Author: David L. Craddock
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The id Software Interviews

By David L. Craddock

Copyright

The id Software Interviews

Text copyright © 2024 David L. Craddock

All rights reserved. Originally published in the United States, 2024.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to info@theworldforge.com.

Published in the United States of America.

Most of the items and products in this book may be covered by various copyrights, trademarks, and logotypes. Their use herein is for identification purposes only. All rights are reserved by their respective owners. Several images used in this book are licensed under the Creative Common License version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0. In accordance with CC license terms: proper attribution has been given in each instance; no images have been altered; and unabridged terms for CC licenses can be found at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode, and creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Becoming DOOM Guy: John Romero’s Life in Games

A Lot of Fun: John Romero and John Carmack on Doom’s Enduring Legacy

John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall on id Software’s 33rd Anniversary

John Romero on Speedrunning and More

John Romero: Apple II, id Software, and First-Person Shooters

Tom Hall: Apple II and the Early Days of id Software

About the Author

Books by David L. Craddock

Introduction

Over the past several years, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing current and former id Software employees and co-founders for everything from books and articles to FPS, my documentary on (you guessed it) first-person shooters.

While I’ve interviewed multiple other co-founders and developers of other titles, the id interviews are special to me. I’ve been a fan of id’s games since the early ‘90s, when a kind old lady introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D. I relish every opportunity to talk games with them, especially the co-founders, whose efforts in the early days codified the FPS genre and contributed heavily to other genres such as platforming.

The id Software Interviews collects some of those interviews for your reading pleasure. I held some back because I plan to use them for other projects, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy what’s here. There’s discussion of Doom, the studio’s anniversary, plenty of talks with John Romero, the Apple II, and much more.

Enjoy the stories.

-David L. Craddock

November 1, 2024

Becoming DOOM Guy:
John Romero’s Life in Games

When I was ten, a little old lady gave me the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. A year later, my friend Aaron and I sat in the back of our Sunday school to whisper over a preview of DOOM in a gaming magazine. If you’d have told ten- or eleven-year-old me they would eventually interview id Software co-founder and DOOM co-creator John Romero dozens of times, neither version of yours truly would have believed you.

If you would have told me the Icon of Sin himself would refer to me as the “foremost chronicler of FPS history” in the acknowledgments section of DOOM Guy: Life in First Person, his memoir and one of the most anticipated gaming books of all time, I not only would never have believed you, I’d have thought you a cruel prankster.

That has all happened, of course, and the cherry on top was being asked by Abrams, the publisher of Romero’s memoir, to host Romero live on stage at the 2023 San Diego Comic Con. On Thursday, July 20, Romero and I took the stage and talked for an hour about his book, some of his favorite anecdotes from a life spent making games, why he took the high road when writing about negative incidents, why a DOOM II mod called Myhouse.wad is taking the Internet by storm, and much more.

Author’s note: This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

*

David L. Craddock: Thanks for coming out, everyone. This is awesome to see. My name is David L. Craddock, and I am the author of over 30 books about how games are made, people who make them, and why you play them. I’ve talked to John for several of those books and articles such as Rocket Jump for Shacknews, and for FPS: First Person Shooter, which is a documentary about… Pac-Man! No, it’s about first-person shooters. John, I think we talked for five and a half hours straight for that.

John Romero: Yep.

Craddock: This is really exciting, because for decades, writers like me have been telling your story by threading it into other narratives, but DOOM GUY marks the first time that we’re getting your story directly from you. To start off, I understand that there was a convention in Canada where you were going to speak, but they didn’t want you to talk about your games; they wanted you to talk about the man behind the game. How did that get started?

Romero: Well, I guess it happened before I even went there. They asked, “What kinds of talks do you have?” I was like, “I’ve got a Wolfenstein one, a Quake one, multiple DOOM ones, programming principles of software programmers.” They said, “We’ve heard those. Do you have one about just you, and how you grew up, where you came from, that made you make these kinds of games?” I was like, “No, but I’ll do that.” I made a talk called “A Life in Games” and gave the talk there. They were shocked when they heard my story about how I grew up. Afterwards, people were saying, “You should put that in the book.”

When I thought about it, I was like, yeah, it makes sense that I would, because nothing is written about that time in my life. I also thought that if I wrote an autobiography, it could double as an id Software and game history book as well, because I remember every single game: when they were made, how long it took to make them, what happened while we made those games. While I was at id, I think I made probably 32 games over five and a half years, which is pretty crazy. That’s a lot of games. I thought that would be cool, so I did that.

Craddock: In the spirit of this book, which has a lot of personal stories that, like you said, you’ve never shared, and a lot of game stuff, I thought we’d use this panel to cover some of those personal moments and talk about games. What went through your mind when you realized you would be sharing stories that, until that point, you hadn’t talked about with anyone other than mostly the people who lived them with you?

Romero: Yeah. Well, I thought that, if I’m writing about how I grew up, which was basically in the desert in Arizona, I’m going to just write about a bunch of the highlights. I remember so much of everything. I have a condition called hyperthymesia, where I can remember everything that I’ve done. That made it much easier to write a book. I can just remember everything, but it’s way too much information. I had to get the highlights, compress them, and then move on to the next phase. I put a lot of stories in there about what it was like growing up with the family that I had. Then I had a huge transition, moving from Arizona to Northern California, which changed everything. The environment was 100 percent different, and that’s how I got my exposure to computers.

Craddock: I think most people probably associate you with Texas or now with Ireland, but you actually grew up in Tucson, and you were immersed in your Mexican, Yaqui, and Cherokee heritage. Since you moved to California at a young age, when were you able to reconnect with your heritage?

Romero: The funny thing is when I went to California, my hair was short, so nobody treated me differently. I basically had zero family connection. I think I took my first plane ride when I went from Tucson to California; it was never a normal thing to get on the plane. I stayed up in Northern California and was in an environment where I didn’t have my Mexican family with me. Obviously, I don’t have any [accent]; speaking Spanish, I don’t have an accent that way. I was focused on what I was doing, which was programming. It was years before [I took] trips back to Tucson to kind of reconnect with my family.

Every time I go down there, it’s like I never left. Everyone’s like, “Johnny!” We all still keep in touch today. But yeah, that was very different for me as a kid, just moving completely into a different environment. It was a lot of focusing on how to deal with the new environment, and taking in a lot of really new, cool stuff.

Craddock: Your book goes into detail on what your dad and stepdad put you through, but one anecdote stood out to me. There’s a point, and I won’t spoil the whole story, where your mom says something like, “Get them out of here,” referring to you and your little brother. Your dad takes the two of you out into the desert, drops you off, and leaves you. The thing I thought about reading that part was that I’m the oldest of four siblings, and I was constantly told, “You need to set an example.” I didn’t want to be a role model. I just wanted to play DOOM and Mortal Kombat, whether my siblings were watching. But there you were, a kid, in this situation where you were responsible for another kid. What was that like for you?

