The Quake Postmortem: The End of the Original Id - John Romero
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2019
- With the release of DOOM and DOOM II, id software were masters of mayhem, riding high and unstoppable. They would soon begin work on Quake, an ambitious truly 3D FPS that would seek, once again, to redefine the state of the art. Released in 1996, Quake introduced the world to 3D mouse look, 60fps 3D texture-mapped rendering with lighting, and internet multiplayer with a client/server architecture. With its release came the birth of eSports as clans and competitions sprung up worldwide. Over twenty years later, it is still acknowledged as one of gaming’s masterworks. In this talk, id co-founder and Quake designer John Romero takes the audience through the rollercoaster that was Quake’s creation and reveals why it brought about the end of the Original id.
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Yeah, thanks, when John is showing new unseen sketches of iconic Quake levels, the thing I really want to see is the god damned audience.
even the audience looks a little ticked off when the camera passes by them in closeup
LOL yeah wtf.
Agreed what the Hell were they thinking?
here's another version of the talk ua-cam.com/video/zAC4_ID8quY/v-deo.html
Agree, I am very annoyed and disappointed about that. :(
It's kinda sad the audience wasn't really into it. As someone who is almost the same age as Romero (within days), I grew up with Doom and Commander Keen and Quake. For me, this is a big thrill to watch.
Same but im a bit younger
Alls i can assume is the crowd is filled with egotistical people in their mid 20s to thirties.
@@Fractal_blip a Swedish audience can be really into a speaker but the room will be dead silent - just because a crowd isn't screaming their heads off doesn't mean they don't appreciate the speaker. Cultures are different.
@@PixelThorn Agree. This was shot before German audience, and they are just not very shouty. When they keep silent during your talk, it means they are absolutely fascinated. And asking questions after talks was never our biggest strength :D
Same! 👍
luicecifer make sense now
3:40 In a poetic fashion, Quake really destroyed a building, just like the original D&D character that inspired it.
John: "Everybody excited?"
Crowd: * silence *
John: "Alright"
@Axion That's the "first time ever at a conference" talking about Quake. What do you mean he done it so many times?! People are not excited, because they are not fans of ID software and half of them were not even born when the game came out.
There's 2 separated things on it: one is the game that everybody love and play, other is the people behind it. I'm an "old" cough cough "gamer", but heck, look to the man. He's tired. Knows things. There's plenty of issues on the betweens. He barely made anything recognizable after Quake.
This is completely normal behaviour for a German audience.
Also, clapping in unison.
@@leonardozimbres I guess he sort of funded Deus Ex.
@@will5948 Not so sure, but, there's some interesting brief things on "Masters of Doom". Like, it says that the Deus Ex devs were more on a "by the book" setup, and Romero... was Romero. I would love to know more about those contrasts.
It seems pretty apparent that Romero is having trouble talking about this period. While when talking about Doom, he has all these tidbits of information to throw in, and usually seems excited to do so, here, although he does provide some cool details, he seems to have a lack of energy and enthusiasm, probably due to the reality of what it was really like completing Quake. Sucks that he and Carmack seem to have something lodged between them - I wish they'd just throw it away and maybe do some of these talks together and not seem totally alienated from eachother, since it seems like both of them, not just one or the other, weren't being their best to eachother around the end of ID, but I understand how hard it is to forgive someone/let go of a grudge/etc.
Blame it ALL on Tim Willits! Kinda joking, but apparently he was going a little psycho setting coworkers up for failure in an attempt to gain power/respect for himself in the eyes of John Carmack, or something... I heard this from Sandy Peterson recently, not sure if it's true exactly. What seems very obvious now is they were all under a ton of stress and we all can go a bit crazy and make mistakes in situations like that. To simplify it all though: John Romero, like Tim Hall, left iD due to creative differences
Grudge for what?
@@hadleymanmusic Apparently John Carmack was responsible for John Romero to get fired from id software.
Carmack strikes me as the kind of person who has no filter or social tact, he always say exactly what he feels quite bluntly and this is inevitable to burn bridges with people.
