Structure

On August 6, 1996, John Romero was dismissed from id Software. Before leaving the office, he packed up mementos: Floppy disks, CDs, posters, personal items. Along with his keepsakes, intangibles departed with him. Elements of id's culture that, like Romero, had overstayed their welcome in the eyes of some of the remaining principals.

"Quake 2 was an enjoyable project to work on, but I definitely missed Romero," Adrian Carmack said. "He's very funny; he has a great sense of humor. You've talked to him a bit, so you know. He's fun to hang around with. He adds a lot to the atmosphere."

Billiards and foosball tables were shunted off in corners. Deathmatch during office hours was prohibited.

"It was more because we were shuffling offices around, rather than some kind of work ethic thing," said Sandy Petersen of the changes that took place at id. "Deathmatching was indeed banned, which was a problem, because obviously you need to test levels in deathmatch. But it is also true that some people spent too much time on deathmatch instead of working."

Veteran developers suspected what they would work on next. The back-to-back-to-back success stories of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom had established id's production formula. When the team developed a new franchise, they carved up its inaugural game between shareware and retail. The next step was to develop a sequel using the same technology. Consumers would snap up the sequel while excitement over the first game was still fresh.

By that pattern, Quake 2 seemed a given. However, there was another step in the company's methodology.

Romero and John Carmack had been the wizards of id. Romero had been the face of the company. Carmack did his best work operating behind the curtain. Romero was gone, but Carmack's role did not change. He was a metronome, setting the beat to which everyone else marched. While the rest of the team built sequels by harnessing proven technology, he set aside old paradigms and engineered new cutting-edge platforms.

Following Quake's launch, Carmack had committed himself to upgrading id Tech 2. Implementing new features and building new technology platforms was Carmack's favorite part of development, and it took as long as he needed it to take. "'Glacial' isn't the right word because he isn't slow," American McGee said, speaking to Carmack's methodology. "He didn't care about story or design. He just wanted the thing to be implemented, the structure to be built, and to push it out the door so he could move on to the next thing. I think his timing, more than anything else, pushed everything forward."

Carmack also cared little for social niceties. New hires such as Jennell Jaquays discovered that while Carmack could be civil, not every developer received the honor of his full attention.

"John was aloof, John was remote," Jaquays said. "If you weren't really interested in cars, like his Ferraris, you didn't really have a point of reference, and I was not a car person," she continued. "I drove a 1981 Lincoln Continental because that was the family's second car, and I needed something that could get through Wisconsin winters: A big chunk of steel."

Paul Steed, another new recruit, joined Carmack's inner circle. An artist known for painting fantastical environments and buxom female characters, Steed was a relative newcomer to technology. He served in the U.S. Air Force for six years before joining Origin in 1991 after answering a job ad that read simply, Fantasy artist wanted. He landed the job based on sketches illustrated by hand. At the age of 27, he put down his pencil and picked up a mouse for the first time, picking up the ins and outs of creating sprites and polygons. Judging polygons too blocky and ugly for the type of aircraft he envisioned for Strike Commander, the next game by Wing Commander (and Star Citizen) creator Chris Roberts, he rejected the industry-wide push toward 3D graphics and painted beautifully detailed, pixel-art ships and tanks using older software.

Paul Steed. (Image credit: Destructoid.)

Steed climbed the ranks at Origin, taking the lead on several titles as art director and later as project director on several games. A potent mix of artistic talent and tireless ambition led him to the position of art director at Iguana Entertainment before being hired by id Software in 1996.

Steed prioritized art before technology, but his chiseled physique and swagger, both honed during his time in the military, caught Carmack's eye. So did Steed's ability to create assets that played to Carmack's latest and greatest engines, one of the qualities that had endeared Romero to Carmack.

Besides his Type-A striking visual styles, Steed introduced another element to id's culture: The drive to create art that served a purpose.

"I think Paul's arrival put the art department at id in a different position as far as thinking about what they could do, and what they should do as their contribution to the game," said McGee.

Über Alles

Id's artists had left indelible marks on projects before Paul Steed joined the company. John Carmack's engines drove technology, level designers constructed shooting galleries with unique architecture and monster placement, but without the vision of Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, id's games may not have been as memorable.

When American McGee had wanted to drape Quake maps in metal and lava Cloud and Adrian had delivered. Sandy Petersen had the brilliant idea to open Doom's E2M8 map with four Barons of Hell impaled on the walls, but Adrian had been the one to paint the grisly décor. Adrian's and Cloud's concept sketches and game assets did more than meet needs. More often than not, they served as guideposts.

"The art department largely drove output because they were the first in the factory," McGee explained. "You had to have textures before you could start building stuff. If the art department started making textures with an overarching goal in mind, then without having to say anything, they could get a result of certain content being built, or not."

In Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, graphics had performed a function. They were memorable, but utilitarian. For id's next project, Steed sought to unify visuals with gameplay for a more cohesive experience. To make art direction an extension of storytelling, and vice versa. He was not alone. Several developers who had been around since the Doom and Quake days had been keen to write narratives that linked levels and characters like connective tissue, an approach contrary to that of Quake.

"We had a group of people by that point who were interested enough in [telling stories]," McGee recalled, "but there was also the other faction who were not interested in that, and who were looking at the engine purely as a vehicle for multiplayer-action type stuff. I think that's another part of the split that started to happen. It wasn't just politics and personalities, it was also a pulling in two different directions of what that technology could do and the kinds of products that id would make."

Quake 2's enemies reflected damage as players weakened them.

Cloud and Adrian fell on the same side of the fence as McGee and Steed. While John Carmack toiled on tech, artists drafted sketches depicting members of a fierce new type of enemy. "Kevin came up with the concept of the Strogg, this vampiric race of aliens that would invade planets and then just Borg-ify the people, steal them, use their body parts," said Tim Willits. "It had a little bit of horror, a little bit of sci-fi, a little bit of action."

Seeking cohesion, Cloud and the other artists thought of ways to connect art and narrative. They devised little touches such as a communications device for players to carry around. By pressing a button, they could call up the device to read over objectives, track how many enemies they'd killed and how many secrets remained to discover. As they progressed, unseen comrades would bark updates and new orders through the device.

"You would occasionally hear other voices coming in over the coms," said Jaquays. "A lot of that came from Steed, who was the only member of the staff who had a military background."

Steed's experience informed the story that Cloud devised for id's next game, a first-person shooter inspired by The Guns of Navarone, a 1961 action-adventure film based on the 1957 novel of the same name. Influenced by the Battle of Leros during World War II, Guns of Navarone sees Axis forces capture the island of Kheros, marooning over 2,000 British troops. To keep the Allies at bay, they install radar-powered superguns on the nearby island of Navarone, a fictional setting. The Allies take to the sky and attempt to bomb the massive guns, only for the superweapons to blast them out of the clouds. Knowing that the guns must be destroyed before Kheros can be retaken, Allied commanders assemble an elite squad of soldiers to infiltrate Navarone, wipe out the weapons, and clear a path for assault.

Cloud's pitch mirrored the film's story, but with the Strogg instead of Axis soldiers, and an alien planet instead of an island. "We would be fighting the Strogg, and our fleet couldn't invade the Strogg planet because of the Big Gun," Willits elaborated, "so they sent in these small groups [of marines] in the little pods. Your mission was to find the Big Gun and knock it out so the strike force could come in. Straight out of the movie Guns of Navarone."

The story had numerous benefits. It was easy to follow, heavy on action, and bore no resemblance to a proposal made by John Romero for Quake's inevitable sequel.

"After I left, there was all this bad blood," Romero said. "Now [they were of the mindset that] Quake is a piece of shit and they hate it, even though it's doing unbelievably great for them. They're like, 'Fuck H. P. Lovecraft, fuck all the shit that was supposedly random. We're going to do something [different].'"

Artifacts, awards, and other memorabilia at id's office in Dallas.

Critics and fans shared the opinions of many of id's developers. While they praised Quake's gameplay and multiplayer, the campaign's levels had felt discordant, jumping between futuristic military bases to castles to metallic fortresses to Lovecraftian cathedrals.

For roughly a week before his firing, Romero had spitballed Quake 2's direction with the other designers. He proposed that players take on the role of a miner on Mars, or perhaps a moon of Mars. "You're in a mining facility," he said. "It's funny because Red Faction [developed by Volition, 2001] went all the way with that original idea, except they had destructible environments."

Id's developers saw no reason to adhere to build on Quake's narrative because the final product had produced little to build on. "I remember Sandy Petersen, John Romero, and American [McGee]," Willits said of early design talks for Quake 2. "I can't remember who else was in the room, but we came up with this story, and it was so bad. Once Romero got the boot and we rebooted the design, it was, 'Let's do Guns of Navarone. It's a classic story and easy to understand. Let's change the setting and use aliens.'"

Romero had bounced back quickly after his firing, co-founding Ion Storm with Tom Hall and setting up shop in the penthouse suite of Chase Tower in Dallas, Texas. Romero's new digs, only a few miles from id Software, were a study in contrast to the Quake developer's more spartan grounds. Ion Storm spent lavishly, hiring interior decorators to deck out the penthouse in arcade cabinets, a big-screen TV, couches for gaming marathons, and beds and a shower room so developers could crash and freshen up at the office. A gigantic company logo dominated Ion Storm's lobby. Curse words and shouts echoed through the halls as Romero and his associates trade rockets in deathmatch.

