Quake’s Creators Look Back at 30 and Admit What It Cost Them

Quake turned 30 this year, and instead of the usual victory lap, the people who made it have been unusually honest about what it took out of them.

The round started with Sandy Petersen, the designer behind a chunk of Quake’s levels and monsters, who wrote that the game came together almost perfectly but at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, he said, and I think it broke us spiritually. That is not the kind of thing you usually hear attached to a stone-cold classic, and it set off a remarkable, public, and gracious round of reflection from the rest of the old id Software team.

The core of it is ambition. Quake was the first truly 3D shooter, and building its engine took far longer than anyone planned, which left the level designers constantly tearing up and rebuilding their work as the technology shifted under them. John Carmack, who wrote that engine, took his share of the blame. He admitted the game was too technically ambitious, that a more modest Doom-plus engine would have given the designers stable ground while fully 3D worlds waited for a later game, and, strikingly, that he pushed everyone too hard and did not understand that a maturing studio needs more slack than a startup. Within a couple of years of finishing Quake, John Romero, American McGee, Dave Taylor, Shawn Green, and Mike Abrash had all left.

I find this kind of honesty more valuable than any anniversary trailer. Quake is rightly remembered as a landmark, the game that dragged the shooter into real 3D and basically invented the modern multiplayer scene around it. But the legend usually skips the human bill, the crunch and the burnout and the talent that walked out the door once the thing was done. Hearing the people who were there name that cost, thirty years on, makes the achievement bigger, not smaller. It also makes the case, quietly, that great work and a healthy team are not the same thing, and that the industry spent a long time pretending they were.