Signature Moves

Id Software's bit flip works like a pendulum. The further it swings in one direction, the harder it will swing on its inevitable return trip.

In early 2004, John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Adrian Carmack offered id CEO Todd Hollenshead and lead designer Tim Willits ownership stake in the company as a reward for years of hard work and dedication. Hollenshead had become the new face of the company, emceeing QuakeCon, giving interviews about projects, and handling day-to-day operations. Willits graduated from level designer to lead designer on Doom 3, then migrated to Quake Live as director.

For Adrian Carmack, hard work and dedication to id's products had become tainted. He had toiled away on Doom 3 as just the latest in id's long line of first-person shooters. "I told some friends of mine once, 'You know, if I have to draw another fucking metal wall, I'm going to vomit,'" he said of Doom 3's development.

Adrian's problems with id ran deeper than his feelings on Doom 3. Like the game's tenebrous environments, id had become a gloomy, tension-filled place. The change was not recent. Since Quake, Adrian had watched the studio's culture darken year by year. Cliques sprang up, coworkers stabbed each other in the back.

"It was really sad for me to watch," he said. "You'd think that as a co-founder, I could do something, but I couldn't. Politically, there was nothing I could do. I owned less than 50 percent of the company. As they showed in the end, I could be fired."

Adrian Carmack (left) with John Romero. In 2014, Carmack bought the five-star Heritage Golf & Spa Resort located in Killenard, Co Laois. (Image credit: Irish Times.)

Adrian was the workhorse of the art department. Over interminable crunch periods, he had seen the effects of 100-hour workweeks on others, and himself. The pressure to stay at the office, to be glued to one's seat in front of one's workstation, came from up top. He felt it, and may have even perpetuated it.

Then the bit flipped. One day at work, he opened Doom 3's art repositories to discover that some of his artwork had been pulled without explanation.

For Adrian, that was the last straw. "If they're not going to use my artwork, then I was going to start doing what I wanted to do at work," he said. "Screw what anybody else wants me to do; I'm going to do what makes me happy. If you're not going to use my art, why am I here? Why don't you just fire me?"

In 2005, the company announced the retirement of Adrian Carmack. The public-facing reason given for the surprise departure was that the long-time artist was ready to leave the nonstop grind of the games industry and pursue other endeavors. Later that year he fired back, filing a lawsuit against his former company claiming that his peers had forced him out.

Adrian's allegation was made public when the Wall Street Journal published a report on the lawsuit. The suit revealed that Activision had offered a deal to id Software: sell the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake properties for $90 million, or sell the company for $105 million. Adrian alleged that all five co-owners had voted against selling, only to turn around and offer to buy his shares for $11 million. He refused, knowing his stake was worth more. The other four countered by offering $20 million. He turned them down again, aware that he stood to make at least $40 million by selling to Activision.

Adrian alleged that the other co-owners' response was to throw their weight together and fire him. With Adrian out of the picture, they could accept Activision's offer and each get a larger slice of the pie. The two sides decided to settle the matter in court. Before taking the stand, id's co-owners and some of their developers conspired to get their story straight.

"Part of the plan for the lawsuit was they would claim that Adrian Carmack had literally done nothing on [Doom 3], so they would be justified in getting rid of him," an anonymous source told me. "They went into the courtroom, and [one of the co-owners] sat there and testified that Adrian Carmack had done nothing, and that all the art was done by other guys."

Adrian Carmack took the accusation in stride by dropping a bomb of his own. "Other artists, programmers, and shareholders were heavily involved," he confirmed. "They tried to say I created very little artwork and the art I did create was of poor quality. I was able to effectively prove that they were incorrect by highlighting all my art files by name and creating side by side comparisons of artwork created by others next to my own art."

Knowing he'd been caught in a lie, the co-owner who had just finished perpetuating id's conspiracy story squirmed until the judge dismissed him and summoned John Carmack. The judge asked if Carmack would corroborate his peer's story. According to my anonymous source, Carmack broke from the group's plan and, wearing a smirk, told the judge that the individual who had just testified was virtually incapable of telling the truth.

"He tanked his own case," said my anonymous source, "which is also kind of a cool John Carmack story because it shows how little he understands of how things work in the real world. At that point, the judge said, 'Look, if you don't settle with Adrian, you could lose your company.' Carmack said, 'We'll settle.'"

"The claim was really just a scheme to eliminate me as a shareholder and a bullshit excuse to not pay dividends to me solely," Adrian continued. "Deceitfulness was not uncommon at id. It was part of the culture and encouraged."

