id Software: Doom, Quake and the Birth of the Shooter

No studio has bent the shape of gaming quite like id Software. Founded in 1991 by a small group of Texas programmers, led by the engineering genius John Carmack and the design firebrand John Romero, it did nothing less than invent the first-person shooter. Wolfenstein 3D proved you could run through a 3D world gunning down enemies. Doom turned that into a phenomenon, complete with deathmatch, modding and a shareware model that put it on millions of PCs. And Quake dragged the whole genre into true 3D and onto the internet. Along the way Carmack's engines powered half the games of the era.

This is the studio's run: the shooters that built a genre, the technology that changed the medium, and the culture it started. Here is the map.

Carmack's engines and Romero's design

id's magic was a partnership. John Carmack wrote rendering technology years ahead of anyone else, engines so advanced that other studios lined up to license them, so that half the shooters of the 1990s ran on id's code. John Romero and the team turned that raw power into fast, vicious, brilliantly designed games. Together they set the template: build a jaw-dropping engine, wrap it in a lean, ferocious shooter, and let the modding community do the rest. It is a formula the whole industry copied.