id's Former Co-Owner Says They'd Absolutely Have Used Gen AI Back in the Day
The quote
Tim Willits — who ran id Software through the Quake-and-beyond era as studio director and co-owner, now at Saber Interactive — told PC Gamer at Gamescom 2026 that id absolutely would've used gen AI back in the day. id's whole thing was adopting whatever new tech was fastest, so AI to generate assets and fill the world would've been a no-brainer. And the line everyone grabbed: "John Carmack would be like making Skynet or something."
The defense
It's the standard-issue veteran move: every old dev says they'd have used the new thing if they'd had it. And it's true! id in the '90s was a technology-maximalist shop — new rendering technique drops, id ships it before the whitepaper cools. Of course they'd have used procedural generation on steroids. The quote is honest about what id was.
It's also exactly what every studio says right before the asset pipelines get gutted. "We would've used it too" is doing double duty: nostalgia for the speaker, air cover for the layoffs. The people saying it are never the ones whose jobs get automated by it.
The footnote nobody dwells on
The guy whose name gets attached to "we all would've done it" is Carmack — the person people point to as proof that technical maximalism is good. But the actual Carmack mostly wants nothing to do with this particular gold rush. The mascot for the defense doesn't endorse the defense. That's the whole story in one sentence, really: the industry keeps drafting Carmack's ghost to bless a future he'd find embarrassing.
Verdict
Fun quote, true quote, and a perfect little artifact of 2026: the old gods get invoked to sanctify the new slop pipeline, while the actual old god is off doing something else. Skynet joke's good though.
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