“When first entering the two story office building where id Software is currently headquartered… you are greeted by a huge DOOM logo, multiple pinball machines, and lots of awards blanketing the walls. Right behind id’s secretary, Donna Jackson, you will find a room holding a original DOOM figure sculpted by id years ago. The id trophy shelf also located in the lobby, consists of various game boxes and awards id has won over the years.

id Software doesn’t require massive office space compared to most game developers since the entire company only employs twenty-seven people, of which three take care of administrative business. While we were there, we got to see pretty much the entire development team, including John Carmack himself. We got to speak with John Root, the newly hired lead animator at id, who stopped by the Cyberathlete Professional League event that I attending.

Before entering the doors which lead to all of the personal offices and work areas, there is a conference room which currently doubles as a storage room for various id relics. One of the next rooms you will notice in the server room. It houses id’s network development drives, the Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein master servers, various web servers, and security equipment.

While the more senior id employees have their own private offices, there are certain rooms where the designers and coders work together in a cubical environment only separated by dividers. The id guys find working in a close environment with other employees in their field better for development.

Some of the other rooms inside id include their modest sized gym which even includes a shower and a break room. The break room which is located in the rear of their offices includes a Red Bull fridge, sit-down area, arcade machines, drink fridge, and a small TV mounted on the corner wall showing CNN.”

-Excerpt and images courtesy of the Internet Archive, QuakeUnity.com, “Inside id Software,” by Roger Lamarca, September 13, 2006

QuakeUnity.com — Quake2World Preview, by RailWolf, March 11, 2008

“Quake2. It has just turned 10 years old, yes, but there is still a huge fan base for it; Tastyspleen.net is evidence of this. There have been many updated clients for the game over the years, with graphical improvements as well as many security fixes for both server and client. What makes Quake2World different from Quake2 ? A completely rewritten graphics engine graces the game with many enhancements: Crisp, clean textures with very fast frames per second, plus the ability to render atmospheric weather effects like rain, snow, and fog. It almost has a Quake3 feel to the rendering, while keeping some nostalgic Quake2 physics. But, just like QuakeWorld, there is no in-game menu, it’s all console. Several of the maps you’ll find that come with the game are Quake1 and Quake2 remakes, but they have been pushing out some custom maps for it as well at a nice rate. One nice feature of it’s map ability, is that it supports legacy Quake2 maps, so you can easily just plug in your favorite custom maps from Quake2 and they’ll work on Quake2World. The maps I’ve had the pleasure of playing on in deathmatch, custom or remake, have been very nice with fast gameplay in every area. The game has slightly faster player movement than that of Quake2 so you might find that while playing on maps that present several items accessible by double-jumping, like q2dm1 for instance, some of the trick jumps can be over-shot accidentally (like the triple box jump to mega.) It features several classic modes of play ‘right out of the box’ including: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Insta-Gib, Rocket Arena, and Teams. An interesting feature is the stats logging. You can either set up a MySQL database for your Quake2World server and have everything logged in a database, or it can do the basic textfile logging. Overall this is a fun game that seems to keep getting better. jdolan and his team have been working on it for quite some time, and they are getting near an end product. You can currently download and play a working version for both Linux and Windows. Once this game is finished, I think it will be a great addition to the Quake games and its players.”

-Excerpt and images courtesy of QuakeUnity.com, “Quake2World Preview,” by RailWolf, March 11, 2008