'Doom:' A Classic Game Postmortem

[Music] um so it's been 17 years since Doom was released it's kind of funny that we've never done a postmortem anywhere on this game which is kind of crazy um but now we are here to do it uh and uh and so we're what we're going to do is kind of go through the development of the game on a month-by-month basis uh starting we're actually going to start uh about a year before we started on Doom to kind of foreshadow things in the future okay there's a little bit of volume um okay so we'll start in December of 1991 uh actually yeah okay so actually wasn't December was it it was like anyway like it's like as far as you know this is December 19 1991 and uh we moved in softare to Madison Wisconsin where I went to

college and we went they we visited in the mid Midsummer and the place was great just like that picture there it was awesome lush green everyone having fun so then we just we moved the we moved the whole company which was only four people at that time uh and then when we got there you know that's that's kind of what happened to us and so we couldn't even go outside anymore we had to kind of stay inside uh so we were working on Commander King at that time and uh and during that you know uh last half of 1991 we basically saw that there's this computer called the next computer that was uh that was created by Steve Jobs company and uh and it looked really really interesting it was it was an amazing work workstation and uh we basically during December uh kind of finished commander keing and we went on our like two we vacation and but John carac didn't go on vacation he was going to stay in program especially he wanted program a next computer so he ordered a

next computer cood uh but he didn't have a car and it snowing and freezing so so so that's John going through the snow to the bank to get to get the money for cood so when the guy shows up he can pay him the $1,000 and then we got finally got our next computer uh and that was in December of 1991 we start working on Wolfenstein 3D and uh we really just kind of mess around with the next it wasn't until like the summer like half a year later we actually used the next computer to do the uh the hint manual for for Wolfenstein and like some Commander Keane brochure stuff yeah it was a lot of worth a lot there for it but we're planning on using it later uh it was it turned out to be a very important computer for our company um so dur right after Wolfenstein shipped uh we uh were contacted by a company named imagineer and they wanted a Super

Nintendo version of uh of Wolfenstein and so we were very excited about getting our game on on a console and so we uh we hired a guy to to start working on a contract cuz we got you know we got other games that we got to make all right so now it's November of 1992 and uh we had we had a year previous to this November of 1991 actually shipped our our uh I think it was our third third FPS um it was our first texture map game called catacomb 3D and uh and so it shipped a year before uh this time but but after this point we decided that we're going to make another FPS and surprisingly to some people surprisingly uh Doom was actually the fifth ID software FPS those are the other games that we had done that were that were Shooters um yeah originally hover tank one was just colored walls

that you kind of drove your tank through and at that time it was kind of a harsh creative uh environment to make an an environment come alive in so I like I would put a a green Cube and that's a tree essentially in my mind you know and uh catacombs 3D actually had textures on the walls and that gave it a lot more sense of space and a lot more fun and you can cast your magic spells and blow things apart and stuff and then the others you probably know spear Destiny is a sequel to to Wolfenstein by the way um so we basically start working on uh some of the tools for the next ID FPS we start working on Doom um programmers in the audience might recognize the the acronym wad which stands for where's all the data oh that's that's actually made after the fact uh we were in like a cheap apartment uh called laprada and carac was downstairs working on stuff and had used you know lumps in the

previous games and stuff and he I was working upstairs doing the Doom Bible and he called up and said I need an extension like what's a bunch of lumps and I said wad you know or something said yeah that works okay wad of lumps so a lot of people started using that and then the the Lucas art or the yeah and then Lucas yeah dark Forces later named their files gobs so everyone was kind of coming up with another three three-letter extension yeah um and so after we were in the these apartments and kind of putting together the file formats for for Doom uh it then finally moves to the Black Cube in mosquite which would you know was just down the down the street from the uh the apartment complex and um and thank you Google for providing a picture of py Tower yeah which there's no other one on the internet yeah um so so we basically start thinking about like what is what is Doom going to be what is what is this next game it kind of you know it started with the name

we played a lot of D and D at it for years you know years before we started making doom and so we decided that this was going to be one of our like d andd inspired games uh carac was really excited to do a game that had demons in it and uh you know we all agreed we we just did Nazis so demons evil oh well what else is evil that was kind of easy you know um so then came Tom Tom SAR uh working on the Doom Bible right after we move in and then he finished it at the very end of November of 1992 um and uh and it was basically a whole kind of a design document for a lot of the game the a lot of the sketches of like where all the levels are in the game and um the names of stuff progressions you go through list all the tools all that kind of stuff I mean you can look at that on the internet this is this is kind of part of the the beginning of the design dock here to kind of say like what what Doom

is and uh you know there were a lot of we were coming up with all these ideas for the technology of the game and like what it's going to be and and uh we felt like really sure before making the game what it probably was going to turn out to to be like like we knew what the uh the technology advances were going to be um we had an idea that we were going to be doing some dark subject matter it was going to be like not bright halls with Nazis in them but like dark scary uh you know hallways I call it lots of Halls scary dark fast B the game we made a lot of hauls cuz of Tom's last name yeah you know um soe so part of the part of the design was uh you know Tom wanted to do uh like what we had done in Wolfenstein uh progression that was like levelto level progression I mean yeah like people really expected that from Wolfenstein and I think that was not the place to innovate essentially uh I think that was a really good I I can complete a chunk you know and perhaps frustratingly complete a chunk back can you know get

