#681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode

27:02And I'd love for you to explain two things for people listening. Number one, when you're saying us, who is us? And why do you think you guys were able to create this breakthrough instead of perhaps other teams? Or were other people simply not looking at it the same way you were in terms of optimizing for speed and using that as like the primary driver behind the development? Okay. So us is id Software, which is a company that I co-founded in 1991. We started in 1990, but we officially started the company in 1991. And that's me and John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack. Adrian and John are not related.

27:46And it was just us four that founded this company and in 1991 which is the first year that we were officially in our own office basically to make games full-time all day long at our own company which is a major achievement for us because like everybody we have jobs like we had day jobs and but we we had created a game in our off time and it did really well and allowed us to basically start the company formally. We were doing side-scrolling games at that time using a technique that no one had ever used before on a PC. It hadn't been discovered for nine years since the introduction of the PC until John Carmack figured out how to get pixel-smooth scrolling horizontally on a PC.

28:36Can you give an example just for people listening who may not know the terminology? I know it seems self-explanatory, but a side-scrolling game, what would be a well-known side-scrolling game so people can visualize? Yeah, Super Mario Brothers is a side-scrolling game, and there were thousands of them throughout the 80s. But on a computer, on a PC, and the PC came out in August of 1981, on the PC, no side-scrolling game could move a dot at a time horizontally. It always moved by eight pixels. It just chunked across the screen. So it was very chunky and blocky when it moved. And that's because even moving the whole screen itself took a lot of time.

29:19But to move it by a pixel was kind of unimaginable because there was no way to control that at a high speed. So when John made the breakthrough in 1990 to figure out how to do that horizontal movement, like a Nintendo, like Super Mario Brothers on a Nintendo, how to do that on the PC. That was basically the moment that id Software was born because it was like, we are doing this in our own company. Oh my God, no one has ever seen this before. I'm just blown away. And when we finally started the company, I think it was like half a year after that, when we started it in 1991, we made 13 games that year and we made them at high speed.

30:01a game took us two months but we would make two games at a time we were so busy the first 3d game that we made was called hover tank one and that was just to get our feet wet in 3d because we knew that 3d is really where games are going eventually because at that point there were very few 3d games and they were very very slow none of them made a wall look like there were bricks on it or rocks or whatever. It was always some kind of solid color or some little pattern of dots, two different colored dots to make it look like another color that doesn't really exist. It's called dithering when you do that.

30:40It wasn't really advanced. So our focus was to make the screen appear like other games, except make it so we can move through the level smoothly, not in chunks, and to be able to turn in any direction and do that at a very high frame rate because no one had ever done that before and that was the focus of hover tank one and that game was made in two months that was john's big breakthrough was just creating the architecture of that engine and getting the rendering for 3d going at that speed 13 games in one year i know nothing about game development But I imagine with a relatively small crew, that sounds like a lot of games.

31:29What do you think enabled you guys to do that, that maybe was not present for other people working on games who had much lower output? What were the ingredients or the approaches of the principles, anything at all, maybe just tolerance for sleep deprivation? I don't know. What were the ingredients that allowed you guys to do that? So the way that we could achieve this game development at such high speed back then was that when we got together as Ed Software, we had already individually, other than Adrian, who just learned how to put pixels on a computer screen, but he was a fine artist on paper already for his whole life.

32:10each one of us four had 10 years of game development experience like all the time and so we'd already made dozens of games each tom hall who was our creative director he was a programmer an assembly language programmer he made tons of adventure games he did action arcade games in assembly language so he was already a very fluent programmer john carmack of course coded since he was a kid. I had coded since I was 11. So we'd been making games for 10 years and the amount of games that we'd made was dozens each. And when you make that many games that quickly, you learn how to scope and scoping is basically defining exactly what that game should be and not adding to it.

33:00Subtracting from it, most likely, if you're going to try and get it done. So scoping is like, this is the amount of time that I have. This is probably the kind of game that we can make and how big we can make it. Let's do that. And as you get closer and closer to that deadline, you start cutting things away that you don't need to hit that deadline. When we did it before meeting each other, when we did it on our own time, we set ourselves our own goals for finishing our own games. And we got really good at scoping. So when we got together and we saw what we could do together, we also scoped together how big those games should be.

33:37And we had to deliver within two months. So we had to know how good every one of us is, how fast we can all work, and then scope a game to that limitation. And because we had 10 years of game dev experience, we could just slam games out super fast, come up with ideas, bam, start doing the graphics, doing the animation, programming the engine. making the levels, making the level editors to create levels, you name it, all the tools that are in the background that no one sees to build the game data, put it together in packages that the game can access. There's so much technology that goes on before you get to gameplay programming, but we were used to doing that already for 10 years.

34:19So it was not just the experience that we had, but it was also the focus that we had. We were just so happy to be able to make games all day long as a job, which is really just like the luckiest position ever. So we could focus on doing that. We could scope our games down really, really well. We knew what to cut when it was time to start cutting stuff if we get we're getting closer to our deadline. And because there was no Internet back then and no one had cell phones, there was complete and total focus because our phone never rang. There was a phone on the wall and that thing never rang. So there's no interruptions.

