A storied Texas video game developer that created iconic games like Doom, Wolfensteinand Quake,which revolutionized the first-person shooter genre and popularized PC gaming, has been hit by layoffs.
Microsoft said on Monday that it would be making major changes to Xbox, including laying off 1,600 employees and dropping several game studios it previously bought. The company also said another 1,250 employees will be cut over the next year, and in total Microsoft will lay off 4,800 employees. That includes around 50 percent of the workforce, or about 90 employees, at id Software, which is headquartered in Richardson, Texas. The news of layoffs at id Software was first reported by the video game industry news outlet Game Developer.
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Jeff Gardiner, an ex-project lead at Bethesda Game Studios, said on X that he was told the layoffs impacted around 95 id Software employees at the Dallas-based studio. Thirty-five people at Bethesda Game Studios, which makes the popular Falloutand Elder Scrollsgame series, were laid off as part of the wider Xbox cuts.
Citingcore part of game development that tests for bugs before final release, was particularly impacted. Several id Software employees took to LinkedIn to confirm that they were laid off. Many said they had worked on Doom: The Dark Ages, the latest entry in the storied first-person shooter franchise
“After over 12.5 years…myself and many others were informed our roles at id Software were terminated as part of larger organizational changes this morning,” Colin Geller, a concept artist at id Software, wrote on Monday.
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Another long-tenured id Software employee, Michael Maynard, also wrote that he had been laid off. Maynard, a games industry veteran, had been with id Software since 2005. Maynard said that the cuts had reduced id Software, which he said produced “arguably THE BEST (in the entire industry) first person action games, consistently.”
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“Just really sad that this is how Id Software, the PIONEER/INNOVATOR of FPS action games is relegated to just another ‘reorganization’ of assets,” Maynard wrote
Romero, a titan of the games industry and one of id Software’s founders, wrote on X to express his condolences to those laid off.
“I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on,” Romero, who lived in Texas before moving to Ireland, wrote on X. “It’s a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history.”
A Texas video game pioneer
Founded in 1991 in Shreveport, Louisiana, id software was the brainchild of Romero, Hall and Carmack. The trio worked at computer company Softdisk, developing games and software for Apple and IBM PCS. Carmack and Hall developed a demo of Nintendo‘s Super Mario Bros. 3for the PC and put together a demo called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement that they sent to Nintendo. Nintendo was impressed but wanted to keep their games on their own systems.
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“They didn’t want their intellectual property on anything but their own hardware, so they told us Good Job and You Can’t Do This,” Romero recalled
But the project inspired Carmack, Hall and Romero to develop more games. One of their first games was Commander Keen, developed with Apogee Software, a Garland, Texas-based video game company founded in 1987 by Scott Miller, a Texas native and University of Dallas dropout. Carmack, Hall and Romero eventually founded id Software, and in 1992 the company relocated to Mesquite in Texas. Through a partnership with Miller, id Software would develop several games published by Apogee Software, which today is known as 3D Realms and based in Denmark.
While in Texas, id Software would develop some of the most iconic video games in industry history, including the first-ever first-person shooter game, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, the game that popularized the genre and PC gaming, and Quake,the company’s first true 3D FPS. The company also made Dallas somewhat of a video game haven, with several companies having headquarters there. Game companies like Gearbox and newer companies like Psychedelic Games have headquarters in the region.
Romero went on to found Dallas-based developer Ion Storm. In a 1998 interview about his then-upcoming game, Daikatana,Texas Monthly called Romero “the reigning bad boy of computer gaming.”
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Ion Storm would only publish a few games, including Daikatanaand the critically acclaimed 2000 game Deus Ex,before folding in 2001. But Romero’s Texas influence stuck around; id Software’s headquarters continue to be located in Richardson, where they’ve developed follow-ups to the Doomseries like the critically acclaimed reboot, Doom 2016.
Miller, the Apogee founder who worked closely with id Software, said on X that he was gutted by the id layoffs, which he heard from friends at the studio on Monday morning.
“I’m heartbroken,” Miller wrote with a screenshot of the original Doomattached.
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