there and boom I have a success and that was a good sense of accomplishment that was very important to this kind of game and then and then uh John was thinking about the technology and what he could do with the tech and he was like there was you know he didn't really he was starting to lay down some of the basic data structures but he also was thinking big so John wanted one big world he just wanted like one big level you know everybody's going to run around the level you could like see through doors and then so then it was like okay well okay it's one big level sort of science data there yeah Science Fiction with demons and stuff like that let's make a big base you know and then we have places to go and kind of sense of place and so on so we start calculating you know how much memory are we going to use uh for this game CU which they are doing while I'm doing about a month of work on this big world and all these things and little nuances and and we're like calculating Sprite sizes uh map sizes and there's this cool like computer room and there's all these tunnels and like there's no way that this is going to work I mean we don't have enough memory

we barely danger go then you recognize real demons come out like new design we're going to just kind of do levels so that's funny I remember something about that a month ago yeah so so that was you know not fun so Tom was you know not very happy about that uh I feel some SN happen yeah mentally yeah you know like when we in Wolfenstein I had since it was something that was uh not an elegant part of the engine I had to really really really fight for push walls but it's like you're going to be walking through things opening doors you got to have some secrets you know I'm like I grew up you know playing Mario and stuff like that I want I want secrets and so I really really f with palls finally gotten into exciting so that was kind of like Snap zero of like you know why am I fighting for something would make the game so fun and then sort of like what

was that month of work that was lost so but in in that sense did you hear that I uh in that sense I mean karmic was was uh trying to get the best technology out there and what he could the best way he can innovate and I was trying to do the same and just like that kind of flash tads a bit yes so now we'll focus on December we're all working we know that like you know half the month is gone for vacations and stuff even though we're doing doom and and it's exciting we're still you know human and everybody should be taking vacation everybody everybody but at Christmas you know what people go so here's a picture of Tom with hair and you know he's he's using thanks thanks everybody I've lost my glasses well I'll never see there um by the way as advice to any of you you if you ever invent

anything just go get a patent on it regardless because copyright because uh at this time I was at the desk and I was kind of man my my wrists are kind of sore so I had my girlfriend sew this 3 years before computer wrist pads came out and uh that's kind of always been a long regret of mine but but uh could have been Rich anyway but you can my wrists were happy that's all that's important anyone could see uh perhaps there's an altic Landing speaker on the right this all ancient technology uh but the next computer was actually uh like a Mac right now he has basically the same operating system that you're using right now with the with the uh Mac over it with the Mac UI on top of it and uh thanks Pepsi for sponsoring this slide yeah a nice old calculator for some reason he was using

that so then we move to January uh January we were beginning making the game and there you know with with us these games never have like pre-production where we like draw a bunch of Concepts and then kind of vet things you know when we make something goes in the game that's just the way it is so so we immediately start uh creating the technology and we start creating the the artwork and we're very confident that what we're making is going to be pretty awesome and so we put out a press release in January as we basically begin making the game uh telling the world how revolutionary the game is going to be and and uh the press release had like here's the the big features that we had at the end of the press release and each of these features in the real press release which you can like Google on the internet has a whole bunch of explanation behind it and probably uh three or four of those didn't even make it into the

game don't do a press release before your game is actually there was a gardening section that just really didn't fit so it was like decades later wasun um then you know we we get into February that's when we actually start making art um at we were trying to do new things so uh instead of just like drawing you know pixels in Deluxe paint uh and making the the art that way Adrien who was a really amazing pure artist he would draw the the actual characters and then we he started making them in clay modeling them in clay and we had a next computer that had a video camera uh that was set up to capture the the monsters as they were put on like a lazy Susan that could rotate e we had like a post that would mark off eights and uh and so we would take a kind of a a picture of it and uh and run it through a program called the uh well yeah they they said what's the name we're like putting stuff in and like little like separate things are coming

out like at pallets and stuff like that well I just had like fuzzy pumper pallet shop or something yeah and it stuck so that was that was the name of the tool that we that we made to take these 16bit uh you know images through a video camera and palletize them into vj's 256 colors the fuzzy pumper pallet shop so uh Adrien only did like a few of these clay models and then that was it there's no more he's not doing that anymore cuz every time you can animate them the clay just rips cuz we had to light them so when you light clay then it go yeah it was it's all open it was new and weird so we kind of stopped doing that um we me you know we basically got the uh the engine up and running pretty quickly you know through throughout January and then into into just the very beginning of February and we took some screenshots uh and uh actually we made a bunch of alphas and stuff while we were making the game and how many of you have actually seen Doom Alphas not that many people cool so you'll get to see all those end will be