34:59Nobody's coming to the house and knocking on the door and interrupting our thoughts. So we could just focus for 12 hours a day at least and just code, design, you name it, constantly. to build on the emphasis you put on scoping, which I think is certainly applicable to so many different projects, maybe all projects. I mean, that certainly applies to book projects and so on that I've been involved with. Podcasts, right? Thematically choosing where you go and where you will not go. I was doing some research and if I'm taking us into a dead end or a cul-de-sac that doesn't make sense, you can tell me.

35:38But I read a discussion of different, I suppose, principles at id Software. And a comment came up, which was no prototypes, which was attributed to you and talks about you guys being your own best testing team and so on. And I was wondering if, can't believe everything you read on the internet, of course, but if this is true, if you could elaborate on what you mean by that. So to get that many games done that fast, you can't be playing around with making prototypes. Prototypes are like, let's test this and see if it works. And let's test that and see it. There's no testing. It's like, here's the game that we're going to make.

36:19Here are all the characters that go in the game. Here's how many levels we have. Here are all the pieces of the levels that need to be drawn. Here's all the animations that need to be created. All the tools that need to be programmed, all that stuff. there's no way to do any prototyping if you're going to get done in two months with four people so we had no prototypes we knew how to code already so there was like because we can just see it in our minds we can just visualize it we communicated with each other just going okay it's gonna look like this on the screen we're gonna see mountains in the background on the foreground we're gonna have another plane and we're gonna have trees there and we're gonna have up in the trees we're gonna have these characters and their ai is gonna be limited to blah blah blah, blah, blah.

36:58And so we just kind of describe what the game is. And we can do that within, let's say an hour. Yeah. At the very beginning of a new game in one hour, we can describe that game extensively for what we're going to create in the next two months. There wasn't like, well, then we have to figure out this. It was like, there was no figuring it out. We're just making it. So there weren't prototypes. It was just, we're making the game Later on with bigger games that we could spend more time on, we could do R &D, but we still knew what we were making. We just needed to figure out how to make that part of it.

37:36It wasn't like we'd build a piece of the game and then throw it away. We would build this functionality because that was the original design. And if we found out that that functionality actually is a detriment to the game itself, to the soul of the game, then we would remove it. but it wasn't like we're prototyping it. We're making that piece of technology in the game. It was going to be part of the game, but we find out that that is not where the game is really. And then we pull it out. So let me ask a, I'm sure a naive question, but if you are going to ensure that, for instance, you can take an element like that and remove it later, if it is not contributing to it, reinforcing the soul of the game.

38:21Do you need to think about that design spec in advance so you don't end up with a piece you want to remove, but that is sort of interdependent with other elements in the game? In other words, does the architecture, how you approach it need to be decided in advance so that you have the capability of removing something in that way? When we're coming up with the design of the game, let's say in this case, It's Wolfenstein 3D. The inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D was a 1981 game called Castle Wolfenstein. And it had a lot of really great gameplay features in it that we wanted to put in Wolfenstein 3D, such as when you shoot a guard, you could drag them and hide them around a wall.

39:04You could search their bodies. You could go up to storage chests and try and open them and maybe shoot them open. But that makes noise. It might call the guards. all these little pieces of design that we wanted to replicate but replicate it in 3d because castle wolfenstein was just a top-down game from 1981 it wasn't 3d it didn't move the screen didn't move around it was just like every other characters are marching around on the screen and that's it like they might leave the screen and disappear but your screen was static like many games back in the 80s so when we were making wolfenstein 3d we start programming in the dead body dragging and the searching and that was the design so we already designed that we're doing it we already got the code in to do it and we're now doing it we're playing the game and we're going you know shooting somebody going up and searching them and as we're playing the game it feels like that doesn't match now what this game feels like because the original game it was perfect it matched perfectly with the way that you you moved around and the feeling of the original game was more of a stealth game.

40:13So Castle Wolfenstein was really the first stealth game made. It was an action arcade game, but it was really primarily about stealthing around and secretly getting out of this castle and escaping it. And we were doing that in our game as well. It was a recreation, but when we got to the point where we're doing some of the similar actions that were not just run and gun, we knew that that is not what this game's strength is. The strength of this game is doing this never before seen high speed rendering and high speed movement through this maze. And no one had seen that before in slowing you down and making the player stop to do something else was anti the focus of the game, right?

40:54So the focus became like, this is the soul of the game. The soul of this game is high speed run and gun. Anything that stops you needs to come out. so even though we programmed in that stuff we pulled it out because it wasn't true to the new spirit of the game the one that we were making it was like the original game's idea was transferred to our game but all of the details of that those two games are different the way that you shoot enemies in the original castle wolfenstein was not the way that you do it in our game our game is much more fluid and simple and easy to control and very very fast and so when we started focusing our design on that part of it, we started removing everything that took away from that speed.