Adrian looks back fondly on id's formative years. "Id, at one time, had been a fun place to work. We used to have a lot of good times there. It was a very enjoyable environment, as [any studio] making video games should have."

Ironically, and sadly, there was some truth to id Software's initial statement that Adrian Carmack had retired to pursue ventures outside of artwork. "I was burned out," he said. "Honestly, I didn't want to create art anymore. I really haven't since then. I've created very little art. It makes me sad. I try every now and then, but, I don't know. I'm just not ready yet. Hopefully one day."

New Realities

Things returned to relative normalcy at id for the next several years. Alongside work on Quake Live, John Carmack devised a new engine, id Tech 5, for a first-person shooter/racing hybrid called Rage, directed by Tim Willits and released to tepid reviews in 2011. At QuakeCon 2007, John Carmack revealed that a team at id was completing preliminary work on Doom 4. A formal announcement followed in May 2008.

In June 2009, ZeniMax Media, parent company to Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks, acquired id Software for approximately $150 million per documents filed in a matter separate from the acquisition. Bethesda issued a press release stating that id would continue to operate autonomously under John Carmack's leadership. Carmack, however, had developed an outside interest.

On Twitter, Carmack tweeted often about his enthusiasm for the growing field of virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs). Talking to VR enthusiasts on message boards, Carmack entered into a dialogue with Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey, designer of the company's titular Oculus Rift. When Carmack requested a prototype, Luckey obliged. Carmack hacked together a version of Doom 3 to run on the Rift and demoed it at the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

John Carmack demoes Doom 3 on a prototype Oculus Rift.

Carmack approached members of ZeniMax about releasing official versions of id Software games for the Oculus Rift. ZeniMax declined. With his contract coming due, Carmack weighed felt compelled to choose between game engines and virtual reality. In late 2013, he left id Software to become chief technology officer of Oculus.

"I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging," Carmack tweeted on November 22. Tim Willits, id's studio director, issued a statement explaining that Carmack's resignation would not affect projects, and wished him well.

After Facebook acquired Oculus for $4 billion in the spring of 2014, ZeniMax filed a lawsuit against Oculus and Facebook. Per the suit, ZeniMax accused Carmack of stealing thousands of files that informed the development of the Rift before leaving id. ZeniMax demanded $4 billion in damages. Weeks of heated testimonies between the two parties kicked off in early 2017. Carmack was not the only major player to take the stand. Facebook co-creator Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, and Oculus CEO Brandon Iribe were three key individuals to give testimony.

That February, the jury ruled that Carmack had not stolen proprietary information, but that Palmer Luckey had violated terms of a non-disclosure agreement, awarding ZeniMax $500 million in damages. A month later, John Carmack sued ZeniMax for $22.5 million, a little more than half of the $45.1 million that he claimed was due to him as id's majority shareholder at the time ZeniMax acquired id in 2009 but never paid.

In June, ZeniMax demanded another $500 million in damages, citing the February 2017 verdict as confirmation that Oculus "wrongly obtained ZeniMax VR technology under the NDA and used it... to establish a business that would not have existed without ZeniMax," per the filing.

As of November 2017, no end to the legal war between Facebook and ZeniMax.

Flip Sides

Amid legal turmoil and the departure of its technical visionary, id Software groped blindly for footing. New directions for its two biggest franchises lit its path.

Doom 4 had been stumbling through development for years by the time Carmack departed for Oculus. Following market trends, id's developers had grafted on design cues from Activision's successful Call of Duty franchise such as a campaign rooted in scripted sequences and a linear path. Taking stock, the team went back to the drawing board. Led by co-directors Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin, the game, titled Doom upon its May 2016 release—and referred to as "Doom 2016" by fans—fused the blistering, shoot-first-ask-no-questions-later template of the original Doom with contemporary mechanics that played to the action, such as Glory Kill executions that saw players rip enemies open like piñatas to refill ammo and health.

To the astonishment of anyone familiar with id's seemingly endless stretch of internal turbulence, Doom 2016 debuted as one of the freshest shooters in years. Arguably more surprising was that it told a compelling story through the player's actions with few interludes to drag down the pace.

"I think one of the things we're most proud of is we created a pretty interesting character," Stratton told me during our interview for Doom: To Hell and Back, an expansive making-of feature on Doom 2016 as well as aspects of the original titles. "People talk about the Doom marine and the Doom Slayer. He has a personality, and he has depth. They're getting into his head, and he didn't say a word the entire time."

