Before Doom, id Software's founders built a Super Mario PC demo Nintendo turned down
In September 1990 John Carmack worked out how to scroll graphics smoothly on a PC. That night he and Tom Hall recreated a level of Super Mario Bros. 3, swapping in a character called Dangerous Dave. Nintendo called the fuller demo impressive but refused to see its games on anyone else's hardware.
Carmack, John Romero and Hall were then making games for Softdisk, a monthly software publisher in Shreveport, Louisiana, moonlighting as a group called Ideas from the Deep. Scott Miller of Apogee Software had spotted Romero's Dangerous Dave and reached him through a string of fake fan letters, since Softdisk screened the mail. Their scrolling trick became Commander Keen, released through Apogee as shareware in December 1990. After the first royalty cheque arrived, they left to found id Software on 1 February 1991 with artist Adrian Carmack, who was no relation.
Shareware was the business model: give away the first episode, then sell the rest by mail order. It carried Wolfenstein 3D, often called the first true first-person shooter, and Doom in December 1993, which popularised both the genre and PC gaming generally. Quake, released in June 1996, was id's first fully 3D shooter. id also licensed each new engine to other studios, and Eurogamer later remarked that the company had been synonymous with PC game engines since detached engines first caught on.
The studio's name was shortened from IFD after one member left. It briefly stood for in demand, which someone thought lame, so they borrowed Freud's id instead, as in id, ego and superego.
Success strained the team. Hall was pushed out in 1993 after clashing with Carmack over Doom's design, Romero left after the tense development of Quake, and several colleagues followed. Adrian Carmack was forced out after Doom 3 and sued. ZeniMax Media bought id in 2009, John Carmack left for Oculus in 2013 as the last founder to go, and Microsoft bought ZeniMax for US$7.5 billion in 2021.
Source: Id Software
