📵 🙍🏼 🐜 Transcribing the broadcast with John Romero: tales of how DOOM was created 🧔🏾 👈🏾 🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏽

On August 10, a stream with John Romero, the creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D, took place on our social networks. It was an evening of warm tube stories on demand: you asked questions in the comments, and John told how it was.

Questions were asked by the author of the telegram channel and podcast Launch tomorrow, Samat Galimov.

We have prepared a transcript and translation into Russian for you, but if you speak English well, we recommend that you watch it in the recording - after all, this is an evening of tube stories.

You are known all over the world as the creator of DOOM and Dangerous Dave. These are very popular games, what was the first game you created?

Probably an adventure game when I started learning to program in BASIC on the mainframe at the university.

Did you go straight on a real mainframe with TTY access?

Accessible through the terminal. The computer was in the next room, I was eleven then.

Was it a text game?

Yes, a text game like Zorg or Adventure.

Was it fun to play your own text game? You knew all the answers

It's like saying that all game creators are bored of playing their own games. Of course it was great to learn and make a game for the first time.

Has anyone else played it?

No, just me.

How did you get access to this first computer?

I practically locked myself there with my friends, one of them had access to the account of a friend who studied at the university. So we used that student's account to access the mainframe.

Was it legal or not entirely?

No, we weren't supposed to be there, but I wanted to learn how to program.

Did anyone kick you out of there?

No, they never kicked out.

Did you have your own computer?

No, I only got a computer after three years. So I was programming on the mainframe in 1979.

John, which game did you publish first?

It was called Scout Search and was published in a magazine in 1984.

In the magazine? Like this?

Then, in the 80s, programs were published in magazines, and people themselves reprinted all the code from there. If they made a mistake while typing, the game would not start.

How many lines of code are that?

Well, usually people tried to keep the games small, so that it shouldn't be longer than a couple of hundred lines.

So, as we found out, the first computer you saw was this mainframe, and what was the first "normal" computer that you worked on?

After the mainframe, I went to computer stores because there were computers, and I tried to program on them until I was kicked out of there. I did this for three more years until we finally could buy a computer for home. So all these three years I sat at different computers, but they all had BASIC, so I could program on any of them.

And how long did you manage to work in the store in one go? In my experience, they get kicked out pretty quickly from there

Some did not mind, they saw that I was programming and really learning something. I was allowed to sit there because when someone walked into a store and saw a child at a computer, sales increased. It seemed as if everything was so simple.

I don’t think that if a child is programming, it’s that easy. Children are very stubborn. What was your favorite game as a child?

Pac-Man, of course.

Real, on a slot machine?

Yes.

And did you play for real coins?

Yes, I have spent three years and several thousand dollars on slot machines. Then machines were everywhere, the world was full of them. They no longer exist, it is even impossible to imagine that machines were everywhere, wherever you look. Pac-Man was played by so many people that a shortage of coins began in Japan and the United States.

Let's go 15 years ahead and talk about DOOM. Doom had three creators: you, John Carmack, and Dave Taylor. How did you all meet?

There were five of us doing DOOM: me, John, Tom, Adrian and Kevin. We met when we worked together at SoftDisk in 1990.

Were you programmers there?

Yes, me, John and Tom were programming. I was in charge of the newly created game development department and I needed programmers, so I hired John Carmack. Tom Hall came to help us, and I transferred Adrian Carmack to our office on a permanent basis, where the artists were sitting, so that he would do graphics for us. So I put the three of us in the same office, and Tom came in the evenings. During the day we worked in a company, and at night we started making our own games.

When did you sleep?

We went to bed at two in the morning and returned to work at ten in the morning. So we worked from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and then started creating a new game. We worked 16 hours a day.

Why did you do this? It took so much time, you devoted your whole life to it. Did you just enjoy the process or did you have a goal?

The fact is that John Carmack came up with a way to make the scrolling smooth on the PC, like Nintendo. Nobody had such a revolutionary technology. We felt that we had a huge secret that would turn everything around at once. And we were incredibly excited that we could use this technology to create our own games and then release it to the world as software.

