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Every once in a while we step away from the usual explainers and do one of these. A proper Deep Dive. The kind where we slow down, pick one story, and follow it all the way through.
Today’s story is about a tiny company called id Software.
You may or may not know the name. But you probably know their work.
Every time you play any shooting game like Call of Duty, Valorant, or Fortnite, you are playing in a genre that a handful of guys in America popularized in the early 1990s. That genre is first-person shooters, or FPS.
They did it with games called Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. They did it fast.
They did it as a bunch of hackers who cared more about pushing computers to their limits than about making a business.
And their influence is so huge that it got people like Gabe Newell who was working at Microsoft at the time to get into gaming and create companies like Valve and games like Half-Life.
In a way, id Software kickstarted Valve by licensing it their engine.
If you wanna learn more about how Valve did with id’s engine and how Steam came around, check out our Deep Dive on Valve.
That’s why today we’re going to dive deep into id Software’s history and try to see what influence this studio has left behind. I’d also go over their current games and layoffs situation.
But let’s go over the origins of id Software first.
Disclaimer: I know it may feel like a capitalization error but trust me it’s not. ‘id Software’ is the actual name of the company we’ll keep talking about in the rest of the article.
Before Doom There Was an Office in Louisiana
This story doesn’t start in a garage. It starts in a boring office building in Louisiana, at a company called Softdisk.
Softdisk had a weird business. For about $10 a month, they would mail you a floppy disk stuffed with random programs and small games. Think of it as a surprise bag of software delivered to your house.
To make the games, they hired a small team of young programmers and stuck them in a division called Gamer’s Edge.
That is where the future founders of id Software met. Two guys named John did most of the heavy lifting.
John Carmack, the genius programmer. John Romero, the charismatic designer. Alongside them were artist Adrian Carmack (no relation to John) and designer Tom Hall.
In September 1990, Carmack cracked a problem that people thought PCs couldn’t handle. He figured out how to make a game screen scroll smoothly sideways, the way it did on a Nintendo.
On PC at the time, this was close to impossible. To show off the trick, Carmack and Tom Hall stayed up all night and rebuilt the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC.
They dropped in one of Romero’s characters, Dangerous Dave, and cheekily named the demo “Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement”.
When Romero saw it the next morning, he froze. He had played thousands of games. He had never seen a PC move like that. He knew instantly that this was worth a company.
The team pitched Nintendo on a PC version of Mario. Nintendo said no.
So the guys took Carmack’s engine and made their own game instead, a colorful platformer called Commander Keen. It was released through a shareware publisher called Apogee in December 1990, and it did really well.
After that first royalty check landed, the team had their answer.
In February 1991, John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall officially founded id Software. Four people. That was the whole company at the start.
The People Who Actually Built id Software
Before we go deep into id, it helps to know who these people were, because their personalities are a story of their own.
John Carmack was the programming guy. He wrote the code that made everything possible.
He was famous for working brutal hours and caring about one thing above all else: making the technology do something nobody thought a PC could do.
Even today Carmack is known for his cold focus and almost machine-like discipline.
John Romero was the opposite energy. He was the designer, the showman, the guy who could take Carmack’s engine and turn it into something fun.
He built the levels, wrote most of the tools, and became the public face of id.
So, if Carmack was the machine, Romero was the personality.
Adrian Carmack was the artist. He drew the monsters, the gore, the twisted stuff. His dark art style is a huge part of why these games felt so different from the cartoony games around them.
Tom Hall was the fourth founder. He was a designer and a storyteller, the guy who wanted these games to have plots and characters and meaning.
That instinct made him great for Commander Keen, but it would later put him on a collision course with the rest of the team.
There is a fifth name you have to mention too, even though he wasn’t a founder. Sandy Petersen.
He joined later and became one of the most important people in the whole story. I’ll talk more about him soon.
John Carmack, the Engine That Changed Everything
To understand id Software, you have to understand what a game engine is.