Destinies

All through 1999, a threat loomed over id Software.

More draining than crunch schedules. More addictive than sniping opponents out of the air on the Longest Yard. EverQuest was coming for the Quake 3 team, deadlines be damned.

Sony's massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) asked players to choose their character's race, class, and name, then turned them loose in a vast fantasy world full of dungeons to raid and treasures to loot. The world was persistent, so events such as the passage of time and the decimation of the game's biggest monsters transpired even after players logged off.

EverQuest.

Earning the moniker EverCrack by jilted loved ones as well as those who struggled to overcome the addiction, EverQuest swept through id's team, occasionally grinding progress on Quake 3 to a halt so the developers could grind out items and levels for their characters. Though he succumbed to EverQuest fever, Graeme Devine did his best to stay focused. After shipping Quake 3 in December 1999 he and other developers switched gears to Team Arena, Quake 3's official expansion. Released in December 2000, Team Arena introduced additional bots, maps, and gameplay features emphasizing team-based play.

Team Arena received a mixed reception when it came to market. Additions such as new weapons—Doom's chaingun, Quake's nailgun, and the brand-new proximity mine launcher—as well as extra game modes, had been added to Quake 3 months prior as fan-made modifications. The community, rather than id's developers, had become stewards of the game, just as the communities around earlier titles had taken the reins on expanding their feature sets.

Internally, some of id's developers agreed with complaints leveled at Team Arena. While Quake 3's popularity seemed to grow by the day, Unreal Tournament had expanded id's deathmatch paradigm to incorporate dozens of gameplay modifiers, weapons, and modes, resulting in a more varied title.

"It's a religious war," said Jennell Jaquays, "and my opinion, even as a former id employee, I really thought the Quake 3 engine was one of the best engines made for gameplay. It was so versatile. So many people licensed it; so many games in the early 2000s used that engine."

Throughout the 2000s, id Tech 3 provided the foundation for numerous best-selling games, from Raven Software's Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force and Splash Damage's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to Infinity Ward's inaugural Call of Duty. In as many ways as id Tech 3 was powerful, it was also limiting. The engine excelled at crafting indoor spaces, but fell apart in the hands of developers whose designs called for sprawling, outdoor regions.

On the other side of the fence, Epic's team had gone to great lengths to position their tech as a versatile tool. Developers who licensed the Unreal engine received extensive technical support, detailed documentation for how to use the toolset, and production videos providing step-by-step walkthroughs for many common problems and designs.

"Going the other way, Quake continued to be a black box," said Jaquays. "Id couldn't be bothered to put that kind of support behind licensing their own tools and engines."

Doom 3.

John Carmack was open to licensing id's tech. He maintained a professional interest in what other developers were making and how they made it, and licensing fees from developers kept id's coffers full in between product releases. A hacker at heart, Carmack released generous portions of source code from older games for free, turning fans loose to see what they would create. These releases did not hurt id's bottom line. Source releases contained everything but a game's assets, so players could not, say, download Quake 2's engine and play the game for free.

Carmack's tradition of releasing old engines breathed new life into id's back catalog. Industrious fans took Doom's source code and decked it out with contemporary features such as support for 3D weapon and character models, and gameplay features such as jumping and crouching. As ports became widespread, players extracted game assets from their musty floppy disks or CDs—or, later, digital versions on platforms like Steam—downloaded free source ports made by enterprising hackers, and enjoyed fresh takes on classic titles.

Paradoxically, John Carmack could be as selfish with his code as he was generous with it. Everything he did, from experimenting with gameplay features to licensing engines, was in service of his passion for creating new types of technology. He wrote engines based on what he wanted to learn and attempt to do. If his technology did not meet a developer's needs, they were more than welcome to take their money elsewhere.

"I think as long as he could come in, sit down, and do his thing, he was happy," Devine said of Carmack. "I think to him, that meant [maintaining] a small company because things like being able to go [work with] NVIDIA, or ATI, or Apple was something he loved doing. That comes from being in charge of your own destiny, and John loved being in charge of his own destiny."