Romero found himself seated on the opposite of the negotiating table. No longer hashing out licensing agreements to build games powered by Carmack's engines, he licensed id Tech 2 to get a running start on Daikatana, his samurai-themed first-person shooter. Working with id gave Romero a window into the company's evolving culture. "He brought a weight bench into the center of id," he said of Paul Steed, "and if you ever called the place, you'd hear, 'UGH! UGH!' He's bench-pressing constantly, trying to get everyone else into it. John [Carmack] got into it because John liked to lift weights."

Carmack had no qualms about licensing his tech to a former colleague. Romero had crashed and burned during Quake, in his view, but Carmack acknowledged him as one of the best level designers around when he channeled his exuberance and creativity into his work. Besides, working with Romero was good business. According to id's licensing agreement, the studio got a cut of royalties on any game built on its foundation.

Few developers at id expected Daikatana to be good, but not because Romero was the one behind the wheel. "The culture at id was an interesting culture," Petersen recalled. "It was partly 'id über alles,'" he continued, the German term for above all and featured prominently in the first stanza of Germany's national anthem prior to the end of the Third Reich following WWII. "We were the best company. We were super cocky. We thought we had the best stuff. Everything we did was absolutely the bomb. Sometimes that hurt us."

Quake's developers took one look at the likes of Unreal, a shooter made by Epic Games running on an engine coded by studio founder Tim Sweeney, and dismissed it. They gave an equally chilly shoulder to the release of a demo for Half-Life, a first-person shooter made by startup Valve Software that ran on a heavily modified version of id Tech 2. Half-Life differed from Quake and Doom by inserting character interactions to break up the player's fights against soldiers and alien invaders. The game featured advanced artificial intelligence as well as unorthodox weapons such as tiny one-eyed bugs that chewed through living creatures in their path and a fleshy alien hand that fired swarms of hornets.

"Generally speaking, the attitude inside id was more negative toward things that weren't invented there," Jaquays agreed. "That's just the simplest way to describe it. I remember [Valve] came in, I just don't remember a lot of the details, other than that [Half-Life] was different than what we were doing. It was less shoot-em-up than what we were doing."

Gibs returned in Quake 2.

McGee remembered standing at the back of a group huddled around a monitor while one of id's developers played through Half-Life's demo. "The typical id response for something that looked like a challenge was to denigrate it and to insult it, and to reject that it could be better than what our team was doing. I said something like, 'That looks really cool. It's really amazing what they've done with the technology.' I got really dirty looks for having said that. It was just this reactionary sort of, 'That's not the right way. That's not how you do this.' When I left id, my first instinct was to go off and use the tech to tell stories because by that point we were seeing games that were leveraging our technology to do more than just running around shooting things."

"[Jaquays and I] would say, 'These guys are doing good things. This is good that they're doing this," Petersen remembered. "Everyone else would say, 'No, it's not good because it's not us.' It's like they wanted other things to be bad. I guess on one level I wanted [other games] to be bad because I wanted us to be the best company and get all the money, right? But I could see that we weren't the best company anymore, at least in some respects."

Petersen observed a disconnect between the dismissive attitude of his peers, and what other developers both professional and amateur were making with id's technology. Quake Rally, a mod written in QuakeC by a user who went by the online handle Bravo_Zulu, was a racing game that showed race cars speeding around turns from a third-person perspective instead of first-person views of gun muzzles and Lovecraftian vistas.

The fact that Quake, a shooter, could be repackaged as a racing game impressed Petersen. "They'd say, 'Look how great our game is. People are making these creative mods,'" he remembered. "I'd say, 'Why aren't we doing this?' That's when I started losing faith in the genius of id Software."

Romero floated a theory in answer to Petersen's query. "Id Software didn't trust anyone who wasn't an owner to take charge of a discipline."

The team had been small during Romero's years at the company, leaving its early members to play to their strengths as a way of covering for their weaknesses. Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud created art, Tom Hall had led design on Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, Romero and other level designers had built incredible levels featuring a variety of settings and gameplay opportunities.

John Carmack wrote game engines. Although he took input from other developers such as Michael Abrash, who had departed id after shipping Quake to seek other coding challenges, id's road was paved by Carmack's whims.

"There's nobody there who can tell him what to do because nobody else can code," Romero said. "I'm a coder; I could talk to John about programming all day long. But I was gone, and there was nobody left at the company who could really challenge him because no one had experience. There was a big design void and no ownership of it. That meant that if Carmack wanted to do something, he was going to do it."

Romero was half right in his assessment of id Software's post-Quake hierarchy. He was hardly the only other programmer to code alongside Carmack. A parade of others followed, from Michael Abrash and John Cash to Brian Hook, another new hire who had nearly two years of experience writing tools and other applications for graphics cards under his belt before joining id.

