Founded 1991 · Shreveport, Louisiana, USA · Founders: John Carmack,John Romero,Tom Hall,Adrian Carmack · First game: Commander Keen (1990, as Softdisk employees)
id Software was born from a mutiny at Shreveport disk-magazine publisher Softdisk, where four employees secretly built a game on company time and equipment, then fled together to found their own studio.
In late 1990, John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack were all employed at Softdisk, a Louisiana software company that published monthly game disks for Apple II and PC. Working nights and weekends — and using Softdisk's equipment without authorisation — the four built a faithful clone of Super Mario Bros. 3 for PC in a single weekend to demonstrate Carmack's breakthrough smooth side-scrolling technique. Nintendo declined to license the technology, but the demo caught the attention of Apogee Software's Scott Miller, who commissioned an original game. The four delivered Commander Keen in three months while still on Softdisk's payroll. When their employer discovered the arrangement, they negotiated a part-time contract to continue producing Softdisk games — then departed to found id Software in February 1991, initially operating out of a rented house in Mesquite, Texas. Doom (1993) would go on to define the first-person shooter genre and become one of the most influential software products in PC history.
The four future founders of id Software were not seeking to start a company — they were seeking a way out of a job they had outgrown. Softdisk published monthly subscription disks of games and utilities for Apple II and PC; the work was competent and steady but offered none of the creative ambition that John Carmack, in particular, had begun to pursue in his own time. His technique for smooth side-scrolling on PC hardware — previously thought impossible without dedicated graphics hardware — was the catalyst. When Scott Miller of Apogee offered to pay for a game built around it, the group had a financial path out before they had a company.
The Softdisk confrontation, when it came, was managed rather than catastrophic. The founders agreed to continue producing games for their former employer's Gamer's Edge disk on a contract basis — an obligation they met through the early id years with games they produced quickly and with diminishing enthusiasm. The real work was Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and then Doom, both built in Texas and then Wisconsin, moving to where the money and talent clustered. The garage-startup mythology that accrued to id Software after Doom's success obscured the more specific story: this was a group of talented people who saw a technical advantage, found a publisher willing to pay for it, and arranged their exit accordingly.
What distinguished id Software from nearly every other game developer of the early 1990s was Carmack's decision to treat the engine — the underlying rendering and game-loop software — as a licensable product in its own right. Doom's engine was licensed to Raven Software, Lobotomy Software, and eventually dozens of other developers, generating revenue that funded id's own productions and spreading the technological standard Carmack had established across the entire PC game industry. This model, in which a studio's technical innovation became a platform others built upon, was nearly without precedent in 1993 and became the template for middleware businesses that shaped the industry for decades.
The id Tech lineage — Wolfenstein 3D engine, Doom engine, Quake engine, and their descendants — constitutes one of the most consequential bodies of software engineering in gaming history. Games as structurally different as Half-Life (1998) and Heretic (1994) were built on id engines. Carmack's eventual decision to release the source code of earlier engines under open licences created a generation of modders and indie developers who learned game programming by reading his code. The studio's founding story — the midnight rebellion at Softdisk — is inseparable from the technological ambition that made the rebellion worth having.