
Reflections on DOOM's Development - tosh
https://rome.ro/news/2018/12/10/reflections-on-dooms-development
======
merlincorey
A nice 25-year retrospective from one of the original FPS title DOOM's team.

> The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything
> about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM
> would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two
> players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more
> excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio.

It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly
exclusively were single screen affairs.

Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly
revolutionary.

I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't
always TCP everywhere).

~~~
msla
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze)

There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it...
after a fashion.

> MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by
> Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place
> in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player
> turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree
> changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the
> concept of deathmatch combat.[1]

[snip]

> Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one
> computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port.

Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack.

On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy:

> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software
> F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet
> Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had
> a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was
> hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique
> personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game
> Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting
> multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each
> additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such
> adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed]

Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had
the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.

~~~
emptybits
Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS
ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs).

Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero,
Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.)

Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense
as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it _was_ head-to-head ... those cables
weren't very long.

Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set
your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console
in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was
slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers
and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked
against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook
3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The
SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have
helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I
personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen
two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named
Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo
Software.

~~~
msla
I'm utterly amazed by the fact I can communicate with one of the authors of
one of the games that defined my childhood.

Faceball 2000 is, to me, a hidden gem of the Game Boy, a platform with many
well-known gems already, and it helped me pass many pleasurable hours.

(Seriously. The Game Boy had amazing battery life, as long as you were playing
it in a well-lit environment.)

Even playing it alone was fun, and I still remember the music as some of the
best of that era of console gaming.

(And, yes, I sank many hours into DOOM and DOOM II as well.)

~~~
emptybits
That's awesome. It makes me happy that you enjoyed and remember the game.
Robert Champagne, the real genius, coded the Game Boy and I rode his
coattails. I was responsible for the Game Gear version, a PC prototype, and
other things. My code ran a _lot_ slower than Rob's and I was never happy with
the final frame rate. :-( The GG had a nice colour screen but horrible battery
life and poor market share compared to the GB. [Aside: the Atari Lynx was a
slightly earlier platform and technically interesting but its market share was
zilch.]

We were pretty proud of Faceball 2000. James Yee, the non-technical founder
behind MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, was a visionary guy. Keeping the aesthetic
abstract (smiley faces, minimal texturing or "realism", etc.) was way easier
to code but it also won us some parental advisory awards in the industry
because we avoided gratuitous violence. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm glad you remember the music. The GB and GG music were composed by David
Whittaker. Very talented. When you unavoidably listen to your game's music
over and over and over and over, it's nice when it's actually well composed
and sonically interesting. The SNES music is also great, composed by George
Sanger, and the SNES had better audio hardware by a long shot but I actually
prefer the tunes and instrumentation of the GB/GG intros, outros, level music,
etc.

Nice chat. And as the game says, when you get whacked by a smiley face, "HAVE
A NICE DAY."

~~~
deng
David Whittaker was my favorite back in the day. Sometimes I fired up "Feud"
simply to listen to the music. It was funny to hear his "Lazy Jones" track
later in the clubs, albeit covered by Zombie Nation.

------
hoorayimhelping
> _and for the first time we were putting multiplayer into our game with a
> mode I called Deathmatch because that name just made sense._

I never really thought about this. Deathmatch is just what generic multiplayer
without teams or goals is called, and has always been called. Someone had to
come up with the name Deathmatch. I was around for DOOM's release, and this
term has always just felt ubiquitous. Cool!

~~~
russdill
[https://books.google.com/books?id=ziG6BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT386&dq=d...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ziG6BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT386&dq=deathmatch&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjImtmrtpbfAhWmslQKHRs3DEsQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=deathmatch&f=false)
(1992)

------
bluedino
>> It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game
that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t
challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time
to shoot for the stars.

They did it again with Quake, but then it was the end of a small team being
able to beat the AAA development houses. I was in awe that it was created by a
few guys, no huge budgets or huge team.

~~~
Sharlin
Quake was again a technological tour-de-force, and its moddability and
multiplayer opened up a whole new world of gaming, but as a single-player game
I find it strictly inferior to the original DOOM.

~~~
jeffbax
I do not agree. At all.

Quake has some of the most amazing maps/episodes and utterly terrifying
aesthetic of any FPS, despite how disparate levels were at times.

I can think of few older FPS that hold up as well as Quake 1's single player
campaign to this day, and the mapping community is still running amazingly
too.

Quake certainly took its toll on ID, and was when Romero was ousted. It may
not have been the original game they planned, but I don't think the game
turned out any bit less amazing of a campaign than OG Doom IMO.

------
crushcrashcrush
This game _defined_ FPS games. This, and Marathon (remember that? RIP Bungie.)

I remember trading DOOM WADs on SyQuest drives.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> This game defined FPS games.

Kind of literally. Before the term FPS they were called "DOOM clones".

