"Doom III from the outset will not support our EAX gaming technologies & there are a number of reasons for this, the primary of which is that id decided to implement the best audio implementation they could, that would work equally well across the widest percentage of PC systems possible. Naturally however, being the leaders in PC audio (with no fewer than 11 PhDs in various fields of Audio), we truly felt that the buyers of DoomIII would be missing out on a crucial element of the gaming experience, i.e. id have undoubtedly developed a masterpiece in terms of gameplay & especially graphics, so why not complete that masterpiece with a truly incredible audio engine?"

"So we come to John Carmack's comments on Beyond3D. It seems to be his philosophy that patents should not exist. Certainly id are altruistic in making their game engines public (crucially after a certain period of time has elapsed), but that is a unique stance & frankly outside the scope of this discussion. However, as can be seen from this example Creative created a graphics technique in 1999 & despite the pace of graphics development it is still applicable 5 years later. The same cannot be said for game engines - no matter how good they are when they first launch"

Would you like to know more? In case you're wondering, this Creative employee is referring to an Unreal patch that was released by Creative in 1999 which supported these stencil shadows, i.e. 5 years before Doom 3 was released. Still, not exactly the "best" worded response Creative could have made on the matter.