raised in about 2 minutes um so we have uh the first level that uh that Tom was working on uh actually got in the game as E2 M7 uh but it was supposed to be like the first level in the game but we had a different UI and that was the first crate maze ever made in the game thank you yes but part of that was um basically John was worried about like too many Poes in the environment you know because he wanted fast fast fast and then really have a blazing fast game so I kind of made crate Maze and things like that that were more orthogonal and and and a lot very occlusive so it would be fast faster and faster so we had you know we were experimenting with UI we had like that's Tom's basic UI that he drew himself and then the other one was it I'm available for art duties later was there the other UI was it done by Adrian uh the second one is done by ad oh no I think I did

most of that he did the shell and I did the text oh okay uh this is my girlfriend's chainsaw it's a Mulla Eager Beaver it's sitting uh I used to be sitting on one of my arcade machines but I sold it so now I'm sitting in my garage uh and if you come over you can like go like that but it's kind of drippy and and stuff it's an old chainsaw it doesn't work anym so so you can see there there's like a power cable going to the video camera the that was used to digitize the actual chainsaw and uh and so all the actual weapons that you saw in Doom were just toys that we bought at Toys R Us and we just kind of held them in front of the video camera and took a snapshot and uh we only had so many toys I think it was like three or four so we just kind of took pieces and kind of slammed them together in Deluxe paint and kind of edited them and stuff so like the plasma gun and The BFG are kind of the same the same weapon toy yeah um the lower words you are the better art you can do so it was fine for that time that's not

actual cap gun was a Dakota a Tootsie toy Dakota cap gun uh we'd actually play with these uh toys at work we're just really busy working and at this time basically carac you know really wanted efficient spaces so he says get books on Military stuff it's basically you know give me cement buildings you know bunkers very very squarish things and so on it'll really run fast it'll be very efficient you know and I was like okay and then went over and looked at various things like this that were not very inspiring yeah it kind of kind of block you know it's sort of like uh that movie you know it's boxy but good well you know it's not that great so so you know so Tom made a bunch of levels that were a bunch of cement blocks basically with some other textures put on it and they just they weren't that fun to to go into cuz it was like corridors with rooms that you kind of go into and you know uh it might make sense when you're playing a game where you know hey demons have taken

over a military base so make it look like a military base and have demons sitting in the rooms but flow wise it just was no fun it was Bizarro so uh so it wasn't that cool but we actually made a uh we kind of made a demo our first pre-alpha of the game and uh that's what we have here hopefully it'll play correctly um the lens for rendering but we did back then was great lens over the text so yes evil Unleashed was our subtitle back then uh and so this was basically the first level that we made using the data structures we created and doomed which was the tool that I wrote to create the levels and uh and you can see the the second gen UI there uh with like autom map in the top right and this was the first time the monsters were rotating in in the engine yeah and again the interface was made sort of larger so there' be less actual screen real estate to render again it was a sort of performance thing it's going to be

faster if there's you know like sort of 60 70% of the screen to render but it doesn't look that cool when uh most of your screen is taking up with a bunch of UI crap it's it's kind of like old school like like a like a game like the system Shack or something where it's important to have interface around you because you're physically doing things like that but here you're just like it's in a raw environment it doesn't really yeah I want to see his head you know so so um so we you know we had the UI there we could actually put a UI in the game see it's not working too well take it out and yeah and there were items at this time you notice on the screen I believe there's a a sandwich both a sandwich and a heart of loar on the same screen there were a lot of uh like the Captain's hand was a key to a door and so there's a lot of esoteric kind of items like adventury kind of things since it was one large world originally yep um let's see is this the same for some reason it's doing the same thing okay yes March finally get past February um in

March strange thing happen in March something interesting happened while we're making the game so 20th Century Fox contacted us cuz we did Wolfenstein which was a pretty fast game um and uh and they thought that we would be the right team to make aliens the game and so we already have a technology running you know we're we're ready to start running with doom and uh and they kind of stop us cuz we all love aliens yeah uh especially Adrian yeah especially Adrian so you know the the shapes of the monsters you know we had Giger books all over the place in the art room so um the bathroom you know yeah totally I know what that means but we talked about it for half an hour that's about it it was like Hey guys here's a really awesome opportunity we talked about it and we're like you know what I don't want to get give up creative control on this game you know this could

be something that's like really original but we do like the idea of running away from you know we're talking about demons already so it's like well it'll be kind of you know alien-ish um sci-fi sci-fi with demons that the mix of Science and sort of Mythos and stuff like that it was one of the true powerful things that the Jos of that yeah if you're in space you kind of expect fighting aliens but you don't expect fighting hell so that was that was something we thought was going to be cool so we decided let's not do the aliens attacking the Space Marine let's do the hell demons attacking the Space Marine that'd be more original it was back then really so then we start doing uh I'm working on this level which is the second level of the game uh E1 M2 and you can see the horrible uh you know that wall texture with the brown crap on it and the red stripe uh but I was like having to explore like forget the cement Square you know rooms with the you know the hallways 90° and stuff I wanted I wanted

