John Carmack, former Oculus CTO and co-founder of id Software, announced he’s still willing to put up $1 million of his personal money to help make VR versions of Id’s most famous retro titles—especially now that Microsoft has laid off a bulk of the studio’s employees.
Having left id Software in 2013 to join Oculus as CTO and help kickstart the VR consumer revolution, Carmack is still one of the industry’s most vocal advocates. Even after stepping down as CTO in 2019 and leaving Meta in 2022, he’s continued to push for open platforms and wider adoption of XR.
Now that Microsoft has essentially pared down Id Software though, resulting in what laid-off VFX artist Derek Best calls the size of “support studio”, Carmack is again reiterating the offer, hoping to make officially-sanctioned Id Software VR games a possibility.
“BTW, if the XBOX division is scrounging for loose change under the sofa cushions, I’m still willing to put up a $1M guarantee to allow TeamBeefVR to commercialize the legacy open source games on VR,” Carmack says.
By “legacy open source games,” Carmack is referring to classic Id Software titles whose game engines were released under open source licenses, such as the original DOOM (1993), Quake (1996), and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001). While the underlying code is freely available, the games’ assets, including levels, textures, audio, and other copyrighted content, are still owned wholly by Microsoft.
Microsoft really kicked the bees nest with all of this. So many groups and people are trying to pry it all away from Microsoft because they are making it clear they can do better.
My biggest fear is that so many of these companies and IPs will go the way of shadow of mordor/war and just be used as a corporate write off, legally tying concepts like the nemesis system up for the rest of time as a complete loss for some small subsidy/tax exempt expenditure