Revolutionizing Gaming: The Legendary Creator of DOOM Speaks | John Romero

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:24For the past 30 years, the most popular video games of all time have been what's called first-person shooter games or have had some element of first-person shooter, meaning you start the game and you're in this world on the computer that you see from a first-person point of view and other people could be your friends or anybody on the network or other people in the game are trying to shoot you and you're trying to shoot them. And then when you shoot them, you get their money and you can buy more powers or more weapons or you can find weapons. And there's just an entire world, this 3D world universe that you're walking around in.

2:03Kind of like Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite, these very popular games. The very first one, the grandfather of all these first-person shooter games, is called Doom. I remember playing Doom in 1994. My friends and I would play every single day. It was so amazing. It blew my mind. It was the first game with real 3D graphics that you're walking around in, and it's networked, so you could shoot and kill your friends, which is something we all want to do occasionally. But Doom was the game. The creator of Doom, John Romero, is on the podcast today, talks about what makes a great game, what do you need to do if you want to get into the gaming business or industry or if you want to make a good game.

2:45He wrote a book called Doom Guy, Life in First Person, and we talk about it right now.

2:55This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

3:12John, I think I've been playing computer games made by you or worked on by you since I was a little kid. You worked on Ultima, right? First off, I'll say in the intro, you're the Doom guy. That's your book is Doom guy. And Doom was, I played that nonstop in 1994 and 1990, all the incarnation, you know, Doom one, Doom two, whatever it was out there, I played. And funny enough, that's probably the last hardcore computer game I played. Hardcore meaning like, it's not like online chess or back end or anything like that. It's a computer game, a role playing computer game. I never got into Fortnite and I started having kids and I wasn't playing all those games as much.

3:57Well, thanks for playing back then. Doom was the first 3D multiplayer game. Yes. All the graphics, everything? Full 3D high-speed multiplayer deathmatch. Nobody had done that. And I have to ask the usual stuff, but how did you get into making computer games? So I loved arcades in the 1970s. You know, first I played a ton of pinball, but then I started playing video games when they started appearing in the arcades, probably around 76, something like that. And what were your favorites? Jeez. Well, Targ was a real early cool one, along with Space Invaders, obviously, was really great. Galaxian had color for the first time.

4:50And that was super amazing. But like Pac-Man is from 1980 changed everything for me. So that was a really important video game. I love all those games and I played all of them. You made an interesting point in your book, how Space Invaders was the first game where it kept track of the high player scores. And you thought that was a good marketing thing. And then I always felt like Galaxian and then later on Galaga were just ripoffs of Space Invaders, particularly Galaga on Galaxian. Like Galaxian disappeared and there was Galaga all of a sudden. yeah totally well the thing is i think galaga was a kind of a sequel to galaxian i see yeah so it was it might have been the same company but it was definitely more advanced you know i have defender in my base right now that was my all-time favorite defender and so good so good so but these were all like arcade like two-dimensional uh very flat which by the way i still enjoy playing those games just as much, but as technology got better, obviously games became much more sophisticated.

5:51What was then the evolution that led to Doom? Many years of playing games and programming, just internalizing design patterns and keeping up with technology and programming. It was a lot of just living in the 80s and understanding design and design's progress and hardware's progress during that time period until 1990 when PC 386s were starting to become popular, and we basically discovered a really amazing scrolling trick on the PC that could make the screen scroll as smoothly as a Nintendo could in hardware. And no one had done that before on a PC. In the nine years that the PC had been out, no one had done it.

6:39Can I ask, what do you mean? So when you're playing Doom, it's like these modern games. It was the first kind of modern game where you're walking around in this 3D space. You see someone, you could shoot them, and so on. It was very much like the ancestor or the grandfather of VR games even. It's the first one. So what do you mean scrolling trick? What was the leap in technology that allowed for this 3D stuff to happen? well the scrolling i'm talking about is for a 2d platform game like super mario brothers that's what really got id software started was with that and 17 games later we started making doom okay so yeah we made 17 games but before doom there was wolfenstein 3d and that was our first actual shooter first person shooter was wolfenstein 3d and that was in 1992 so that was the one that like really kick-started the first person shooter and then doom was a refinement and a redefinition of what a shooter should be and that's the one that a lot of people copied and why do you think like with doom there was just this unreal excitement for that game to be released and was Doom the first multiplayer game where you could play on different computers and shoot each other?

