Wasn't sure if I should post this in gaming or tech. I guess the end result is tech, but my post will be around gaming.
John Carmack has left id to become the Chief Technology Officer for Oculus VR. I'm happy for him, but I am saddened by the news that he's leaving id. id without Carmack (I fear) is just another bland, faceless gaming company#24056. It was bad enough when they lost John Romero (and that was a dumb decision on his part), and even worse when angry fallout forced Paul "Crackwhore" Steed to leave the company.
id has been a part of my life for almost exactly 20 years. So more than 55% of my entire existence has passed knowing that somewhere out there was an innovative gaming company with this brilliant man.
I cannot express how much id games were/are a part of my life. DooM and I share the same birthday. At 16 years old, when I had a shitty day at my shitty telemarketing job explaining to shitty people that the shitty products they were ordering were not, in fact, shitty; it was nice to come home and take out a shotgun and blow away some imps. I played DooM as recently as last month (Heretic as recently as last night, though that's technically Raven) and it's still just as cathartic hearing that shotgun blast, rack, and imp do a death growl. When I was suicidal around that same age, DooM also helped vent some of those feelings as well.
Then Quake came out and the Internet began to boom. The deathmatch was one thing, but id made it very easy for players to mod their game (something rather unprecedented at the time, even moreso that they encouraged it). A man named David "Zoid" Kirsch came up with the idea of recreating a new type of deathmatch. One that wasn't a free-for-all, but team based. He used an existing map, made the silver and gold keys the "flags," put in code to put players on either a red or blue team, and incorporated a fun mod (that wasn't his) that added a grappling hook. He made the games "runes" allow players who held them give them differing powerups. He made it so the flags could be captured by taking one of the keys to your home base, and if your team was in posession of their own key, it would capture the enemy's flag. He only did this quick and dirty code for one and only one level. So it just played on a loop when the level change happened.
He put it on his server, told players the basics, and let them try it out. He went on vacation for a week and when he came home, he realized he had forgotten to change his server back to a regular deathmatch server. He figured the players were freaking out and upset, so he immediately changed his server back to deathmatch. .... And then he was bombarded by angry players telling him to change it back to his new mod. Even though it only had one map, word had spread like wildfire over this new type of multiplayer and his server was jammed full 24/7 with many others trying their damndest to get in.
He realized there was a huge demand for it. Capture the Flag was born, and all modern team-based games owe everything to it.
It took many years before I could claim that World of Warcraft had eclipsed my "hours played" that I had put into Quake and Quake 2 Capture the Flag. I was there when Team Fortress was only just a Quake 1 mod (many people thought it debuted with Half Life. Not so.) I was there when folks like John Carmack and many others in the industry were updating their .plan files (before blogging became a thing) and read them on a daily basis (Da Tale of Tales was inspired by Robert Love of Raven Software's .plan file of a humorous fantasy story he had been making up on the fly).
Throughout it all, Carmack was there behind the scenes. Loving technology and loving pushing its boundaries. He was never a man to shut down ideas, try new things, or put down other people's tech. In fact when a new engine came out that surpassed his own (sometimes only in different ways) he would publicly praise it and then challenge himself to do better. John was also the guy who decided he was going to release the entire source code to his older games as new ones come out (yet another thing rather unprecedented). He was a celebrity to geeks like myself. To me, he still is.
I wish you the best at Oculus, John. I know you will continue to push the boundaries of technology and amaze me for years to come. I'm a little saddened because it feels like my best friend just moved away to another state, but life goes on.
I'll frag some more imps in your name.
Edit: Apparently he still part time works at id as the article has been updated. I guess that's better than nothing. Now my best friend has still moved away, but flies in for business every now and again.
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