

Development of Doom - michaelpinto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom

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jboggan
Dave Taylor, whom the article calls the "spackle coder" is a really brilliant
and interesting guy. He was my roommate for awhile and I heard some
fascinating stories (he did the sound engine for Quake which involved a lot of
time spent with Trent Reznor). My favorite was when I asked him what kinds of
(presumably brutal) music everyone was listening to during the creation of
Doom. The most commonly listened-to artist: Sarah McLachlan.

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michaelpinto
What's amazing to me is that both Doom and the first web server were created
on NeXT workstations. It's also interesting to see that while everyone a few
years ago was rushing to learn Objective-C that Carmack was coding with it in
1992. Looking back on it maybe Steve Job's "lost years" were in fact his most
productive (especially given that Pixar made Toy Story during this era).

~~~
nextos
Indeed. Oversimplifying a bit, modern Apple is largely NeXT stuff running on
more affordable hardware. NeXT was very forward thinking, so this is far from
a criticism to Apple.

This is a pattern I've spotted quite often, interesting ideas brilliant people
have but that can only be executed many years later, when technology catches
up.

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javery
I highly recommend the book Masters of Doom. Great writing and such a great
story.

~~~
nailer
It also changed my perception of both John Carmack and John Romero. The latter
sometimes gets picked on for not being the engine guy and for Daikatana, but
Johnwas writing level editors, compression apps, and massive amounts of
tooling work allowing Carmack to focus exclusively on the engine. He also
waded through a flooded lake to get to work one day.

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simonh
I used to see Sandy Petersen from time to time at roleplaying games
conventions, in the UK and Germany. He had a black t-shirt withe the DOOM logo
on the front and "Wrote it!" On the back.

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maurits
Almost obligatory, fabians code reviews [1] are a joy to read (even if you
spend most of your time in Matlab).

[1]: [http://fabiensanglard.net/](http://fabiensanglard.net/)

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bluedino
In light of the current 'Blurred Lines' lawsuits, how did id ever get away
with basically ripping of Metallica for the Doom soundtrack?

~~~
tokenrove
(Slayer and Pantera, too. See
[http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_music](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_music)
for one plausible breakdown of "inspirations". The "Bobby Prince is a Filthy
Thief" compilation, too:
[http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doomcovers/](http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doomcovers/))

The soundtrack didn't make a huge amount of money, and wasn't highly visible,
would be the real reasons, as far as I can see. Also, arguably, the Blurred
Lines lawsuit sets a new precedent for this kind of thing.

The story goes that Bobby Prince, being a lawyer, knew just how much he could
copy without infringing, but that seems pretty tenuous in some of these cases.

~~~
jewbacca
"Doom and Metal/Rock: A Comprehensive Comparison"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H3BB2gKKeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H3BB2gKKeY)

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lukeman
Here's a great video recorded at id Software in November of 1993 by Dan
Linton, a visiting BBS operator:
[https://vimeo.com/4022128](https://vimeo.com/4022128)

Around a month later, the first public version of Doom was uploaded to the BBS
that Dan Linton ran.

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nilic
Nice Machinima documentary about id Software -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCafnH_eisA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCafnH_eisA)

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momentofinertia
I clicked the link thinking it was about a new development methodology...

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JeremyMorgan
The tools were developed in ObjC, but the game engine itself was coded in C.

~~~
melling
The source is on GitHub: [https://github.com/id-
Software/DOOM](https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM)

~~~
benkant
> [https://github.com/id-
> Software/DOOM/blob/master/linuxdoom-1....](https://github.com/id-
> Software/DOOM/blob/master/linuxdoom-1.10/g_game.c#L456)

One thing that's clear when reading game source code is that they hard code a
lot more than I would writing system or application software. That's to be
expected given the nature of the beast, but it's still one of the first
obvious differences.

~~~
treve
And this also perfectly explains why computers don't feel exponentially faster
than 20 years ago. We're always taught to add abstractions all the time.

