John Carmack, the father of the FPS genre (who made his name at id Software), says it’s a fascinating piece of research.

Microsoft has released a technology demonstration from its AI Copilot research lab, showing off a generative AI game. This has created Quake 2… or at least something close to it, since the original didn’t have anything to make us queasy (not even the PS1 port!). While the framerate and performance is questionable, John Carmack wasn’t reacting to that on Twitter, but to what Microsoft had done behind the scenes. He said it was impressive research from the Redmond tech giant.

What? This is impressive research work!

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 7, 2025

The research was published in the journal Nature. Not exactly a publication for us, but still. But Carmack’s knowledge is hard to ignore. And if he says it’s impressive, then it must be really good work. After all, he is involved in artificial intelligence himself. He founded Keen Technologies in 2022 (an obvious reference to Commander Keen, another id Software IP) and is involved in AGI (artificial general intelligence).

Microsoft’s tech demo isn’t very sophisticated yet, but back in the day, people would have complained about steam engines being better than a horse. It’s an early demo, and let’s not forget how quickly generative AI has gone from utter nonsense to amazingly realistic and accurate sound and video production.

To quote from the research paper, “We extracted two datasets, 7 Maps and Skygarden, from the data provided to us by Ninja Theory. The 7 Maps dataset contained 60,986 games, resulting in approximately 500,000 individual player trajectories, totaling 27.89 TiB on disk. This represented over 7 years of gameplay. Quake 2 was originally developed by a small team, and they certainly did not need 28TB of data and many kilowatts of GPU servers.

But the question is, how many people’s jobs will be taken over by the advance of AI?

Source: PCGamer