Romero: I was five and a half, and I just had to deal with it. I was used to my dad getting mad. He was an alcoholic, and he worked in the mines, and he was a hard guy. He would get his paycheck and bet it all on pool games, and he even bet and lost his car. It was always something super chaotic. A lot of times we didn’t have food because he did something dumb with the money. So, getting dumped in the desert, we had no idea that was happening. My brother was with me, and our dad drove us out there in the truck. We were told to get out, and then just took off.

I kind of recognized where we were, so I told my brother, “I think I know what this is.” I grabbed his hand and we started walking back along the Santa Cruz Wash, where flash floods happened. We walked for about half an hour before he came back. He went home and my mom found out that he had just dumped us in the middle of the desert, literally. Scorpions, tarantulas, rattlesnakes—everything was in the desert. We were used to the desert. We used to go out in the desert and get mesquite for our barbecue we had almost every night, and just go to smash dead trees and throw them on the back of the truck. This was back in the ‘70s, so we’d be standing on the back of the truck holding on to the gate while he’s speeding through the desert, and if he hits the brakes, we’d fly into the back of the truck. Sometimes we’d sit on the wheel wells. All this stuff that’s illegal now, but back then, a lot of things weren’t illegal.

Craddock: You mentioned cutting your hair. Could you talk a little bit about what that means to culture?

Romero: In native culture, hair is really important. My great grandmother on my mom’s side was full Cherokee, and she had really, really long hair. That’s actually where I think I get my hair, even though on the Yaqui side, which is my dad’s side, my grandpa didn’t have any hair. So, it’s definitely on my mom’s side. It’s a symbol of your native culture. You wouldn’t cut it off unless it was for a really good reason. I didn’t know that for a long time until I learned later in my early twenties.

Craddock: I, and perhaps many people here, did a double take when they saw pictures of you in gaming magazines in the early 2000s after you cut your hair. What was behind that decision?

Romero: Well, I found out there was a charity called Locks of Love. You donate your hair and they can make wigs for people who are recovering from cancer. When I found out about them, I thought that would be a really good reason to cut my hair. And, you know, I’d have a new look for a little while. I started growing my hair again immediately. I knew I didn’t want it to be short for very long, so I donated my hair, and then immediately grew it, and then I cut it again and did it again. I’ve only done it twice.

Craddock: I love the title of your memoir and the cover art because I remember DOOM’s boot-up screen vividly from childhood. Well, who am I kidding: I play through it two or three times a year. What I wondered is, you’ve made a lot of iconic characters, so what made “DOOM GUY” the perfect title for your memoir?

Romero: I’m going to be remembered for DOOM more than any other game. But also, we named the player in the game “DOOMguy” because it could be anybody playing the game. It could be a woman playing the game. The reason the book is called DOOM GUY is the reference to the original DOOMguy of the game that I made versus being Slayer, which is the new character [in DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal]. It also references the fact that I’m actually the DOOMguy on the cover of the DOOM box. When we were doing a photo shoot for the dynamic action pose for the illustrator, he brought a model to pose so I could tell him how he needed to stand and everything.

The guy just was not getting the stance right, or the action, or anything. He had taken off his shirt. I was like, “No, let me do it.” I ripped my shirt off and I got in the position, and I made the model be a demon grabbing my arm. I took our BFG toy and I was aiming it as well, saying, “This is what I’m talking about.” The camera guy took a bunch of pictures and then he made the box cover from that. So that’s how it happened. I’m actually DOOMguy on the cover.

Craddock: Less than a year later, you became a literal model—and this is how we all know you best—as the model for the severed head at the end of DOOM II.

Romero [laughs]: Oh, I thought you were talking about 2014’s Men in Game Development calendar.

Craddock: Well, there’s… there’s that. Let’s talk about that.

Romero: I think it was a charity calendar that was being made by some group. They asked a bunch of guys in the game industry if they would [pose shirtless for] a certain month, and they asked me to do one. Brenda, my wife, took the picture. It was kind of impromptu. We were in Ireland, and Ireland has 4,000 castles. We picked one with a really cool staircase. She took a picture and submitted it, and they chose it and put it in there.

Craddock: One of my favorite parts of the book was reading about you tapping into your creativity during your childhood. You mentioned you were the proverbial kid playing with sticks in the yard because there wasn’t much to do, and you’d make up games to entertain yourself. Do you remember any of them?

Romero: It was taking anything that I could put together with something else. Usually, it was broken bricks from around the outside of the house. There were dirt trails everywhere, and an alley where everybody put the trash. You could find many things around the trash and use that, but usually it was bricks, stone, anything that could be put together to kind of build a little structure like a house. We’d find horned toads and stick them in there. Basically, if someone threw away any kind of garbage that was a toy or something like that, I would take it.

Craddock: Dumpster diving in first person?

Romero: Yeah! [laughs]

Craddock: One part of your career in games that I didn’t know about, although it made sense when I thought about it, was that you got a lot of compliments when you were younger about your artwork. People know about your game design and coding, but they probably don’t know that you loved to draw from a young age. Is there an alternate universe where John Romero is the lead artist at a game studio?

Romero: Probably. I spent a lot of my time drawing comics. I started out drawing anything and got pretty good back in the ‘70s. Semi-trucks were everywhere, so I used to draw semis all the time, and really cool hot rods, characters like Scooby Doo and Captain Caveman; I don’t know if anyone here remembers Captain Caveman. Then I started making these comics, which I called Melvin comics. Melvin is a kid who basically gets destroyed by his father, like, immediately [in every strip.] He does something stupid, Dad finds out, and ruins him. Then his dad has this ridiculous piece of advice at the end of each comic, like, “Remember, kids, clean up your room!” while Melvin is dead in his bed with his eyes crossed out because he didn’t clean. They’re still really funny to me.

Craddock: That would have looked great printed right next to Calvin and Hobbes.

Romero [laughs]: Yeah. The opposite of Calvin and Hobbes.

Craddock: I wondered, since you had these difficult relationships with your dad and your stepdad, were you ever able to reconcile the fact that they put you through a lot of hard times, while recognizing that they loved you in their way and did a lot for you throughout your life?

Romero: People make mistakes, you know? That’s just part of human nature. You just forgive people for everything they did. If you’re a parent, and you’re in your early twenties, you know, it’s very different from being a parent in your thirties or forties. I know that, especially if you’re drinking alcohol all the time, you’re not really that great of a parent. My stepdad was a drill sergeant in the military, so he already had his own kind of personality. You have to learn how to live with that. I focused a lot on learning how to code and make games, drawing, and all these things that didn’t require anyone else for a long time. When I moved out of the house, that made things a lot better. When you live at someone else’s house, they want you to make money and contribute, or get a life. My stepdad randomly kicked me out house one day, and I was just like, “I don’t feel like I have enough money to live somewhere.”

