Quake

TCW Podcast Episode 238 - Quake We dive into the development of Quake, the ambitious and turbulent follow-up to Doom from ID Software. John Carmack set out to build a groundbreaking engine featuring full 3D rendering, dynamic lighting, and client-server multiplayer. This pushed the technical boundaries in a pre-GPU world. To achieve this, he brought in legendary programmer Michael Abrash from Microsoft, selling him on the vision of Quake as a step toward the metaverse as imagined in Snow Crash. Meanwhile, John Romero envisioned Quake as a fantasy RPG inspired by a character from his D&D campaign, but lack of direction and his growing obsession with Deathmatch led to team frustration and eventual fallout. The result was a game that redefined first-person shooters and laid the groundwork for decades of engine development. It also marked the end of an era at ID with the ouster of John Romero. TCW 030 - DOOM!: TCW 197 - The ID of Game Development: Doom States and DeHackEd: P2P vs Dedicated Servers?: Token Ring - The Betamax of Networking: Artie - The Strongest Man In the World: Space Strike (DOS): Cosmic Crusader (DOS): Big Top (DOS): Snack Attack II (DOS): So You Haven't Read "Snow Crash": Ramblings in Realtime by Michael Abrash: QuakeWorld Launch Event: Quake (DOS 6.22): Quake Longplay: Excerpt Quake Postmortem: New episodes are on the 1st and 15th of every month! TCW Email: feedback@theycreateworlds.com Twitter: @tcwpodcast Patreon: Alex's Video Game History Blog: Alex's book, published Dec 2019, is available at CRC Press and at major on-line retailers: Intro Music: Josh Woodward - Airplane Mode - Music - "Airplane Mode" by Josh Woodward. Free download: Outro Music: RoleMusic - Bacterial Love: Copyright: Attribution:

You can listen to Quake online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Quake is an episode from They Create Worlds by Alex Smith, and Jeffrey Daum.

This episode is 81:48 long.

This episode was published on Jul 15, 2025.

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