41:38But there were some things that we had to leave in, like to open a door and wait for the door to open. That's actually suspense that we need in the game. If we didn't have any doorways, you're just running through a maze, just like blowing everything away constantly nonstop, but you have no suspense really. So those doors provided the suspense. One of the original game's focuses was the suspense of wondering if you've made a noise and alerted the guards to come after you, or if they heard you trying to open a chest in the next room and you can see them in the next room and you're just like trying to open a chest.

42:09And if you shoot it, then they're coming in the room and they're going to try and arrest you. So we had a new focus of our design and that's why we start removing and changing it.

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43:22So let me build on Wolfenstein 3D. And I have a question from a friend of mine, because I mentioned to him that we were going to be speaking. His name is Alon Lee. He's the co-founder, co-creator of Exploding Kittens, not just the single game, but the company that produces many, many tabletop games and card games. And he said, holy crap, amazing. Ask him how the pressure of promising the world a game when he didn't have one somehow cajoled the cells of his body to do the impossible and will one into existence. And we went back and forth a little bit. And he said, let me know if you need any links to early Romero development stories.

43:59That guy literally did the impossible. So could you expand on what he means by promising the world a game when he didn't have one and how that cajoled the cells in your body. I mean, that may not be the right way to put it, but to do the impossible, just for people who don't have any of that background. We made Wolfenstein 3D. For me personally, that was my 87th game that I'd made right after Wolfenstein 3D. We made Spear of Destiny. That took us two months. That was number 88. There was a game called Shadowcaster that used our technology that we had made. So all the tools that I wrote, any gameplay code menu code all the stuff we license our technology and give it to another company and then they make a game that's game number 89 it's called shadowcaster and then game number 90 not that i even was counting back then it was just like next game you know we're gonna make the next game at the time at the very end of 1992 after making all of these games and really when wolfenstein came out everything changed because now we have high speed 3d no one had ever seen this before.

45:08Ultima Underworld was out and it was a really great role-playing game set in 3D, but the 3D let you turn your head and look up and down and all that stuff, which really slowed the game down. So it wasn't a high speed game. You had stepped slowly through a dungeon, but it was 3D. It was like the 3D is now happening at this point. Like if it's not ours, it's probably slow, but it is 3D because the world is now going to become 3D. But it's hard to get to that point. Our focus was speed. That was where we wanted to live. So with the next game, we had had such massive success with Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny that we jumped basically to the front of the industry with those games.

45:55Like immediately, bam, we are now in the lead because nobody was making this and this was the new thing high speed 3d is the future we're there first and we need to keep our lead the planning for our next game after that and then our planning was happening at the end of 1992 was the creation of the engine that was a wolfenstein plus engine after spear of destiny it led to shadowcaster but that engine's architecture was too limiting for what we had in mind for our next game. So that's why we licensed that technology out and decided we're not using that 3D engine architecture anymore. And so at that point, we'd made four games in full 3D, high speed, all that.

46:42For our fifth game, we needed a new architecture and to come up with a list of all of the things that this new game would do. And we were thinking like, we need to go beyond anything we've ever seen this next game and this was the only time we ever did this the next game needs to be the best game we could imagine playing that there can't be a better game in the world than this game what would that game have so we made a list a bullet point list of all the things that this new game should have obviously it needs to have light and dark has to have light levels it needs to be like spooky and he's have bright areas which we had no lighting in wolfenstein it was just full bright you know like the lights were always on so it's like we need lighting control we need height control we need to be able to go up down up and down stairs we need to have giant tall rooms really cramped rooms we need walls to be drawn at any angle which no game in history had ever done at that point where you can have a wall that's at an angle and like a wall that's jagged and all that every game before this next game was basically a maze game and when you look at a maze from above it's just 90 degree wall terms it's like those classic mazes labyrinths you know where you're just like drawing a line through the maze that's what every single game from the 70s until that point looked like.

48:12Wolfenstein 3D was a high-speed maze game. It was the same thing, 90-degree corners all over the place. So this next game would break that barrier. So we're going to have what we call non-orthogonal walls that could create a space that no one had seen before. We were going to make this game multiplayer so people could play with each other and against each other for the first time because right then local area networks were just barely like they were just barely starting to sell network cards and the cables and all that stuff in all the computer retail stores so we would make a game that would take advantage of a network if you ever had it and it would take advantage of the modem to play against or with your friends and then we would also make the game open so people could change the game to do whatever they wanted and make it their own.

49:08Basically, they could make levels, they could make new sounds, new graphics, they could change the whole game basically in mod it. It's called mods modification. So we would open it up to modders who wanted to create a new experience using the tech that we created. And we would also give away the first piece of this game for free into the world. And you don't have to pay for it. You just get it. And if you like it, you had fun. if you want more then you buy it from us that's called shareware we had this whole list of everything we're going to do and we were very confident that we could do it because we already own john was already planning the architecture of the engine he already was very confident in how he was going to be able to do that and at that point we were just on top of the world like we had just conquered everything with wolfenstein 3d and with the spirit of destiny and so we're just like invincible feeling.

