Doom

Xbox's new layoffs cut 1,600 roles now and 3,200 by 2027, with four studios spun out. Among the reported casualties: the idTech engine team at id Software, the lineage behind Doom, Quake and every Wolfenstein since.

The thread's sharpest read wasn't nostalgia. Keeping an in-house engine means keeping engineers who know it, and can therefore ask for more. Switch to Unreal Engine and you rent low-wage contractors instead, hired per project and dropped when it ships.

Carmack's admission is structural: Quake bundled a new renderer, a client-server netcode layer, and the QuakeC scripting engine at once, bottlenecking the whole studio on his graphics work while the rest shipped Doom expansions.

The thread refuses the apology. Several argue the leap was the point, that the next-gen engine was id's job, and that second-guessing a masterpiece is the wrong lesson.

Prince didn't just compose the soundtracks. One reader notes he also did the sound effects for Doom, the gunshots and the snarls people remember as atmosphere.

A computer-science instructor says he's shown Prince's work to students for years as the example of how sound builds a world.

Another grew up with the Macintosh version's MIDI files and only later, hearing Pantera and Slayer, realized what the tracks had been quoting all along.

The build is a 320x240, 256-color raycaster that precomputes distance shading into 'colormaps,' so darkening is O(1) per column instead of per pixel.

Graphics veterans corrected the era: the engine is really Wolfenstein-3D-class, not Doom — and some details are 'a bit too cool for 1993.'

The deeper point landed anyway: this is exactly the kind of from-scratch craft current LLMs are terrible at.