In honor of Doom’s 20th birthday, Wired Game|Life just posted a fantastic three-page interview with John Carmack. The former id Software Technical Director, and current #Oculus VR CTO, touches on just about everything you would expect in a Carmack #interview…but some of it (the last page especially) is a bit sad.
Carmack and Wired’s Chris Kohler touch on Doom, the early days, the #FPS genre, and the like, but when it comes time to talk about Doom 4, Carmack sounds awfully regretful when talking about the prolonged development.
WIRED: Another question you probably can’t say much about but that everyone reading an article about Doom will want to hear—what’s up with Doom 4?
Carmack: That’s something I can’t really go into much in detail. It’s been hard—one of the things that was a little bit surprising that you might not think so from the outside, but deciding exactly what the essence of Doom is, with this 20-year history, is a heck of a lot harder than you might think.
…
that was id’s mantra for so long: “It’ll be done when it’s done.” And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game.
Rushed game development rarely yields positive results, but the “done when it’s done” philosophy seemingly touted by many developers, particularly on the PC side — id, Valve, Blizzard, to name a few — can seriously complicate development and release down the road.
Backing up a bit, Carmack has the same kind of regretful, sad outlook on Doom 3 BFG never getting that promised Oculus support:
But I did feel really bad about the fact that I had pseudo-promised Doom 3 for the Rift when I was first talking about it, and now the fact that it didn’t get released, I felt personally uncomfortable with how that turned out.
The interview is a solid mix of calling out id/ZeniMax misfires and 90′s id Software nostalgia. Take ten minutes and read it, if you haven’t already.
Similarly, I came across this John Carmack-Quake Live tweet on NeoGAF today. It’s not from the interview, but it has the same regretful tone seen in the article.
@mamantoha The last couple years, I pushed for moving Quake Live to Steam, but it just wasn't a priority for Zenimax.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) November 8, 2013
Quake Live is/will be a standalone title of sorts by the end of 2013 — an odd move instead of exposing it to the massive Steam community. Money is a factor, as always, but why turn away from a user base of 65 million people? That question, along with any others you might have about id Software 2012-2014, will probably be answered well after those Kennedy assassination papers are declassified.
Reblogged from: gamefront.com
