1. Carmack stopped making games for us PC gamers and started making games for the true mass market: casual console gamers. Rage is a great competitor to Halo or Call of Duty or whatever.
2. He left a huge void in the world of FPS gaming. The "best" FPS games today (Battlefield 3, Call of Duty) are graphically beautiful, watered down, crap for console gamers. Their actual game play sucks.
Quake1 Netquake Deathmatch/CTF/Clan Arena/Rocket Arena is still more intense and more a test of skill than any other game to follow in the ~13 years since it was created.
Creating a modern replacement (for no other reason really than fixing a few minor issues and bringing in new players) is on my list of Things To Do.
I'm living out my top-choice fantasy already: working on my web startup. Gaming is a secondary love, but if no one else gets around to it I definitely will.
That's like saying that somebody should be pretty good at physics because Einstein was. Juggling lots of ideas at once was pretty much Leonardo da Vinci's thing.
Discouraging people from having confidence in themselves (even when that confidence is unrealistic) is one of the biggest tragedies brought about by modern-day mediums such as HN et al.
I'd rather strike out a dozen times than watch from the stands.
Call of Duty is pretty good and also idtech3 based ;) Of course the IW engine has had years of work put into it to the point where it could be considered a different engine, even though the core code base is still the same.
Red Orchestra 2 is pretty good, but it is super buggy and the community is small. If it didn't suffer from so many game breaking bugs on release it would easily be the best FPS of the last 10 years.
Sadly and relatedly, the Descent series (6 degree of freedom FPS) was an intense test of skill unmatched anywhere else, and the last release in that series was ~13 years ago. I don't know of any other newer games in the genre.
Competitive FPS gaming reached a peak around 1998. Since then, the only games I've heard of with similar high-level competition have been in the RTS genre. "Watered down" seems to be the name of the game nowadays.
2. He left a huge void in the world of FPS gaming. The "best" FPS games today (Battlefield 3, Call of Duty) are graphically beautiful, watered down, crap for console gamers. Their actual game play sucks.
Quake1 Netquake Deathmatch/CTF/Clan Arena/Rocket Arena is still more intense and more a test of skill than any other game to follow in the ~13 years since it was created.
Creating a modern replacement (for no other reason really than fixing a few minor issues and bringing in new players) is on my list of Things To Do.