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This year is a particularly important one for id Software. Not only did the company recently celebrate its 35th anniversary, having been established in February 1991, but it is also gearing up to commemorate 30 years of its groundbreaking first-person shooter, Quake, as well as the anniversary of the very first QuakeCon, later this year.
As a result, the company seems to be pulling out the big guns to get people hyped for this year's QuakeCon (taking place from August 6th to 9th, 2026, at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas), announcing in a DOOM: The Dark Ages One Year Anniversary Stream that id Software's four original co-founders, John Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall, will all be in attendance at the upcoming event.
According to Romero, writing on Twitter/X, "It's the first time all four of us have been together since 1993, and the first time we've all been to QuakeCon," making this somewhat of a historic moment not only for the event, but also for id Software fans who have hoped to see the four men come together again, after going their separate ways.
Just to give you a bit of history, of the four co-founders, Tom Hall was the first to leave id, departing the company in August 1993, prior to the release of the original DOOM, after creative differences led the other members to ask him to hand in his resignation.
This is an event Romero describes in his book, Doom Guy: A Life in First Person, as "the one truly negative chapter" of DOOM's development, and led Hall to join Apogee Software, where he worked on the Wolfenstein 3D sequel-turned-spiritual successor Rise of the Triad, before reuniting with Romero a few years later, in 1996, to co-found Ion Storm after the latter left id following the turbulent development of Quake.
Adrian Carmack, meanwhile, stayed with the company until 2005, when he was allegedly forced out over his shares, prompting him to sue. In 2014, he was announced as the new owner of a Heritage Golf & Spa Resort in Killenard, County Laois, Ireland, and later reteamed with Romero two years later, in 2016, on an unrealised Kickstarter project called Blackroom, which was described at the time as "a return to fast, violent and masterful play on the PC."
As for the remaining co-founder, John Carmack, out of the original four, he was the one who remained at the company the longest, resigning in 2013 to become Oculus VR's CTO. In the past, a lot has been written about the relationship and supposed animosity between John Carmack and his fellow co-founder, John Romero, particularly in David Kushner's 2003 book Masters of Doom, but this is something both men have tried to downplay in recent years, both suggesting they would have handled things differently if they were more mature and not, as Romero notes, "the twentysomethings we actually were."
For Doom's 30th anniversary, the pair reunited for a special anniversary stream, to prove they had long since buried the hatchet with writer David L. Craddock, but it appears there are now plans to get all four men together in the same room, with some "activities" and "fun things" planned, according to Bethesda's senior community lead, Joshua Boyle.
What exactly these "fun things" are has yet to be revealed, but we're personally holding out hope for a panel, with all four men present. General admission tickets for QuakeCon 2026 are on sale here.