------
shortcord
DOOM was before my time, but I really enjoyed Masters of Doom which is the
story of id up to right before DOOM III. Wil Wheaton did a fantastic job with
the audiobook.

~~~
redisman
DOOM was one of the first 3D games I played and the first I played with a
Soundblaster (a GPU like card you'd buy to hear sounds other than beeps and
boops). I've never been so amazed at a game since. I literally had my jaw open
for minutes. After fiddling with a set of drivers that allow me to have enough
RAM to boot it of course. I was just learning how to draw pixels on screen
with BASIC and could somehow extrapolate that if I get good enough I could
maybe do a game that resembles a 2D game but when I saw DOOM I realized how
little I know. There's no way I could to this day write a 3D engine which
makes me a bit sad but at least I understand most of the math behind it after
working in games.

------
coroxout
"The year of 1993 was a magical one ... The engine was revolutionary in that
it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen
before. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance."

(obligatory old-man-shouts-at-cloud post) pfft, nobody who hadn't already
played Ultima Underworld II, released in Jan 1993, maybe

but seriously, great game (both of them!), and always interesting to read
about

~~~
jccalhoun
Well, Wolfenstein 3D and even Catacomb 3D were both before Doom as well.

~~~
mthoms
Neither of those were true 3D. In fact, even Doom wasn't fully 3D.

The view could only ever be at 90 degrees for example (no looking up or down)
and the environments couldn't have more than one floor and one ceiling at any
given location.

I think the limitations made the genre even more successful because it forced
people to "evolve" into 3D by going from Wolf3D > Doom > Quake. Step by step.
True _immersive_ 3D was actually a jarring (but undoubtedly fun) experience
for the first time. Anyone here remember Descent?

~~~
int_19h
By Heretic, you could look up or down in Doom engine, although the way that
was done distorted perspective (it basically kept all vertical lines vertical,
while distorting proportions horizontally, to approximate the effect).

I would also add Duke Nukem 3D to your step-by-step list. Reason being,
firstly, it had sloped floors. But also, as I recall, it was the first 3D
action game to have what was then called "room over room", even though the
engine was fundamentally limited in the same manner as Doom - it achieved that
by utilizing portals. So actual architecture was still one-level, but portals
transparently connected it in a way that simulated multiple levels.

There were also some really crazy hacks to achieve something like that in
Doom. Like, bridges that you could walk over _or_ under. The way it was done
is by having an invisible platform that was lowered and raised as the player
approached the "bridge" from the corresponding direction, combined with a fake
middle texture that wasn't actually solid.

~~~
mthoms
All this talk of Id games and I totally forgot about Duke! It definitely
should be in the discussion. Now, if they'd only make a sequel... ;)

------
davidjnelson
Doom is such a foundational game. My friend and I both got into tech by making
doom wads and playing them over our modems in the mid 90s. Fond memories. I
still remember some of the maps I made, they were a blast. Hilarious too since
we would mod various sound effects to play funny things :-)

------
ydnaclementine
Serious question, are Romero and Carmack still friends? I think they're both
brilliant and a great example of a duo.

For some reason the internet paints them as rivals, or that Carmack was the
one who succeeded (continuing with ID and now at FB) and Romero faded away and
was never really technical (and works at a gas station).

~~~
acdanger
I read the book Masters of Doom a few years ago and they did a good job
portraying them as creative rivals with clashing personalities.

I don't know if they've reconciled in recent years and I've never heard about
Romero working at a gas station. Any source for that?

[https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Cult...](https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture-
ebook/dp/B000FBFNL0)

~~~
whatever_dude
Literally the last thing Masters of Doom talks about is how Carmack and Romero
are still friends. Maybe not best buddies - they have completely different
personalities - but I don't think there's much animosity between them.

There's no basis for the claim he's working at a gas station. He runs a game
development company in Ireland.

------
favorited
> I was finally using a real operating system with an incredible programming
> language, Objective-C

I know that NeXT workstations were pivotal to id's work at the time, but I
still love seeing some casual ObjC praise included.

------
Koshkin
It is a little bit sad to realize that this amazing game that took so much
effort and ingenuity can now be easily run at a full speed in an emulator of
8086 written in JavaScript. Inside the browser, on a Raspberry Pi.

~~~
sneakernets
A modified Doom codebase can run on a Gameboy Advance with an acceptable
framerate.

Doom's rendering trick wasn't dependent on CPU power as much as it was cache
manipulation, memory access speed, and VGA card speed. Everything was already
pre-computed, so the rendering engine only needed to look up a binary tree and
spit out to the screen exactly what it was told. Even the game logic reused
some of the renderer's LUTs when the code could get away with it, which was a
lot.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
320x200 is 64,000 pixels. Assuming 20 fps, that's 1,280,000 pixels per second
that need to be rendered. It ran at least 20 fps on a 66 Mhz CPU, meaning that
each pixel had at most 52 clock cycles to render, and that's not even handling
game logic. Certainly some optimizations involving not re-rendering pixels on
the HUD come into play, but still I'm blown away that that they figured out
such crazy optimizations.

I feel like if I were to try to write Doom's engine that I would struggle to
reach 60 fps on my i7 CPU, even rendering in Doom's original 320x200
resolution.

~~~
usefulcat
Actually I'm pretty sure it was 320 x 240 (mode X, which had the advantage of
providing square pixels), so slightly more impressive.

~~~
tom_
It was 320x200, apparently:
[https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio](https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio)

~~~
sneakernets
Not to be _that guy_ but the doom wiki moved over to its own domain at
[https://doomwiki.org](https://doomwiki.org) due to Wikia hijacking the wiki.

Anyway, Doom used a special version of Mode X dubbed "Mode Y", which is
Abrash's ModeX with fewer pixels to worry about.

~~~
tom_
The correction is very welcome. Fixed link:
[https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio](https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio)

(I found the link with google on my iPad, so my search was not as exhaustive
as it might have otherwise been.)

------
bitwize
> I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project,
> especially one like that.

Good to see Daikatana has proven instructive to Mr. Romero about the pitfalls
of writing checks with your mouth that you can't cash with your ass.

------
evanjacobs
"I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project,
especially one like that."

So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the
most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate
that others follow that path?

It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in
part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to
achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.

Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working
Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of
introducing any new product.

~~~
westoncb
That comment is likely a nod to his later experience pre-hyping his game
Daikatana, which he got lots of backlash for.

