id Software

This article is about the video game developer. For the geodata software editor, see iD (software).

id Software LLC

Formerly	id Software, Inc. (1991–2009)
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Predecessor	Ideas from the Deep
Founded	February 1, 1991 (1991-02-01) in Shreveport, Louisiana, US
Founders	Adrian Carmack John Carmack Tom Hall John Romero
Headquarters	Richardson, Texas , US
Number of locations	2 (2024)
Key people	Marty Stratton (co-studio director) Hugo Martin (co-studio director)
Products	id Tech Wolfenstein series (1992–2008) Doom series (1993–present) Quake series (1996–present) Rage series (2011–present)
Number of employees	200+ (2016)
Parent	ZeniMax Media (2009–present)
Divisions	id Software Frankfurt
Website	idsoftware.com
Footnotes

id Software LLC (/ɪd/) is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack.

id Software made important technological developments in video game technologies for the PC (running MS-DOS and Windows), including work done for the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake franchises at the time. id's work was particularly important in 3D computer graphics technology and in game engines that are used throughout the video game industry. The company was involved in the creation of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre: Wolfenstein 3D is often considered to be the first true FPS; Doom is a game that popularized the genre and PC gaming in general; and Quake was id's first true 3D FPS.

In June 2009, ZeniMax Media acquired the company. In 2015, it opened a second studio in Frankfurt, Germany. ZeniMax Media was acquired by Microsoft in March 2021. In July 2026, the majority of id Software employees were reputedly laid off.

History

Formation

The founders of id Software – John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero – met in the offices of Softdisk based in Shreveport, Louisiana, developing multiple games for Softdisk's monthly publishing, including Dangerous Dave. Along with another Softdisk employee, Lane Roathe, they had formed a small group they called Ideas from the Deep (IFD), a name that Romero and Roathe had come up with. In September 1990, Carmack developed an efficient way to rapidly side-scroll graphics on the PC. Upon making this breakthrough, Carmack and Hall stayed up late into the night making a replica of the first level of the popular 1988 NES game Super Mario Bros. 3, inserting stock graphics of Romero's Dangerous Dave character in lieu of Mario. When Romero saw the demo, entitled Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, he realized that Carmack's breakthrough could have potential. The IFD team moonlighted over a week and over two weekends to create a larger demo of their PC version of Super Mario Bros. 3. They sent their work to Nintendo. According to Romero, Nintendo had told them that the demo was impressive, but "they didn't want their intellectual property on anything but their own hardware, so they told us Good Job and You Can't Do This". While the pair had not readily shared the demo though acknowledged its existence in the years since, a working copy of the demo was discovered in July 2021 and preserved at the Museum of Play.

Around the same time in 1990, Scott Miller of Apogee Software learned of the group and their exceptional talent, having played one of Romero's Softdisk games, Dangerous Dave, and contacted Romero under the guise of multiple fan letters that Romero came to realize all originated from the same address. When he confronted Miller, Miller explained that the deception was necessary since Softdisk screened letters it received. Although disappointed by not actually having received mail from multiple fans, Romero and other Softdisk developers began proposing ideas to Miller. One of these was Commander Keen, a side-scrolling game that incorporated the previous work they had done on the Super Mario Bros. 3 demonstration. The first Commander Keen game, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, was released through Apogee in December 1990, which became a very successful shareware game. After their first royalty check, Romero, Carmack, and Adrian Carmack (no relation) decided to start their own company. After hiring Hall, the group finished the Commander Keen series, then hired Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud and began working on Wolfenstein 3D. id Software was officially founded by Romero, John and Adrian Carmack and Hall on February 1, 1991. The name "id" came out of their previous IFD; Roathe had left the group, and they opted to drop the "F" to leave "id". They initially used "id" as an initialism for "In Demand", but by the time of the fourth Commander Keen game, it opted to let "id" stand out "as a cool word", according to Romero. In September 1991, it relocated to Madison, Wisconsin. Later on April 1, 1992, it relocated to an office in Mesquite, Texas.

The shareware distribution method was initially employed by id Software through Apogee Software to sell its products, such as the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein and Doom games. They would release the first part of their trilogy as shareware, then sell the other two installments by mail order. Only later (about the time of the release of Doom II) did id Software release their games via more traditional shrink-wrapped boxes in stores (through other game publishers).