"Some of the best pieces of entertainment, the story [of how they're made] usually starts with, 'We had no money,'" Martin added. "You have to be resourceful and clever and come up with some really interesting stuff. We had full support and had plenty of resources to work with; id is a tremendous team. But in terms of the brand, what is it? It's a dude who just wants to kill demons. It was a fun challenge."

Doom was back, and by extension, so was id Software. One question lingered. With Doom back on the map, what about Quake? Studio director Tim Willits answered less than a month later during Bethesda's E3 2016 press conference. Amid a promising lineup that included developer Arkane Studios' Dishonored 2, id unveiled a trailer for Quake Champions, a multiplayer-only arena shooter descended from Quake 3 and Quake Live, and the first main entry in the series since 2005's Quake 4 by Raven Software.

To many fans, Quake Champions seemed poised to fill a vacancy in id's lineup. Doom 2016's multiplayer component had been developed by Certain Affinity, a third-party studio founded by ex-Halo developers who had years of experience designing multiplayer modes for console shooters such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts. Perhaps as a result, Doom's multiplayer felt derivative of those games rather than id's classic shooters. In particular, controls felt floaty, perhaps a product of being developed by a team with experience designing for less precise input modalities such as thumb sticks.

Rulesets in Doom 2016's multiplayer likewise mirrored those of console shooters. Doom and Quake tradition dictated that players be allowed to retrieve any weapon they found on a map, as well as guns dropped by defeated opponents. In Doom 2016, players chose from predefined loadouts limited to two or three weapons. Most problematic was that of all the modes available in Doom 2016 at launch, a free-for-all, classic deathmatch-type option was not among them.

In fairness to Certain Affinity, Doom 2016's multiplayer offerings were not poorly implemented. Rather, they felt unrelated and unconnected, as if developed for a separate product and then shoehorned into Doom at the last minute. That was the case: On PC, technical issues required players to boot a separate instance of Doom depending on whether they wanted to play the campaign or multiplayer.

By announcing Quake Champions as a multiplayer-focused title, id Software positioned Doom and Quake as two sides of the same coin. One game offered an engrossing and satisfying single-player experience. The other would follow in the footsteps of its most successful outing by going all-in on online, competitive gaming.

"They had captured that Doom feel, that original DNA, and were adding all these Glory Kills and this modern stuff to a classic game," Willits said of the Doom 2016 team. "We knew that was going to be great, and that kind of inspired us to do more with Quake."

Models

Willits had kept a finger on the pulse of Quake Live's competitive scene since the game's inception. By virtue of that fact, he was the first one to notice when the game's pulse began to flutter.

Competitive games need two materials to flourish: players, and sponsors. Without sponsors willing to put up big prize pools for tournaments, pro players will pick up stakes and migrate to other games out of necessity. It's how they make their living. By 2015, QuakeCon was the last major venue hosting Quake Live tourneys.

Monitoring dwindling interest, the Quake team drafted a concept for a Quake Live expansion codenamed "Lovecraft" in early 2013. Adam Pyle, id's lead developer on Live with Tim Willits presiding as director, pitched the expansion. "The idea was to give unique abilities to each of the characters and just make it a game type," Willits explained. "We had Freeze Tag and all these other fun, arcade-y game types for Quake Live that people enjoyed, so his idea was, 'Why don't we just add some abilities and add a new dynamic to playing?'"

Pyle and the team put together a Champions prototype in Quake Live. "We actually have a build of Quake Live where you can run around and Ranger has his Dash, Tank Junior has his shield. It was a lot of fun, so we knew we had something there," Willits continued.

Still, the team hesitated. Although their proof of concept was fun to play, it didn't solve the underlying problem that releasing an expansion for Quake Live would amount to a Band-Aid for a game whose user base had already bled out. That, coupled with the team's growing enthusiasm for the Doom 2016's delicate balance of modern and classic tropes, galvanized them. They resolved to transplant the concept of special abilities from their prototype to a brand-new package titled Quake Champions.

Pyle and Willits proposed Quake Champions as an amalgam of old and new. Returning staples would include weapon pickups scattered around maps, power-ups such as Quad Damage, and an emphasis on player skill through techniques that anyone could pull off with sufficient practice such as rocket jumps and strafe jumping, the result of a glitch in Quake where players jump and move in specific directions at precise times in order to dramatically accelerate their movement speed.