50:00So what we did was we took our two week vacation at the end of 1992. And we came back in January of 93, right at the beginning of the year. And we're going to start working on this new game that we called doom. And we decided for some reason that we were going to put out a press release and tell everybody what's going to be in this game. And it will be the greatest game that earth has seen and we did we put a press release out before we even start writing the game we put a press release out saying this will be the best game anyone has ever played on a pc and this is what's going to be in it and it's a breakthrough in game technology and all this crazy stuff so we needed to fulfill that and so we started working on it okay crazy crazy yeah it's nuts.

50:57There are, for instance, as thought exercises, some companies that will write press releases in advance of developing a technology product to help hone their focus on various elements. But that is for internal use only. You guys actually put out the press release. What was the conversation around the press release? Because it's a smart team. There was some thought, I'm sure, that went into that decision. What was the logic, if there was one, behind putting out the press release? I don't know why we would have put out a press release. It doesn't make any sense. But I think that what happened is Wolfenstein 3D came out.

51:41Remember, at this point, we were so used to making games extremely fast. With Wolfenstein, that was the very first game that we could make in any amount of time that we wanted. There was no deadline on Wolfenstein. We made the shareware version of Wolfenstein in four months and uploaded it. So there was four of us making Wolfenstein. We had Kevin Cloud in there for the very last month to add graphics and do a bunch of other cool stuff. But we were very fast and we didn't have a deadline on that game and it released in May, the shareware. So we had the rest of 1992 just building up this world domination of Wolfenstein.

52:24There was an internet top 100 list of games every week. And Wolfenstein was at the top for the entire year after it came out. It was huge. We were just on top of the world, but after we released Spear of Destiny, It came out, I believe, in September of 1992, and no one had heard anything from us in three months, which back then with these accelerated schedules and people wanting to know what we're doing, like we're finally now doing interviews with places. We're doing radio interviews. We have the local TV station in our office interviewing us and recording our screens. We have them interviewing our publishers.

53:05Like people wanted all kinds of information about what we were doing. So I think at that time it was like, let's put out a press release telling people what we're going to start working on because everyone is asking us constantly what we're doing next. So let's just do a press release and just like it's equal information for everyone. It's not like there's an exclusive with this one computer magazine, you know, computer gaming world or something. There's no exclusive. It was here, everybody, this is what we're working on. And now we have to dive back down in the ocean and start making it like, don't bug us, you know?

53:36So I think the press release is probably to let everyone know what we're going to do next. It's incredible. All right. So I want to take a pause here just for a second to ask you about, tell me if I'm pronouncing this correctly, hyperthymesia. Am I getting that right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So could you just define this for folks? And my question is also, to what extent this has been an asset and to what extent this has had maybe a shadow side or been detrimental in any way? So if you could just explain what it is and then hop into that. Yeah. Hyperthiamesia is like a memory disorder where the person with hyperthiamesia has a superior autobiographical recall.

54:21And it ranges from really good recall of significant events and things that happened in your life that most people would forget over time. With hyperthymesia, you never forget those things. They just don't go away. You wouldn't know it if you're young, but as you get older and you start to lose decades of memories because you don't use them and they're not significant anymore. Hyperthymesia, you don't lose them. They're always there. And the extreme end of hyperthymesia is where you remember every second of your life since you got hyperthymesia. And that could be born with, but sometimes it is an induced memory disorder.

55:04So people have been hit in the head with a baseball and boom, they have hyperthymesia and they have like, they record every second of their life, which gets to be kind of insane because everything that you've ever done is always present in your brain. And having all of these thoughts, like all of these memories constantly, it's a big hindrance, I guess, in just normal operation, like just living. My hyperthymesia is I remember basically everything that has happened to me, mostly all the significant, all the significant stuff and things that are connected to it. So like music and movies and programming and games and that kind of stuff.

55:49I would remember basically all of that stuff through all the years. And I would, you know, things that I cared about, I would remember those things. I would remember the names of people who wrote games when those games were published, the year that they were published, all of that stuff. So I would remember everything. So it makes it a lot easier to just say, hey, what happened in 1983 when you were doing blah, blah, blah? It's like, well, I was actually programming this stuff, but I didn't have my computer yet. So I had to do it on paper in the kitchen and, you know, it was a soy pussy or I could tell people what I did whenever.

56:24Have you had that to the best of your knowledge since birth or was that induced at some point? I think I've had it mostly since birth, but it got stronger when I started to learn how to code at really high speed after getting the computer in the house. I was learning so much so fast. I actually had to take breaks from learning because my head was just packed full of stuff and it needed to settle. And I had to stop myself from learning for a day or two before I could jump back in and fill my head full of stuff again. and due to the nature of what I was learning in the early 80s which is learning every byte of memory in an entire computer the knowledge of language wasn't as important as the knowledge of hardware at that time so I needed to learn all of the hardware of the computer that I was programming and then the languages on top of that and then start creating off of the top of that information so that was also a forcing function to induce memory of everything basically that was happening.