Like, what? That’s not cool. My mom talked him down, and I immediately got a job with three times the amount of money and moved out in a month. I was like, “That’s not happening again.” I never went back to living with my parents after that. Stuff happens, you deal with it, and move on. I think it’s my way of seeing things: Bad things happen all the time, so when good things happen, it’s like, “All right!” If a bad thing happens, it’s like, “Of course.”

Craddock: You describe how you had a very logic-driven personality like that of a programmer, where you boiled things down to, “input in, output out.” Was that how you processed life even before you discovered coding?

Romero: Yeah, I think so. Because it’s like, okay, if anything happens, let me just figure out how to deal with it and move on to the next thing. When you’re a new programmer, everything is a bug. Everything just doesn’t work. You’re always trying to solve a problem. So, with real-life problems, I just thought, Okay, this is a real-life problem. I’ll try to solve it as fast as I can, then get on to the next thing. Being used to solving problems constantly as a programmer made it easier for any real-life problems because I was solving stuff all the time.

Craddock: The Apple II was my first personal computer. Well, it was my grandma’s. She was a reading teacher and had an Apple II in her classroom, and she brought it home for the summer, and it was basically mine for three months. The Apple II was a formative computer for you as well. There’s still a lot of affection for early PCs such as the Apple II and the Commodore 64, but the Apple II especially is still beloved. Why do you think that is?

Romero: There’s a really great book by Laine Nooney that just came out [in May 2023]. It explores the reason the Apple II was such a leader back then. It has a lot to do with the amount of access that was put in that computer for people to access any part of it. That the computer manual that came with it had schematics of all the hardware on it to make it fully open. That’s what we at id Software were about as well: Opening up DOOM for modding. All those slots in the Apple II were for peripheral cards, and that’s why the PC has peripheral cards. It’s because of Steve Wozniak’s design, which is also based on earlier designs, like the S-100 bus of the Altair and all the other computers that came before it. Woz was very much about sharing information and making [the Apple II] open and not a closed system.

I think getting in early, and giving the computer a lot of graphics and sound [made the Apple II a leader]. It came out in 1997 and had all these features back then. The Commodore PET didn’t have them. The TRS-80 didn’t have them. It took five years until the Commodore 64 to actually have graphics hardware, although the Atari 800 [released] in 1979 was pretty amazing when it came out. But it had a smaller audience than the Apple II, and the Apple II didn’t really change for 10 years. That allowed it to build up a massive software library that everybody would play. What computer do you want to get? Well, the one with all the software.

Craddock: That makes sense. The Apple II being in so many classrooms played a part in that as well. I was playing The Oregon Trail on an Apple II in my fourth-grade class.

Romero: Yeah, that was critical. Steve Jobs getting the Apple II in schools was critical. It’s funny, because in January of ‘83, we moved from Northern California to England. I lived just north of London, and I went to a US military base for school. As soon as I got there, I was happy. I came in at the start of the second semester, but they had a computer lab, and it was all Apple II computers, and they were teaching BASIC programming.

Craddock: For a lot of your fans, the first game of yours they played was probably Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, or DOOM. But you were selling games that were published as code listings in magazines. In the book, you mention Scout Search was the first game you sold, and you got lots of rejections before selling it to Apple InCider. What do you remember about those rejected games?

Romero: Oh, yeah, I wrote so many. I never submitted any games that were written in BASIC because they just weren’t good. BASIC was the first language I learned, and the games I wrote were just not fit for publishing in magazines. As soon as I started learning assembly language in 1983, I wrote a bunch of little games. I wrote a Frogger game. I wrote a [clone of] Miner 2049er, if you remember that. I made a Breakout-style game, just a bunch of little games that I wrote in lo-res [color mode] and sent to magazines. I even did a Donkey Kong game. They all got rejected, probably because they were lo-res, and [they were too similar to trademarked games]. I had all these rejection letters, and was just like, “All right, I’ll figure out what to do.”

Scout Search was a combination of BASIC and Assembly, because it teaches people who are at different levels of learning. If you’re a BASIC programmer, you’ll learn something from the BASIC listing, and if you’re an assembly language programmer, you’ll learn something about game programming from the Assembly listing.

Craddock: Yeah, that makes me think of DOOM’s source code. John Carmack released it in 1997, I think, and I remember opening it and sorting through a hybrid of C and assembly.

Romero: Usually when you’re writing a game, you do as much as you can in the higher-level language [such as C or BASIC], because higher-level languages are so much easier to type: You type a little and get a lot of [work out of those short commands]. Low-level languages [such as assembly] are usually for speed, because the data that you need to do something with, like graphics data, needs to be manipulated really specifically depending on the hardware you’re trying to use. When you’re rendering a screen, like pixels for VGA screens, you put the graphic driver into a specific mode that sometimes changes how all the memory is interpreted. Then you have to write the graphics into memory at very high speeds in this weird format so it looks great on screen. Even way before DOOM, I’d done many games that were half and half. It was kind of rare after the ‘80s for games to be all assembly because the C compilers were great, but I don’t want to get too technical.

Craddock: I knew you’d worked at Origin early in your career, but I guess I just assumed you’d met Richard Garriott. It turned out you didn’t. When did you finally meet him?

Romero: Yeah, he worked at the Austin branch of Origin, and I was in New Hampshire, which was actually the big studio. They had Origin’s corporate office there. All the marketing was there, the salespeople were there, and all the ports they were doing were managed up there as well. Ultima V was being developed in Austin, and simultaneously, they were porting it to the PC where I was in New Hampshire. Herman Miller, who was a great low-level VGA graphics programmer guy at Origin was there; Cheryl Chen, and Ed Nelson, and John Fachini, who was the project lead of the PC version. The [core team] was just four people making the PC version of Ultima V.

So, yeah, there were a lot of projects going on up there. I never met Richard because he never flew up. He stayed down in Austin. When I started Ion Storm in 1996 and I was looking for a publisher to pay for us to develop games, Origin was one company I wanted to talk to. When I got there, before I even reached Garriott’s office, I met Rod Nakamoto, who created the MockingBoard soundcard for the Apple II. He was just in the elevator, and I was like, “Oh, my god! Rod Nakamoto!” He was also the founder of Micro Systems, so it was great to meet him. Right next to Richard’s office was Herman Miller’s office; he was the longest-tenured employee at Origin at that time, which was 20-something years, so it was great to meet him.

Anyway, Richard walked us through all the projects that they’re working on, giving us information about what they were doing and how we could fit into it. At the very end, I had him sign my Ultima V t-shirt that I’d kept since 1987.

Craddock: So even John Romero is asking for autographs.

Romero: Oh, yeah. Richard Garriott is a legend.

Craddock: You’ve met so many “game design rock stars,” a term coined to refer to you and select others in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Is there anyone you’ve always wanted to meet but haven’t?