That is, you, in fact, knew that you were sitting on a sack of gold, but not in a monetary sense, but in the sense of creating something outstanding

Yes. In less than three months, we made three games using this technology, and then released them. It was Commander Keen. The first trilogy.

I must confess I play it every day in DOS box

If you have a Mac, you can download Commander Genius - this is a great version of all Commander Keen games specifically for Mac, but inside it is the original DOS game.

It amazes me how much effort people put into games. If people paid so much attention to software, we would live in a different world. People are much more indifferent to websites or conventional software. It works - and okay.

I know you were involved in the Super Mario III demo. Can you tell us about this?

When we came up with this technique, the first thing the demo was used for was creating the first level of Super Mario III, but without using Mario himself. We were moving around the world of Mario, and one of my characters, Dangerous Dave, was jumping in this world. It was just the original demo called Dangerous Dave and Copyright Infringement. It looked amazing. The idea immediately came up to make the first two levels of Super Mario III with all the monsters, Mario and everything else, and send them to Nintendo. That's why we made this demo to see if Nintendo is interested in publishing our version of Super Mario III for PC.

And they were apparently not interested?

They thought the version was really great, but decided they didn't want to transfer their ownership to someone else's platform, so we made Commander Keen.

, . , DOOM , . ? . ?

Wolfenstein. We made Wolfenstein in 1992, which was our third shooter. Before that, we had two more, they helped us work out the technology and understand what they generally do in first-person games. By the time we made Wolfenstein, we realized that using weapons makes the game fun. Right after that, we released the prequel to Wolfenstein, Spear of Destiny. We made it pretty quickly, in just two months. And then they started planning for DOOM. Technically, we had to do it all over again, from scratch, because we couldn't use anything from Wolfenstein, as we planned to write a completely different engine. Even before we started working on DOOM, we knew what we could achieve in the game, and we were very excited about that knowledge. We didn't think we were taking risks, because we knew what problems needed to be solved and we knew that we would give ourselves so much time,how much it will take to solve them. So Wolfenstein took four months, from idea to release, and there were four of us. After Wolfenstein, we hired two more. There were six people in total, one of whom was a business manager and did not participate in the development, so there were five of us.

When the five of us worked on DOOM, we knew we could make this game. We knew that there was nothing in our vision of the game that was beyond our power. We just started working on the game and faced all sorts of problems - with speed or just with creative difficulties. For example, before DOOM, all maze games had walls at 90 degrees. Since the very first mainframe games in the 70s. There were no other mazes in any game.

Is it because it is more difficult to draw a curved line?

Yes, from a technical point of view, you need more processing power to process segments whose endpoints are not fixed to a certain edge. There are many optimizations that are possible if you have straight walls and 90 degree turns. But if they turn and meet at arbitrary points, you have to solve many problems to make the areas convex, some bizarre shape with many bends, etc. John Carmack was confident he could do it. He didn't care if he could or not. So we conceived a game like no one else has seen. Doom was the first game to feature walls that weren't 90-degree corridors.

Even Wolfenstein was just a fast version ... Even in it, although you can move smoothly there, the world itself consisted of right angles. Aside from Wolfenstein, very few games were fluid. Basically in games with rectangular mazes, players moved block by block. We changed everything, allowing the user to move freely in any direction, but the world itself was still limited, and with DOOM we practically removed the borders of the world. We lifted these restrictions to create levels never seen before ... Here's another reason people were so excited. They have never seen a world that did not have rectangular labyrinths.

This is a very serious advance in technology, it required a lot of investment.

, . - — , , ? , , , ?

We had almost as much time as we wanted. Since we released Commander Keen in December 1990, we have had no money problems. With Commander Keen in the first month, we earned our first $ 10,500. A year later, we were making $ 50,000 a month, and there were still only four of us. It is clear that we did not spend everything. We just kept investing in the company, but our bank account kept growing. Thanks to this, we had a lot of time to create games, we never had to speed up development. We spent four months developing Wolfenstein, and DOOM took a whole year. When Wolfenstein came out, there was at least five times more money.