Arenas would be designed to highlight a variety of architecture such as wending passages, verticality, and central areas where powerful weapons and prized items act as bait. Willits and Pyle also planned to circumvent the awkward transitions from failed business model to failed business model that had made Quake Live's lifespan bumpy. "Our ultimate goal is that it's a free-to-play game, but there are lots of people that don't like free-to-play games," Willits said of Quake Champions. "There are people who just want to buy their Quake, have everything, and go and play. That's what the Champion Pack is."

From the moment Quake Champions launched in closed beta in the spring of 2017, id offered two ways to play. First, as a free download. Anyone can install the game and jump online as Ranger, a Champion modeled after the original Quake's leading grunt. Players who want access to more Champions can purchase the Champion Pack, a one-and-done transaction that adds all currently available champions to their lineup and guarantees access to others as they are released.

Quake Champions entered early access—a preliminary state that lets developers sell a work-in-progress title while plugging away toward completion—in August 2017, shortly before QuakeCon. Until the game matures as a full release, the Champion Pack costs $30, roughly half as much as it will cost later. Purchasing Champions individually works out to between $7 and $8 USD per character, making the Pack a better buy.

"We really encourage people to just get the Champions Pack," Willits said. "The Champions Pack is cheaper now than buying Quake 3 in 1999, even with inflation. The reason we needed to be free-to-play is because Quake Live was free-to-play for a long time, and we really need to bring in those people, especially in eastern Europe; that's a huge market for us. We want to get as big a pool [of players] as possible, but we don't want to alienate anyone, so we have both those options."

Quake Champions runs on a hybridized engine, news that came as a surprise to many players who assumed that id's next internally developed game would run on Doom 2016's id Tech 6. Willits explained that id Tech 6 was not finished when the team broke ground on Quake Champions, steering them toward a Plan B. "We looked at a lot of the id Tech 3, the Quake 3 tech, and some id Tech 4 stuff. There was some stuff from id Tech 5 [we liked], so we kind of cherry-picked and worked with Saber on their stuff, and it worked fine."

Based in New Jersey, Saber Interactive was founded in 2001 and quickly made a name for itself as one of a select few studios to build proprietary engine platforms in an era when most developers licensed engines from id or Epic Games. Armed with a concept and technology, all that stood in the Quake Champions' team's path was registering an Internet domain for the game's online home. QuakeChampions.com seemed a natural selection, but like Quake Zero before, a squatter slowed their progress. This time, however, the squatter willingly and sheepishly relinquished his seat.

"A few months before we announced Quake Champions to the world, Bethesda ran a search on all the URLs and found that QuakeChampion.com was owned by Tim Willits," said Willits. "They were like, 'Uh, yeah, you seem to own QuakeChampions.com. You need to transfer that to us.'"

Natural Talent

Quake 3 launched in December 1999 with the bare minimum of single-player trappings. Quake Champions downsized offline modes further, dropping bots and tournaments. The reason, outlined by Tim Willits, underscores how id views the Doom and Quake properties.

"Doom's got a great single-player identity—it's got great multiplayer, too—and Wolfenstein is off-the-charts single-player awesomeness, so we really felt [Quake Champions] is where we could do the best job, putting all our eggs in one basket and making the best multiplayer experience possible," he said.

Cutting ties with all semblance of single-player is a milestone for the Quake franchise, which ended up straying into Doom's shadow. "Quake 1 was really a lot like Doom, because that's what we knew," Willits continued. "This helps us keep brands separate. You know they're both id games, but they're not the same."

Within id and among the game's players, there was—and remains—some concern that outfitting Champions with unique abilities could weaken Quake's foundation. From the beginning, the franchise has been predicated on skill. More often than not, players with superior reflexes, intimate knowledge of a weapon's quirks, and intimate knowledge of a map should triumph over opponents who get lucky or, in the case of Champions, have access to implements that no one else can use.

Pyle and Willits knew that, and prioritized fundamentals. No matter which Champion players choose, spatial awareness and expert handling should win the day. For instance, although any player stands a chance using any character, Quake veterans will find that some are more in tune with one era of Quake than others. Slight differences in factors such as midair handling could steer some players toward a character based on the physics in Quake 2.

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

The result is a pastiche of Quake control modalities and tactics. "So," Willits said, "if you are a big Quake World fan—Quake 1—then Anarki would be a character for you because he has basically the same air control as in Quake World. If you're strictly into Quake 3 or Quake Live, then you'll like Ranger. That's why Ranger is the [character] everyone plays for free: We want that Quake 3 feel. For Quake 2, I think Clutch is similar to the Quake 2 feel. So, we have all these champions that fit different Quake styles of play."