Romero: I would love to meet Larry Miller, which is the most generic name for a programmer. He did some amazing 3D programming in assembly language on Apple II. This guy was crazy-smart. When he made a game, he didn’t send a disk to publishers. He would go to the publisher with his secretary who had a massive stack of paper, pages and pages, reams and reams. She would type in his assembly code [as he dictated it to her], and when he ran it, it worked. He had the whole game in his head. This dude was brilliant. I’d love to meet him.

Craddock: Let’s talk about Softdisk and your Gamer’s Edge division for a minute. It’s you, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack. You come to work one morning and find a floppy disk on your keyboard. This is one of my favorite stories. Could you tell us the significance of that disk?

Romero: The disk had a little demo that Tom and John had spent about six hours creating. I left work probably about 10 o’clock the previous night, and they started this demo around 11 o’clock. That’s because Tom came in after I left; we just had a 10-by-10 office. John was still there, because he was trying to finish this little piece of tech [code for smooth scrolling] that I challenged him to write. It so happened that Tom came in and saw this working, and said, “You know what we should do? We should make the first level of Super Mario 3 using Romero’s Dangerous Dave character.” We had an NES in the corner of the room and it was running Super Mario 3. Dangerous Dave was perfect because the character already existed with all his animations, so he could take that and put it in this demo. John said, “All right, let’s do it.” They spent six hours, until about 5:00 a.m., making this little demo that Tom thought would be hilarious, that I would laugh at because he named it Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. It was just a joke to show that John did the thing that I kind of dared him to do.

I came in and there was the disk on my keyboard. There was a sticky note on it that said something like, Run Me. So I went and I ran it. The game popped up on the computer, and I was laughing just because the screen said Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. Tom had drawn a title screen with a judge wearing a powdered wig and holding a gavel. I was like, okay, this will be funny. The game starts, and I see the [first screen in World 1-1 of] Super Mario 3. There’s Dangerous Dave in a Mario level. I held down a key, and as soon as the screen scrolled, I was just like, “Oh, my god.” I was blown away. No one had ever seen this happen on a PC. It moved like an actual original Nintendo.

The significance is that the PC was released in August 1981, and no one had ever done this before. It had been nine years, and John Carmack figured it out. I saw it, and was like, “We’re leaving. Now. We’re quitting. We need to start a company because this company can’t take advantage of this the way that we can.” I knew this because I took the disk around to show people in other departments and they were like, “Oh, neat.” I’m like, “No way. Seriously, nothing exists like this.” Suddenly, I was like, “I’m going to shut up,” because this is crazy that people don’t even recognize it, and I don’t want too much information getting out.

We immediately made a Super Mario Bros. 3 demo for Nintendo. We did the full first level with all the characters in, all the animations, everything. We sent it off to Nintendo. At the same time, I was contacted by Scott Miller, and he wanted us to make a game. We did it. That’s how id Software started.

Craddock: I brought up that story so I could establish some context for my next question. You and I have been talking about that disk recently for one of our projects. I’ve been thinking about its significance, and I realized that every time that disk and Commander Keen come up in articles and books, they’re made out to be a steppingstone to id’s FPS games. I think people are overlooking the disk’s greater significance as one of the first game engines, since that tech was used as the foundation for Commander Keen. Am I wrong about that?

Romero: Yeah, it was one of the first game engines. Just the concept of having an engine and making multiple games out of it actually came out of necessity. That code on that disk, you can trace the entire first-person shooter genre to that disk, because if that demo didn’t happen, the FPS genre we know today would look very different. It would have happened because of someone else, but it wouldn’t look the way it does today. It all traces right back to that. That’s why id Software started, and that’s why we started making 3D games eventually, after we did that hardware trick with smooth scrolling, and then we got into 3D games and started making Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake and all that stuff. It all comes back to that. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have started id Software.

Craddock: That’s what I was thinking. For all anyone knows, you four would’ve hung around Softdisk a while longer and then gone your separate ways. I think another epiphany from that story is that today we have people who consider the end-all-be-all platform, but Nintendo’s NES was so far ahead of the curve before Commander Keen made people realize that smooth-scrolling software was possible on the PC. Nintendo was so far ahead of everybody else.

Romero: Absolutely. The Super Nintendo was incredible. When that came out in 1990, it was the best platform. We had every platform back then. The Neo Geo was super badass, except it was extremely expensive. Every cartridge cost, like, 100 bucks. It never really took off because of how expensive it was. But below that [in terms of hardware] was the Super Nintendo. That was incredible. Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo looked awesome. We used to play as many fighting games as we could on it. Any games, really. Super Star Wars, Super Empire Strikes Back, and Super Return of the Jedi were awesome. Super Mario World, Zelda: A Link to the Past… It had so many incredible games. I played F-Zero against Carmack for years.

Craddock: What do you guys think of Mode 7?

Romero: Mode 7 was awesome. In fact, I have a demo that we made similar to Mode 7 on the Super Nintendo, but on the PC to make a racing game.

Craddock: One of id’s pre-Wolfenstein 3D shooters was Catacombs 3D. I still go back to that and experiment with it, and one reason is because of the mechanic where you can click your mouse to throw a fireball or click and hold to charge up a larger fireball. I really liked that mechanic. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that mechanic didn’t return in any other id game. I wondered why that was.

Romero: It just didn’t make sense in our future games. For a game set during World War II like Wolfenstein 3D, you hold down a button because you want instant response for your weapons, right? I think that design idea was probably okay for that game, but it wasn’t good for Commander Keen. When you press the button, you kind of crouch down and then jump. You should never do that. In Commander Keen 4, you jump immediately, because you want that “I’m jumping right away” response. You don’t want your character to say, “Okay, I’m getting ready to jump.” Just jump.

It’s important to really understand design rules. One of them for us was, stop pausing [before certain actions] and make the thing happen as soon as somebody presses a key. Charging up your power was great for Catacomb 3D because it made sense for what you were doing: you could shoot a fireball quickly, or build up power. Earlier that year, we made a game called Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, which has a really cool mechanic where you have a shotgun with unlimited shots, except you can only hold eight shots [before you must reload]. Everything’s coming towards you, you’re shooting and you’re running out of ammo, and you have to stop shooting to automatically reload your shotguns while stuff is still coming toward you. That delay while zombies are coming toward you is intense. That was a really great balance, and again, we did a lot of experimentation: having unlimited ammo, or having to charge a fireball, that kind of stuff. We experimented with design all the time.

Craddock: Dangerous Dave is usually mentioned in the context of the Copyright Infringement demo, but he was one of your most popular characters before id Software. Where did he come from?

Romero: Dangerous Dave started out as a 1988 game on the Apple II that was published by Uptime. In fact, it was published in the very last issue of Uptime. Fortunately, I made a bunch of games for Uptime, and they were publishing all my stuff through one year all the way until they finally ceased functioning. Jay Wilbur was the guy who was in charge of the Uptime disk. As soon as [the magazine went under], he went to Softdisk. And at the same time, I went to Softdisk with Lane Roathe. All three of us were hired simultaneously to come and do good things.

