Sorry, got to sperg out on Romero and early id history.
I think Romero deserves quite a lot of the credit for id softwares early success. When Carmack and Romero met at Softdisk, Romero was the more seasoned programmer. Carmack’s motivation for joining Softdisk was to learn low level programming techniques from Romero. But Carmack quickly surpassed Romero in programming, so Romero handled the gameplay and tools programming, while Carmack programmed the engines.
For Doom, Tom Hall was initially doing the level design. But Romero wasn’t very impressed with his work – there were lots of 90-degree angles and sparing use of different in floor/ceiling heights. Basically, Hall was stuck in a Wolfenstein level design mentality and not taking full advantage of the Doom engine. So Romero jumped into DoomED and made a level that set the standard they should be aiming for. Then Hall left/was kicked out of id.
Regarding Sandy Petersen, when they were interviewing for another level designer to replace Hall, they interviewed a few ‘professional designers’ that they sat down with DoomED and they took a lot of time to basically come up with nothing. Then they interviewed Sandy Petersen and when shown DoomED, he took to it like a duck to water and made something fun to play. He then only had a couple of months to complete the registered Doom levels, some of which was polishing up Hall’s levels.
With Quake, Romero seemed to go off the rails. He was tasked with coming up with design document for Quake, but was instead fucking around with producing Heretic and Hexen, doing interviews, making bold promises about Quake’s features on IRC, etc. But the troubled development wasn’t all his fault.
Meanwhile, Carmack was having great difficulties with programming the Quake engine. He’d brought on Michael Abrash to optimize his code for rendering and processing the game world. Problem was Carmack was regularly throwing that code away and trying new approaches. So Abrash in turn was having his optimizations discarded and having to optimize new code.
I can kind of understand Romero fucking about when the Quake engine development wasn’t stable and getting dragged out. Still, I think he had to pushed to come up with a design document for Quake and when he did eventually come up with something it was very brief, something like 2 pages long vaguely describing some sort of ambitious RPG like game. But Carmack said fuck that and lets take all our existing assets and pump out as quickly as possible something more like Doom.
In hindsight, Carmack on the Lex Friedman podcast has said they shouldn’t have been so ambitious with the Quake engine implementing true 3D, client/server networking and QuakeC in the same engine. Instead, he suggests doing a Doom engine game with client/server networking and QuakeC language would have been better, then doing true 3D next game. Carmack also expressed regret at kicking Romero out.
There’s also the snake Tim Willits that joined id during Quake development. He was asked by Carmack to give American McGee level design advice during Quake 2, but actively gave him bad advice to sabotage him and get him fired. Sandy Petersen has hinted Willits was a piece of shit and why he left id. Christian Antkow has outright said Willits is a piece of shit in a Twitter in response to Petersen tweet. I’ll try and dig up these tweets as I think they may have been deleted. Willits has also claimed in the last few years he came up with the idea of deathmatch only levels with Quake – this is blatantly untrue as there were community made deathmatch only levels for Doom.
Anway, it would have been interesting if Romero (and McGee) weren’t kicked and Willits had been fired for being a snake. I think id would have produced some much interesting games that pushed the FPS genre gameplay wise.
Edit: regarding this article
https://pledgetimes.com/doom-3-ex-i...to-end-up-in-therapy-for-crunch-and-pressure/
Antkow said: "But fuck Tim Willits. One of the most horrendous human beings I have ever had the displeasure of having to interact with.”
I was misremembering it being in response to a Petersen tweet, but I think it still stands Willits seems like a piece of shit.