John Carmack Talks Doom on 20th Anniversary
Happy birthday Doom.
Yes, you read that heading right: Doom made its first appearance 20 years ago. The file was uploaded to an FTP server site located on the University of Washington network by an id Software executive. The file name was doom1_0.zip, and it weighed a mere 2 MB transfer. Yet back then that was a huge file, and took seemingly forever to download using a dial-up modem. The zip file multiplied as gamers downloaded and uploaded it to other FTP sites, and eventually made its way across the globe.
In an interview with Wired, John Carmack looks back on Doom, talks about game development in general, the old shareware model, his role in the gameplay design of Doom and more. He is also seemingly regretful that id Software fell into the "when it's done, it's done" mentality.
"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases," Carmack told Wired. "If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id's mantra for so long: 'It'll be done when it's done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it's done when it's done and you're talking a month or two, fine. But if it's a year or two, you need to be making a different game."
As for Doom 4, he really couldn't provide any information, but admitted that designing the fourth installment is a challenge. "It's been hard," he admitted. "One of the things that was a little bit surprising that you might not think so from the outside, but deciding exactly what the essence of Doom is, with this 20-year history, is a heck of a lot harder than you might think. You get multiple Doom fans that have different views of what the core essence of it is, and there's been a design challenge through all of it."
On the gameplay front, Carmack said that he was responsible on how weapons work, how world interactive items work, how the AI works and so on. However, the personality of the game – how much damage things do, tuning it, changing speed – mostly came from John Romero. Carmack then goes on to admit that he is perfectly happy about the game's demonic theme.
"I pushed certainly for the demonic aspect of it," Carmack said. "That's still something that I feel good about, looking back. In later games and later times, when games get attacked with some of the moral ambiguity or actual negativity about what you're doing, I always felt good about the decision that in Doom, you're fighting demons. There's no gray area here, it is black and white, you're the good guys, they're the bad guys and everything that you're doing to them is fully deserved."
To read the full interview, head here.
The good old days when games were made by gamers instead of bean counters and pointy haired bosses. I prefer Carmack's approach of "it's done when it's done" against EA's, Activision's, etc "we're releasing every year whether or not it's ready".
2 hours on a 15k modem, versus 6-10 hours for a large size game on Steam. I think we may have stepped backwards somewhere.
It was a whole new world coming from gaming on an N64 on a 640x480 27" tube TV to a 17" 1280x1024 CRT monitor and gaming with a keyboard & mouse. I still remember being in awe of the pixels and details never seen before in a game. It was instant love and I never looked back, including countless all nighters just in awe of the graphics. In fact, these two games motivated me to learn how to build my own rigs and overclock instead of spending $1K plus on the latest Dell or Gateway PC. Some 16 years later, I never looked back. Still console game with a PS3 and now PS4, but nothing replaces PC gaming. Ever. Carmack owns that badge.
Tim Sweeney, one of the founders of Epic Games and main developer of Unreal Engine, said on a Anandtech interview that he gave up programming for a year because of Doom. He considered it witchcraft.
Loved the aspect of puzzles, mazes and secret rooms and most of all the secret room returning to Wolfenstein3D where the demons invaded them as well - not to mention finding what really happened to poor Commander Keen >;D
Gabe, listen up.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom
Honestly, I'd be willing to play last gen graphics with a captivating continuous story than some of the blinged up, story-made-such-that-can-make-more-DLC crap that gets shovelled out nowadays.
I remember always jumping off the balcony in level three and nuking my drunk buddies with the BFG
I was always the one to setup the ethernet coax cables (dont forget to terminate them) and ipx network.
On the other hand, many games today are simply rushed. We see what happen with Battlefield 4. Publishers wanted to rush products to meet an artificial deadline, to roll out basically a beta software. On PC side, it is a nice excuse to release an unfinished product, now even console versions are also like their PC counterpart, though I don't play on consoles, but I found this one amusing, what excuse do they have this time. Creative process also takes time, many sequels can't compare to their first iteration because of this.