8:05Or what was the trick with Doom, you think, that got it so exciting? Everybody was frantic to have it. Well, no, Doom wasn't the first game that could be played across computers. That actually had happened, I'd say, probably in the late 70s. I didn't know that. Between using modems. Yeah, it's like using modems, Ataris and Apple II computers. They're turn-based games. They weren't high speed or anything because the computers were really slow back then. But there weren't too many multiplayer games because local area networks where you have a cable that plugs into the back of your computer, that was not even a thing until basically around the year when Doom came out, were people able to go and buy cards to put into the computer and start plugging in networks.

8:58So luckily, Doom arrived to take advantage of that. But it was the very first high-speed deathmatch shooter. But it was our fifth first-person shooter in 3D. This is kind of a technical question, but in order for two people to play peer-to-peer, so I'm on your computer, you're on your computer, the computers have to send information about what's happening graphically with these 3D graphics. That strikes me as the complicated part. Like, was there just, like, how many, how much data described a scene where I'm, where I am? Because that's what's going back and forth between the computers. So what's going back and forth between the computers back with Doom was only the key presses that you made.

9:41Because the other person has the same game running. So why would it need to send any data like graphics? It doesn't because they have the same graphics. So all they're doing is sending the keystrokes that say what their character should be doing on your computer. I see. So you know, each person knows where the other person is looking and where they're moving. And then it orients itself according to, you know, its first person. So whatever you're looking at, that's what you see. And you just keep track of, you know, if the person moves, if the person is shooting and so on. Yep. because what they're doing, like say they press the fire button, it goes across the network to your computer, and your computer goes, oh, this is the fire button pressed for that character in the world, make them fire.

10:26And so you would see them shoot their gun because it's taking that packet of data going, oh, that character pressed the fire button, and it makes them press the fire button in your game so they look like they're shooting. So when Doom came out, how long before you realized, oh my God, this is going to change my life? we actually didn't think about changing our life we thought we thought um this is gonna be a really good game when it comes out this will be the best game that we've ever played and you bought a ferrari testarossa yeah we did that was a little bit life-changing it was it was but we were we actually were making a lot of money from wolfenstein before that wolfenstein did really well but doom did go like nuclear it was it was really huge but you know it was a life-changing game but we weren't really interested in money we're interested in making the best games at the time and so where what were the challenges what were your biggest challenges when making doom well the challenges were really just exploring the game as we're really as we're developing it it's like we're making this 3d thing what does it look like well what can the engine do and what what's the definition, the data definition that the engine is giving us and then figure out how to make a level look good with that.

11:48But yeah, it was a lot of going, basically climbing over a wall. Like we hit a technical wall or a creative wall, we have to climb it and get over it because there's a problem. But overall, we did hit several walls during development, like, oh, geez, it's actually drawing the screen kind of slow. So John Carmack has to create this thing called the binary space partition, which is a data structure that lets the whole screen, like what you decide to draw on the screen is what determines how fast your computer is going to draw it. And he figured out the perfect amount of data that needed to be drawn on the screen, every single frame and nothing more than that.

12:27And that is what the BSP was important to do. And then it was like, how do we make a level that looks like no other game? developing an abstract level design style was critical to making a game that no one had ever seen before so yeah it was crazy and even at the beginning before we started working on the game we made a list of all the things that we would put in the game and then in the beginning of january before we started writing code we put out a press release telling everybody this is gonna be the best game in the world that we're going to make what factor does storytelling play like If I'm just playing a first-person shooter game and just monsters are coming out of the place and blah, blah, blah, it doesn't feel like how did you add kind of an aspect of storytelling so I feel like, oh, I'm interested in getting to the next level.

