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It's also worthwhile to remember where the team honed their craft, as was also mentioned in this session: The early id team worked for a publisher called Softdisk that provided a game subscription where customers received a new game every month. This was basically a way to iterate on the practice and process of game development in one month cycles. The shareware relase of Doom had four months of development, which sounds crazy short by today's standards, but for them it was unusual to have so much time.

There's several talks on Youtube by John Romero where he tells the story of the early id software, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2MIpi8pIvY




> The shareware relase of Doom had four months of development

This is incorrect. Doom took a year.

This was literally in the first answer Carmack gives on the Twitch stream yesterday - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvAkaJsvAXs&t=493


Yeah, from what I can tell Romero is referring to Wolfenstein taking 4 months to shareware release here: https://youtu.be/QvAkaJsvAXs?t=3580


GP talks about the shareware release, which was just the first episode, not the full game.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Shareware


Doom was released (as shareware, upgradable to the full version) after a year in development.


Sokpop is running a similar approach on Patreon. They have 4 devs and have released over 100 games since 2018 https://www.patreon.com/sokpop/about


Sokpop is fantastic. A tiny game coop based out of Scandinavia releasing interesting tiny projects every month.


Wikipedia says 1 year: official team development started Nov 1992 and the first episode was released Dec 1993. IMHO this is underplaying it given Carmack started on the engine before that and it evolved from Wolfenstein 3D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom


Yep, I remember him adding emphasis while reminiscing the Softdisk era and how forcing themselves to push new stuff on a tight schedule may not have been the right conditions to produce anything of quality but it gave them the right conditions to hone their skills.

What I'm uncertain is, whether this was mentioned in the book "Masters of Doom" or Carmack's interview on Lex Fridman.




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