TITLE
The Egos at Id
AUTHOR
Marc Laidlaw
PUBLICATION
Wired
YEAR
1996
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Pale and slender, the modern quintessence of boy genius, John Carmack pulls his bright red Testarossa into midday traffic on the LBJ Expressway. He looks barely old enough to drive, but there’s no reason to be nervous. Traffic is crawling.Carmack nudges his car into the fast lane as a quarter-mile gap opens ahead of us. The thrum of the engine deepens; my whole body vibrates in tune with the car. Carmack grins. Suddenly we’re going 130 miles an hour, our cherry-red reflection swelling up in the rear fender of the car ahead.
It’s not the first time John Carmack has taken me for a ride that sent my adrenaline rushing. But every other time, I was playing a computer game. It may seem a minor distinction, but if I happen to die this time in Carmack’s world of precision-engineered speed, there’s no restoring my life from some menu of saved games.
He shifts lanes and hits the brakes, and it feels like retro-rockets kicking in. Even Carmack’s games aren’t quite this realistic. Yet. I unlatch the corners of my mouth from my ears. “Don’t the cops just sit outside your parking lot and wait for you to leave?” I ask.
“I don’t have trouble with the police,” says Carmack. “Everyone thought I would – young guy in a car like this, must be a drug dealer. But I haven’t had any problems.”
John Carmack didn’t make his money dealing drugs – he made it by addicting millions to some of the wildest rides in the computer game industry. He and his cohorts at id Software first struck pay dirt with Wolfenstein 3D, which set new standards for computer games in 1992. Their 1993 hit, Doom, is a helter-skelter lunge through a nightmare zone that makes Wolfenstein look like Pac-Man.
[…]
Back in the parking lot, Carmack takes a moment to lift the hood of his Testarossa. He’s proud of the car, but he’s outgrown it. His mechanic is working on a new Ferrari with an even more powerful engine.
Likewise, Carmack has put Doom behind him. Long before the game was finished, frustrated by its engine’s limitations, he started building another from scratch. Not Doom, but something entirely new, whose engine lets id raise the stakes for 3-D world-building one more time. This game is called Quake.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
id Software
GAMES MENTIONED
Doom (1993)
Quake
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Michael Abrash
Adrian Carmack
John Carmack
Kevin Cloud
American McGee
John Romero
Jay Wilbur
Tim Willits
Mike Wilson
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive
PRINT AVAILABILITY
August 1996 (Volume 4, Issue 8)