13:16I'm interested in exploring this new universe that I'm in. Well, back then, if you remember, we just got past the 80s and there was no story in the 80s. You just did whatever the game was. You just did it and figured it out, right? Right. Ultima, where, by the way, I didn't know you until I read the book that you worked at Origin Software. Ultima was my all-time favorite game in the 80s. That had a lot of storytelling. Yeah, because that was an RPG, but we weren't making RPGs. We were making a whole new thing. And so that whole new thing was a game where there isn't a big story. In fact, I think in Wolfenstein, we actually put a lot of story in the menu system.

13:55But yeah, we got rid of that. When we made Doom, we decided environmental storytelling is what was going to be interesting to players because they don't want to stop and read things. They want to explore and experience things. So as you start Doom, you're at the very first level. You're looking at things you've never seen on a computer before move smoothly in a way you've never seen before. So your brain is not worrying about story. Your brain is going, oh, my God, look at what this is. What's out the window? There's a sky out there. What's that fireball coming over here? You know, you're like seeing this stuff for the first time.

14:33And I put a dead character in there, a dead space marine. So you see like somebody was here and got wiped out by something. And so you're starting to see the marks that were made in the world as you explore. And so our environmental storytelling was the only story that we wanted to tell while the player was going through the game. And they're making the story happen as they're playing it. so we weren't concerned with uh text and and uh you know dialogue and all that kind of stuff it was just like just play it and experience it we'll give you breadcrumbs to show you what's going on and what happened here in this environment that you were you know that you were now in something happened before you got here and you're kind of discovering it as you go through i love that i totally forgot that you had that uh dead guy and that that does seem like an important component and it leaves this element of mystery.

15:26Plus, there was things to uncover on each level, like more equipment and guns, and there were secrets on each level. And then you described your experience when you first experienced multiplayer Doom. You logged on and played, I guess, John Carmack, your partner at the time, and you were blown away. And I think for me, I had that experience that the first time I sat down and played Doom, people were shooting at me my friends from across the room on our computers yep and that must have been really like i've never had this happen to me before in a game yeah and it's and i i guess games have never stopped having that since like yeah basically like the first player shooter has essentially become the default format for all gaming ever since and but now it's what's what's the difference now?

16:22The worlds are so much bigger and so much more complicated. I can't even... It took you I guess about a year to make all the levels and graphics of Doom. It must take a million years now to make a modern game. It does take a long time because the fidelity of what you see on the screen is unbelievably higher than it was in Doom. A texture, a layered texture in today's game is so many times the entire size of what doom was the whole game with all the levels and everything one texture is bigger than that many times so the data definition of games today a model with all the polygons and the super detailed skin that's on them it's it's so much data there's lighting with colors and shadows um and it all has to happen at a high frame rate.

17:19It's so complex nowadays. And you have to create this entire world. There's not just like eight levels. There's a million cities and people and rooms and houses and everything. For someone just starting out in gaming or making games now, is it even possible to reinvent the wheel and create a new game? Well, what you're talking about are these really massive games that do take, you know, 1 ,500 people to make and, you know, 100 million plus dollars to create. But that's not the only kind of game that's out there. You know, there's a lot of games made by just a few people, you know, or a small team of 12 or something.

18:04And those are indie games. And those are made by very small teams of creative risks. And they create new things that no one has seen before. And if they really catch on, there's a lot of copies of that type of idea until somehow it turns that that some of that idea hits into some really massive game um so yeah so you know say uh arma 3 had a really cool uh mod that was a battle royale type mod that turned into eventually fortnite all right and it's and it's because it came from a modder it came from an indie who decided to do something cool try something creative and eventually found its way into a giant, you know, triple A game.

18:48And what did he do that was creative? What made that interesting for that time? Well, one of the things about Deathmatch when you're playing a game with other players is there's a format that gets to be kind of repetitive. A lot of people are playing a game where you get in, there's maybe 30 people or less, and they're all shooting at each other. Maybe they're on teams, you know, but they're all just trying to shoot each other. And a lot of times they're really close proximity to each other because they spawn into a level that's not really massive. And for people who are just starting to play shooters, getting killed over and over again is not fun.