After Wolfenstein 3D's great success, id began working on Doom. After Hall left the company, Sandy Petersen and Dave Taylor were hired before the release of Doom in December 1993.

The end of the classic lineup

Quake was released on June 22, 1996, and was considered a difficult game to develop due to creative differences. Animosity grew within the company and it caused a conflict between Carmack and Romero, which led the latter to leave id after the game's release. Soon after, other staff left the company as well such as Michael Abrash, Shawn Green, Jay Wilbur, Petersen and Mike Wilson. Petersen claimed in July 2021 that the lack of a team leader was the cause of it all. In fact, he volunteered to take lead as he had five years of experience as project manager in MicroProse but he was turned down by Carmack.

ZeniMax Media and Microsoft

On June 24, 2009, it was announced that id Software had been acquired by ZeniMax Media (owner of Bethesda Softworks). The deal would eventually affect publishing deals id Software had before the acquisition, namely Rage, which was being published through Electronic Arts. ZeniMax received in July a $105 million investment from StrongMail Systems for the id acquisition, it's unknown if that was the exact price of the deal. While the two companies were open to technology sharing, John Carmack ruled out larger changes like having Bethesda use id Tech for The Elder Scrolls, or exchanging IPs to develop Doom RPGs and Fallout first person shooters. id Software moved from the "cube-shaped" Mesquite office to a location in Richardson, Texas during the spring of 2011.

On June 26, 2013, id Software president Todd Hollenshead quit after 17 years of service. On November 22, 2013, it was announced id Software co-founder and Technical Director John Carmack had fully resigned from the company to work full-time at Oculus VR which he joined as CTO in August 2013. He was the last of the original founders to leave the company.

Tim Willits left the company in 2019. ZeniMax Media was acquired by Microsoft for US$7.5 billion in March 2021 and became part of Microsoft Gaming.

In July 2026, 136 workers at id Software, around 50% of the company, were laid off as part of a mass layoff of 3,200 workers in Microsoft's Xbox division.

Company name

The company writes its name with a lowercase id, which is pronounced as in "did" or "kid", and, according to the book Masters of Doom, the group identified itself as "Ideas from the Deep" in the early days of Softdisk but that, in the end, the name 'id' came from the phrase "in demand". Disliking "in demand" as "lame", someone suggested a connection with Sigmund Freud's psychological concept of id, which the others accepted. Evidence of the reference can be found as early as Wolfenstein 3D with the statement "that's id, as in the id, ego, and superego in the psyche" appearing in the game's documentation. Prior to an update to the website, id's History page made a direct reference to Freud.

Key employees

• Donna Jackson – Office manager / "id mom" (1994–present)
• Marty Stratton – Director of Business Development (1997–2006), executive producer (2006–present), studio director (2019–present)
• Hugo Martin – Creative director (2013–present)

Former key employees

Arranged in chronological order:

• Tom Hall – Co-founder, game designer, level designer, writer, creative director (1991–1993). After a dispute with John Carmack over the designs of Doom, Hall was forced to resign from id Software in August 1993. He joined 3D Realms soon afterwards.
• Bobby Prince – Music composer (1991–1994). A freelance musician who went on to pursue other projects after Doom II.
• Dave Taylor – Programmer (1993–1996). Taylor left id Software and co-founded Crack dot Com.
• John Romero – Co-founder, game designer, programmer (1991–1996). Romero resigned on August 6, 1996. He established Ion Storm along with Hall on November 15, 1996.
• Michael Abrash – Programmer (1995–1996). Returned to Microsoft after the release of Quake, but eventually worked with Carmack again at Reality Labs.
• Shawn Green – Software support (1991–1996). Left id Software to join Romero at Ion Storm.
• Jay Wilbur – Business manager (1991–1997). Left id Software after Romero's departure and joined Epic Games in 1997.
• Sandy Petersen – Level designer (1993–1997). Left id Software for Ensemble Studios in 1997.
• Mike Wilson – PR and marketing (1994–1997). Left id Software to become CEO of Ion Storm with Romero. Left a year later to found Gathering of Developers and later Devolver Digital.
• American McGee – Level designer (1993–1998). McGee was fired after the release of Quake II. He joined Electronic Arts and created American McGee's Alice.
• Adrian Carmack – Co-founder, artist (1991–2005). Carmack was forced out of id Software after the release of Doom 3 because he would not sell his stock at a low price to the other owners. Adrian sued id Software and the lawsuit was settled during the Zenimax acquisition in 2009.
• Todd Hollenshead – President (1996–2013) Left id Software on good terms to work at Nerve Software.
• John Carmack – Co-founder, technical director (1991–2013). He joined Oculus VR on August 7, 2013, as a side project, but unable to handle two companies at the same time, Carmack resigned from id Software on November 22, 2013, to pursue Oculus full-time, making him the last founding member to leave the company.
• Tim Willits – Level designer (1995–2001), creative director (2002–2011), studio director (2012–2019). He is now the chief creative officer at Saber Interactive.
• Kevin Cloud – Artist (1992–2006), executive producer (2007–2023).
• Robert Duffy – Chief Technology Officer (1998–2024).