shapes that were more interesting and you can see these are like real kind of early textures but I was trying to to make a you know a level that didn't feel realistic but you could still kind of identify it as a as a place that might be military base you know cuz you're you're kind of at a at a science station on a on a moon so uh so I wanted it to be more interesting to explore so that's where I started to play around with um lots of lots of contrast in in room Heights and contrast in lighting and cuz the engine does does uh you know really great Lighting in fact on this um on this slide uh this engine the Doom engine did something that I don't know uh many other engines do I think the build engine did it but it does what's called diminished lighting where the light gets darker automatically through the engine as it tries to render off into the distance which means that you have a game that's just automatically scary you don't even have to really try you just kind of just draw and stuff make the light a little bit you know

medium and it's just dark in the distance and you can have like a a really bright a bright bright light in the background to to create silhouettes of stuff so the Doom engine was really amazing for creating scary spaces cuz it just made it scary automatically um and then so then I made this room which I don't think to you guys is very impressive looking but uh back then this was the room that really changed the look of of the game because uh this was the before all that the stuff that you saw this was really like the room that showed hey we can have like high ceilings with you know Banks of computers up uh you know higher than the player and um and show like a real you know how high can this can this get what kind of scale can I get in this game this was almost one of these we're kind of defining the possible scale of the game and this is one one way that we're doing it through this room it's a very important difference in that most games which was kind of where we started are doing a very functional oh I could

be here in this space there's a console that I could use kind of thing where this was kind of an abstraction or a a a a different almost a artistic choice to to to just Elevate and and make things grow and be huge and big and different and and that was like this room is like the start of something like very large that really defined doom and that was brilliant by John yeah just the abstract level design instead of trying to be realistic is really what this room started yeah um and so we basically everybody loved it the artists came in and we like that's it man so that's that's it the game is the the level design uh is is set you know basically we're going to be doing the abstract stuff but then disaster struck what happened we all had to stop working on Doom it's so drama filled this whole game the finale of Days of Our Lives the Super Nintendo version that we had got got a guy to work on was not

finished and imagineer was not pleased it had been um you know since I think the summertime so it been like about 9 months and they hadn't heard anything from us and we're like oh what you know oh that guy was working on the port and we couldn't get a hold of the guy and like it was it was it was you know it was a nightmare situation because we couldn't we couldn't get it done basically with somebody else and so and so basically we stopped working on Doom right in the middle kind of and basically ported Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo and so the whole team jumped on it artists jumped on Art you know just like stop Doom um and like I I have a programming degree and like I've been doing design for a long time but I pulled that out and like did the bonus screen where all the junk bounces around in the screen at the end everybody's like help you know we got to get done with this thing we got to get back on Doom uh we wanted to ship it Christmas so uh so we all jumped on and it took us like 3 weeks to just blast out the the

port um and that's including all of the you know put rats in there in green blood and all that NE for some reason Nintendo didn't like you know like swastikas and Hitler and stuff like that so you fought the stot Meister Meister St yes you know whatever we had to get it out uh so then you know we could kind of get back to it work on Doom started again after that 3 weeks like what the hell um and then uh and then I was working on that E1 M2 level and uh and I made this this thing here which is like a you know it looks kind of innocent it's this it's this uh these stairs that kind of go down but the way that the code was structured it caused a recursion problem when John was traversing what his sector list uh internal data structure um slowed the game way down because it was looking

into something that had to go in and out of a list recursively and the game Super started chugging and uh and he you know he liked the way that the game was starting to look so he was he he wanted to fix the problem instead of hey just draw a bunch of blocks yeah so that that was that was the the cool moment there cuz like I sit there was giv constraints and and and said you know well I'll do the best I can with these you know sort of blockage things and John just said hey this looks cool screw you make your Tech cool yeah yeah fix the engine dude this is that's the great part of the tension of a team of great people is that the ability to do that so uh so what you know the the the way that he was storing the sectors internally and traversing through them wasn't any kind of rocket science or anything but that that's kind of why this we we hit this problem with this with this uh this this area of the level so basically John had to fix the problem and so he started reading up and uh and then the BS tree the bsp tree was

born um this was based off of work by a guy in the audience here is named Bruce Naylor and uh he had researched this for uh I think it was backface coling off of 3D models and John had read a white paper on it and decided hey I could use that you know into basically that calling algorithm to call out uh nonvisible sectors inside of a inside of a level so he adapted that algorithm into the engine and and it was instantaneous you know it's it's super fast and that was that was great so John carac was impressed you know about like this looks really cool and he could see that and that's what led him to technology yeah and that and that was great because the whole industry's been using bsps now for a very long time couple decades I think well since then almost um so then we we we get to April and uh we work on another Alpha we kind of get another Alpha out there um this is like some of the text I don't know if you

guys can read it but this is some of the text out of the read me file that we always put in all of our deliverables that we kind of send out and these were just sent out to like beta testers that we've known for years so it's just a few people that we sent these to um but we kind of reached what we felt was uh an alpha Milestone people called like uh football or push wall and fruit basket yeah actually that's the name of the some of the um so we're using a Dos extender to take take advantage of 4 megabytes of memory so we're not limited to the lower 640k and down at the bottom left you can see the little two dots that's kind of our frame rate counter down at the bottom uh since we didn't want to put a big number on the screen hey man if this gets out you can all kiss your autograph Doom books goodbye um so uh so you can explain the so this room was a little more sort of a

