
Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem - adventured
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/12/john-carmack-doom/
======
rpm4321
This was interesting:

 _" The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell
into was the longer and longer times between releases. 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."_

~~~
aryastark
This is what ultimately did 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever in.

There was a lot of overlap between Apogee Software (later, 3D Realms) and id
Software in the early days. The mantra of 3D Realms was, during Nuke Forever,
that the game will be done _when it 's done_.

That mantra works great at a small scale. But when AAA titles go from Duke3d
to Halo/CoD within the span of one development iteration, you're screwed. The
cost of keeping up was, I suspect, just too great for a company the size of 3D
Realms to keep up. Even id Software was diminishing, post-Quake 3.

Companies like Blizzard and EA have the resources to pump out WoW expansion
#9, or Madden 2035 or whatever. For better or worse (my opinion, usually
worse) the industry has become more like Hollywood blockbusters. The whole
world hears about when GTA 5 comes out and makes billions of dollars the first
week, or whatever. As a result, we're just going to get what Hollywood gives
us in movies: sequel after sequel.

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ojbyrne
Perhaps I'm wrong but the opening sentence - "At the stroke of midnight on
December 10, 1993, an executive at id Software uploaded a file to an FTP site
on the University of Washington’s network" \- seems inaccurate - the big ftp
site back then was actually Washington University St. Louis - a different
entity than U of W.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Yes-- wuarchive.wustl.edu and ftp.wustl.edu are what I was thinking of, too. I
fondly remember pulling Aminet and Linux-related files off those servers back
in the early-to-mid 90s.

~~~
peterashford
Ahh.... me too. The Amiga community was great. _sigh_

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bitwize
"And I have to say I was pleasantly heartened when the Call of Duty wave came
over in more recent years and really took first-person back to the top of the
heap in prominence."

CREATED DOOM AND QUAKE, THE EXEMPLARS OF ADRENALINE ACTION FPS

[Good Guy John Carmack]

HAS NOTHING BUT KIND WORDS FOR DILUTED ALSO-RANS LIKE COD

Seriously, I probably wouldn't be so soured on "modern warfare" shooters if I
hadn't played so much Doom and Quake in my teens-to-early-twenties. They set
the bar, a bar which has proven very difficult to meet.

~~~
deletes
You have to consider that Doom and Quake are on the same level that modern
generic shooters. They were basically, find the keys( up to three ), find the
doors and kill the monsters and nothing more. I think Doom and Quake were what
CoD is today. And there is nothing wrong with that if you like twitch
shooters, because that is what Doom is. ::hides::

~~~
bitwize
What you're saying is that _Doom_ and _Quake_ had very basic mechanics. I
won't argue with that. But the kind of gameplay they exhibited was very
different from the CoD series. _Doom_ 's ridiculous weapon loadout, ridiculous
number of monsters (especially on higher difficulty settings), the fact that
your player character moved at highway speeds, etc. gave a sense of urgency
and chaos to the game. CoD has nothing like the feeling of dread you get when
you spot a bonus in a darkened room, naïvely cross the threshold, and hear the
hissing of _multiple_ cacodemons emerging from hidden chambers directly behind
you.

Another interesting mechanic in _Doom_ was the ability to either mow down
monsters yourself, or save a bit of ammo by enticing them to kill _each other_
and mopping up the stragglers. This was widely copied in "Doom clones" of the
day; the instruction manual for _Marathon_ even gave tips on "berserking".

CoD and its cousins in the "bloody screen, so real!" genre are quite
different. They're fine for what they are, but some of us who have been
playing FPSes for a while feel there's something missing. There's a series of
parody videos on YouTube called "Call of Dooty" which are basically _Doom_
with CoD tropes: QTEs, tutorial levels, waypoints which walk you through the
path you're supposed to follow (and penalize you for straying off the path),
NPC dialogue that refers to the demons as "Russians", etc.

~~~
vinkelhake
I played a _lot_ of Doom and Quake back in the day. I also enjoyed CoD:MW and
MW2. All those games are very linear and scripted. The feeling of dread you
describe works the first time you see it. The second time you get there you
know what is going to happen - and that's perfectly fine!

Both Doom, Quake and the Modern Warfare games are essentially built on linear
scripted sequences like that. I'd urge anyone to play "All Ghillied Up" (which
may be one of the best levels of all modern shooters) and try to tell me they
didn't feel at least some excitement.

By the way, if you're looking for something that carries the Doom/Quake torch
of mowing down lots of enemies at crazy speeds, check out the Serious Sam
series.

~~~
Crito
I wouldn't say that Doom is linear in the same way that many modern shooters
seem to be linear. The labyrinth levels aspect is something that I miss.

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CaptainZapp
Cool; I just finished "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner.

It tells the story of ID Software, the groundbreaking games they developed up
to the split of the two Johns and then some.

A real interesting read for anybody interested in the subject.

~~~
Bamafan
After reading this book, I realized I had WAAY underestimated Romero's impact
on iD.

Point blank - without Romero, there is iD Software (it was his idea to form a
new company). There is no Doom. There is no Quake. Romero was one of the
primary creative forces behind iD.

Carmack was the tech genius who made their ideas come to life.

~~~
talmand
I've not read the book, but I've often wondered if things would have been that
different without Romero.

Maybe in the beginning he was a driving force but I speculate something
changed. Be it something with him, technology changes, or whatever but he
later did not seem to have as big an impact.

I met Romero back during the beginning of the Ion Storm days and based on that
short chat with him I was convinced that Ion Storm would succeed. Sadly it did
not. Granted, Ion Storm did turn out some of the best games ever made but not
the one that Romero made.

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brianzelip
As I've also recently finished reading _Masters of Doom_ (as a result of HN's
discussion of Jeff Atwood's blog post about it [0]), I know that the Wired
article has it wrong in the first sentence. Doom wasn't uploaded to a Univ of
Washington server, rather Univ of Wisconsin.

The book was a really good and quick read. One point I'll make about its
content was how it told of Carmack reading Steve Levey's _Hackers_ (1984) and
thought that's where he belonged. I was happy to learn about his alignment
with free software.

Wolfenstein 3d was my first non-console game. I enjoyed it tremendously, as
with Doom and Hexen. I'm currently a COD addict.

The term "deathmatch" was an insight of Romero's upon experiencing the
beginning of multiplayer. That was also nice to find out, that deathmatch came
from Doom. It has totally stuck since, as team deathmatch is considered the
default game type in COD.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6570439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6570439)

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AJ007
"WIRED: Doom is famous for having been ported to every possible platform,
almost. Do you want to port Doom to Oculus?"

Carmack doesn't mention it, but you can get Doom on the Oculus here:
[https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=4...](https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=4743)

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joepour
If you enjoyed reading this and want to learn more about Carmack, Doom and id
software, Masters of Doom by David Kushner is a well researched and enjoyable
read.

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pmarin
_" (Carmack’s responses have been edited for space and clarity.)"_

What atrocity! Only us the programmers can apreciate his _brain dump_ style of
writting.

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acomjean
I like the part where he writes the IOS version by going to an open source
version of Doom, updating it for ios and re-commiting it.

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bitops
I was struck by this statement:

 _" There’s something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a
corner and shooting at something."_

Do others feel this way? I've played shooter games when I was a kid, but I
don't know that I feel intrinsically rewarded by shooting at stuff.

~~~
TillE
It's more of an immediate sense of action/consequence, like striking a
billiard ball, rather than anything special about shooting.

