Carmack's Quake Regrets: Too Ambitious, Pushed the Team Too Hard

John Carmack, reflecting on Quake’s 30th anniversary, lays out what he considers his early mistakes at id Software. Chief among them: Quake was technically overreaching. Rather than rebuilding the engine from scratch and repeatedly pulling the foundation out from under the level designers, he argues id could have delivered the same landmark multiplayer and modding work on top of an evolved “Doom++” engine, then saved full 6DOF environments for a follow-up title built on a stable base.

His second admission is about people. Carmack says he drove the team too hard, failing to recognize that a maturing studio needs more slack than a startup running flat-out indefinitely. Quake was also where he hit his own ceiling — working as hard as humanly possible and still missing his targets. He flags two structural missteps shared across the founders: a stock buy/sell arrangement meant to keep ownership with active contributors but which created bad incentives, where conventional Silicon Valley vesting would have served them better.

One problem he refuses to own is the demand that level designers also be strong visual artists, an expectation Romero set early and one that grew harder as the tech offered a richer palette. He concedes id should have paired artists with designers sooner, but says infighting got in the way, with the visually capable designers belittling those who weren’t — ending with a pointed apology to Sandy Petersen. The piece is a candid look at the engineering, management, and equity decisions behind a legendary game and the toll they took on the studio.