People without external pressure usually talk about the problem of project sprawl

...

When you add everything and add features and constantly move the release because you want to add more and more and more. How did you stop?

We knew exactly what we were trying to do. Say, with Wolfenstein, we really added more to the game, and then after playing it, we quickly removed the features we added, because they interfered with the very essence of the game, and the essence was - a dynamic game in which you have to shoot at everything. If you have to stop in the hallway to search the body, you stop the essence of the game. The game was very fast and that became the essence. The bottom line was to shoot at everything, get keys, open doors, keep shooting at everything, collect everything you see, but never stop the player, except for the moment when he got to the door and he needed to open it. That, in principle, is all - you only stop if you bumped into a door. The more we added something to the game that could slow down the player, the more we realized that the game was not about that:not about being inconspicuous, not about fumbling through other people's pockets or carrying corpses. We took it all out again, because that's not the point of the game. It's not about shifting bodies and messing around with all this. It's about speeding full steam through this castle at 70 frames per second and, in fact, killing everyone right and left. We removed from the game everything that did not correspond to this. It was the same with DOOM. While doing DOOM, we had a lot of elements that we then removed. In Wolfenstein, you had to pick up items for which points were given. Then we started playing DOOM, and realized that this is not an arcade game, there should not be points, we do not care about the score. We are worried ... Your task is to kill all the demons, get out of the level to go to the next one, destroy all the demons there and save the remaining people. The point is notto get more points. Moreover, DOOM does not punish the player for death. That is, they do not tell you that you have three lives: there are as many of them as you want. If you die, you end up at the beginning of the level, or you load from a saved game and try again. You do not lose the passed levels, you do not have the number of lives, as in the arcade. So we removed the lives, removed the score and all the items that gave points.

It turns out that there was no strict plan. Everything was constantly revised. You add something, then you realize that it doesn't work, then ...

We take it away, yes. These things were in the game for a long time, until we finally decided that the essence of the game is not about them, let's throw them out, they only confuse everything. If you have scoring, then players immediately think, "Oh, glasses!" They decide that glasses are important. But we were not going to do anything with them, because the main thing in the game is the invasion of demons. The goal is not to collect devilish bibles and get points for them. So we removed everything that was not the essence of the game.

Did you test all this on someone or did you make decisions within the team?

Inside the team. We didn't have a quality assurance department. All these years we have been debugging ourselves.

So you showed it to someone else just before the release?

We still had several outside testers, since we didn't have our own. We sent the game to them for review. These people have worked with us for many years. Then they told us about the problems they found. If something pops up.

Their comments were only about problems they found, not ideas, right?

Anything. They shared with us all their thoughts. They usually found bugs that we had already found and fixed. Cool if they managed to spot a bug we missed. It rarely happened because we played it all the time, thousands of times, so we saw everything.

Is it true that you scanned snakeskin boots and ripped knees to create the textures? What's the story with that?

Yes! In DOOM, a lot of things have been scanned - weapons, and Dumgai, and Cyberdemon, and the Baron of Hell. These are all scanned 3d models that we have created ...

Wait, 3d models? In the nineties? What are you talking about?

Yes, we used a camcorder from the 90s with videotapes. We connected the camera to the computer and pointed it at the table where we put the monster. Then they photographed the figurine and turned it in different directions towards the camera. We turned it eight times and took a screenshot each time. When the picture got to the computer, we cleaned up the pixels of the room in the background, and then painted the remaining pixels, because the monster looked like a monster, but it turned out not bright enough. Then the artist just clicked on the pictures and got the monster from all angles.

If the monster is moving, we use the picture from a different angle. If the player is behind a monster, we see it from behind or from the side - from a certain angle, because it was not a real 3d model, but a two-dimensional sprite. So when the monster moves, we need to move its leg, then rotate it eight times and photograph it from eight angles for each frame of the future animation. So the artists did a tremendous job to scan all the monsters from all angles, it was overwhelming work for two people. One of the artists dealt mainly with characters, while the other did the textures for the game.

Was this all done internally? All these guys were sitting there?

