I've been reading the book about the Wolf3d engine lately to remind me how insane those days were. The way he made it all work is staggering. I wonder how different video games would be if Carmack never took up the mantle he did. Would someone else have filled in, and if so how many years later would it have been?
For that time period Ultima Underworld was developed at the same time as Wolf3d and had a more feature packed if less performant renderer so not long is the answer. Then System Shock only came out a year or so later!
Carmack definitely deserves all the praise he gets but there were a lot of other people pushing the technical boundaries in all sorts of ways.
I think it's easy to overstate the impact first-movers have on any given industry. The 3D FPS genre was already being explored in the 70s and it's a somewhat obvious direction to explore on the PC as the hardware becoming ubiquitous in American homes matured enough to make it possible.
Carmack is a smart guy but it's not like there wasn't going to be a competitive PC game industry in his absence. Ken Silverman or Tim Sweeney come to mind as alternative first-movers in the space, I don't think it would have been much later.
The games might have been less violent for a bit longer without id though.
> The games might have been less violent for a bit longer without id though.
Probably not. They were just channeling the culture which was a lot of heavy metal and horror/action movies. Personally for me in my early teens it was a nice outlet for feeling powerful in a game rather than bullying some kids at school or whatever.
Releasing the source code for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 was very much a Carmack thing. Source code releases for extremely successful, closed, commercial projects remains very uncommon (though it is fair to point out that the current Unreal Engine code is published.)
We'll never know is the real answer. How sooner would the modern lightbulb have been invented without Edison, the affordable automobile without Ford, etc. He put in the work and made it happen before anyone else, and that's damned important IMO.