Craddock: You and Carmack ported a lot of your Apple II games to the PC. Was that a case of you two knowing those games, having written them, and feeling confident you could port them quickly?

Romero: Yeah, the reason we made them is that we were working on a new product that I started called Gamer’s Edge. It was a subscription disk for games. Every two months, we would mail games out to people who were subscribing to get whatever we were selling them. We just had to design and ship a game every two months. That happens a lot faster when you have something that you’ve already written that you can use as a base to make a sequel to. We already knew everything about catacomb because John had already made Catacomb 1 and 2. Making the next catacomb, Catacomb 3D, was easy, since we already knew all the characters and we knew what the world was about. We could just focus on making a Catacomb game for Gamer’s Edge. The same with Dangerous Dave: We already knew him, so making a sequel was easy. That helped speed along the process.

Craddock: One quote you shared with me years ago, and I’m paraphrasing, is, “Make your first level last.” You did that with DOOM’s E1M1 map. How did you implement that philosophy in DOOM to help you decide what the first level should show, and what it should hold back for later?

Romero: This is something that all game developers should be doing: By waiting to make your first level last, you know everything about the game, so you can put all that knowledge into making a first level that really blows away the player. You’ve made so many assets: all the characters you’ve developed, environmental storytelling language, everything. Now you can just load it all up in that first level, and make it really impressive for the player. In DOOM, the player enters the first level and says, “Oh, wow, why is that person lying on the ground? And what’s this over here?” If you start building your game by making the first level, you have nothing except the walls you’re drawing. There are no characters, no items, none of that stuff. You’re going to have to revisit it [throughout development] to add things to it.

But if you make the first level last, it’s something you don’t have to revisit later. It’s like, “I’m making this level, and I’m putting everything in it.” It’s so much more impressive when you do that. It works out so much better than, “Oh, yeah, the first level is where I made a bunch of mistakes.” When you launch a game, you don’t want the first level to make players say, “This is kind of crappy.” Show the best thing first and make the first thing the last thing you make.

Craddock: Doom map makers take pride in designing levels so they can be beaten by players who like to start with nothing but a pistol. That challenges goes all the way back to the early days of id: Every level of Doom and Doom II can be beaten even if you choose to start with a pistol. Did that idea take shape with Doom, or was it something you wanted to do earlier?

Romero: It started with Wolfenstein. We knew you were going to die, and when that happens, we put you back at the beginning and you start with the minimum: your pistol and 100 health. In later levels, I remember thinking that I needed to make sure players could get better weapons fast [after dying]. Sometimes I would put a chaingun in the first room, hidden in a secret. So, if the player goes up to a wall and it opens, they’re like, oh, good, they’ve got a chance to survive. In DOOM, there's always the obvious the weapon that unit you're supposed to have. In the first level, you will get a shotgun, probably from a shotgun dude that you have to kill, if not sitting out in the open. Then in map two, you can get the chaingun, because that’s the next weapon. Then there’s the hidden rocket launcher in map three. Every level goes until there's a hidden BFG late in the game, and eventually a BFG you can find in the open.

Craddock: As a DOOM fan, I have to say that one highlight of this year for me was watching Decino complete Ultimate DOOM, Sigil, and DOOM II on Nightmare with 100 percent secrets and items. Have you ever finished Nightmare?

Romero: Nope. I can’t get past level three [DOOM’s E1M3]. I dare anybody here to get past level three. It’s so hard.

Craddock: Decino said that map is one of the game’s biggest hurdles.

Romero: The problem with it is backtracking. If there’s any level where you have to backtrack, where you have to go far in the level and then come all the way back to the beginning, you don’t have any armor, health, or ammo pickups; you’ve used it all up, but all the monsters are back because after 30 seconds monsters all come back one after another. You really need to be a speedrunner and know how to dodge, but there’s all these hitscan enemies like shotgunners, and you can’t really dodge those guys.

Craddock: What is your favorite DOOM map in any commercial DOOM game that you didn’t make?

Romero: That’s tough. I really like level 14 [in DOOM II] that American McGee made. That was cool. I love Downtown, map 13. Sandy Petersen made that; those are both really good. American did a great job on Map 4, which was one of the earliest DOOM II maps. Also E2M8 in DOOM when the Cyberdemon is revealed. You start the map, and the first thing you see is the boss from the first episode, which is bloody and mounted to a wall. You’re like, what happened? Then you hear that loud, thumping noise, and you’re like, “Wait, what did that? Is that what I’m hearing?” It’s terrifying to go out and meet the Cyberdemon.

Craddock: The industry has changed a lot, and you’ve both seen and been a harbinger of that change. What are some design principles from the ‘80s or ‘90s that have faded, but you think are still applicable today?

Romero: I really like puzzle-solving in levels; you saw a lot of that in the ‘90s. There was a lot of puzzle solving to get through levels, and it was done really well. We didn’t want scenarios where you flip a switch that opens a door, only you have no idea where the door is. You should have already seen that door. Having puzzle solving coupled with a bunch of secrets hidden all over the place for players to find makes them play the game again, play that level again, when they get to the exit. The [score screen] says zero out of 20 secrets and they’re like, “Wow. I know the level pretty well, but now I’m gonna start looking for secrets.” It’s always fun to have a level that you feel has that kind of depth in it and realize, wow, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Kind of like Myhouse.wad, right? I finished five percent of the game, only I felt like I’d finished all of it, so I had to keep playing. What an insane level.

Craddock: I was going to ask you about it. Many people are saying Myhouse.wad is a candidate for horror game of the year. Now, I’ve played a lot of DOOM mods, but that map does things in the DOOM engine I’ve never seen. You and Carmack wrote the engine. As you were playing, were you sitting there trying to analyze everything that was happening?

Romero: Yeah, I was. And the thing is, I don’t do any scripting. The author used [a source port called] GZDOOM with scripting tools. There are things he did we couldn’t do in vanilla DOOM. It looks like an old-school map, but it’s not. You go through this house, which is a tiny house. If anyone has read House of Leaves, which I actually read years ago when it came out, this is almost like the DOOM interpretation of House of Leaves. The house doesn’t look that big [from the outside], but when you go inside, it’s massive. You go through it, and at some point you go back through it again, but at different points in time. You see a PlayStation connected to a TV, and then you see an Xbox. There’s so much happening. It’s crazy. That little house turns into a massive place.