story based thing uh when like Doom was a great game with sort of uh you know things jumping out at you and just pure you know raw experience which was brilliant about it uh at this point my my thought about it was hey there's you know speaking of aliens uh what Jim Cameron did that was so great is he showed you just at the start of the movie there's all these uh people's transponders in this one place over there and your journey is towards that so you have a deeper and deeper and deeper sense of dread as you head to it and so that was the very very small simple story I was trying to inject on there is just that sense of of deeper dread underneath the the scary sort of experience but as you know it's kind of boxy right now in this version yeah this is one of the early boxy hey do military boxy room kind of stuff and that's why you can see it's yeah and at that time we had to you know we trying to find a texture style and stuff so the the Silvery cool one was like kind of

realistic looking it was kind of a really interesting more Spacey yeah more Spacey and kind of cool and in the stone and stuff so we kind of stuck with what was what was okay to do this was a E1 M7 and uh you know there might be some people out there that that have played E1 M7 a million times this is this is like the really early version of E1 M7 so if you play the level a lot you totally know where where you're at and here but how different it is from the actual release game this is a lot of uh still using these is limited amount of textures we didn't have that many textures back then because we kind of were dumping a lot of effort into the the modeling and the texturing or the um the characters having to pixel you know basically do pixel editing of the characters cleaning up all the frames and that was a lot of work to to clean those guys up and it's the weekend here so there's none of the demons are there taking some time off knocking one back that's yeah the end of V1 M2 or that's E1 M6

um a lot of uh you can see I was playing around here with actually uh the I did all the programming of of everything that happens in the environment in the game so all the flashing lights the stairs the platforms the switches all that stuff I was I was coding all of that and uh and testing it in my level so like while I'm making the levels I'm testing the functionality of the levels at the same time with the cool features like hey it'd be cool if this you know there's some lockers really cool there's some demons in the shower here that's what that's supposed to you know you get dirty you know killing and Ming and all that consigning souls to hell and all that stuff but uh yeah at this point I'm I am very glad he was doing uh some of the gameplay stuff right now cuz sometimes it's difficult to get gameplay stuff in uh in sort of a technical focused uh company uh so I really wanted teleporters in the game teleporters were my new push wall so I like stole one of 80s Al adrianne's graphics and I colorized it red and I

sto then stole his metal texture and put bands around it and I said here can you make this teleport to another one of these somewhere else in the level and it's like okay so that was awesome you I was like I'm free I can make all I can go over here and do special rooms and all it was a it was nice to be able to do that so it was non Snappy yeah yeah this was this was um basically E1 M2 and I think that's that's probably the end of that video um yeah we had like little signs and stuff in there that you know these are real early signs that don't don't exist programmer art or designer or whatever it was programmer art um dark hle there's there's the exit why why um yeah the that's basically everyone that was in the company at that time the very bottom there um so it was a pretty small team and uh and then we get to May of

1993 and so we put out another uh we put out another pre beta um I don't think that this is like maybe a minute um but we you know we're we're improving the game we're making new builds it's uh it's funny that they're not out all over the place uh so it's good to get the video here um so we were like this is getting more real we got a lot more textures than this uh you can see the the the the the UI at the bottom totally changed up we're just playing around with new things we have a font yeah now there's a menu system and and uh and uh we took some like those little markers on the side there are kind of taken from Wolfenstein um but we basically we're trying to kind of fill out the menu system so we can program some stuff in there uh some more functionality so we don't have to like put you know command line parameters to enable functionality uh we got our skill levels in there cuz we need to put stuff in in the levels like while we're making the level we got to be able to put you know Monsters of varying difficulty in there so like now

we're getting more um you know just kind of more of the game more of the game uh actually going so yeah you can see they just disappear now but hey you can shoot them pop you can shoot the you shoot the de demons they disappear you know not fun but you know at least it's working and uh in this so yeah I think this was pretty much the the whole thing this little bitty level but it gave us a lot more textures some shooting new UI menu system so we're kind of dumping a whole bunch of stuff in there with just uh there's just two two of us programming at that time just me and John um but the artists are doing a lot of work redoing you know the bullet clips and the armor and you know the artifacts that you pick up because in in the game you actually were picking up a lot of artifacts it was keeping track of items that you picked up even all the way until October um so uh eventually decided that that was not going to be a a fun thing to do picking up all these items we're doing that in Wolfenstein but it wasn't

something that kind of fit inside this game and there's I think that's Tom's Yeah that's you think that I think the Adrian did that I'm pretty sure that's that sort of Bes speaks sort of to the original one world design being like turned into like map that you go through yes we are at June uh in June uh we I think Jay had talked to computer gaming World which was the really cool magaz back there for PC games and so a guy named Chris Lombardi came out and he did a preview of Doom it was a two-pager this is just one of them and uh and he did a really great job on this preview um sneak peek and uh and so they actually in this issue of the of cgw they did two previews one was called Companions of zanth and one was doom and uh and they got Companions of Zan on the cover um with a kind of a mention of Doom on it so that was really cool that we actually got our our self mentioned on the cover of a magazine finally uh the first time that we actually got any