Carmack had a habit of steamrolling over goals that conflicted with his own. Not out of malice, but a characteristic nearsightedness. Looking to deviate from id's beaten path of shooting galleries, Devine spearheaded development of a MMORPG codenamed Quest in between shipping Quake 3 and working on Team Arena. Quest would take place in a fantasy world where swords and magic spells coexisted with technology. The world would be made up of shards, and players would travel between shards to engage in quests and battle rival factions.

"They had these citadels where everyone could meet, and there were vendors and so forth, and you could venture out into the shards," Devine explained. "There was a lot of [player-versus-enemy combat], but it was cooperative; you would form teams. Later, when Guild Wars shipped, I said, 'Huh—that's the Quest game design right there. Did someone get a copy of the Quest game design and just make it? Because it's pretty cool.'"

Artifacts, awards, and other memorabilia from id Software's office.

Devine viewed Quest as the perfect opportunity for id to plant a flag in other soil. It would be a new property that incorporated what the team had learned about networking infrastructures from working on Quake 3. Where Doom and Quake had become renowned for deathmatch, Quest would have a cooperative bent. Players could battle one another, but the developers would concentrate on seeding the massive world with incentives for cooperating.

Through Quest's earliest stages, John Carmack engineered id Tech 4. Outside his programmer's den, the small team working on Quest got swept up in excitement. "Adrian Carmack was drawing all this wonderful concept art for it, and it was looking incredible," said Devine. "Anytime you've got Adrian Carmack making concept art for you, it's going to look incredible. There was excitement inside id about making Quest, but I think Paul Steed and John really wanted to make Doom 3."

Line in the Sand

It was common knowledge around id that Carmack's engine in gestation would be used to power id's next first-person shooter. Also common knowledge was that that shooter would be a Doom game: A reboot of the franchise, or a sequel to Doom 2: Hell on Earth.

Steed's and Carmack's excitement proved infectious. Some developers who had helped build Quake 2 and Quake 3 had played Doom as fans, but had never worked on it. The prospect of contributing to the next generation of the series was like a bright, beautiful feather they envisioned adding to their caps.

"They saw it as a sure thing, and more in id's wheelhouse," Devine said. "It was definitely more in id's wheelhouse because it's Doom, right? I think they returned to their roots with Doom 3. I think they moved away from a lot of the stuff that was put into Quake 3 and Team Arena, to give it a little bit more than straight-up shooting. There are people who love that."

Devine was used to going head-to-head against Carmack over matters of programming. Debating his friend was practically in his job description. Carmack had hired Devine in part because of his coding acumen. Further, Carmack gave ground when he was wrong, such as when Devine supplied empirical evidence for why id needed a firewall to fortify its network. To Devine's recollection, only one of their arguments stood out as acrimonious and unfair.

"The one that really hurt was when he cancelled Quest in favor of Doom 3," Devine said. "That was really the beginning of the end of my time at id."

In the thick of predevelopment on Quest—working with artists to generate concept art that helps to define the game's look and tone, brainstorming game design, deciding on technology—Devine traveled abroad to promote Team Arena. When he returned from his trip, John Carmack delivered an ultimatum. Either id cancelled Quest and rolled its nascent team onto Doom 3, or he would quit.

Awards, artifacts, and other memorabilia at id's office in Dallas, Texas.

In a .plan posted in June 2000, Carmack detailed his reasoning. "Design work on an alternate game has been going on in parallel with the mission pack development and my research work," he wrote. "Several factors, including a general lack of enthusiasm for the proposed plan, the warmth that Wolfenstien [sic] was met with at E3, and excitement about what we can do with the latest rendering technology were making it seem more and more like we weren't going down the right path."

Knowing what it would mean for id's future if Carmack walked, Devine fought back. "I was like, 'That's not letting me have a say, John. That's basically saying, 'We're doing Doom 3.' I don't think he ever understood the extent of my hurt from that."

