called Cuthulhu Wars that I really want to try out. It also has a video game version and was a highly successful crowdfunded project. Kevin Cloud remained at ID Software and served as creative director for the company for a while. One of the notes trivia I've found out about Kevin Cloud is that when you look down and you see the hands and Doom and Doom too, those are Kevin Cloud's hands. And that concludes the discussion about the ID Software story a two parter. I could probably have gone into much more detail. There's so much to talk about, and that company was incredibly in luential, so maybe at some point I will take another stab at it. We'll see, but I feel like those are pretty good start for getting a handle on what ID Software was and how it was important. I hope all of you out there are doing well. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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