kind of press was I think on the phone after Wolfenstein we did like a radio interview with somebody and so that was really exciting and random yeah and so it was cool to see you know the first time that Doom was in something uh we right in the middle of development um so now July hits yeah and uh at this time uh you see notice Doom has a lot of variety in Monsters at this time uh like a month before before there were there's nothing flying there was a bunch of going going you know and shooting stuff at you throwing stuff at you coming and destroying you and stuff like that and again it was sort of a fight to say you know there needs to be something flying I realize you know this is fake 3D and stuff but there needs to be something flying something that can come down at me you know something that doesn't have to be be on the same path that I am you know something that can come up and you know scare the crap out of you and Fin finally after a lot of effort then

finally we got the the flying skulls and things like that so but it was kind of a fight yeah and uh that kind of led to another little snap in my my happiness like trying to you know this should be obvious you know why why can't we just you know do this and that's cool so anyway so at that time there's like ID and there's uh me and there's a circle of you know people having fun and really uh loving what they do and talking to each other and I'm kind of like isolated and alone like the sad [Music] clown so yeah Tom Tom wanted more creativity things were getting optimized out of the design and uh and so we kind of felt that Tom's Vision was kind of too much for what we were trying to boil the game down to which is pure speed demons keys since it's scary dark fast I things like I I wanted were like environment dangers you know things that were different from you know bunch of hallways and green slime and stuff like

that and in the end it just like well you know like it's difficult to be the thing was a a pure thing and it's difficult to be on the fifth version of the same thing and seems they've done a few more of those that you just want to know get your creative Yaya out and uh so I think he was kind of ahead of the design game where we're trying to yeah considering yeah considering I was making trees out of like green blocks I was kind of like you know I was ready to explode so so then we get to August and so then tom leaves we depart uh we parted ways and we started had a meeting and just like parted ways and after the meeting I felt a deep sense of relief because this thing is like uh just sort of been eating at me and been unhappy and not not getting my

creative juices out and that led me to the the realization that all like all of us wanted was creative happiness creative happiness always wins and it will make things sort out so karmac wanted creative his technical creative happiness and to to do what he wanted to do John had founded in Creative happiness you know he's getting to do a lot more design you know that he's brilliant at instead of just like being hampered by tools and stuff like like that and this allowed me to get out unfortunately uh I kind of did rise of Triad which a number of people like uh but it was sort of like wolfestein 1.5 you know and I I I'm really proud of the death match the death match has incredible like crazy things going on drunk missiles you know and Flame walls and stuff uh and actually there's an inside story um the god mode of Rise of the Triad is actually something John did while no clipping through walls in

Wolfenstein cuz he would sit there and he turned no clip on to like go look at a different room or something and then he just kind of Goo like he's move I am moving through walls I will destroy you all so that kind of turn it to God mode I will destroy you kind of an inside joke uh but but the thing the thing I want to get the point I want to make about that though is did rise the Triad but then eventually years later I did get to get my creative Yaya completely out with an arronax which is a space game which had characters which really told had a really sense of space and and I'm really proud of the writing and the experience of that so yeah Tom actually was was uh developing prey after rise of the Triad and he left uh 3D Realms they kind of renamed themselves he left 3D Realms uh while he was on prey to help uh start up iron storm so he could make an Acron giant RPG yeah prey was prey was an

interesting project I had sort of a interesting thing that uh kind of showed up a little bit in arronax but it's a series of combined classes you know that each kind of contribute to each other three primaries and two two that add to each other and uh but the that just wasn't creatively working out and the team wasn't really happy with it either the way things were going uh the one thing that I do do like that is in prey is grab PA you can just walk up the wall I had the the very Perfect Image originally and prey of being able to go like this and throw a grenade and have it bounce on the ceiling like that and wait for something like that so it would be a great Death Match kind of thing anyway so then so then yeah so then Tom goes and eventually he does an acrx but during this time Tom's gone uh Tom was creative director and he was on the project for 10 months and now there's a void and so we need hire some other people cuz I'm not going to finish doing all the levels myself um cuz I still had

you know programming to do in the game and and and everything else but you know I just want wanted to say one more thing and that can you stand over here and point your mic at me I just wanted oh yeah I just wanted to say that I am proud to have worked on Doom and after 18 some years I can wear this shirt and say that you know I wrote [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] it all right yeah that'll be uh 20 bucks for another shirt to come off if you know what I'm saying we actually made uh Wolfenstein shirts that way as well so Wolfenstein 3D rote it and then we did a bunch of the Doom ones while we were making the game uh it's pretty funny so yeah yeah actually we uh came up with uh I think I I did the the Roto shirts and then I did the go to hell ad and then like apple