57:29I have one family member who has almost certainly, I never heard this term before, but hyperthymesia. He can recall just about every fact, every experience, significant or trivial from his past. So he's much older than I am, but can recall the seating arrangement in every class that he was ever in, every word of every foreign language he's ever studied, et cetera. And what I've seen is that that is a superpower on so many levels, but also as an example has been challenging for him because negative experiences, arguments, let's just say slights, kind of moral injuries, all of these things are also as ever present for him.

58:18And it's very challenging. And I'm wondering if you have seen any, I don't want to say trade-offs, but challenges related to having such an enhanced memory besides what you've mentioned. I'd say that's totally true for a lot of people that have that. For me, the, say, negative slash hindrance would be that I think a lot of things are similar in importance, even if they aren't. So I would think that this possibly insignificant detail is more important than anyone else would think. And the reason why I think it is because the way it's connected to other things. It's like, if that didn't happen, then these other things wouldn't have happened as well.

59:00So yeah, so it's like not knowing like, well, say for this book, what's important, when it isn't important. But it was really important. Then I went to the heavy metal concert with this person. Has that been challenging in group environments, like team environments, where you're sort of trying to weigh the relative significance, but because in your mind, some of these elements that might not be deemed important by other people are sort of importance adjacent, so you weigh them more heavily. Has that been challenging in team environments at all? Not really, because I think the most helpful part of that is just knowing what has been made before, like what games and game design techniques, programming techniques, approaches to certain control issues like that stuff.

59:50Luckily, just having played so many games over so long a time, that has been really helpful to be able to recall solutions or other approaches people have taken that we don't need to research and figure it out again, like reinvent the wheel. It's like this game in 1984 did this on an Atari 800, and we might be able to do that on the PC or something like that. So it was more helpful to solving issues or being able to make sure that we're not replicating failed designs of the past, you know, and that we were always creating new things I hadn't seen before, which was really helpful. How important or how much of a contributor Or do you think to the ongoing success of the team was having two games and therefore two options for things to work on at any given point in time?

1:00:38I would say that having two games at a time, it did not impact really anything because we knew what we were doing on both those games. One of those games came out a month before the other game, right? So that was like the priority. but what we did was kind of we divided our time into two roughly eight hour days or seven hour days so we would go from 10 to six on one game and then six to two on the next game so we just all shift because it was really important to be in sync with each other when we needed to like ask questions or whatever we were all on a project and it wasn't like oh you're just making a level for the other game well i guess i can't ask you you know it was like we were always in sync so we would shift to the next game and start working on that and then the next day we start back on the other game and the reason why we're doing eight hours and eight hours or seven and seven was because we loved making games like we wanted to get these games done we're learning a ton it was super fun being together and making these games we'd be laughing it would be new things that we're inventing.

1:01:51It was just like, it was like being in a lab where things are going right all the time. So it was super fun and we could do those hours without a problem. And we did it for a whole year. All of 1991 was spent with all the hours that we were awake working on games, two games at a time, at least because we were in sync at the same time when we shifted projects, we didn't get creative block with something. It's like, ah, I can't even figure out what I'm going to do with this level. I'm going to just make a level for the other game. We would help each other if anyone got stuck. It's like, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do for this one section.

1:02:27And I'd like, well, put a meat grinder in there or something. And it's like, oh, yeah, good idea. You know, we would help each other. But most of the time, we already knew what we were doing. I mean, we kind of pre-thought everything out before we started working on these games. And we could do it at really high speed. So we just executed because that was the really important part. We got the ideas and we have lots of experience. It was all about the execution of our ideas and in sync. And luckily, because we had such a small team of four people, that could happen very fast. The bigger the team gets, the harder and longer it takes to make one vision come out the right way.

1:03:03But with four people that have very distinct jobs to do, it works really, really well. Doom, we paused at the press release. You go on to create Doom. When did you, after its release, or maybe in the course of developing it, realize, holy shit, this is a monster, or it's going to be a monster. This is going to be bigger than even our grandest press releases could have predicted. Was there a moment or an event, a day, anything that comes to mind? Several things happened during the development that were interesting in that respect. we knew at the very beginning of making the game that it was going to be the greatest game that we've ever played because that was our focus of you know like why we're making the game so we already like knew it was going to be awesome and the best game that we had ever played that was already like a given but while we're making the game we got to a point where Tom Hall left the team in August of 1993.

1:04:10And we brought in Sandy Peterson to replace him doing level design work. I basically took over as the game designer of the game. And that's how we started stripping a lot of stuff out of the game, like lives and score and getting rid of items that didn't matter. Really streamlining the design. Sandy was making levels. And at this point, the design language for the level creation was figured out because I needed to solve that problem with what are our levels going to look like that maximizes the use of our technology that no one has seen and create spaces no one has ever experienced before in a way that is kind of drastic and not a little bit better than Wolfenstein 3D.