Timeline

Game development

Technology

Co-founder John Carmack at the 2010 GDC

Starting with its first shareware game series, Commander Keen, id Software has licensed the core source code for the game, or what is more commonly known as the engine. Brainstormed by John Romero, id Software held a weekend session titled "The id Summer Seminar" in the summer of 1991 with prospective buyers including Scott Miller, George Broussard, Ken Rogoway, Jim Norwood and Todd Replogle. One of the nights, id Software put together an impromptu game known as "Wac-Man" to demonstrate not only the technical prowess of the Keen engine, but also how it worked internally.

id Software has developed its own game engine for each of its titles when moving to the next technological milestone, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, ShadowCaster, Doom, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III, as well as the technology used in making Doom 3. After being used first for id Software's in-house game, the engines are licensed out to other developers. According to Eurogamer.net, "id Software has been synonymous with PC game engines since the concept of a detached game engine was first popularized". During the mid to late 1990s, "the launch of each successive round of technology it's been expected to occupy a headlining position", with the Quake III engine being most widely adopted of its engines. However id Tech 4 had far fewer licensees than the Unreal Engine from Epic Games, due to the long development time that went into Doom 3 which id Software had to release before licensing out that engine to others.

Despite his enthusiasm for open source code, Carmack revealed in 2011 that he had no interest in licensing the technology to the mass market. Beginning with Wolfenstein 3D, he felt bothered when third-party companies started "pestering" him to license the id tech engine, adding that he wanted to focus on new technology instead of providing support to existing ones. He felt very strongly that this was not why he signed up to be a game programmer for; to be "holding the hands" of other game developers. Carmack commended Epic Games for pursuing the licensing to the market beginning with Unreal Engine 3. Even though the said company has gained more success with its game engine than id Software over the years, Carmack had no regrets by his decision and continued to focus on open source until his departure from the company in 2013.

In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GNU General Public License. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old. Consequently, many home grown projects have sprung up porting the code to different platforms, cleaning up the source code, or providing major modifications to the core engine. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake engine ports are ubiquitous to nearly all platforms capable of running games, such as hand-held PCs, iPods, the PSP, the Nintendo DS and more. Impressive core modifications include GZDoom, which adds to the Doom engine modern hardware accelerared renderers and a scripting system called ZScript, and was also utilized in the creation of ECWolf for Wolfenstein 3D and Raze for the Build engine. Meanwhile DarkPlaces adds stencil shadow volumes into the original Quake engine along with a more efficient network protocol. Other projects include Yamagi Quake II, ioquake3, and dhewm3, which maintain the goal of cleaning up the source code, adding features and fixing bugs. Even earlier id Software code, namely for Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D, was released in June 2014 by Flat Rock Software.

The GPL release of the Quake III engine's source code was moved from the end of 2004 to August 2005 as the engine was still being licensed to commercial customers who would otherwise be concerned over the sudden loss in value of their recent investment.

On August 4, 2011, John Carmack revealed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that it will be releasing the source code of the Doom 3 engine (id Tech 4) during the year.

id Software publicly stated it would not support the Wii console (possibly due to technical limitations), although it has since indicated that it may release titles on that platform (although it would be limited to its games released during the 1990s). They continued this policy with the Wii U but for Nintendo Switch, it collaborated with Panic Button starting with 2016's Doom and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

Since id Software revealed its engine id Tech 5, it calls its engines "id Tech", followed by a version number. Older engines have retroactively been renamed to fit this scheme.

