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id Software's influential first-person shooter, Quake, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and some members of the team have been reflecting back publicly on the game's difficult, multi-year development cycle and past mistakes that have only become much clearer with hindsight.
If you've read about Quake's history before, you'll likely already know that its development took a significant toll on the studio, ultimately leading to John Romero's departure after the game originally shipped. In retrospect, the majority of the issues stemmed from the team's creative ambitions, with its groundbreaking 3D engine taking much longer to develop than initially anticipated, alienating the level designers, who had to constantly redesign their levels as the technology improved.
As a result, by the time the engine was ready, the original premise, based on a D&D character named Quake who wielded a big hammer, had gone through a rather dramatic transformation, becoming a first-person shooter, due to the team being burned out and wanting to prioritise a genre they were already familiar with.
The recent back-and-forth on social media seems to have been kick-started by one of Quake's level designers, Sandy Petersen, who described the game as "an amazing feat of art, programming, and design" but also referred to it as coming at "a grim cost," breaking the team spiritually, and causing several members of id to leave in the following years.
He went on to argue that, in his opinion, "Id Software was never the same [after]" and that "the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."
This then prompted id Software co-founder John Carmack and John Romero to add their own reflections on the project and the toll it took, suggesting the ideal solution would have been to build a Doom++ engine to avoid much of the friction inside the studio.
"Quake was overly ambitious technically," wrote Carmack. "We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow-up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters."
"I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points."
Romero agreed, "We should have made a DOOM++ first while the engine stabilised, then taken the full 3D step after. Quake may have been too ambitious, but that ambition was something we all believed in.
"We were trying to make the next great leap, and none of us could really know at the beginning what that leap was or how long it would take. We were building the road while also building the car driving on it. No one had ever done anything like Quake before."
Both men also talked about how the development of Quake caused a divide among the designers on the team between those with a strong "visual sense" for creating convincing 3D environments that played well and those without. Carmack stated that he doesn't accept responsibility for this problem, as Quake needed levels that "not only played well, but looked awesome." But suggests the owners should have figured out earlier "how to pair up artists and designers". He went on to suggest their failure to accomplish this led to "Infighting among the designers," suggesting "the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
"The maps had to play well and look great, of course," Romero wrote. "However, Quake made that harder because the maps had to work as gameplay spaces and as convincing 3D environments. As a coder, designer, and artist, I guess this felt natural to me (the Wizard’s Manse is a good example of what we were going for). American [McGee] was also really good at this. His aesthetics, and particularly the verticality in some of his levels, were outstanding (The Vaults of Zin, especially).
"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help."
In somewhat related news, John Romero recently held a stream on Twitch to mark Quake's 30th birthday, playing through the single-player campaign and taking questions from fans, which we highly recommend watching back if you have fond memories of the famous shooter.
Later this year, the four co-founders of id Software. Romero, Tom Hall, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack are also set to reunite in August to celebrate 30 years of QuakeCon, marking the first time all four of them have been in the same place since 1993. Tickets are available here.