1:04:58It needed to be drastically better than Wolfenstein 3D. So that took some work to kind of come up with this abstract level design style when that happened and we started to you know make stuff it's like okay this is looking really great sandy peterson immediately started picking up that style because i like would sit and talk to him at the very beginning about like here's what is important about using this technology that makes us stand out and so he started putting those elements in his levels and when i got to run sandy's levels not mine because i when i make my own levels i know everything that's in it so i'm just like testing to make sure it looks good it's working well the enemies are doing what i want them to do the pacing is correct when combat happens is when i want it to happen when exploration happens i have the area cleared for the player to do that all of these things but when i play sandy's levels for the first time i know nothing about it and i remember the first time when i started playing these levels i knew what people were going to feel like finally right right and it was like wow this is scary you know i'm like going through this level and i'm hearing these monsters moving around i don't know where they're at but i don't like that they're coming for me somehow and it was great because i finally got to kind of feel in a game experience way what people would feel when they're playing it now at that point i'm so used to the technology that it's like whatever even though it changed everything like no one had seen a screen that looked this way.

1:06:30For us, it was just like another day at work, whatever. So I was just focused on the experience part of it. So that to me was really fun to play a level I didn't make and experience in a little way what people were going to feel like. And then we got to a point where it's like early October and I, for some reason, look at that press release again and look at the bullet points because I'm like, as a producer type person, I need to make sure we're putting everything in the game. We didn't promise stuff that we didn't deliver on and we need to mostly get that bullet point list done. And I saw that we were missing multiplayer.

1:07:06Like we didn't even think about it. We thought about it in January. But we get to the point of the game where like the game is mostly done now and it's early October and I'm like, whoa. Yeah. There's no multiplayer. So I go and I tell John, I'm like, you will not believe this. There's no multiplayer. Remember, we're going to do that. And he's like, Oh, yeah. So John's a genius. And so John figured out kind of immediately in his brain was like, Oh, I'll just solve it with a peer to peer networking model. So he figured out how he's going to bolt multiplayer onto the game and make it feel like it's been there the whole time.

1:07:51and so it just took him a few hours you know he just needed to learn how to get network packets going between computers over our network and then how to get the game like what data does he send between computers he's trying to minimize the amount of data so it's fast and he learned within just hours the techniques that he needed to do and it took a couple days to hammer out some of the the speed issues but it was pretty fast before i'd seen him shoot a character he had two computers going and he's moving a character on one screen the other one you see the guy running around inside the level it's like oh my god like we've never seen this before in any game and then you shoot him and the guy dies and it's like oh my god this is going to be the most fun thing in the world and I go back into my office and I get that code running on my machine and we just start shooting each other.

1:08:45It's like, this is nuts. Oh my God. And then I'm imagining the level I'm currently working on and seeing two people fighting in another room from my viewpoint. And I'm just like, there's nothing like this on earth. Oh my God, this is changing everything, you know? So I got so excited at that point. So that was another, holy shit, this is going to be so different and blow everybody away and change everything. So multiplayer was when I saw that, I mean, and this is October. And so that was really amazing. And then the lead up to when we're about to release the game, we're not online talking to anybody, but somehow people knew were getting close.

1:09:28We were starting to get random phone calls at the office. We have people online coming up with, there's like these weird subcultures going on in Usenet around Doom and people creating games based on Doom being the best game that could ever be made and then them like creating a really crude version of that and calling it smashing pumpkins into small piles of future debris because that was such a funny thing. We put it as a cheat code in doom just there was a lot of internet activity around the fact that we're about to release the game and we never said anything so it was really weird that the world was starting to go nuts before we launched the game and that was the third like okay but up until that point every game that we made we would put it out and then our plan is to just wipe that game out with the next one like the next game is going to just destroy that thing So it's like, boom, game's out next.

1:10:27So we never thought that Doom was going to be living actively for 30 years, which is this year. It'll be 30 years old. Stuff is being made for the game on a daily basis all the time. And one of the greatest mods that has been created was released not that long ago this year. Incredible. It's called myhouse.wad. People are still making insane stuff for the game. but we never thought that was going to happen. We just thought we're going to make a really great game and the next game's going to wipe it out. You know, like that was it. That was the goal. Let's hop back to something that you mentioned in passing that you left in 1996.

1:11:06Could you tell the story of how that came to be, how you ended up leaving the company? We started making the last game that I had worked on and did software. It's named Quake. And we started working on Quake in 1995 as a team. John had already kind of started planning the technology at the end of 94 when we were finishing Doom 2. He was exploring the technology for the next game, which was going to be a massive, massive jump in technology. And so when we started as a team in 1995 to make Quake, it was like making Doom, right? It was like, here's this giant mountain we got to climb again. There's a lot of tools.