did these really simple couple word ads I think they stole it from me personally but oh yeah okay so so now we have to hire some new people right so uh we just hired two more people replace Tom Dave Taylor everybody knows Dave hopefully um and then the legendary Sandy Peterson who uh was uh working with chaosium on kak thulu and a bunch of other stuff so he was a well-known designer back then um so then these guys jump on the game Sandy is taking over Tom's design work Dave is is doing a lot of programming for us to get the game out you know we get into September um we're making a lot of progress on the autom map uh lots of levels are getting done uh in the style of game levels back then and uh we get the DMX sound drivers uh we we didn't have enough bandwidth to do the sound drivers ourselves so we actually uh had a guy named Paul rck uh he wrote Sound drivers that he was licensing out so Dave got those hooked

into the game so we can actually get sound effects and everything um in October we finally get another build of the game uh it's a pre-release and uh and it's getting close you know we're only I think what 2 months away from release at this point so um so the game's looking better you can see way more Textures in it the lighting's better we had a lot more time to uh to make more of an environment in this game so this doesn't have the sound effects in it cuz it would be annoying but uh but you can see uh how much more work's been done to that really simple level and it does take a lot of time when you're making levels to just keep going over and over the same area in refining your texture alignment and your lighting and your effects and your placement and everything that you're trying to do in these things uh making a great level requires a ton of iteration and a ton of play you need to play your own level and so I play these things a lot and like this isn't even

the final version of it cuz there's no lift there in the final in the final game um you can see that uh even the sky is different uh that's like trying to be realistic it looks like uh you know you're on Phobos and there's space above the mountains which sure space would be black like that but it doesn't look that good you know the black a black void like that doesn't uh it doesn't feel as good as something that has has more light so we kind of made it we we changed the the final the final uh the final Sky to actually be light colored so the level actually felt a lot better yeah if you put like stars in there they would kind of Alias or something with a yeah they would drop out and kind of look samply um you can see that we're picking up items we're keeping track of items and next to the Doom guy's head we have the lives so uh we still had those kind of things in the game uh even at the intermission screen was keeping track of you know your rewards for items that you picked up and stuff but we I

basically just didn't think that um like this was a this like I felt like this is a pretty modern game let's get rid of the the things that arcade games had in them uh so I didn't like the idea that uh that you would have to have lives and like you could end the game and kind of get really mad because you tried really hard to get through like E2 M5 or something so I got rid of the idea of uh lives and if you get killed you just go back to the beginning level infinitely as much as as as much as you want and we have a save load feature in the game where we can save it at any second while you're playing it and reload it instantly so it would be you know there's a high probability that players will be able to actually finish the game and get through it um so you can see here uh walking through E1 M2 uh how much different it is you can see that these Fireballs from from these guys is still I think it's Tom's art yeah the Fireballs that they're throwing is old um but at least you can see the game getting getting uh

more done and really the next step past this point was the final game it was just the next revision of all of these little layers of graphics and and level design and menu systems and and stuff like that so you can see uh actually had to run a TSR program called fake fake date to to allow me to record the demo because we had a a a Tim locked press release version that we sent out so you know uh it's hard to say I I don't think you can set the date manually inside of dosbox um so going forward November was like okay we're at the very end we got to hurry up and get this game done so we're all doing final polish work on it so a lot got done the first ipx multiplayer um in a game was created like a fast shooter game uh the word Deathmatch is created uh came up with that just while I was thinking about you know what kind of mode that would be we put Co in there cuz it just seemed obvious that you'd want to go through the the game together with friends um we

finished all of the the the the extra 10% of the game that it takes to really make it feel polished um and then we got you know modems working and all the game maps were modified to handle all the game modes that we had with all the difficulty levels and everything so it was really just tons of polish at the very very end um and we were spending more and more time at the office the uset was going crazy because everybody knew the game was going coming out for a whole year so they were inventing all kinds of stories and and uh new um games based off of cheat codes that we had and you know it was actually the internet created some cheat codes uh so it was it was just like really furious at the very end that last November December um was was was pretty crazy um and then basically that was December 10th is the day that we are putting the game up on the net we had a 30-hour stretch at the very end of No Sleep 30 hours everybody just running the game on every machine

um we had a last minute bug that was like it was a really crazy bug that uh only if you knew everything about the technology would you know how to debug but basically uh the game runs on a timer so even in the future with you know 50 Mega 50 gahz processors this game will always run at the at the correct speed um but in doing that using the timer at the at a lowlevel uh interrupt level basically if the timer starts at some crazy random value when the game starts there's a possibility that it could hit zero and at that point the game just locks up so we sometimes saw the game running on a bunch of machines it would just randomly lock up for no reason at all and uh and only only Cara could figure out that it was the timer code that was wrapping when that happened so fix that bug and then it never you know that was just like during that last time uh fixing that bug and it was the last thing that we had in the game so ironically Doom is uploaded to my

college Computers University of Wisconsin upload the game to the College University of Wisconsin's FTP server and everyone was waiting for it so we had to um you know we had to try and get in there get a slot in there to do an upload which is what we did and so um you know we were using a modem and putting the game up and uh totally couldn't hear and it blew up the whole server and uh and then we had to get on the phone with the sisp of the of the FTP server and then we had to have him kick everybody off and then we had to slot in again because we had hundreds of people trying to get onto the server to get the game and we couldn't even get the game up on the server because they're sitting there and then it blew up again so the second time the game blew up and and uh and then basically had to tell him to just lock everybody off so we could just upload it and so he did that and now Bucky's happy and then the game was uploaded uploaded to the world and made its way across all the bbs's and uh you know everybody knows

