Greatness requires obsession. When Carmack coded for 28 hours straight, he wasn’t just meeting a deadline. He was pushing the boundaries of what is possible.”
In 1991, one man coded for 28 hours straight without sleep.
What he created transformed both gaming and aerospace engineering.
The story of DOOM is wilder than you think.
Here's how one coding marathon changed technology forever: pic.twitter.com/fhdgZ13oFy
— Terry Kim (@projectkim) January 21, 2025
But let’s look at this critically — is John Carmack really that much of a pioneer? Well… yes. Even if he’d stopped at making the id Tech 1 engine that shaped Doom and a legacy of several other engines and series that would spawn from id Tech (including GoldSrc/Source from Valve and its games), John Carmack’s place as an industry pioneer would long be solidified. His later work with Oculus VR and Armadillo Aerospace is really just a more modern cherry on top of these all-time great achievements.
Additionally, let’s not forget the output of id Software prior to Doom. Doom and the eventual full-3D-logic Quake wouldn’t exist at all without Wolfenstein 3D, which runs on what some people call “id Tech 0” and came out years ahead of Doom. This 3D gameplay engine came to be after id Tech’s creation of Commander Keen, and has similar (but less visible) restrictions as Doom, where gameplay can only be calculated on a 2D plane (so rooms layered over each other, aiming up/down, etc are impossible).
What Terry Kim, fortunately, didn’t skim over was Carmack’s time with Softdisk, where they developed Dangerous Dave, the first major series of side-scrolling platforming games made for PC rather than console. Of course, there were still limitations — namely per-screen challenges rather than seamless side-scrolling. During this time, Softdisk also developed and pitched a Super Mario Bros. 3 port to Nintendo, based on their progress in making a proper side-scrolling game engine for PC. This work was later used for id Tech’s Commander Keen, whose success would fund all of id Tech’s future advancements for both themselves and the industry at large.
Silly example: but did you know that among dozens of other games, titles as recent as Half-Life: Alyx are still using code derived from id Tech? Granted, it’s Quake-era id Tech 2, but we don’t have that without Carmack, John Romero, and the rest at id Tech, either.
