I’m proud of Quake. We all are. Quake changed games forever. That said...
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
We were in our 20s, used to working as much as humanly possible, and pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked. At the time, it felt normal. But yes, looking back, it was not sustainable for everyone, particularly as the team grew.
With Quake’s engine, John and I have talked about this since, and we both agree that we should have made a DOOM++ first while the engine stabilized, 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.
The level design point is important, too. At id, we took for granted that level designers were also going to have a strong visual sense. The maps had to play well and look great, of course. 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 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.
id still goes on, and so does Wolf, DOOM, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really.
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