Customization goes further than the feel of each character. Weapon skins allow players to tote throwback designs such as the original Quake's long, cylindrical rocket launcher and centered weapon view, for instance, though skins do not alter intangibles such as damage or firing speed. Similarly, players can customize outfits without gaining or losing an edge in battle.

Not all customization is cosmetic. Every champion sports active and passive abilities, as well as health, speed, and armor stats. Doom Slayer, the Doom 2016 incarnation of id's "Doomguy" marine, can activate Berserk to boost his movement speed and punch enemies so hard they explode. Visor's passive ability, Grasshopper, allows him to perform strafe jumps, while Ranger mitigates all damage by 25 percent, promoting frequent rocket jumping.

Some players are concerned that certain abilities have marked certain characters as the cream of the crop. The cyborg Clutch can summon an energy shield that soaks up the bulk of any damage dealt to him from the front. Some champion-specific tweaking almost went deeper. "We almost had preferred weapons for each champion," Willits said. "You would not spawn with them; you still had to pick them up. But the reason Scalebearer holds the rocket launcher in every one of his pictures is he would have had an advantage with the rocket launcher that the other champions did not have."

Focusing on the franchise's skill-first tenet, the Quake Champions team went with an agnostic weapons model. "For us, the philosophy of weapons in Quake games is they're situational," continued Willits. "Given any situation you are in, there's an ideal weapon for you. Long range, short range, moving targets. You pick the weapon that fits that situation. That's how we focus on [weapon balance]. Anything missing, we'll try to steer into with Champion abilities."

A Quake 3 logo at id's office in Dallas.

Hot tempers and shouting matches over weapon balance remain a constant within id. "We stress so much about the weapons that we still debate whether the lightning gun should do six points of damage a second or seven points of damage," said Willits. "We actually talk to the pros: 'It is six or seven?' We stress about it, we argue about it."

Cooler heads prevail in the face of history. With few exceptions, Quake Champions imports Live's arsenal wholesale. Players can choose to start off with a shotgun, machine gun, or nailgun; within each arena, they'll find standbys such as the rocket launcher, railgun, super varieties of nailguns and shotguns, the lightning gun, and the heavy chaingun.

The tribolt, seeming to be a new weapon at first blush, reveals itself to be the reincarnation of another fan-favorite weapon. "It's more of a precision grenade launcher," Willits admitted." You can drop your projectiles and then they blow up [on a timer]. People said, 'Where's my grenade launcher?' so the tribolt is a new gun, because it is important to put new guns out every once in a while, after 20 years."

Willits sees no reason to fix what isn't broken. The team has been tweaking and adjusting hit boxes, splash damage, rate of fire, and other factors since the 1990s. They know what works, more or less, and tiptoe around changes that could disrupt the game balance that pro players have come to expect after years spent in Quake 3 and Live.

"In each Quake game, the speed of rockets is different," explained Willits. "That usually directs people to which Quake they like: The speed of the rockets. In the last 16 years, we've thought a lot about these guns, so there really wasn't any change to the functionality of weapons in Quake Champions."

Reverence for Quake's history doesn't preclude tinkering. In late spring of 2017, a controversy over a change to the railgun broke out during the game's closed beta phase. In Quake 2, 3, and Live, the railgun inflicts the same damage whether players zoom in or not. The team sparked an uproar by rewarding players who zoom in before firing.

The issue for many players is that Quake has traditionally been a fast-paced, shoot-from-the-hip FPS. Modern shooters, namely Call of Duty, slow down the action by nudging players to view battlefields through iron sights and scopes. "Zooming, in my opinion breaks the flow of the game and takes away from the fast paced combat," wrote Reddit user Levexify on Quake Champions' official sub-Reddit. "The game forces you to zoom if you want to play optimally and this is seriously a gamebreaker for me, and I imagine, for alot of other people too. Please make zooming optional, remove the bonus damage." (Text pasted as it appeared in Levexify's post.)

"We did the zoom power boost to the railgun, which was hugely controversial," Willits said. "'What are you doing, id? You ruined my Quake! I can never play this game again! I'll buy it. But I hate you. But I'll buy it.'"

Fortunately, the game's early access status provides the developers time to hone in on what's working and decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether to follow their vision for a mechanic or err on the side of their most important demographic.

"I think the reason all of our games have been more geared toward hardcore fans is because our philosophy at id is to make a game that we like to play," said Willits. "We're hardcore [players]. For Quake Champions, getting the pros on board, making sure our community was happy—that was the number-one priority. We would be dead if we did not have the pros. If they're not playing the game, we have nobody."

