id Software

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.

It's not just a renderer: the engine logic is reimplemented, with behavioral quirks that differ from the original, like buttons you shoot instead of touch.

The deflation: despite the 'CSS' name, it needs JavaScript to run at all.

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 book covers the 80286, EGA hardware, the engine architecture and the CGA port, with source on GitHub and a free high-res PDF. The author calls it a return to debugging C and assembly as a teenager.

The context one reader added is the real lesson: dedicated console hardware rendered sprites for free, so a 'more powerful' PC had to invent tricks to fake what a SNES did in silicon. Several others noted the site looks a lot like Fabien Sanglard's.