Id Software

id Software

Founded	1991-02-01
Headquarters	Richardson, Texas, USA
Website	www.idsoftware.com

id Software (pronounced "id," not "eye-dee") was founded by John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack. They had been making games under the name id Software as early as 1990, but they didn't officially become a company until February 1st, 1991. The group met as in-house game developers for Softdisk and broke away to have more control over their own games. Their early games were published by Apogee Software, but by the time Doom came around they began using various publishers.

In particular, id Software is known for pioneering the first-person shooter genre with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom (DOS), and Quake.

On June 24, 2009, id Software was acquired by ZeniMax Media, who also owns Bethesda Softworks. And on November 22, 2013, the last of the original founders, John Carmack, left the company to work for Oculus VR.

Games

Music Development

DOS

The company's earlier MS-DOS titles used a sound driver designed by Jason Blochowiak, which made use of files based on the IMF format. Doom (DOS) and the games derived from it used Paul Radek's DMX driver; John Carmack later admitted regretting using DMX due to design flaws, but was unable to drop it for compatibility reasons. It's unclear who created the sound driver used for their final DOS title, Quake (DOS), though it may have been Carmack.

SNES

id Software only worked on one SNES game, Wolfenstein 3D. The driver used was called SuperFamicom Low Level Sound Driver and was coded by Rebecca Heineman. The source code of the driver also credits John Carmack, but he said that he did minimal, if any work on the driver and that the credit should go to Heineman. The driver converted MIDI files to code for the SNES. Robert Prince arranged his music from the DOS version to be compatible with the limitations of the SNES. For the most part, the songs are note-for-note (Prince probably used the same MIDI files as the original), but the tempos are considerably faster.

When the SNES port of Doom was being developed, development was outsourced to Sculptured Software with id's supervision. The music arrangements were handled by Paul Webb. Due to the arrangements being note-for-note, it is most likely Webb had received Prince's MIDI files. Paul used the Wolfgang and Berlioz music software by Sculptured Software. Coincidentally, both Webb and Prince used an Ensoniq EPS in their works.