Artifacts, awards, and other memorabilia at id's office in Dallas.

Where Romero was correct was in his declaration of the role those coders filled. Abrash was a hero of John Carmack's, but although Abrash had proven invaluable during the development of id Tech 2, Carmack had been its driving force, as he had been the driving force behind the breakthroughs that had informed every id game to date: scrolling graphics for Commander Keen, pseudo-3D spaces for shooters from Hovertank 3D to Doom, and true-3D movement for Quake.

At id, Carmack's technology came first. Design, and everything else, came second.

The Name Game

By mid-March of 1997, the team had made significant progress on the creative direction of their next first-person shooter. The identity of that FPS was still a subject of debate.

Since their Guns of Navarone-inspired project had no relationship with Quake's premise and milieus, there was no reason for the game to be labeled Quake 2. After months of arguing, those in favor of creating a new property waved the white flag. The new game was being written in QuakeC, which meant that even though its characters and story would be unrelated to Quake, its technology made it a branch on id Tech 2's family tree.

"Quake was different because it was a whole different engine, and the feeling was that Quake 2 wasn't a different engine, therefore it was the same game," Petersen said. "John Carmack always looked at the engine as the important part. Not the storyline, not the action, not the art. The engine was the game."

Adrian Carmack explained that id's lawyers rather than John Carmack or another developer had planted the seed for positioning the game as a Quake sequel. If their attorneys foresaw a single possible trademark dispute—not just in games, but washing machines, tables, clothing—they would advise id to go with a different name. Doom and Quake had been generic enough that legal disputes had seemed an unlikely possibility.

Simple cutscenes divided Quake 2's units.

"We had a list of a hundred or so names, and they would all get rejected," Adrian said. "Finally it was just, 'Fuck it. Quake 2 it is.' It was terrible, you know? That should have been a new franchise."

"It really should have been called something different," Willits admitted. "We should have had Quake 1, the new IP, and then Quake 3 would be Quake 2, and Quake 4 would have been [a sequel to] the new IP. That's what we should have done. Now we have this identity issue for Quake. Quake 1 and Quake 3 kind of fit together, and Quake 2 and Quake 4 fit together, but they don't all fit together."

Work on Quake 2 proceeded apace. Strogg enemies inhabited levels in various stages of completion. Weapons were derived from Quake's arsenal. In addition to a grenade launcher, players would be able to pull pins on grenades and lob them. The longer they held the fire button, the further the grenade would sail. John Cash, one of id's programmers, developed a complex AI system that made the Strogg exponentially more intelligent than the demons and denizens of Doom and Quake, whose behavior defaulted to moving toward players in a straight line and attacking sporadically.

"They were starting to develop production content," Jaquays remembered. "The game was actually more complex at that point, in terms of play mechanics, than it would end up being. Then John [Carmack] and two other people went off to E3, which was in Atlanta that year, and when they came back, we were told that John was going to rewrite the entire game in DLLs. And he did."

Short for dynamic-link library, DLL files promote greater efficiency in programming as well as user resources. A DLL file can contain blocks of code and data that can be shared between any applications that use it, cutting back on the number of instances programmers have to duplicate information. DLL files were not available in DOS, Microsoft's command line-driven operating system, but were being embraced by developers of Windows 95 and 98 applications.

Reading up on DLLs, Carmack saw numerous advantages over QuakeC. "It would definitely be more efficient as a DLL," he wrote in a .plan—text files created in UNIX popular among developers, and a precursor to mainstream blogs—dated March 13, 1997. "As we do more sophisticated game logic, efficiency becomes more and more important. For simple deathmatch modifications this wouldn't be a big deal, but for full-size game levels it will likely be at least a 5% to 10% overall speed improvement."

Carmack found that Quake 2's game logic could be nestled in a DLL file. When and if that logic needed to be debugged or revised, id's programmers would only need to sift through a single file, preserving the architecture and state of other files.

Quake 2 lore, framed at id Software HQ in Dallas.

"We are directing significant effort towards making Quake 2 a better game, as well as just a better multiplayer virtual world. Quake 1 was pretty messed up from a game [design] standpoint, and we don't plan on doing that again," Carmack wrote in another .plan posted on March 18.

Restructuring Quake 2 to run on DLLs boosted efficiency in some areas. It did not, however, mitigate the ripple effects caused by Carmack's unilateral decision making.

"The biggest issue we had with the game, with any of the games and with John working on them, was sometimes he would leave the building at night and break the system," Jaquays explained. "It had a direct effect on me because I had kids. I'd get the kids off to school and then come into work. I was one of the first people in. I would come into the office at eight-thirty and have a broken engine, which meant I had nothing I could do."

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