1:11:45There's a lot of foundational work that has to get done. And let's do it. So we just started working on it. and the design of the game also was like we started making quake and we couldn't because the tech wasn't going to be there but this now was going to be the tech that we could use to make quake which is why we named it quake so it's like we're going to do that game that game was a medieval 3d adventure with combat it wasn't a first person shooter because that never existed at that time. It was going to be a 3D action medieval. We're going to recreate our D &D adventures that we had and put it in full 3D in a real full 3D game.

1:12:29So that was the design. As I'm making the level editor and kind of experimenting with 3D, there's a lot of other stuff going on at the company because Doom changed the planet. And then Doom 2 again was even better than the original Doom. It was crazy because we only had at the time when we shipped Doom, where it was only six of us that shipped Doom. And on top of that, we had three other people in the company to handle business, all of the managerial type stuff and all of the technical support type stuff that was going to happen. That's incredible. It was a very small company. and working on Quake, we got our team up to 10 eventually to make Quake.

1:13:13And still with the other three people, I think on top of that, the company was 13 people when Quake launched. So we had like a very small team and we had the world coming at us. And there was so much to deal with Doom's impact and the articles, the hint guides, the strategy guides, the other projects that we had going, that it took up a lot of time, which wasn't bad because at that time, there was a lot of technology creation for Quake going on. And I was creating the level editor for the level design team to start experimenting with. And it was really just two other people on the team doing level design in full 3D for the first time.

1:13:59And that was Sandy Peterson and American McGee. So it was still pretty small. We still had more people eventually to hire onto the team to get us to 10 by the time Quake was shipped. But at this time, there was probably seven of us. It was pretty small. During that time, the design of that medieval game just kept getting stronger and stronger. It was getting reinforced with more things that could be done to reinforce the feeling of that medieval world and do new things that we hadn't seen a game do at that time in lots of different ways. So it was becoming a really strong design, really strong, really cool.

1:14:41And the problem is that we were spending all of that year kind of spinning our wheels, doing 3D levels, little pieces of levels and stuff. But we didn't have the gameplay programmer that could actually do anything in the game because the engine wasn't ready. Like we're waiting for that engine to actually happen so we can start using it. John, can I pause you for one second? Just for people who hear this word but may not understand how it applies within game development, could you just define engine? In simple terms, what is an engine? So at this point in our game development, we had created this term called engine.

1:15:19and the engine is what drives the game. And that is the thing that puts the images up on the screen. It's the thing that loads files and saves files. It's the thing that takes input in and makes gameplay happen. It's what makes sound come out and music come out of the game. And so the core functionality that is needed for a game to run without any of the graphics and any of the actual sound effects themselves, The core technology is called an engine because you can put the data in and it will come out. It will play. You put sound effects in and then use gameplay code. You define when those will play and they come out.

1:16:02And so it's an entire set of code that any game can be made from. So it's called an engine. And we pioneered the idea of an engine in 1990 with our original Commander Keen game. We started calling it an engine even before we launched Keen. So we started that idea in 1990. Now we're talking about 1995, which we've made a lot of games since then, since 1990, 20-something games. So with Quake, we're creating a new engine, one that can do full 3D, one that has a completely different look to it, has more advanced gameplay code. Everything about it was different. when we got to november of that year the engine was finally ready but the team was burnt out because of the massive effort that it took to create the technology and the fact that they'd been making a lot of data that couldn't be used because the engine changed so much that what they made was too primitive the engine could do more than what they had created because every time we were making stuff for the game, the engine would be at a certain point of speed and we're modifying our levels to make it run well at that speed.

1:17:18But that means it's a little too primitive because the engine got faster and faster and faster. And by the time we reached November, we could render much more interesting views in the world, but we didn't build those worlds yet. We were slowly inching towards them. So it was a lot of like, wow, all the stuff I worked on can't really use it. So people were burned out from that. And the team did not feel like they were up to the task of doing research on a new style of game, which is what Quake was going to be. It was not going to be a first person shooter. They basically suggested that we should just make a shooter because we know how to do it.

1:17:59We can nail it. This is brand new tech. That's awesome already. If we just do a shooter, we can all just like ship a game and take a rest kind of thing, you know and i was just like no we need to do this the whole world knows what this game is it's in magazines like everybody knows what quake is and this is like what i'm all about is we're pushing our technology to the limit let's push design to the limit too let's go beyond what we've done before and make something new people haven't seen i wanted to make this 3d game experience something no one had seen before that goes beyond our first person shooter and so they just really didn't want to do another unknowable mountain to climb.

1:18:41Like, when is it going to be defined? You know, like we don't have a scope that has an end on it now. Like we didn't either with the engine and we didn't change course while we're doing it either, which is what really harmed the team. So I basically just kind of gave in and said, I will design a first person shooter that will use all of this stuff. and what we've done to date to the best that we can and then release it as fast as we possibly can. So we started doing that in from the middle of November. We basically went into crunch mode at that time, even though everyone's burned out. They're mostly burned out because they weren't making something that they could see what it was going to be used for because we wanted to get it done as fast as possible.

