id Software

This is where the founding members of id software met. They were all hired to work at Gamer's edge developing games.

At the time the video game market was most popular around consoles and out of the PC world since consoles were far more powerful, but John Romero was fascinated by PC’s and thought they were the future of gaming. The PC's of the day were not powerful enough to handle side scrolling, the main feature found in the most popular games at the time. This was one of the reasons consoles were so dominant in the market but Romero managed to convince Al that Gamer's edge should focus on making games for PC's.

One late night at Gamer's edge John Carmack was showing Tom Hall a new feature he was developing, sidescrolling. Overnight, John Carmack and Tom Hall replicated the first level of Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC. The next morning, when John Romero saw this he decided to convince the Gamer's Edge team to quit their current jobs and to start their own company.

The problem they had was that they didn't own their own equipment, so they wouldn't be able to develop anything on their own. What they did was they took borrowed Softdisk's equipment. After Softdisk's closure time and on weekends, they would take out the equipement and load it into their cars to take it to their lake house and would bring it back in before anyone was able to find out.

The first idea that they had was to create an exact replica of Mario 3 and contact Nintendo to show them their new technology. Their hope, strike a deal with Nintendo. They thought that Nintendo would pay good money for porting their games to PC. Nintendo, on the other hand, wasn’t interested on moving out of their own consoles, they figured that the only reason people would buy a NES was to play Mario and they wanted things to stay that way. Regardless, the id team didn’t let this get them down.

Scott Miller was a game developer that created his business out of an emerging concept, shareaware. His first idea came from Andrew Fluegelman, founding editor of PC magazine. His idea, publish programs on the internet and wait for people to send in "appreciation" money. This idea seemed brilliat to Scott, it was a 20$ million dollar industry. The only problem was that gamers weren't interested in showing their appreciation. When Scott uploaded his first game in shareware no one sent him any money in regards to the game. So, he had to come up with a solution. Rather than giving the entire game for free, he would partially publish a game. If gamers wanted to play the rest of the game they would have to send in a check to get a disk containing the rest of the games levels. His business brought in over $150,000 dollars only by word of mouth, and that was before he got in touch with John Romero.

Scott Miller got a hold of one of John Romero's games, Pyramids of Egypt, and found it amazing. He liked the game so much that Scott sought out for John Romero. The only problem was that Romero was working for Softdisk. At the time, gaming companies were on the look out for head hunters looking for talented programmers. The only way to contact Romero was with fan letters.

Even though id software popularized they still kept their work ethic. As soon as they would release a game they would set out on developing another one. As they finished Wolfenstein they were left with a big whole to fill due to its great success. The team, split, decided on either focus on demons or continue the Commander Keen saga. Being John Carmack the most innovating member of the team they decide to go with his idea. Tom Hall was let go soon after.

The team now as one, with the new game designer Sandy Petersen, is set on developing their new game.

Other problems arouse from Apogee so the team decided to go their seperate ways, away from Scott Miller. Now people are urging the team for the release of their new game and they don't have a publisher anymore. So, they come up with the idea to publish through magazines. At the time it was common to sell shareware to magazines for a profit and use that as advertizing.Id software gives them their shareware for free and only asks them to "move it in quantities".

It's a Friday night, the team put in the last 30 hours non-stop checking for bugs before release and the network at Wisconsin university was flooded with eager gamers waiting for the long awaited Doom. As the clock strikes midnight the team is trying their best to upload the game but the network is full and they’re not allowed in. They must kick everyone out in order to upload the game. Doom was finally published to the internet on December 10 of 1993.

One thing that John Carmack and John Romero agreed on as programmers was to keep the code open source, despite their success comming mainly from their ability to innovate and stay ahead of their competitors. Although the main engine would stay hidden, and sometimes licensed, the games were coded so that they could be easily moded.

By this time id was having internal problems. Romero, was out living the life of a rockstar. He would be out talking to the press, the fans and working with other companies on new video games. Carmack, on the other hand, wanted to do nothing other than focus on their next game. Little by little tensions started to rise and Carmack was slowly finding a replacement for Romero. Romero took no interest in Carmacks new hirings but when he was confronted by Carmack he had decided that his time at id was over. He called up Tom Hall and started to make plans for a new company. Though planning to leave, Romero stayed for the duration of the development of Quake and up until its release. By the time the game was ready to be published, Carmack asked for his resignation. He agreed.