There was one other programmer who worked with Carmack on Quake 3, John Cash.
My point is, even having one Carmack level developer on a team is a bridge to far for most.
Yes, you can write huge projects using just C, but you honestly don't think most people would recommend it unless every little drop of performance was really that important or you had no other choice or you had a super guru with an amazing track record writing the software.
At the time Q3 was written (13 years ago), console games were still being written in assembly language.
You are ahead of yourself by a few years. Q3 came out in 1999, which means it was written in the late 90s, so think PSOne and late SNES/Genesis titles.
Aside from the PS2, I don't think so. N64 came out in '96, Dreamcast came out in '98 and PS2 came out in early 2000. In '99, we were only two years away from Xbox and GameCube. I know that at least N64 games were written in C.
PSX games were often written in C, as well. I suspect that developers had started to migrate to C near the end of the SNES era, although I'm not sure how many SNES games were written in C...
My point is, even having one Carmack level developer on a team is a bridge to far for most.
Yes, you can write huge projects using just C, but you honestly don't think most people would recommend it unless every little drop of performance was really that important or you had no other choice or you had a super guru with an amazing track record writing the software.
At the time Q3 was written (13 years ago), console games were still being written in assembly language.