There were only two of them, two artists.

Is it true that after the release of Doom, people quit their jobs, dropped out of universities, schools, colleges and played all day? It's true?

Oh yes, it was an incredible hit.

Don't you feel guilty?

No, we expected DOOM to cause a huge drop in productivity, as we wrote in the press release.

Did you play yourself after the release?

Yes, they played constantly.

But you played hundreds of times during development

But there was Deathmatch in the multiplayer game, it was scary fun, so we played this mode all the time.

So the game has no end

Uh-huh.

Are you sitting in the same room or using a larger local area network?

We in the company had our own network, everyone was connected to it, so everyone could play. It was a wired network so the speed was great. If I wanted to play with Sean [Green], who was sitting behind the wall in the next office, he just went into the game, we connected and called each other on the phone to make sure that both were connected.

On a wired phone, right?

Yeah, on the wire phone.

Who played the best? Did you have champions in your company?

Yes I. We didn't have many people, our company was very small. It was mainly me, American [McGee] and Sean [Green] playing. The rest hardly played. They only played to make sure their textures were working properly, the designs were working, but they weren't interested in Deathmatch. There were only three people playing, because there were eight of us in the company, including the secretary ... nine, including Americana.

Tell me about Deathmatch, because it says on your wiki page that you are the "father" of the word. How did it happen?

As soon as we managed to launch a multiplayer mode, where you could see another character on the screen and shoot at him, we immediately understood: this is what we will be doing. We didn't just shoot monsters anymore, we could kill other players with rockets - real fun. It's like you're fighting in the ring, you can't leave the level, but deathmatch sounds much cooler. This is a life-and-death fight. It's Deathmatch!

So let's say today is December 10, 1993. The game just came out. What do you feel?

We were terribly tired, we worked 30 hours, started the day before, and loaded the game at two in the afternoon. We just ... Some were already asleep, lying on the floor - they ran out of all their strength. Jay, our CEO, was able to get enough sleep because he wasn't programming. So he felt good and was ready to deal with loading the game. At two o'clock in the afternoon, it was uploaded to the University of Wisconsin ftp site and to the BBS with software in Massachusetts so that people using BBSs and modems could download the game from there, and Internet users could download it from the university site. As soon as the game was posted, we all went home to sleep and slept until the next day. We are incredibly tired. But we knew that the game would be successful.

John, the only thing I can't figure out is that you had plenty of time, enough money, you weren't time bound, but you still programmed at night. And after the release you got enough sleep ... Why?

Because we're almost done. We have almost finished the game, and when such a project comes to an end, everyone is working hard to complete everything as soon as possible. We didn't have a release date, but we knew that day was just around the corner. So we just wanted to do as much as possible, because Christmas was coming up, and before Christmas, you can make good money because DOOM can be bought as a gift. The more days left before Christmas, the better.

Still, you understood something about finance

Yeah. By the way, we released Quake in June, as soon as we finished it. It happened in the summer, and summer is the worst time to sell a game.

One of the reasons DOOM is so popular is the ability to create mods

Weren't you scared? Weren't you afraid that people will create something crazy?

No, that's exactly what we wanted from them. We created the game itself, but we knew that if it was easy to modify, people would be able to show imagination and come up with all sorts of cool things that would encourage us to new ideas. We have provided people with a world of endless content. And even today, 27 years later, new levels continue to emerge.

Will definitely need to check it out.

Yes, go to doomworld.com .

By the way, before this interview, we contacted the most popular gaming site on the Russian Internet.

It's called "Kanobu" and they prepared a list of questions by voting

So the first question is: do you really like DOOM 2020 and DOOM 2016?

Yes, I played both games, they are great, just super. I'm really glad that DOOM has been modernized because you can't just go and recreate the original. They did exactly what needed to be done for a modern audience.

Where are the streams, John? :)

At some point I'll take care of them, but now I have too much to do. I love streaming, the last time I did it was when I played DOOM Eternal. Often I talk with a friend on a headset when we play, so I interact with people, my attention is absorbed in this. During the stream, you have to entertain the people, I don't want to be distracted by this.

