Id Software suffered major layoffs under Microsoft's Xbox "reset" plan, which will see 3,200 people cut and multiple studios divested. This sparked commiserations from id co-founder and Doom mastermind John Romero, who also shared that he's personally helped with the studio archival work which he hopes will continue internally.
"A note on digital preservation: id's history is critically important to the history of games," Romero writes on Bluesky. "I've preserved id's complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has."
Romero, who was fired from id in 1996, has some experience with the situation now facing many former id employees. He's also plenty familiar with game preservation, dating back to the shareware days of Doom, which laid the bedrock for a game that can now be played on virtually anything with a screen (or, with enough willpower, virtually anything without a screen).
"I hope someone is doing the same for the company's ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them)," Romero adds.
Amid reports that half of the studio was cut, impacted id Software developers have suggested critical disciplines, including the studio's legendary tech team and a platoon of coders, were all but entirely laid off.
Senior gameplay systems programmer Michael Maynard hammered Microsoft in a LinkedIn post.
"Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was no longer needed and should be let go; despite all the amazing work and effort from every designer, programmer, artist, audio specialist, level designer, fx, tech design, and on and on and on," Maynard says.
Romero's private id archive is a rare blessing. Fallout's Tim Cain said last year that he was "ordered to destroy" his own archive of the formative RPG's development.
