John Carmack Pushed Microsoft to Make VR Fan Ports of ‘Quake’ & ‘DOOM’ Official, But Was Denied

Team Beef’s unofficial VR ports of classic Id Software games are undoubtedly fan favorites, letting you go head-first into a rash of ’90s retro titles like the original DOOM. Now, Id Software co-founder and former Oculus CTO John Carmack says he tried lobbying the Microsoft-owned studio for the chance to get those ports offered as official VR versions on Quest, but was unfortunately denied.

“I tried — we had a conversation with the powers that be at Id Software, and I even offered to personally guarantee a million dollars in sales if they would allow Team Beef to sell full versions of the classic titles officially on the store,” Carmack says in an X post. “I had some hope, but that was still too small potatoes to make anything happen in a Microsoft company.”

While Carmack’s wording to “personally guarantee a million dollars” seems more like a strong vote of confidence in the games’ general marketability to Quest owners, and not an explicit offer to plonk down personal cash as such, when Carmack speaks, people tend to listen.

Having co-founded id Software in 1991 alongside John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall, Carmack helped revolutionize PC gaming with groundbreaking real-time 3D graphics and multiplayer modes, leading to the release of Wolfenstein 3D (1992), DOOM (1993), and Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena—all of which were later unofficially ported to VR headsets by Team Beef.

None of those were the first VR ports of Id Software’s iconic titles though. At E2 2012, Carmack got a chance to go hands-on with an early Oculus Rift prototype running Doom 3: BGF Edition, a remastered version of the iconic shooter released in 2004.

This was one of the pivotal moments in Carmack’s career, prompting him to leave Id in 2013 and join Oculus a few months later—notably a year before Meta (then-Facebook) acquired the VR headset startup for $2 billion. Carmack went on to lead Meta’s mobile VR efforts in addition to taking on the roles of the division’s Chief Technical Officer and consulting CTO leading up to his departure from Meta in late 2022.

As for Team Beef, the modding group has also unofficially ported a laundry list of other titles, including Core Design’s Tomb Raider (1996) and Valve’s Half-Life series, but is also currently working with Flat2VR Studios to officially port flatscreen shooter Wrath: Aeon of Ruin (2024) to PC VR headsets.

It’s a shame Team Beef isn’t getting a proper crack at releasing official ports, instead relying on Patreon donations to support their work, as there’s clearly an appetite for retro-style shooters on the Quest platform.

One such modern interpretation is Bevan McKechnie’s COMPOUND (2022), which is estimated to have generated $1.4 million in gross revenue on PC VR alone, according to Steam Revenue Calculator. This notably doesn’t take into account its ostensibly greater reception on Quest, which currently at a [4.8/5] rating garnered from over 700 users.

Again, for Microsoft, figures in the low-millions can basically be considered rounding errors; the company has also largely shied away from having any real involvement in VR gaming. And no, we don’t think the upcoming Xbox-branded Quest headset or Microsoft Cloud Gaming really count.