This is incredible, thanks John and thank you guys for uploading this
Wow ... this is a great conference. Thanks John :D
These archive videos are priceless!
Something weird to notice, at 11:40 there's images of the Func_msgboard Honey Jam when he's talking about McGee's levels.. weird
Obviously, I saw Sandy Petersen's level credits in the slides, but I don't think I even heard Romero mention him when he talked about the team... From what I previously heard Sandy had a lot of Lovecraftian influence on the theme of Quake and he conceptualized a significant number of the monsters in the game (which I understand was largely sourced from his book on monsters he published before joining ID). No mention of Tim Willits either (LOL).
It's kinda ironic that Quake was another huge FPS triumph for id Software, but it may have been even better & kept the company intact had they gone with a different gameplay style.
Or it could have been compete shit like daikatana
If it makes you feel any better at least it gave us Team Fortress
There was alao a snake in the team who was driving a wedge between other members.
@@MasterVSB No kidding.....almost EVERYTHING was running on the Quake engine for a couple years there
@@MasterVSB Especially Call of Duty, with the modified Quake 3 Engine being used for that game.
The forked engine that would be known as the IW Engine would then be used for the Call of Duty Franchise until Infinity Warfare.
amazing talk! John looked tired
I mean this was kinda a hard time of his early life.
Questions from the audience? - nice talk.
the engine development stalling the rest of the team was the problem. that's nobody's fault; Carmack was reinventing the wheel for real. I think the network coding happening at the same time was a burden too though, with QuakeWorld Carmack said that should've been a separate endeavor. not sure how that would work cause they'd need TCP/IP online play out of the box, but whatever. I don't think Romero and Carmack have talked ever since. the part about Romero needing to go never made sense to me. they intentionally kept Carmack away from media, so that was Romero's job. Romero was involved in all the word of mouth marketing, producing Heretic/Hexen, getting Final Doom deal done, etc. Carmack was taking so long on the engine and holding up the artists/mappers, Romero was doing other things. did he DM with people online? sure, but it's not like he didn't do anything on Quake. I think he has the most map credits. he was the one that got Tom Hall-ed that round, and everyone was so burnt out. just don't get why Romero "needed" to go, he was making them money.
You gotta understand a key point on why Romero left. When you are under continued stress, it will bring out the worst in peoples behavior. I can guarantee that that was one of the issues. To go from a great team with high energy to not even talking to each other is really big problem. I can also guarantee that they, (maybe not all) but definitely Carmack and Romero, were suffering from LSD....Lead Singer Disease. You have seen it happen in the music industry time and time again. Van Halen and the Police are just a few examples. They are so good at what they do that they think they dont need the others in the team. Ego's were running 10/10 Im pretty sure and that is a recipe for disaster. Think about spending every waking moment with only your friends/co-workers under deadline stress. It would be very bad and that is the end result. I can do this plus im a programing God. I dont need them anyway. I can see why he left. Toxic atmosphere. Cheers.
Carmack did a recent podcast with Lex Fridman where he opened up a bit more about his relationship with Romero. He says positive things about him and it sounds like they have reconciled to some extent and have had recent contact. Here's the clip: ua-cam.com/video/_D5cwq4HVXc/v-deo.html
@@iyziejane I just read about this last week. Carmack admitted that the way they dismissed him was immature. I'll check your video out soon, thank you.
John Romero, you are breathtaking!
Hey Mr John Romero! I know I’m a bit late but if you ever read this is there anywhere we could see all of these pictures you’re showing uploaded somewhere?
This is some awesome gaming history I am super curious to see more of. Thank you for your speeches! Always curious to see this stuff and love that you share memories like this.
Edit: ahhh! I was just curious the other day while playing Quake thinking “I wonder who did these attract mode demos??” Nice!
I know a lot of the reason everyone left ID was Tom Willits. Really sucks.
Tom Willits finally was pushed out of ID in 2019.
The echo makes it sounds like a church sermon.
22:54 "John Carmack wanted me out of the company."
