id Tech
More info
- Creator
- id Software (John Carmack)
- Released
- Owner
- id Software / Microsoft
- Type
- Game engine family
The umbrella name for id Software's engine lineage — nearly all of it architected by John Carmack, and nearly all of it eventually opened.
id Tech 1 was the Doom engine (1993), which sorted levels with BSP trees. id Tech 2 arrived with Quake (1996) and true 3D; the third powered Quake III Arena (1999) and was widely licensed; the fourth gave Doom 3 (2004) unified lighting and stencil shadows.
id Tech 5 introduced MegaTexture in Rage (2011), and the sixth and seventh drove Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal (2020). Carmack routinely open-sourced the older engines under the GPL — a tradition that spawned countless ports and other engines; Valve's GoldSrc began as a Quake fork.