Pro Scene

Id brought pro players into the fold at an early stage of Champions' development. At QuakeCon 2015, the developers confided to certain pros that a new Quake was in development and that they would be soliciting feedback when the game reached a playable state. Over the next year, id took the game on the road to events such as PAX East. At various events, they invited pros to try their hands at Sacrifice, a permutation of two popular game modes.

In Sacrifice, two teams of four players fight over a single flag rather than defending their own and trying to capture the opposing team's. Once a team nabs the flag, they take it to an obelisk and must hold it there while a meter fills up, a riff on modes where players vie over control points on a map. All the while, enemies attempt to steal it and hold it at their obelisks. The contest continues until one team scores three captures.

At QuakeCon 2016, id welcomed over 60 pros to have a go at Sacrifice. The verdict: No good. Fighting over one flag tended to result in wild shootouts every time one player dropped the flag. Other players complained that maps weren't symmetrical, giving one team an advantage if their capture points were more accessible.

Quake Champion's developers listened. Sacrifice was scrapped not once, not twice, but three times. Each time id asked pros for their feedback. Each time the pros wrinkled their noses and expressed their preference for Team Deathmatch, regular deathmatch, and Duel, a one-on-one bout where players choose multiple Champions and battle until one player's roster is eliminated. Id continues to update Sacrifice, although players of all skill levels invest more time in the game's deathmatch-centric modes.

One pro, John "Zero4" Hill, worked his way from id's inner circle of professional gamers to a professional at id Software. "John Hill has been the best hire," Willits said. "He is a pro player, and he knows those guys. He told over 300 professional gamers about the Quake [Champions] world championships months before we announced it, and they never leaked it. Imagine telling 300 people about a secret and no one leaks it. That's good communication."

As the game crept toward early access, Willits and Pyle broadened their outreach by looking for ways to make the game inviting to casual crowds. "We gather data on everything, and we've learned that most people died in Quake [Live] holding the machinegun because they never switched weapons," Willits recalled. "There was an education we needed to give those players. We teach them how to pick up armor and health, and what guns are good for which situations."

Quake Champions has benefitted from numerous quality-of-life changes rolled out in patches. Still plagued by long wait times between matches while the game searches out opponents, the game added an option for players to stick with a group they just played with in order to start the next match faster, while the lore system gives players another way to collect scrolls that can be unlocked to open up skins for the characters.

"All of those things aren't for [pro players]. We have those people," Willits said. "Now we're working on building up other folks who may be a little intimidated by Quake, but who want to experience something new."

Migration

Willits' next challenge may be his most daunting: Convincing Quake Live diehards to migrate. From his perspective, there's ample reason to embrace the next generation of Quake. "You don't see [people playing] the same Champions; you see a lot of meta-game as far as who's playing what and how they play those Champions. After a year, I can say that I was right: It worked out well. [Champions] don't change the game; it's still skill-based, but they add so much special. That was a big change, so I don't want to mess with anything else. I think we got a good balance [between old and new]."

 As for next steps, id hopes to move Quake Champions out of early access sooner rather than later. True to tradition, however, the studio's release date is When It's Done and not a moment sooner. More maps and characters will be added as the game ripens, and upcoming tournaments such as Dream Hack in Sweden, scheduled for early December, will put up a prize pool of $350,000. In another nod to the franchise's legacy, Willits contacted Chris Vrenna, former Nine Inch Nails musician—and a well-versed soundtrack composer in the games industry since his work on the original Quake—to take the lead on scoring Quake Champions.

"We hopped on a phone call one Friday afternoon, and he told me what [he was working on], and it was Quake Champions," Vrenna recalled. "Because of my history with id and Quake, he asked me if I would score it. To which I replied, 'Absolutely not.'"

Vrenna laughed. "No, no, I said, 'I would drop everything for any [project] you would ask of me. Let's do it.'"

Even in gestation, Quake Champions is on its way to making good on what Willits expects from the franchise's present and what he believes it will achieve in the future. Even so, he does confess to some nostalgia for the days when he could roll up his sleeves and make a more direct impact on a game's DNA.

"It's sad that I don't get to make maps as much anymore, but it's the spirit of the game, the core: it's fast, fun, fluid, and exciting," Willits said. "When you get that rail shot: you're almost going to die, then [your opponent] turns a corner and you hit him and you win—there's nothing better than that in gaming. Watching the world's best Quake players play, what they can do, the dexterity they have, the mental game they play. No game can do that better."

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