I remember when I was streaming it; I got to a certain point where I was like, is this Cube, the movie where there’s an infinite amount of other spaces all around? It’s hard to describe. But the funny thing is, when I finished it in my stream, which was almost two hours long, I got to the end, and I was like, “Okay, well, that was pretty interesting.” Then it drops you into level two of DOOM II, because normally when you play a custom map, it replaces level one, and it drops you into level two when you finish. But the thing is, if I would have finished past map two, I would have been back in Myhouse.wad again, because it actually extended the game, right? I have to play it again because I only saw five percent in two hours. It’s really good. It’s really scary and weird.

Craddock: I’m getting a signal that we should wind down, so I’ll wrap up with a couple more questions about DOOM GUY. For fans here who think they know almost as much about you as I did, what do you hope they take away from your book?

Romero: What I’m really grateful for is being able to make games my entire life. Since I was 11 years old, I’ve been making games constantly. I’m really grateful for being able to stay in an industry that changes as fast as this one. It’s a really fun industry to be in. It’s really great that it’s so creative. I think what people will get out of the book is how creative I was as a little kid, and when I found games to be massively creative, that meant I could kind of grow with games as they were getting better and hardware was getting better.

And that it’s a positive book. There is zero negativity about people in the book, even though negative things happened to me. I just forgive people all the time. The book is all about, hey, people make mistakes, and that’s just what happens, and there are reasons people did certain things. Looking back after this many years, it’s easy to kind of say, “Yeah, it would have been better if we had done this.” I think people will notice that whatever image of me is out there, I think that might change. If it was a negative image, they can see that I wrote a positive book. Anybody that’s going through any kind of difficulty growing up, or in certain situations, they can see that I was in that kind of situation, and DOOM GUY is like a blueprint for how I got out of it. It was a lot of hard work and focusing on something that I really liked doing, and I stuck with it even when everyone around me was like, “You’re wasting time playing games.”

Craddock: For our last question, where can people find DOOM GUY?

Romero: It’s everywhere, but I always encourage everybody to go to their local bookstore to keep them in business.

Craddock: And you’ll be doing a signing here.

Romero: Yep, I’m gonna do a book signing here. If anybody wants a signed version of the book with any kind of personalization, you can order it on our site, romero.com.

A Lot of Fun:
John Romero and John Carmack on Doom’s Enduring Legacy

Most video games enjoy a shelf life (digital or physical) of a few months. A lucky few last a year or two. Doom has seen countless gaming platforms and breakout hits come and go over 30 years, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Released on December 10, 1993, id Software’s magnum opus is on everything from MS-DOS and Windows 11 to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and—because Doom runs on everything—lawnmowers, lamps, and pregnancy tests. (Sort of. That last platform is heavily disputed, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Thirty years later, John Romero asked me to moderate an hour-long discussion between him and John Carmack as they reflected on Doom. This transcript recounts their conversation on topics spanning where they were and what they were feeling on that fateful day in 1993, the influence Doom has had on its players’ choice of careers, why Doom turned out better than Quake and Wolfenstein 3D, and more.

**

David Craddock: To kick things off, obviously, we're doing this on the 30th anniversary of Doom’s release. As you think back 30 years to this day, what are some of the first memories that come to mind?

John Carmack: For this day, it was always Romero being in charge of getting the final build together, getting it all ready and getting it out to people. But this was the culmination of almost a year of work at that point, and we knew we were on the glide slope to an explosive reception. We had had early alphas and tests out that different people had seen, and we knew what we had. It was kind of triumphant moment for us because we were proud of what we had done, and we knew it was gonna land really well. We probably couldn't have guessed that it landed as well as it did, but there was no doubt in our mind that it was great at that point.

John Romero: Yeah, it was [triumphant]. I remember that last 30-hour day. It was pretty crazy. We had the last bug, which had to do with the timer overflowing or under-flowing. That was a pretty cool bug to solve because you thought about it for a minute, like, why would it be freezing up on some machines [and not others]? You went over and looked at the code and when you fixed it; it was like, that's been in the game since day one when you put the timer interrupt in there.

Carmack: And there are related bugs I still see in some games where some of the shader effects start getting a little kitschy if the game has been running for multiple days without a reset just because floating point [numbers and math] winds up having issues when you keep time in seconds and never reset it. Those “let the game soak for multiple days at a time” bugs still bite people to this day.

Romero: It was definitely it's a very low-level bug, and the entire game was tied to it. But it was amazing to have the answer from a year-long project that quickly.

Craddock: I think one of my favorite stories from this time is you all trying to upload the Doom files to the University of Wisconsin's servers, but there were too many people logged on waiting, so everybody had to log out so the admin, David Data, could upload. Was that the first time any of you had seen that sort of reaction to one of your releases in real time?

Romero: With Wolfenstein 3D, we were up at four in the morning uploading it to a BBS, and I think the only reaction we saw was when we logged into the BBS, we saw “Wolfenstein 3D” scroll up in ASCII text and. We were like, oh, right, this is something people are going to be looking at. We uploaded it and went to sleep because we’d been up all night. But with Doom, it was the first time that we uploaded it to the internet. It was Jay Wilbur who did the uploading. We started at two in the afternoon because we had to get that last bug fixed and tested. So, that was the first time we had people waiting. In fact, I think the week before, we had people calling the office randomly, asking when Doom was gonna go up. And we're like, how do you guys even [have this number]. That was the first time we actually heard from people and could see people were really excited.

Carmack: The 90s really was an era of technical scaling issues yet to be addressed, where everything was very ad hoc. You can't break YouTube or Facebook today. A lot of these [these sorts of operations] were a specific machine sitting in a specific office with a specific network connection. It was a time where everybody would find it's like, oh, Doom blew this up or Slashdot blew this other thing up [by driving a lot of traffic to a specific machine host]. We were in an era standing on the shoulders of giants. Now, you can just drop worldwide releases that literally a billion people can get [simultaneously], but there was a lot of learning along the way.

Romero: Especially about networking, because that was when people first started getting network hardware at home and learning how it even worked with Doom supporting IPX on a local area network. That made many people learn a lot of stuff pretty quickly. [Author’s Note: IPX, or internetwork package exchange, manages the transfer of data packets from one point to another.]

Craddock: As you said, Doom influenced many players to learn how to network their computers together to play deathmatch. There are many people who, by playing Doom and learning how to network, were encouraged to enter careers in game development and IT fields. When was the first time you realized that Doom was influencing people beyond simply enjoying a great video game?

Carmack: Doom encouraged people to figure out hardware things: how to upgrade hardware, how to install things. Especially the networking, where we had only had a couple of years of going from the earliest super-janky networks we had, like parallel port network adapters, and then finally getting the thin net coax Ethernet system set up. It really was early days, and many people landed in network administration posts, the network admin in their office wiring up computers. Many offices wound up having a suspect business case put forward for why they all needed networking shortly after Doom came out.

It's interesting to contrast with Quake, where that level of programmability [through innovations such as the game’s built-in QuakeC language] launched a lot of game dev careers. But Doom launched a lot of IT careers.

