id co-founder John Carmack revisits Doom at QuakeCon: ‘Still a great game after all these years!’

At this year’s QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software’s OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with the reason for the season.

“I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were,” Carmack wrote on X, “The Everything App.” “It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years!”

It certainly sounds like Carmack’s a little rusty: E1M4 and M5 have par times of 1:30 and 2:45 respectively. I’m always curious to see how developers relate to their own games, especially a Criterion classic like Doom decades down the line. Carmack’s fellow John, Romero, is still very much “Knee Deep in the Dead,” as it were, creating the Sigil expansions and even giving the one-of-a-kind MyHouse.wad a try on stream.

I’ve always been slightly shaken by Larian honcho Swen Vincke’s admission that he’s never revisited Ultima 7⁠—one of his favorite games and primary inspirations⁠—because he knows it wouldn’t stand up to his memories from the ’90s. In the same conversation, Vincke told me that he spends so much time immersed in and testing Larian’s games during development, he hardly touches them after launch.

Couldn’t be me: I compulsively replay all my favorites to the point that it’s a problem. I have to agree with Carmack: The original Doom really has held up after all these years.