The Egos at Id 

They made Doom the most popular computer game of all time. Can they do it again with Quake?

Aug 1996 By Marc Laidlaw

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.
The most popular computer game of all time, Doom has sold more than 2 million copies. But that only hints at its popularity. As many as 20 million shareware versions are installed worldwide - unregistered but perfectly legal copies, distributed free with id's blessing. Myriad Doom players are creating worlds of their own. By releasing chunks of their games as shareware, id's marketing strategy turns every player into a potential distributor and puts the skeleton keys to cyberspace into millions of hands.
Carmack builds the graphics "engines" that make id's games go. The ideal engine of a 3-D game is an intricate and elegant construct of code that allows players to speed through solidly built virtual worlds. The engine allows every picture on a monitor to be drawn there quickly enough to convince hand and eye that it is instantaneous.
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.
Dark, violent fantasy has deep roots twisted in the Texas hardpan. Robert E. Howard, author of the gory, poetic pulp exploits of Conan the Barbarian, made a better living than the local banker during the Great Depression. Dull surroundings give rise to the wildest sort of escapism, and audiences seeking respite from grim realities may go for the stuff in a big way.
So it is that the surreal interiors of Quake, id's next great hope, have come to life on the outskirts of Dallas - in a black glass tower by the LBJ Expressway, flanked by furniture outlets, condos, restaurants, and movie multiplexes. Nothing so scenic as a tumbleweed breaks the flat monotony of the flood plain; in the distance you can just make out Dallas's downtown towers.
If Doom is the most popular computer game of all time, Quake must be the most anticipated - though the official line on Quake's release date is id's standard "As soon as it is finished." No executive-level decrees pressure developers down the corporate ladder to release a bug-riddled game according to a schedule imposed by the guys in suits. At id, there are no guys in suits.
It helps, of course, that Doom has provided id Software with enough cash flow to take its time getting everything perfect. In 1994, revenues hit US$7.7 million; in 1995 that figure more than doubled, to $15.6 million.