Doom, Quake CEO on Piracy

by on March 13, 2007 · 4 comments

Todd Hollenshead is the CEO of id, the developer of the DOOM and Quake series. He gave a talk at GDC about piracy. Unfortunately no transcript or video are available, but here is a summary of his talk (warning, this page’s color selection is hard on the eyes.)

Here is another report on the talk: The first link gives some really fascinating details about how some of id’s titles have been leaked, in particular one case in which source code was leaked due to a security flaw in Linux.

Another article about Hollenshead is here, including the amazing account of a journalist actually making an illegal copy of Hexen 2 to pirate it at a press event!

Here’s another article: It mentions a comment Hollenshead made about how piracy forced id to develop for non-PC platforms. There’s also a really interesting user comment someone named “Empty_One” makes. He points out that if developers are forced 100% to the consoles because of piracy, we won’t see mods any more: you can’t mod a console game. Thus, one of the most promising sources of game innovation – fan-based modding – will die out. There would have been no CounterStrike mod for Half-Life if Half-Life had been console-exclusive. (Incidentally the first comment on that post is from some idiot gleefully announcing how much he’s looking forward to someone pirating the next Quake title).

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About Solveig Singleton

Solveig Singleton is a lawyer and writer, with ventures into ceramic sculpture, photography, painting, and animal welfare work. Past venues for her policy work include the Cato Institute (mostly free speech, telecom, and privacy), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (mostly privacy and ecommerce), the Progress and Freedom Foundation (mostly IP). She is presently an adjunct fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation and is working on a new nonprofit venture, the Convergence Law Institute. She holds degrees from Cornell Law School and Reed College. Favorite Movie: Persuasion. Favorite Books: Dhalgren; Villette; Freedom and the Law. Favorite Art: Kinetic sculpture--especially involving Roombas. Most obsolete current technology deployed: a 30 yr. old Canon AE-1. Music: these days, mostly old blues, classical guitar, Poe, Cowboy Junkies, Ministry. Phobia: Clowns.

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  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    The good news is that this is not necessarily the case. With .NET running on the 360 now, theoretically Id could write bindings for their software to allow you to at least write some C# to change things around a little.

  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    The good news is that this is not necessarily the case. With .NET running on the 360 now, theoretically Id could write bindings for their software to allow you to at least write some C# to change things around a little.

  • http://www.ssokolow.com/ Stephan Sokolow

    To be perfectly honest, I can’t bring myself to care. All of my favorite game series (and some of my favorite genres) died out when the games became an industry rather than an art.

    To this day, I spend most of my gaming time on DOSBox, ZSNES (A Super Nintendo emulator and yes, I do still have the cartridges for the games I play), ScummVM (An open-source VM for games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM engine), BasiliskII (680×0 Macintosh Emulator. Old MacOS versions are freely downloadable from Apple FTP), and a couple dozen Linux ports of good classics.

    If you play a worthwhile game from that era, you get the feeling that somebody enjoyed making it… that it’s a minor work of art. The closest I’ve ever come to re-capturing that with modern games is playing the odd Nintendo game. (eg. Conker’s Bad Fur Day for N64 or The New Super Mario Bros. for DS)

    Though, to be honest, I’m starting to feel that it might be a good thing that almost no good games are made anymore. It’s annoying waiting for decent emulators to be written, I can’t stand not being able to back my games and save files up to DVD-R, and I’d rather not play than buy a TV tuner card just so I can run a second (redundant) CPU’s program on my existing monitors. (My computer doubles as my DVD player, jukebox, game console, eBook reader, and communication device. I never watch broadcast TV anymore and almost never use the POTS phone)

    *sigh* Oh well, maybe I’m just asking too much of an industry that used to be filled with my fellow geeks.

  • http://www.ssokolow.com/ Stephan Sokolow

    To be perfectly honest, I can’t bring myself to care. All of my favorite game series (and some of my favorite genres) died out when the games became an industry rather than an art.


    To this day, I spend most of my gaming time on DOSBox, ZSNES (A Super Nintendo emulator and yes, I do still have the cartridges for the games I play), ScummVM (An open-source VM for games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM engine), BasiliskII (680×0 Macintosh Emulator. Old MacOS versions are freely downloadable from Apple FTP), and a couple dozen Linux ports of good classics.


    If you play a worthwhile game from that era, you get the feeling that somebody enjoyed making it… that it’s a minor work of art. The closest I’ve ever come to re-capturing that with modern games is playing the odd Nintendo game. (eg. Conker’s Bad Fur Day for N64 or The New Super Mario Bros. for DS)


    Though, to be honest, I’m starting to feel that it might be a good thing that almost no good games are made anymore. It’s annoying waiting for decent emulators to be written, I can’t stand not being able to back my games and save files up to DVD-R, and I’d rather not play than buy a TV tuner card just so I can run a second (redundant) CPU’s program on my existing monitors. (My computer doubles as my DVD player, jukebox, game console, eBook reader, and communication device. I never watch broadcast TV anymore and almost never use the POTS phone)


    *sigh* Oh well, maybe I’m just asking too much of an industry that used to be filled with my fellow geeks.

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