1:19:25We went into what's called crunch mode, which at that time was seven days a week, all the hours that you can, which is at least 10 a day. And we did that for seven months, seven days a week. Oh my God. Yeah. And it was really hard. And after the game was released, it was like a month and a half before I quit because there was still some work for me to do to get the game mastered and created, go into stores and be shipped to customers, that kind of thing. I took a vacation. I came back. I mastered all that stuff. And I was already planning for half a year to leave because if we're not going to commit ourselves to furthering design, it's just going to become a technology company.

1:20:06Then I want to leave and go create a design company. And so I already planned after that big meeting about a month later, two, two months later, already planned to leave and start another company with Tom Hall. And he agreed that he, you know, he would love to do that. So I said, after shipping Quake, then we'll start doing that. So that's what happened. After shipping, I started getting in touch with publishers and they also, John Carmack mainly didn't want to work with me anymore. So they asked for my resignation. I was like, well, I'm going anyway, so let's sign it. It was a very tough game to get through.

1:20:42What was that experience of separating from the company like for you? Was it challenging? Was it strange to be on your own and to sort of leave behind maybe the identity that you had built with that team? What was that experience like just emotionally, psychologically for you? leaving and starting another company, I was very excited about it. I was excited because I was going to be doing this with Tom, who's a really great friend, amazing creative force, someone super fun to work with. And we both had tons and tons of experience. So I was really excited about that, but I really liked working with the other people at it as well.

1:21:25So it was really like, it sucked, but it was also exciting. Like at the same time, I was like, that was a lot of really great work there. But I'm also excited about what I can possibly do without limitations on what, say, design could do. It was negatives and positives, but I think that it was mostly positive because we're starting to do something new. And that was really, really fun to do with Tom. And we spent about half a year building relationships with different publishers to start Ion Storm. and finally, after six months, figure out who we're going to side with and signed up with Eidos. What led you to want to write your memoir, Doomguy, Life in First Person?

1:22:08What were the reasons for wanting to write this book and publish this book? So several years ago, I went to do a speaking engagement in Canada and they basically had heard the story of Doom's development and kind of already knew some of the stuff I talked about. So they said, can you do something different? Can you tell us about your early life and what made you the person that would make Doom? Instead of talking about Doom, talk about how you became the person to make Doom. so it was like oh kind of like my life in games you know early early games so it's like all right i'll write that talk so i wrote a talk that had a lot of the stuff that happened in my early childhood with the all of the exciting things that had to do with drugs and murders and just the low-income stuff which kind of shocked people they had never heard any of that before and you know hearing the audience and the questions later was just like people saying you should put that in a book like nobody knows about that information i was like yeah i didn't really ever talk about it before and yeah that would be a good idea in fact because i haven't seen anything out there that really documents the id software's you know ludography what game started on what date when did that game ship what's the authoritative book on the development of all of its software was stuff, I could actually put that in this history as well.

1:23:42So it was kind of a twofold reason for writing the book was to get the whole story out there from when I was born until today and to also be a really good chronicle for everything that happened during those years and when those things happened and a bunch of the cool stories that people had heard before and just put a lot of really good stuff in there as well. Like there was a game that I was working called Black Room. And every once in a while, I get people asking, so what's up with Black Room? And I always tell them, I can't talk about Black Room. Well, Black Room's in this book. So it's really, really, people are going to get to hear everything about Black Room.

1:24:19Is it true that Doom, the name, comes from The Color of Money? Or is the origin story a different origin story for the name? Yeah, the name for Doom came from John Carmack. He was watching tom cruise's the color of money movie and when he was watching it and he saw the guy walk up to tom cruise's he's got his cue stick inside of his case on his lap and the guy's like what's in there and tom cruise like looks down at it and looks up the guy goes it's doom it was like wow that's a really great name you know like we haven't heard of a game called doom before so he said, how about Doom? And it was like, that is awesome.

1:25:01Yeah. And that was it. The rest is history. So John, people can find you on Twitter at Romero on Instagram at the Romero. Thank you for taking the time. And is there anything else you'd like to mention any other asks or requests of the audience, anything at all that you'd like to mention before we bring this to a close? Well, I mean, I'm really grateful to have had a really fun career making games. It's been a blast from the early days of learning how to program a computer all the way to today, using really advanced technology to make shooters with bigger teams. I've seen everything that's happened during that huge span of time.

1:25:45And it's been just a really, really, really great, a really great time overall. all. So I'm just really just happy to have had that kind of a life. And that's all of that is basically in this book. Excellent. John, thank you so much for taking the time. And I am looking forward to getting a copy of Doomguy. People will be able to find it where books are sold. And we'll link to everything in the show notes as per usual to all my fine listeners at tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, be just a little bit kinder to yourself and to others. and as always, thanks for tuning in.

1:26:46or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday.

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