Carmack did not stand alone. Grouping with Paul Steed and other like-minded developers, his cohort opposed another group that included Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack, id's remaining co-founders. Adrian, who had balked at the notion of making another Doom and had rejected the idea several times, planted his feet. Excepting technical innovations, he argued, id had effectively made the same game for going on eight years.

Undeterred, John Carmack stated that id either came together to work on a reboot of Doom and Doom 2, or Kevin and Adrian would have to fire him and those who sided with him.

"I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was important enough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it," Carmack wrote. "Obviously no fun for anyone involved, but the project direction was changed, new hires have been expedited, and the design work has begun."

A meeting room at id Software.

Kevin and Adrian's acquiescence did not come free of charge. The very next day, they fired Paul Steed. "Paul has certainly done things in the past that could be grounds for dismissal, but this was retaliatory for him being among the 'conspirators,'" Carmack wrote. "I happen to think Paul was damn good at his job, and that he was going to be one of the most valuable contributors to Doom."

Adrian Carmack disagreed with John on why he, at least, had dismissed Steed. "I'll say for me, I had a standing vote to fire Paul Steed for various reasons," Adrian said. "I'm not going to go into that, but I had a standing vote for two years to fire him, so it certainly wasn't retaliatory for me. Had John left, I'd have been fine with that, and he knew that. We talked about it."

Quest's small, upstart team fell in line. Those developers who had stood across from Carmack in the debate knew that he was upset over releasing Steed, but found it difficult to muster sympathy. "It was just sad," Devine said. "I love John, but that was not a way to lead."

Jennell Jaquays pecked away at Doom 3 until a combination of genre fatigue and being on the receiving end of the company's infamous bit flip spurred her to resign. "I didn't like where the game was going. I was tired of remaking the same game over and over, which is what id Software is still doing," Jaquays said. "The games we were having other people make for us were more interesting, such as the Wolfenstein games. I had no emotional attachment to or appreciation for the Doom 3 project."

Jaquays had been spending much of her time at work on community outreach. She found moderating id's forums and writing engine documentation to help developers navigate id Tech 3 were much more fulfilling than working on yet another shooter. Then, in mid-2001, she noticed many of her colleagues pulling up in flashy new cars and touting fancy electronic toys. Jaquays saw the writing on the wall.

"I knew this was the usual response to getting bonus payments," Jaquays said. "I didn't get one. In fact, no one had even told me I wasn't going to get one. I learned about it from the person who had been my manager on Quake 3," she continued. "That was the point when I decided this was not a place I wanted to be long-term."

Concept artwork on a blackboard at id's office in Dallas, Texas.

Jaquays gave notice and left id Software in June 2001. "Working at id made my career again, at least in software," she said. "Whatever I may say about the rough times there, having [id Software] on my resume was a career maker. It still is in some ways. You go to places and you have people come up to you like they're Wayne and Garth: 'We're not worthy!' I still get that from this industry, and the [tabletop] roleplaying game industry. I have some friendships that came from the fans and community, that I still have today—some of the women I met online. One of them helped me get through my first divorce, so that was kind of a big deal."

Continuing, Jaquays credited her tenure at id for bringing her game design skills, previously only applicable to pen-and-paper RPGs, up to speed. "I learned how to do game development in a modern game [environment]. That was a big deal. Working at id taught me about online communities: their importance, and how they need to be maintained and nurtured, and sometimes—what's the proper word?—herded. Those are things I took [from the experience]."

Devine made his exit two years later. "It was bittersweet, the bitter part being [cancelling] Quest and working on Doom 3," he said of his time at id. "That was not optimal. I wish we'd made Quest because I think we'd have given World of WarCraft a run for its money with a better initial game system for an MMO at that time. That would have been an interesting adventure to go on. But I think overall, I have no regrets about being at id."

