> Id Software Turns 32

These guys made me the gamer I am today. These guys are also why I’m a software engineer.

When I first got my hand on Wolfenstein 3D at a friend’s house back in high school I was intrigued. It seems like a different kind of game and I wanted to give it a go. But it strangely didn’t hook me right away. It wasn’t until Doom that I was absolutely hooked. But back then Pcs were not cheap. Graphics cards didn’t exist. Windows wasn’t even a thing yet. It was around but it was in its 3.0/3.1 phase where you still booted to DOS first.

Computers, as gaming devices, were still kind of primitive. These guys cracked the code, opened up a whole new genre, and pushed what was possible at the time to its limit. We have graphics cards because these guys pushed hardware to to its limit.

Whenever someone asks me about tech idols I usually give two people: Steve Jobs and John Carmack. Steve often gets an eye roll because, well, he’s Steve. Carmack always gets a “Who?”, to which I remsond: You’ve at least heard of a game called Doom, right? At that point any nerd who knows just kind of gets it.

Absolute fucking legends. All of them.

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