Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.”
Wow, my admiration for Carmack just increased tenfold.
Wow, my admiration for Carmack just increased tenfold.
and AC (after Carmack).
It is a simply game but it changed the course of history in terms of what direction gaming went, thus the heavy hardware designs to support that type of games.
The crazy GPU push--later culminating in CUDA and all that other nonsense--is completely due to the Quake OpenGL and 3dfx support.
High-speed internet at home was mostly useful for playing on QuakeWorld, and later derivatives Half-Life, and the Unreal series (not a derivative, but you get the idea).
So, yeah.
EDIT:
One might also point out that the death of the great workstation companies (SGI, HP, etc.) happened because they were no longer competitive in the CAD space, specifically because consumer-level graphics cards were improving driven by the demands of gaming.
That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC.
So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM.
Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.
To be fair to Romero, he could actually program, make games, and design levels. It's really hard for me to accept the claim that he contributed nothing to id:
>He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D;Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D; Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.
He might have made some really poor decisions, but the guy has legitimately been developing games for 30 years. Just look at how many projects he has been involved in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
Somehow I came out of Masters of Doom with a lot less negative opinion of Romero than others did. Carmack, while clearly a genius, actually seemed like a real jerk at points.
I don't think Carmack is a jerk so much as he's just, well, different. More like a machine than a human. I guess that could cause him to be heartless at times but he came off as fair.
Romero was important for ID's success, but as the story played out, Carmack was able to find success without Romero but Romero was not able to be successful without Carmack. Read into that as you will.
He also, like Jobs, had a sense of what could be insanely great. In the book, when you read about the offices that he wanted for Ion Storm, you get a feeling of Jobs' perfection and micro-management. Romero, like Jobs, wanted to take things to the next level.
I feel compelled to do that, too. Sometimes I think it's a curse.
Right now, I'm working on the same engineering problems that Twitter and Facebook have already solved[1] for a tiny, underfunded startup in San Diego, and I can't just do what Twitter or Facebook did and get paid for it. I have to do it better, "take it to the next level".
I feel absolutely compelled to do something that would make my engineering buddies go: how the fuck did you do that? Oh well—at least I still get paid either way. :)
[1] Or did they? Now that I've spent time in that space, I've developed a taxonomy of how social networks are constructed and grow, and it's obvious (at least to me) that what we've got today is like the Altavista of search engines, just waiting for a Google to come along and apply superior algorithms and data center design and kick some ass. We'll see.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana#Reception_and_controv...