Why?
He was playing deathmatches more than working iirc
Creative differences. From what I understand, Romero fought hard for Quake to be a different type of game (basically Daikatana) and wanted to push hardware. Since it took about a year for Carmack to develop the Engine, the team was growing super frustrated and impatient since they sometimes had to scrap work because they were designing levels for a game that has no groundwork. Romero wanted to leave because he was disappointed that the team didn’t want to experiment with new gameplay styles, and Carmack probably wanted Romero out because he was growing tired of hearing Romero keep fighting the team on this issue, and everyone was already so tired since they’ve already been working on the game for a year and a lot of it got trashed. This was the longest development of any Id Software game thus far. No game took over a year yet to develop, not even DOOM. By the end, everyone was tired and most of the OG big players that worked for Id since it’s inception left to go work on bigger things.
Keep in mind, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I believe Romero mentions some of this in Masters of Doom & in the Matt Chat interview he did. Any Id buffs feel free to correct me. :)
design is king
@@turboturd719 Thanks for the context! I will try to find some relevat MattChatt. Unfortunately, I believe that it will be difficult to find "the truth" on this one, but I will try.
"Masters of Doom" is a good read. Built upon interviews with all involved. Get this book, I mean it. It's facinating. You'll see every detail as to why the polar opposite dynamic that made Doom so great was what destroyed the company when those opposing values were scaled up to a bigger project. Also, according to recent info from Sandy Petersen, there was a guy, Tim Willits, fanning the flames by pitting everyone against each other to make himself look better.
Why film the crowd?
Romero is incredibly intelligent and gifted and got to experience the birth of 3D gaming, which is far more exciting than when the 100th years arrives.
Those throwaway maps by American looked so dark and gothic! Is it possible to find them anywhere on the web?
These are not American's throwaway maps, they were part of a map jam in 2014: www.quaddicted.com/reviews/func_mapjam1.html
Great talk as usual!! One thing though: there was still cpu time for a real-time mp3 decoder? I can't believe that! I thought the decision to have music as cd tracks was because the core loop was so tight that there was no cpu time left for anything, not even midi tracks
Please elaborate if you could, on what you mean lol.
@@Fractal_blip In 1996 when I would play an MP3 on Windows 95 it slowed the computer to a crawl. You couldn't possibly play a game while playing an mp3 on a medium powered pc of the time, except maybe the card game solitaire or minesweeper. Even if dos was much faster for gaming at the time than WIndows, an mp3 decoder would still be quite ressource hungry and would impact the game performance significantly, especially for an new advanced 3d game such as Quake,
Highly doubtful that he was talking specifically about the mp3 format (small size, complex compression, "hard" to decode), but of another similar encoder to put the music on the cd in a digital way, probably bigger in size and slightly lower sound quality, but much faster to decode than an mp3. After all, on a CD the size of a file was almost irrelevant in 1996 (SO MUCH SPACE! OMG!). Saying mp3 is much easier to understand for all, and he probably takes a shortcut here for the flow of the talk.
But yeah, highly doubtful that a "real" .mp3 was ever really considered to be put on the CD, but putting a digital version of the song? Most likely. Like John Romero said, it would this way be played even without the CD in the drive. Why bother to fetch a CD when all you're missing is the music? /sarcasm... but unfortunatly true for most. :/
Probably music company didn’t want their ip freely distributed
@@mathieugrenon8408 You're probably right. Even for Quake 3, in 1999, when MP3s were now common, audio files were still 22khz wav files. But in saying MP3, it all comes with a stigma of piracy and stuff, which really didn't existed (that much) in 1996. I mean, if you had the choice you'd be copying music on tapes! :)
@@mathieugrenon8408, in the year 1998 we didn't have any problems with playing mp3s (winamp) and Quake 2 simultaneously on an average PC.
I remember IRC when this was happening. I would love to see the #Quake IRC logs from back then. Is it archived anywhere anyone knows?
