the id games scale of system completeness

I really like id Software. I’m pretty sure it’s because I was playing Doom (well, Chex Quest, same thing) as a kid, and then later a bunch of open source Quake 3 based games.

I’ve also been kicking an idea around in my head about how you can get an idea of how much you can do with a given system just by determining what the latest id Software game you can reasonably run on it is. (Reasonably meaning “it not only runs, but it runs in technically playable condition”).

The most obvious example is “Doom complete.” Getting the original Doom to run on things has been a hobby of the industry almost since the game’s release, and according to the Doom Wiki, Lotus even used it to benchmark whether a PC was generally behaving okay. Broadly speaking, if a system is Doom complete, meaning if you can run Doom, you can generally do most basic computational work.

This is basically the same idea as Lotus, except expanded to include the rest of id Software’s main franchises (as well as some honorable inclusions). For newer games (say, Quake 2 onward), the benchmark for completeness includes the requirement of running the game at either 1024×768 or 720p at whatever can be described as “medium-high settings”, since you can theoretically run Doom 2016 on a lot of hardware at 640×480 on lowest settings, but that shouldn’t count it necessarily as Doom 2016 complete.

There’s two subclassifications of id game completeness I tend to think of: “proven completeness”, which means “a port actively exists and works” (or “a translation layer exists that can run a version from another platform”, to allow proven completeness on Linux/MacOS via Wine/Proton in the case of newer games), and “theoretical completeness”, which means “a port doesn’t exist, but given enough research and knowledge on what a given platform can do, we can safely conclude that the game could run.”

Some other examples on the completeness scale include:

• “Quake 3 complete”, while not quite as prolific, would reasonably prove that your computer is capable of reasonably modern computing, since if you can play Quake 3 reasonably well enough on it, you can assume that what you’re working with is capable of anything a Windows 98 or early XP-era machine could do. Android is also proven Quake 3 complete, thanks to sdlioq3a.
• The highest possible mark on the scale (at time of writing) is “Doom Eternal complete” (Dark Ages isn’t out yet). Doom Eternal needs some beefy hardware to run decently, but a Doom Eternal complete system can probably run an LLM or a big Kubernetes cluster, or do some 4K video mastering work.
• Half-Life complete is somewhere between Quake 2 and Quake 3, and serves as both an honorary inclusion and a landmark for people who may have more experience with Valve’s catalog. Half-Life 2 complete would be approximately the same as Doom 3 complete, and so forth.