Have you ever tried to just focus on the game and see what happens?

Probably worth a try [laughs].

Are you planning any unofficial additions for DOOM 2 or maybe SIGIL?

Yes, SIGIL is an episode I did for DOOM's 25th anniversary. This is the fifth episode of DOOM. It's cool that the software liked it and was officially added to DOOM. So if you have DOOM on Switch, iPhone or set-top box, then you have SIGIL. SIGIL is one of the rare episodes for DOOM I. Usually, expansions and new levels are developed for DOOM II, but in honor of the anniversary, I decided to release an episode for the original version.

Any other additions planned?

Yes! I cannot say what exactly I am doing, but I am planning to do something.

You said you were playing, but you weren't streaming games with your friends. Are we talking about games that you didn't develop? Can you tell us what you like to play?

Mostly in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, sometimes in Wildlands.

How many hours a week do you play?

I play about once a week for 6 hours with a friend. We start around 9pm and finish at 3am or later.

Will Daikatana be re-released? The current version is very far from what you originally planned

I'm not going to re-release Daikatana. The problem is that this game was nearly wiped out on release back in 2000. So 20 years ago people just ... So many articles have been written about how bad she is. She really has many shortcomings. This game has such a bad reputation that I don't have to waste time re-releasing it.

How important is it to you whether people like your game or not?

How much joy do you feel from the fact that you are making the game for yourself, and how much of the fact that people are delighted with your game?

Ideally, you make the game for yourself and people love it. If you put a lot of time and energy into a game that you love, then people will also like it. When I was making levels for SIGIL, I really liked them. I spent a lot of time on them, and when they came out, many were happy with them.

Have you ever started a project knowing that people would not like it, but still wanted to complete it?

When I do something, I don’t think at all about whether the people will like the result. Sometimes at later stages of development you start thinking something like: "We are missing this feature, people will probably expect this feature." But at first you don’t think about such things, you only think about what will look cool and what will not. Then, by adding details to the game, you try to make sure you haven't forgotten anything.

So let's finish with the questions from Kanobu. This is a very difficult question [both laugh].

Cyberpunk 2077 is coming soon. It shows a model of the future that awaits humanity

What do you, John Romero, think about the future of the gaming industry in 30-50 years?

Mmm, my God ... Well, I think something has to happen with set-top boxes, because phones are getting more powerful, at some point they will replace set-top boxes. I think the Switch concept - when you have a portable device that projects a game onto a large screen - shows us what games would look like for those who prefer to sit in front of a large screen with a phone as a controller. You may need to connect something to the phone so that you can press the buttons faster. Sony and Microsoft will do something along these lines. Because phones are so powerful that maybe they will release a phone that everyone wants to buy and replace the set-top box. After all, phones are so powerful that they can broadcast a signal to a TV screen using a wireless network. So what to doif everyone is on their phones? Mobile devices are a different segment of the market, new technology allows you to play cool games that cannot be played on a phone, just because the screen is too small. So, in my opinion, these are completely different things - sitting on the couch with a controller in hand, looking at a large screen, say, in 4K, and sitting with a phone, playing something simpler.

Do you play games with Apple Arcade?

I signed up for this service, so I play some.

What do you recommend?

Grindstone, I probably haven't played it yet, but I know it's good.

Cool, thanks, and a second short question. Do you have a Switch?

Yes, I love Switch. I used to play The Legend of Zelda a lot. I really liked Breath of the Wild. Played Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But now I don't have much time to play.

What projects are you currently working on?

Right now I'm working on the game Empire of Sin. We have been developing it for over three years. It is due out this year. You can just go to empireofsingame.com and watch the video and you will see that this is a 1920s mafia strategy.

Do you still work at night?

Yes, of course [laughs].

Should we expect a shooter from you?

Hope!

If you didn't have enough communication with John, you can watch our previous interview with Romero "Simplify and cut out the necessary" , where the questions were asked by the managing partner of RUVDS ntsaplin

Transcribing the broadcast with John Romero: tales of how DOOM was created