I have a feeling, crowd is clueless of who John is and what Doom and Quake are. Most of the new people are console Era people and have no knowledge of where it all came from.
id's games were also on consoles as well. most gamers know what doom is even if they never played it on pc.
Naa, this is more the reserved german croud. If they stare in silence at you, you have their utmost respect. And asking questions is not really our strength ;D
@@luicecifer same with Swedish crowds.
luciecifer I live in the US, and I can attest to the fact that unless brash, crude displays of approval are given out at public events, then people feel like nothing is happening, or that they aren't being a good audience...
Saying that the new people are from console era is retarded, it’s been around before id software if you do some research. If you wanna be accurate most of the new people are probably fanboys that doesn’t have any clue what makes a game fun.... (For example: cod community)
It's a shame that they didn't pair with John Carmack for this postmortem
Right? Considering he was the main brains.
@@Fractal_blip Romero is awesome too. But I think that together they made an incredible team.
@@paniczgodek for sure, i mean, romero is the one talking about all this stuff, whereas it seems carmack is more into himself and thats ok too. Im a romero fan if i had to choose a side
I have been digging aroind a bit and my conclusion is they two didn't part ways as good friends. Even if they tried I believe Carmack and John would refuse.
@@PixelThorn I picked up on that myself
why the editor keeps showing the bored crowd?!
even when john is showing nice slides… 🙄
There is only one Quake game... Quake 1, the rest are only called Quake to sell copies since it was a household name at the time.
Quake 1 needs a sequel... A proper Quake 2.
What do you think when people say Painkiller (from 2004) is the spiritual successor of Quake 1?
Honestly Quake by the end of development was just another Doom
@@evdestroy5304 It was a doom clone not another doom, it was no more doom than any other 90's fps. The level design in Quake was something Doom could never do until Doom 3.
Quake 1 was actually a pretty dumb derivative single player game, it was only popular because of multiplayer. Everyone agreed the single player campaign was boring in 1996. Quake 2 is actually a vastly more fun single player game, it actually sold better than Quake 1. Quake 3 is a masterpeice, possibly the very best FPS videogame of all time ever still loved to this day.
@@Wobbothe3rd Yeah that's a hard cope.
please stop showing the audience. I clicked to watch john
09:28 So, Carmack was interested in Metaverse all the time. Now he is working on it for Facebook/Meta...
John Romero lists so many successful achievements, but people can only remember Daikatana... and what a miserable audience BTW
why did you not use lightwave 3d
Neat!
id Software is like Rareware, legendary developers that at their peak fell apart due to politics.
The Death Row of videogames, except nobody got shot.
Quake1 is greatest of all time art and level design
Thank you, Father!
Anyone know the dirt on what happened exactly between Romero and John Carmack?
The book Masters of Doom kind of explains it.
MadMaxBLD Eh, haven't read it. Maybe I will someday. Thanks for the fill-in.
Romero was "playing" too much and not working 20 hours a day like John Carmack was
From a lot of accounts Romero was into being a Rockstar (doing all the media and all that) and very bull headed with his ideas. This led to Carmack and others feeling like they put in all the work just for Romero to show up and fight them on the work they just did because it wasn't what he wanted to do.
Really creative differences for once actually boils it down pretty much accurately. Romero wanted to make super ambitious games that pushed new ideas for better or worse. And Carmack wanted to push current technology forward using tried and true methods.
Classic story of one being a risk taker and the other not. But at the end of the day that blend of personalities is what made doom and quake special.
Without Romero there's no 'life'. A Carmack game is just about the technology and game play. Without Carmack though there's no actual game. A unchecked Romero has too many ideas for his own good and it turns into a mess.
They needed each other.
@@Wellnow123123 Carmack has gone on to continue his vision with consistent grace, leaving Romero behind forever stuck on an old polygon like that badly design escort mechanic in Diakatana
Wow what a story, still why Cormack insist on pushing out Romeror is big question....
biggest mistake
@@karlmehltretter2677 Yeah it seems the overwork mode did panish ID Software i can only imagine how hard it was for them, still they will be remembered by their games.