Doom 3 earned the dubious reputation as one of id's most divisive releases when it hit shelves in the summer of 2004. A reimagining of threadbare stories in Doom and Doom 2, the game channeled the spirit of horror games like Resident Evil to create a creepy atmosphere and slow-paced experience heavy on scares. Creeping through sterile labs and Mars bases, players encountered enemies in groups of two, three, or as many as half a dozen. The game's pacing stood in sharp contrast to the action-packed romps of the original games, which crammed dozens of enemies into hallways and rooms.

Additionally, a vocal majority of players despised one of the game's core mechanics: having to choose between holding a flashlight or a gun. Their binary option was to fumble around in the dark with a weapon, or light their path but leave themselves vulnerable when a monster inevitably attacked. "Duct Tape," one of the game's most popular user-created mods, sticks a flashlight to the machine gun and shotgun, narrowing the beam of light to preserve the atmosphere.

John Carmack takes the stage at QuakeCon.

Perhaps most surprising, Doom 3 flipped the script on Quake 3 by featuring a lengthy campaign but the bare minimum of multiplayer modes, perhaps because id sought to avoid cannibalizing Quake 3's players.

Doom 3 reviewed and sold well for id to bifurcate its development team. Both projects were first-person shooters, and both were helmed by Tim Willits, but one was less an homage to id's trademark style as an effort to renew community interest in competitive play.

Going Live

"Quake 3 really, in my opinion, is the greatest multiplayer game ever made, ever. Ever," repeated Tim Willits. "Which is why Quake Champions feels so much like Quake 3. If you want to know who has the most skill in an arena shooter, you play Quake 3."

Hundreds of thousands of players agreed. Throughout the early and mid-2000s, Quake 3 was a proving ground for casual and pro players alike to test their railgun skills and knowledge of game maps. All the while, hardware grew by leaps and bounds. The most passionate of the PC-gaming crowd routinely upgraded their rigs: more memory, faster processors, beefier video cards. Quake 3 soared on faster, new hardware.

With new hardware came new games. Over time, Quake 3's servers thinned until only the diehard—namely pros who made all or some of their living competing in the game—remained. During his annual keynote at QuakeCon 2005, Carmack announced that id would make id Tech 3 freely available. Two years later, he proposed ripping the guts out of the game and replacing them with a new framework that would make Quake 3's content free, too.

"Most people had enough computing power [to run Quake 3] as fast as it could run on a desktop [even] with [other applications] running," Willits explained. "Carmack came up with the idea of, 'Why don't we just give it away for free? We'll put it in a browser because the download size won't be very big, and most people have really awesome computers.' We were going to make money selling ads, which was not the best business model ever."

At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack revealed that the company was working on Quake Zero, a free-to-play version of Quake 3 optimized to run as a plug-in for web browsers. Shortly after the announcement, Quake Zero was rebranded as Quake Live. Unbeknownst to Carmack at the time, someone had purchased the QuakeZero.com domain name out from under id. Rather than pay off the squatter, id, only a few months into working on the game, simply went with a different name.

Quake Live sported numerous technical improvements over Quake 3. While the graphics and gameplay remained largely unchanged, the game bundled in more maps and a refined user interface that shuffled the placement of certain data such as the ammo count for the player's current weapon to make it easier to spot. A warmup period was added to each match, giving players time to roam fiddle with controls and refresh their knowledge of a map's layout before a timer counted down to the official start of a match.

Carmack relished the opportunity to iron out some of Quake 3's underpinnings, such as rolling out an easily readable list of active servers which made jumping into games faster and more intuitive. A statistics system went above and beyond displaying frag and death counts, tracking which weapon players favored, how many kills they scored with each weapon, and making note of how many times players had performed actions such as capturing flags and assisting other players. Reviewing stats benefited pro players, who were perpetually scrutinizing their play styles for ways to improve.

