Carmack Played Doom at QuakeCon 2026 and Took 15 Minutes on a Level With a 1:30 Par Time
John Carmack showed up to QuakeCon 2026 in Gaylord, Texas for a retrospective talk and reunion. While he was there, he tried the Evercade Doom port and played through a couple of levels. E1M4 and E1M5, specifically. Spent about 15 minutes on each.
E1M4's par time is 1:30. E1M5's par time is 2:45.
The guy who built the engine didn't care about par times.
What 15 Minutes on E1M4 Actually Looks Like
Par time exists so speedrunners have something to chase. It's not a target most people hit anyway. But Carmack taking 10x the par time on E1M4 tells you something: he wasn't there to go fast. He was there to be in the thing he built. Walk around. Look at the rooms he helped make over 30 years ago.
That's kind of genuinely great. The engine runs, the Imps are where they're supposed to be. The guy who wrote the code to make all of that possible is just walking through it. Taking his time. Not speedrunning. Not performing. Just playing.
The Evercade port is also a specific choice. Handheld, retro-dedicated hardware. Not the flashiest way to experience Doom in 2026. Carmack didn't seem to give a shit about that part.
The Other Side: Swen Vincke Has Never Gone Back to Ultima 7
Swen Vincke runs Larian Studios and has talked about Ultima 7 as one of his biggest inspirations. Foundational game for him. Primary reference point from the 1990s. And he's never gone back to play it since.
That's the opposite move from what Carmack did at QuakeCon. Vincke presumably doesn't want to find out that the game he's been mentally building on for three decades has aged in ways he doesn't want to see. The memory of Ultima 7 is part of his creative foundation. Poking at it could mess something up.
This could mean the game holds up fine and he's just being careful. It could mean he knows on some level that going back would change the version of it that matters. Either way it's a deliberate choice to leave it alone.
Then There's Romero
John Romero, who made the Sigil expansions for Doom, has been engaging with the fan community in a different way. He played MyHouse.wad on stream. MyHouse.wad is not a casual pick. Playing it publicly says something about how he thinks about Doom as a living thing people are still doing genuinely interesting work with, not just a museum piece.
That's different from Carmack nostalgia-touring E1M4 and different from Vincke keeping Ultima 7 safely preserved in memory. Romero's approach treats the game as something that keeps evolving. The levels he made are still a platform.
Three Approaches, None Wrong
Carmack wandering through levels at a convention built to celebrate that era of gaming makes complete sense for the context. Vincke keeping Ultima 7 locked in memory makes sense if you think of foundational games as creative infrastructure rather than something to consume again. Romero engaging with where Doom has gone makes sense for someone who's clearly still interested in what the original work can become.
None of these are wrong. They're just different relationships to the same basic question: do you go back?
But Carmack spending 15 minutes on a level with a 1:30 par time is still funny as hell. The man is not in a hurry.
Source: Pcgamer