Id Tech
series of video game engines
id Tech is a series of successive game engines designed and developed by id Software. They are used in many of id Software's games, such as games in the Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein franchises, and has been also licensed to other developers. Several notable game engines, such as GoldSrc or the IW engine originate from id Tech code.
Earlier game engines up to id Tech 4 have been released as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL-2.0-or-later until 2005, GPL-3.0-or-later until 2012). id Tech 5 to 8 remain proprietary, with id Tech 8 currently being the latest engine.
According to Eurogamer.net, "id Software has been synonymous with PC game engines since the concept of a detached game engine was first popularised." However, id Tech 4 had far fewer licensees than Unreal Engine from Epic Games. id planned to regain the momentum with id Tech 5, until the company was bought by ZeniMax Media in 2009 (who was later bought by Microsoft in 2021), with both companies choosing to keep the id Tech engines exclusively for id and its sister studios as a proprietary engine.
Naming
Prior to the reveal of id Tech 5 at WWDC 2007, the engines were simply referred to by the names of the games the engines had been developed for. The Quake II, Quake III Arena and Doom 3 engines were retroactively renamed to id Tech 2, 3 and 4, respectively.
"id Tech 1" was not used as an official name for any engines.
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This entry incorporates text from “Id Tech” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.