After reading those IdSoft histories, Quake shipped a new client server networking layer, a new quake C scripting engine, the new fully polygonal engine …

This was far too ambitious and bottlenecked everything on Carmack’s graphics work. The rest of the team was left to create Doom II and Ultimate doom while Carmack worked, but even then it wasn’t enough to ease the bottleneck.

doom II could have been a quake C scriptable, client server game that shipped slightly later as a step between Doom engine and Quake engine instead of the four or so year technical delay between Doom and Quake

And this burnt the team out, made quake’s development a compromised scramble and led to Romero’s departure. That’s no way to run a company.

Anyway, listen to Xalavier Nelson of strange scaffold talks on sustainable indie game development. It makes no sense to compromise a company for the sake of shipping a single game.