the rest of the story um we went on to make Doom 2 and Quake and and that weirdly uh level 10 of Doom 2 is mine I actually got it and was just playing was like what the the diamonds I what that it was a funny moment any so that's it that's the story of how we made Doom um thanks everyone we can do uh well first of all I would like to this is an odd job and really like to thank everybody that like gets the games and downloads them because you're just kind of like sitting in a room doing like this thing because you like to play it you know it's like I want to play that thing and then all of a sudden oh this is really great it's like you know okay nice to meet you I don't know how this happened but it's it's kind of cool so questions uh anybody has question questions uh beit hit a microphone so

everyone can hear it so to me one of the sort of most interesting Dynamics in Doom was the uh variety and sort of enemy attacks um and just sort of the timings of them and so on I'm was curious as to kind of where along the process or how much did they come out the way you'd planned or was there a lot of change throughout in terms of like Fireball speeds and enemy run speeds and shotgun timing and whatnot um yeah everything in the game was totally iterated on like heavily we had you know we made really best first guesses uh the game in the the game frame rate the the rendering rate was locked at 35 frames a second even though it could probably go 70 we made it 35 so the rest of the the the game would run evenly on more systems and that the uh and we ran the internal AI at 10 frames a second so we would have a a good a good speed for the enemies we don't want them coming too fast because it's just not very fair or fun so so uh we put first guest values in for everything the damage uh how the

damage scales on weapons the weapon firing rates how much per second damage that could possibly be um to try and perfectly balance all the weapons so you know what you were having to decide was if something's really far away you want to use not the shotgun and if something is is Big you want to use the rocket launcher and and uh stuff that's really far away use the pistol or the chain gun uh so we we we did a ton of balancing on that to try and kind of even out the damage dages and the times that they would fire and we and and uh I'd have to say it just felt perfect uh you know even even years later when we play Deathmatch in other games and come back to it it just it's it just we got really lucky balancing uh all the damage thank you I can't see you over I guess there's a hand over there hi hi there um so now that the game is well the game has been finished for a while and ported for a lot of systems do you guys go back and think that there was

any element that you want to change and also which Port do you think is the best and the most best representation of the game um I don't I I don't have anything that I want to change other than you know uh I would I would go over the levels probably and just do some more polish on the levels um but they really they they feel great and uh I think the game is I really don't have any like I don't look back at and go oh man that was really messed up like in you know with Quake there was there was some damages with the rocket launcher I would probably change but uh but with doom it just seemed right um him got one yeah uh hello I'm Carlos uh first of all thanks for coming uh I recently read masters of Doom and uh it reminded me of uh kind of like a when I was growing up like the image that people had John Romero like you know someone that was very excited very passionate about he was doing uh one of the things that I

thought about was how you guys always wanted to make like the best games around you you wanted to compete with the greatest and you wanted to break new ground and you know make the you know use like CarX technology and apply it in design in ways that nobody had seen before um and you then when you disagree with I think it I I saw a YouTube uh interview with Matt like mat chat matat yeah yeah where you uh you say you disagree with some of decisions that were made in quake and you ended up you know doing your own thing and you still wanted to you know make your own you know great first person shooter and your your vision of it right um so as a Creator what made you transition from you know that passion towards say triaa games STS a different Focus now towards the say social space um well I I played Deathmatch like constantly for years and love Deathmatch I really Deathmatch is like one of the most fun uh ways to play a game for me um but nowadays going into the uh into the the latest games they're

not they don't feel the same way they feel like I feel like I'm going slower through the world and I really like the doom and Quake speeds of you know player run it felt like they're more skill-based than you know like uh than than just like aiming at somebody with a with a rail gun um not not as much fun for me uh and uh and as a designer uh it's way more challenging to make a game that you know hundreds of Millions people will like uh like say social games it's much more of a challenge to try and uh get back to what you know the roots of of what's fun and to make it palatable to way more people um so I still I still have some really great ideas for some shooters that I'd like to make um but right now um you know I've I've moved through we both moved through a lot of different kinds of designs in in our careers and and uh it's fun to touch a lot of different areas well I think I think John's genius is seeing the the the next thing and and it perhaps the timing has been off

occasionally but when carac and I made a joke first level of Super Mario and left it on John's desk he closed the door when we came in after you know crashing and stuff and he says we are out of here he knew it they said this is it we're out of here boom this this a success was crawling and yeah with the tile scrolling stuff and when uh we did Monkey Stone together it's like it was a very early thing the cell carriers didn't really have it together as far as games but that's that's the biggest thing now is you know mobile games and stuff so it's brilliant little early on that one and uh now striking the Forefront again with social games and and sharing it with Brenda the brilliant Brenda thank you yeah thanks I think that's it for questions because we have to run to another talk yes thanks everybody [Music]