19:27It makes them not like playing shooters, right? And if you play Counter-Strike, that's probably the highest kill rate to spawn. You know, the shortest time to death is in probably Counter-Strike where you spawn and you're dead. and you spawn and you're dead because these people are such experts so um what what was uh brendan green had had invented this battle royale mode where you make a level that is so huge that putting 100 people in it is still hard to find them and what that does is is it makes it kind of a more casual death match experience where people have enough time to parachute down into the world where they kind of decide where they want to land and they go searching through houses and they're finding stuff people are killing each other in the world but they don't even know because they're still far away from them that they get some game time they get to play they get to experience the world maybe take some shots at somebody eventually they'll get killed and they'll learn something from the experience but then they'll respawn in another server and figure out how to do it even better but at least they feel like they're in the game and having fun and doing stuff and getting better and that's more of a casual approach to deathmatch versus throwing everybody into a room and you know everyone gets spawn killed constantly now with with the advent of uh chat gpt and and these uh language models do you think other you know ai based characters in the games will start to get more sophisticated and more conversational so you'll have a harder time you'll have a more interesting time interacting with them and a harder time identifying who's human or not?

21:05Well, yeah, right now there's even videos on YouTube that you can watch where somebody is using Unity and they show you in real time how they hook up a plugin and it's a speech-to-text plugin that then can get sent out to ChatGPT, which then will process that, come back with a response and turn that text back into speech. So you can be talking to a sidekick and just say whatever you want to them and they'll say something back based off of a chat GPT response. And that means that we're going to have talking characters in games where the dialogue is not programmed and burned into the game and you've exhausted everything they can say.

21:49It's going to be real time and it's going to be infinite. And so you can actually get into conversations with characters in games before long. And it's going to be a whole new world.

22:11look as a manager of people as an employer as an entrepreneur and as even an investor in startups i can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire the best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

22:54And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature. then promoted to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

23:32Doom spawned this entire generation, like almost 30 years of these first player shooting games. They got more and more sophisticated graphically as computers got faster. And now we're going to see this next level. level. Do you think, you know, what are, are you working on any games like that right now? Like I know you and your wife have Romero games. Like, are you making your plans? We're working on a first person shooter and we're using unreal five and we have a major publisher that we're working with. And that's all I can actually say about my game because it's a secret. Right. Are you going gonna use uh ai i can't i can't say what we're gonna use okay well back to the doom days like here you you you you and a bunch of guys you made doom it's a huge hit it's very exciting and it's doing something you love this must have been a dream come true because it's very rare to a do what you love for a living but b have it also be your company so you're actually making a lot of money from it.

24:35What was life like then? It was super, super great. I mean, I've traditionally have basically run my own company and id Software was my fourth company at that time. So it was what I like to do, which is come up with a design and make that design. And it was even better because I could work with a really great team of people. And that's so much better than working on your own. Like when you work with a team of people who are just excellent and you all work really well together. And that's why our games are so good is because our team work perfectly well together. You know, design wise, tech wise, art wise, just perfect.

25:18And, you know, we could push each other and get better and better and go farther. And we just kept on trying to push ourselves to make a better game and then a better game. And so the idea was like, all right, we're going to make Wolfenstein and it's going to come out and then we'll make the next game. It'll just wipe out Wolfenstein. We're just like, we're going to make the next game. It'll just beat everything we made before. Next, you know, so we're always in that mindset, like trying to make the very best thing based off of what we had done before, do it even better. And then, you know, at the time, gaming was bigger than this new burgeoning technology, the web.

25:58And yet web companies were being valued at ridiculous valuations. Even back in like 1996 or 1997, it was always ridiculous from the beginning. And I feel like gaming companies weren't valued as ridiculously, even though you had more users, in some ways better technology. It still is a fast-growing space. Like were you thinking of going public? Like id Software never went public. Were you thinking of going public or doing innovative business stuff? Nope, not at all. I mean, our focus was on everything being very small and focused. And we never would have gone public. That would have been like the antithesis of what our company was about.