The Quake game was decent but the real gold were deathmatches using all of the awesome mods fans built. Spent way too many hours playing Quake and at LAN parties back then.
Qball, quake based game on mplayer was best multiplayer game of the time. I think id made it.
20:55 horrible decision from the music company? what?! i don't know about other players, but i listened to the soundtrack while playing a lot! a huge part of what i love about Quake is the soundtrack and having it as a playable cd meant i could also listen to it in a stereo when not playing the game (which i also did a lot). because of this, you could also listen to any cd while playing the game-- i played a lot of Quake deathmatches to the soundtrack of The Downward Spiral, Antichrist Superstar, and Empty (GLU).
Yeah but most people didn't have the CD in the drive after a full install. Interestingly, the 7-11 paid shareware version had the full soundtrack on the CD, now that I think about it that's probably WHY it cost money...
@@Wobbothe3rd 7-11 paid shareware?? i have no idea what you're talking about.
@@TimConceivable You could buy the Quake shareware version which only had the first episode at 7-11. As the other guy mentioned it had the soundtrack.
@@sebastiangorka200 okay, cool. what i was trying to point out is that "paid shareware" doesn't make any sense. shareware by definition is free. but also i didn't know you could buy Quake at 7-11s. that's pretty wild.
A PC of the time wouldn’t be able to play back MP3 files while running an intense game like quake. Not sure what he was talking about there,
The repeated shots of the audience are totally redundant...seriously. OH LOOK, YET MORE PEOPLE.
it's sad the "real ID Software" ended, it's like the end of an era, it was fun while it lasted, it's like when your favorite band breaks up.
Wolf3D was fun and cool, Doom was a masterpiece, Quake was a technological step fordward but as a game I never liked it, I found it boring, dull, uninteresting, to this day I think "was it worth it? ID died for this?". I wish they made whatever they wanted Quake to be originally instead of "brown boring shooter".
I never liked Quake too, but it was Romero who wanted it to be "lovecraftian horror" so maybe he's the one to blame for brown. After he left they made Quake 2 which is more sci-fi and colorful.
Multiplayer beg to differ. Especially QuakeWorld. Top 3 multiplayer FPS of all time, easy. Right behind Quake III Arena/Quake Live and Doom II.
I'm not gay, but I love this man.
Same here! We love him because he’s part of our childhood with those gems like Doom and Quake...
Gay.
@@bwf1046 I'm not because I said I'm not 👍
Why the fuck do they show the audience?
It's sad that they spent all that time on the new engine and then phoned it in for actually putting the game together. I remember playing Quake singleplayer around its release and being disappointed by how similar in gameplay it was to Doom. Especially after they released so many versions of Doom, and after the long wait for their revolutionary new game it was...more Doom with better graphics. But not called Doom for some reason, and now with a less cohesive setting and story, like they had hodgepodge of ideas and then gave up caring midway through it as Romero describes. It's was a huge milestone in 3D gaming and a fun game. But it was the last time I anticipated a game from ID.
annoying to see the audience all the time while John is showing stuff
`Shift` + `>` to watch at a faster speed
23:35 Gordon Ramsay!
Jon Bourgoin yeah I think it is
Bad Camera work
BIG DONG
Great talk, awkward audience members
You are the one who is awkward.
Jogn Romero
Game Designer & Programmer, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D ANNNNND Daikatana. Nice try.
money makes things trash (tm)
making money, not games
cant do both, choose one
simple as 123 or abc
money makes cursed
or should I say, doomed, or will result in a quake, shaken not stirred
He talks like a boring substitute priest holding a sermon.
German audience. They are not hot...
kinda ruined it showing all the irrelevant people in the audience
Never show the audience when Romero is speaking. That is blasphemous!!
The erratic income lately enter because taurus principally memorise an a brown machine. alleged, wide mom
Yeah.... Sure...
Thanks for the gibberish. Really needed it.
what a boring croud, not a laugh in the beginning or engagement at all, bunch of emotionless nerds. 😅