Romero: Yeah, I've heard that so many times, people saying, “I got a job because of Doom” and “I had to learn how to network the computers and install the drivers.” I meet those people at tech conferences nowadays, like WeAreDevelopers [conference] in Berlin—there's so many people there, and so many of them got their start because they needed to play Doom networked because it was cooler than [connecting over] a modem.

Craddock: I understand you had a conversation somewhat recently where you realized there was something that would have been possible in Wolfenstein 3D, but you didn’t realize that until recently. What was that?

Romero: It just had occurred to me that the push-wall hack into the Wolfenstein engine that was inelegant actually could have been solved if we had treated the secret doors as regular doors and just have them open like a door, instead of having to push a block through the matrix. That would have been an elegant design solution for the way the engine already operated and would not have caused headaches.

Carmack: I look back at that as one of those kinds of growth moments for me. [When Romero and Tom Hall proposed secrets], I was like, this is going to be a mess to put this in. Tom and John were leaning on me about it, and I finally was like, “Oh, all right”—and it was absolutely the right thing to do. And yes, in hindsight, it would have been faster to just have it be a sliding door, but the grinding, push-wall sound is pretty iconic. I had to go through this learning process where I realized clean code isn't the point. The point is creating something of value for the users, and sometimes you really should just suck it up and do something that's a little bit ugly, because it's going to be awesome, and it's going to be worth it.

Romero: Yep. It was funny because before that, everything went so smoothly. The sidescrolling engines only needed so much functionality to enable so much to happen. We didn't really need [to figure out how] to do some crazy thing in parallaxing or whatever we were doing in Commander Keen because there was plenty of functionality there. But when we got to that point in Wolfenstein, we were like, “We're missing something, and that thing is secrets, and this [push-walls] is probably the best way to represent a secret in the world that we have.”

Carmack: That was a case where Wolfenstein was done under these extreme, almost extraordinary design constraints; there just wasn't that much you could do. There was a clear sense of crossing a threshold with Doom where you went from something where there was just this tiny puzzle box you could mess with in Wolfenstein- and Rise of the Triad-type games, to the extra things that were enabled in Doom. They opened up a pretty much unlimited creative box, where again, we're still seeing levels where people are doing novel and interesting things with it. That's an interesting theoretical thing to contemplate. I talk about kind of the Turing completeness of a creative expression, where once you've got a certain set of tools, you can build an unlimited number of things versus just more stuff that looks exactly the same.

John Romero: And Doom’s still being pushed today. People are still hacking the original data structure to do interesting things, which is pretty cool. I even did some new stuff with SIGIL that I hadn't seen in any WADs. I think that's one reason people are still making levels: [Making Doom maps is] the easiest way to make something that looks great. If you want to get anything more complex than this, you're talking 10 times the work, usually.

Carmack: It really was a painful step function for the people approaching the creative threshold with Quake, where it really was 10 times harder just to make something that looked decent versus Doom, this sweet spot of everybody being able to draw on this 2D view. Maybe we could have done a few more things, added curves or something in the [overhead map] view, but it was just this bad step function going to full, general 3D. That made it not something everybody could do just on a lark, but something you set out time to do, to almost trace a career arc when you want to start building mods for the newer games.

Romero: [laughs] That means it takes a really long time to use these edges today.

Craddock: I have to say, as a player, when I saw a chunk of the wall sliding back and heard stone grinding on stone, I felt like Indiana Jones—but with an SMG—finding some ancient secret in a temple. That combination of visuals and audio feedback created a powerful sense of achievement every time we found secrets.

Carmack: Yeah, and those are all the core game design development things you want to envision what the player feels, there. That was one of the great things for Wolfenstein, that sense of running around and then suddenly there is that slight movement on the screen and the grinding sound—that is directly punching the reward button for the player.

Romero: We needed that so badly, too, because making the levels for Wolfenstein had to be the most boring level design job ever, because it was so simple. There was some fun functionality with making the characters */*/moving paths and stuff, but Keen was actually more rewarding to make levels for. When we got secret walls, that made it a little bit more interesting to us as designers.

Carmack: Yeah, that was an interesting thing. With Doom, we had lost the “pathing enemies” functionality. There were some interesting, kind of emergent properties about how the level would play differently just based on how long you took in one place or another.

Craddock: John Romero, today is also a big day because you’ve released SIGIL II, which is the official unofficial sixth episode of Doom. Would you like to talk a little about where people can find it?

Romero: It’s SI6IL.com—we spell SIGIL with three sixes in the middle—or you can search for “Doom SIGIL.” You'll find the page, and there's a MIDI version that’s free. Jimmy Paddock did the MIDIs for it, as he did for SIGIL; he’s a really talented musician. Then there’s a link to the MP3 version, with the soundtrack made by Thorr. SIGIL’s soundtrack was made by Buckethead, whereas Thorr is a pretty new composer, and his stuff in SIGIL II is really great. So, you can choose which version you want, and we have big boxes, not just a DVD case.

Carmack: You mentioned boxes. In the days of Doom, we had all the discussions about packaging. It was so important how [and where] you sat on the game store shelves. There was that whole bit about big boxes didn't store very well, but you're trying to push your competitors off the shelves. One thing I look back on is not fully getting it. I was saying, “We could just sell this in a brown paper bag and it will still sell.” But of course, there is this whole optimization process to the marketing and presentation. That is sufficient value: You can succeed without it, but you might as well do a good job optimizing how your business presents everything. That does matter.

That is a lost era of displays and things where of course now everybody [releases and buys games] online. There’s a lot to be said for that. It’s a net positive, but it’s missing things from bygone ages.

Romero: Yeah, especially games that came with cool little plastic pieces, like glowing stones.

Carmack: Oh, and the cloth maps. That always stood out to me.

John Romero: I actually have a signed Ultima II map on the wall behind me. Those cloth maps are awesome. They call them feelies or tchotchkes or trinkets or whatever you want. Those were the coolest ones, and the books that were in there that made those boxes really heavy. There's a reason there's a box, and then everything became digital. So now, when we put out a box, we try to put stuff into it, fill it up with stuff, because the boxes are for collectors.

Carmack: Back in the old days, we would think about how nobody reads the manuals. But now that games are super-sophisticated, I look at things like Diablo or Minecraft, games like that, and it’s like, how do people learn everything about this game? They have to trawl it on YouTube and figure out different things there. Whereas we had these games that were tens or hundreds of kilobytes sometimes with fat instruction manual, like the Wizardry manuals. It’s funny how that’s gone.

Romero: Some had multiple manuals. If you look at Ultima V or IV, they had like four books in there for different things like the magic spells and stuff. It was pretty cool.

Craddock: I’m going to pluck a good question out of the chat. Graphics have come a long way, but what do you think about how enemy AI has advanced and where it could go in the next five to 10 years?