26:45Like we didn't want to have to do anything for anybody else. We wanted to do what we wanted. And if somebody owns you, you do what they want. And that's not why we started a company. We started a company to come up with ideas and make those ideas happen. So that was the whole point. Selling our company would have been the, okay, we're kind of done. And we were offered a buyout in 1996. A company wanted to buy us for$100 million. And we turned it down. Wow. So you had 25 % of the company. You would have made$25 million. And not a lot of people turn away that kind of money. uh were you were you confident that you were gonna make that anyway even if you kept going or what was what was your what was the back and forth at the time well we basically were in such a um a certain space where we were all focused on trying to finish our current game and we'd had such a rough time developing the game from the very beginning and now we're like in the last seven months of of creating and releasing it that we didn't want anything to take away from our focus on the game so we just we just told him we can't even think about this offer right now we're too focused on finishing this game so we can't even talk about it so we just kept on developing and this was this was quake the game you're working on was quake yeah yeah and which was sort which was like a 10 times more sophisticated doom yeah definitely and basically the the rise of games sort of had a moore's law like essentially every 18 months games looked so much more sophisticated than the games made 18 months earlier and like quake was to doom how kind of gordon moore was describing the evolution of computers basically um and then it was at that point that there was I guess you guys were all working so hard so together and you were in your 20s things are bound to there are bound to be problems what was going on that eventually led to you uh uh leaving id well we made a decision um in November of 1995 and the time when the quake engine was finally done um we made a decision to just not do any more r &d on the game which was required for us to create a 3D experience that would support the design idea, the game design idea that we'd had for a year at that time.

29:12And because it was such an arduous development process to get that engine made, when we made the decision to how to go forward with the design of the game, it was basically we need to just kind of make a thing that we already know how to make and not try to invent a new type of design. And for me, that's what the exciting part was. Someone else already had fun making the tech part. For me, the exciting design part was yet to come. And it was like, no, we can't do that because we've had such a hard time. So for me, it was just like, well, I'm not here to just keep pumping out the same kind of thing.

29:50So I'm going to leave after the game is over. And now you had seen like a year or so earlier, your company being valued at$100 million, your stake being valued at$25 million. And were you happy with the settlement terms that you and your partners reached when you left the company? Well, the settlement terms were already written in an agreement from years earlier. So we just basically abided by the agreement that we had, which was a buy-sell agreement. So if somebody leaves, the company has to buy their shares. And the valuation of the shares is based off the previous year's profits, basically, or the income of the company.

30:28So that's how that worked. It's funny though, because I bet the company trying to buy your company was multiplying the last year's profits and coming up with a valuation. So was there ever regret that you didn't kind of, once you left, was there regret that you maybe you should have taken that offer? Nope. No, not at all. Again, like when we were making games, it wasn't about the money. It was about what we were making. And that's what we were doing was fun and exciting and interesting. So that's, I have, I've never gone back to that going like, I should have gotten more money. Not at all. You know, I was happy to be there.

31:05I was lucky to be part of the company and to work with those people. And, and I don't ever go back. You've evolved into like, you've had several game companies, like since, since Doom, what are your favorite, what are the favorite projects that you've worked on? Well, since Doom, I really loved working on Hexen. And, you know, Heretic and Hexen were really fun, you know, shooters. They had a medieval design to them. Those are really cool. I actually worked on an MMO for about four years. It wasn't released. It was very quiet. But it was really interesting to work on. It looked really, really great.

31:45Really liked learning about mobile development, mobile games, building mobile games. Let me ask you about mobile games. So when mobile started, it felt like computers were back in the 80s all of a sudden. And it reminded me of arcade. Like Angry Birds is essentially an arcade game style game. And that sold or that distributed around 100 million copies. So what was it about Angry Birds you think that got people so excited, even though it's like 10 steps behind in terms of computer gaming? Well, that's easy. It's like, why is Candy Crush so massive? You know, it's because there are so many people playing games that are not hardcore games.