30 Great Gaming Geeks

How great is it to be ranked #5 on a list of the top 30 "gaming geeks"? Pretty great, if you ask me! Ahead of me are Steve Jackson, Shigeru Miyamoto, Reiner Knizia and Will Wright. That's a pretty awesome group of people.

There's a down arrow on me, and an up arrow on Will Wright, suggesting that I used to be ranked higher than #5. Wow. Thanks, Geek-O-System guys!

It's great to see 10% of the list from id Software. Plus, Warren Spector from Ion Storm, at one point. Tom Hall should be here, though. He's brilliant and under-appreciated.

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.