The only change that ruffled feathers was id's decision to remove the gibs that sprayed and bounced around the screen when a character exploded. Germany threatened to proscribe downloads of Quake Live unless the violence was toned down. Id complied, replacing gibs with a burst of sparks.

In 2008, id rolled out invitations to a closed beta for Quake Live. To run the beta, all users had to do was download a small plug-in file for compatible web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer. In 2010, the game launched as a free download. Over that span of time, the game had undergone changes to its distribution model. Not even a developer as successful as id could get away with giving away a game for free without strings: Instead of charging the consumer, the team replaced some textures with advertisements. The model seemed sound: Let players play for free, and without cluttering their screens with the types of pop-up ads that plagued web browsers.

Quake Live.

Unfortunately, the ad model came with a fatal flaw. "We put ads in the game, but in order to get paid, the user has to look at an advertisement so it covers a certain percentage of their screen," Willits said. "They have to look at the ad for a second or two. The game is so fast, you don't look at anything for a second or two, let alone half your screen. We put a big Intel ad on the side of one level, and no one ever saw it because they were just [flying by]."

Heading into the 2010s, publishers and industry pundits raved about the benefits of ads. Instead of charging players a premium price for new games, they could paper virtual worlds with banners and posters and billboards, taking care to contextualize ads; the last thing players wanted, they knew, was to be soaking up the atmosphere of a lush fantasy world only to turn a corner and view a sales pitch for Intel's Pentium processors painted onto a rock.

At QuakeCon 2009, while Quake Live was still in beta, John Carmack admitted that in-game advertising had proved a bust. Ads had not generated enough revenue for the game to operate in the black. There were a number of reasons why ad revenue failed to materialize, among them the fact that advertising agencies were struggling to stay afloat due to the financial crisis that had arisen in 2007.

That December, Electronic Arts' Ben Cousins, general manager of the monolithic publisher's free-to-play division, confessed that even EA was struggling to justify the model. "We actually aren’t getting much from ad revenue at all. The in-game advertising business hasn’t grown as fast as people expected it to," he said in an interview picked up by [a]list daily, adding that microtransactions—charging for individual items such as weapon packs, costumes, and horse armor—was "a far better bet. If you think about how fast the virtual goods business has grown in the last year or so, it's been much quicker and become a much more reliable source of revenue."

A quiet day at id's office in Dallas, Texas. Most of the developers were attending QuakeCon.

Cousins went on to admit that publishers had not given in-game advertising as much thought as the model warranted. "I think it’s more about specific deals where you can tie the content in. We did a deal with Dr. Pepper for Battlefield Heroes, where if you buy a bottle and scan in the code you get an exclusive outfit. That kind of deep integration will work, I think, but I'm not convinced that we’ll have billboards in games and things like that. Maybe those days are over."

Not ready to throw Quake Live out with in-game ads, id pivoted. "We pushed into subscriptions, where you could have premium maps, access to other content, and you just subscribed to it. It was cheap, like three bucks a year or something like that," said Willits.

Quake Live hatched out of beta and offered subscriptions in two flavors. A Premium subscription ran $1.99 a month and came with access to 20 maps, the Freeze Tag game mode, the option to create a clan and join up to five other clans, and player statistics stored on servers for six months. Pro subscriptions cost $3.99 and accounted for all the perks on the premium tier, plus statistics stored for 12 months, the ability to run game servers, and invite friends who stuck with the free-to-play version to participate in games set on Premium-only maps. Rather than pay monthly, players could pay annual fees of $23.88 or $47.88, respectively.  

Quake Live with in-game ads.

As developers of browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome shed support for plug-ins, id pivoted again. Still free-to-play, Quake Live became available as a digital download separate from web browsers, just like a traditional game, carrying a $9.99 price tag. The upside was that Quake Live was cheap. The downside was that servers once again became ghost towns. Casual players had long since moved on.

Within id, developers pitched an expansion pack they believed would rejuvenate flagging interest in Quake Live. Before it could take effect, id's development team had to survive its most turbulent period yet.

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