IMF Music File Format

IMF ("id music file" or "id's music format") is an audio file format created by id Software for the AdLib sound card for use in its video games. The format is similar to MIDI, in that it defines musical notes, and does not support sampled digital audio for sound effects. IMF files store the actual bytes sent to the AdLib's OPL2 chip, which uses FM synthesis to produce audio output. The format is based on the AdLib command syntax, with a few modifications. Due to the limited features and relatively low sound quality, modern games no longer use IMF music.

A large number of songs in id Software's early games (such as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D) were composed by Bobby Prince in IMF format. Other game developers like Apogee Software also used this format in their games (such as Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Duke Nukem II, and Monster Bash).

Linux gaming

Timothee Besset was responsible for many Linux ports of id Software's games.

id Software was an early pioneer in the Linux gaming market, and id Software's Linux games have been some of the most popular of the platform. Many id Software games won the Readers' and Editors' Choice awards of Linux Journal. Some id Software titles ported to Linux are Doom (the first id Software game to be ported), Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Since id Software and some of its licensees released the source code for some of its previous games, several games which were not ported (such as Catacomb 3D, Catacomb Abyss, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Blake Stone: Planet Strike, Super 3D Noah's Ark, Rise of the Triad, Doom 64, Strife, Heretic, Hexen, Hexen II, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force Holomatch, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy) can run on Linux and other operating systems natively through the use of source ports. Quake Live also launched with Linux support, although this, alongside OS X support, was later removed when changed to a standalone title.

The tradition of porting to Linux was first started by Dave D. Taylor, with Zoid Kirsch doing some later porting. Since Quake III Arena, Linux porting had been handled by Timothee Besset. The majority of all id Tech 4 games, including those made by other developers, have a Linux client available, the only current exceptions being Wolfenstein and Brink. Similarly, almost all of the games utilizing the Quake II engine have Linux ports, the only exceptions being those created by Ion Storm (Daikatana later received a community port). Despite fears by the Linux gaming community that id Tech 5 would not be ported to that platform, Timothee Besset in his blog stated "I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done". Besset explained that id Software's primary justification for releasing Linux builds was better code quality, along with a technical interest in the platform. However, on January 26, 2012, Besset announced that he had left id.

John Carmack has expressed his stance with regard to Linux builds in the past. In December 2000 Todd Hollenshead expressed support for Linux: "All said, we will continue to be a leading supporter of the Linux platform because we believe it is a technically sound OS and is the OS of choice for many server ops." However, on April 25, 2012, Carmack revealed that "there are no plans for a native Linux client" of id's most recent game, Rage. In February 2013, Carmack argued for improving emulation as the "proper technical direction for gaming on Linux", though this was also due to ZeniMax's refusal to support "unofficial binaries", given all prior ports (except for Quake III Arena, via Loki Software, and earlier versions of Quake Live) having only ever been unofficial. Carmack didn't mention official games Quake: The Offering and Quake II: Colossus ported by id Software to Linux and published by Macmillan Computer Publishing USA.

Despite no longer releasing native binaries, id was an early adopter of Stadia, a cloud gaming service powered by Debian Linux servers, and the cross-platform Vulkan API. A Linux version of Doom from 2016 was tested internally, while it and its sequel Doom Eternal can be run using Wine and Proton.

Games

Main article: List of id Software games

Commander Keen

Main article: Commander Keen

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, a platform game in the style of those for the Nintendo Entertainment System, was one of the first MS-DOS games with smooth horizontal-scrolling. Published by Apogee Software, the title and follow-ups brought id Software success as a shareware developer. It is the series of id Software that designer Tom Hall is most affiliated with. The first Commander Keen trilogy was released on December 14, 1990.

Wolfenstein

Main article: Wolfenstein (series)

The company's breakout product was released on May 5, 1992: Wolfenstein 3D, a first-person shooter (FPS) with smooth 3D graphics that were unprecedented in computer games, and with violent gameplay that many gamers found engaging. After essentially founding an entire genre with this game, id Software created Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Doom 3 and Quake 4. Each of these first-person shooters featured progressively higher levels of graphical technology. Wolfenstein 3D spawned a prequel and a sequel: the prequel called Spear of Destiny, and the second, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, using the id Tech 3 engine. A third Wolfenstein sequel, simply titled Wolfenstein, was released by