John Carmack Reminds Microsoft He'll Guarantee $1 Million To Bring Team Beef’s Ports To VR

John Carmack reminded Microsoft that he's “still willing” to put up a $1M guarantee to allow Team Beef to commercialize its VR ports of id Software’s classic games.

Carmack first revealed that he made the offer regarding Team Beef’s id Software mods last year. At that time, Carmack said that he even personally guaranteed “a million dollars in sales" to allow Team Beef to sell its ports on Quest's store.

Today, in a post on X, Carmack stated that he's still willing to put up a $1M guarantee.

The message was part of a longer thread aimed at Microsoft, who recently laid off 136 members of id Software (reportedly 73.5% of the studio’s staff) during a massive “reset” of its video game business. Microsoft plans to eliminate 3200 jobs across multiple studios. (id Software was sold to ZeniMax in 2009, and ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in 2021).

Team Beef has ported a range of classic PC games to VR, including id Software’s Doom, Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3. They’ve also released VR ports of Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, and the Star Wars Jedi Knight series. Currently, these ports require purchasing the original games on PC and then using SideQuest to install them to Quest along with Team Beef's modified code.

In addition to founding id Software, Carmack was also once Oculus’ CTO, and has shown great support for bringing id Software’s games to VR.

John Carmack Offered A $1 Million Guarantee To Bring Team Beef’s Ports To The Quest Store

“I tried” John Carmack says he offered id Software a $1 million sales guarantee to allow Team Beef to sell its VR ports on the Quest store.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

"I had some hope,” Carmack wrote about his offer last year. “But that was still too small potatoes to make anything happen in a Microsoft company.”