Carmack: That's something we talked about a lot where we could have made enemies a lot smarter, even with the constraints we had back then. But it is not as good of an idea as many people might think. Everything in the world has to feel like it revolves around the player for the games we were doing. I mean, there's something to be said for games where you're exploring a world that exists with or without you, but the enemies are mostly there to have an effect on the player, to [keep them from[ doing something efficiently and going about their lives. Doom didn't get knocked for enemy closets and things like that, where you're basically just throwing an enemy out at the player. For the games we were doing, you don't really want smart enemies; you don't want them to do pathologically dumb-looking things that break the player’s immersion in something, but you also do not really want them taking a hiding spot or flanking the player and sniping them from behind. That's not the enjoyable thing. Some people enjoy that, like, okay, I'm going to take this hardest hardcore thing that you're throwing at meet, but most people want to go in and Rambo their way through everything. That doesn't take a lot of intelligence for the enemies.

Now we are approaching a new era with the way the artificial intelligence stuff is going, where the world of actual deep characters is going to be very different than it's been in the past years where you can create something today that does have deep backstories; that will, for certain types of games, be very transformative. But I did always fight about a fight against doing a lot of depth to things because we were so constrained on the resources; it was a very small team. You look at something like Diablo, [Blizzard Entertainment] has enough resources and enough people, so they can add depth to lots of things. But our tiny little team, if we went super-deep on something, it would not have been the best use of our time. With anything we did, we wanted to make sure most of the people playing the game actually got to experience it. We don't want to just do something that only a handful of people would go through.

Class-based mechanics was one thing John and I used to kind of argue about. And obviously, in the modern world, you've got the time debt to do all that, and that adds a lot to it. But in the early days, I was always afraid that, well, if you spend a lot of time building for six or eight different classes, that's going to be a lot of work that most of the people who play through the games won't see. I would say, ‘Can't we find something else to do that everybody going to get some value out of?” That AI is definitely the future, but back then, I think we made the right calls.

Romero: Even games today, having AI that easy is totally preferable to players. There are games that will add drones in as a target. People hate that because they move all over the place, and it’s hard to aim [at them]. Having more of something dumb is preferable to having one super-smart AI. I think people are still trying to push the envelope on having smarter enemies. And it's always like, well, that's too smart; people want to turn it off. I think we made the right decision in Doom having enemies that moved at the speed that they did, which is typically pretty slow, but we have huge numbers of them. That was more interesting because you had to be more strategic.

Carmack: That was something we had to struggle back and forth as technology improved. The enemy count went down a lot in Quake [because of on-screen polygon limitations] and the game was less fun in some ways because of that. We had to have a crutch for that because of course what you really wanted was that same feeling of walking into a room and mowing down hordes of enemies.

Craddock: You two are often referred to as the Lennon and McCartney of video games. Why do you think that comparison fits you?

Romero: Lennon and McCartney were a really great creative team that made really popular music. I think a lot of our early games were very well-liked because there was push and pull on the creative side and the tech side. We didn't want to take forever writing something where the tech would have been not optimal for what we were going for. I think a lot of our games focused on speed as the goal. When we started getting into 3D, we started focusing on what is the thing that we can do really well that other people can't? That was John's technical mastery over VGA’s chain4 mode, and [my] writing a game design around that speed and making something that was increasingly more fun with each game. I think we both did what we did in the service of making a really great game, and I think we spoke the same language because I'm also a programmer.

When you have a designer who can speak code, it is a lot easier to know what you need to compromise on instead of some coming up with a very unrealistic idea for a design. A lot of times, designers don't know what can be done [with the chosen tech]; they might not know that even a simple feature could be hugely complex. Change a couple of words, and it's like, oh, we can do that right now. We worked really well together because we knew how to do our jobs well and make the right decisions. [Author’s Note: VGA, short for Video Graphics Array, is a way of interfacing between computer and screen. VGA’s chain4 mode is a way of accessing memory.]

Carmack: I'm not really a music guy, so forgive me if I butcher this, but I did smile when I read about the early history of The Beatles, about how they might have looked like a blow-up success, but they went through this long grinding period of mastering their craft playing live. That was some of the most valuable part of our early time where we cranked out all these games at Softdisk, the monthly subscription magazine [that included software]. We went through so many iterations, and this idea of you don't start out with the perfect world-changing breakout thing there; you grind through a lot of process, and you learn a lot while you're doing it.

Now, of course, there’s the Beatles analogy. We were probably the first sort of rockstar game developers. It was this novel new thing and Romero leaned into it a bit. The world was fascinated with video games. Our industry was no longer just this Atari 2600 that you plugged into your TV. It was something that suddenly looked cool enough for mainstream press to be talking about. Anytime the mainstream press is going to kind of turn their eyes on you, there's going to be the focus on the interpersonal drama and figuring out everything else that they can do to make an interesting or exciting story. I think it was almost inevitable. We were there at the right time.

Craddock: I remember reading Nintendo Power magazine, which was very insular; they didn’t talk about people much, but they would talk about Konami’s Ninja Turtles games o Nintendo’s Mario. But for me, it was you two, and maybe Ed Boon and John Tobias, who represented the first time I realized, oh, people make these games. It seems obvious, but you’re right: In the early days, people would write about studios, not people.

Carmack: I still remember that classic Electronic Arts advertisement from the late ‘80s—that was even before our time—when they first put developers front and center. Japan probably lagged the rest of the world with being company-focused over creators. That’s even weirder when you consider the focus on movie directors and musicians and so on. That we were independent and bootstrapped gave us a lot of freedom, and we made a lot of mistakes on things, but it allowed us to kind of evolve differently than coming up inside one of the big corporations.

Romero: Yeah, it was treated kinda like books and music, like, oh, this is another creative thing. [Electronic Arts founder] Trip Hawkins was all about putting artists front and center. Their marketing included manuals that resembled liner notes in albums. I think our team was so small—we shipped Doom with six people at the very end, but it was five people for most of its development—and Quake was around 10 people. That meant you could actually get somebody's name. But teams are so big nowadays; there are so many people involved you can’t say it’s made by one person because so many people make a massive impact on the game.

Craddock: You’d both made around 20 games before Doom. What was the impetus for changing your development process for the game that became Doom?

Carmack: There were a few things kind of pushing us along the way. We had just moved from DOS development to our NeXTSTEP workstations, which was a significant win for us; we had real software development capabilities. We knew that the next step in graphics was going to be getting us away from this block level. I mean, like John said, Wolfenstein was not a great thing. From a creative design standpoint, we learned the flow of a game and what we could do there, but it was very limiting. We had even seen the intermediate step with ShadowCaster [by Raven Software using the Wolfenstein 3D engine] where even if you add floors and ceilings and some other things to it, the tile grid is just not really where you want to go. Our next step was going toward this kind of CAD-like line development. That followed reasonably naturally out of what we needed to do. We knew blocks were the tyranny that we needed to get away from, so we needed something that was going to have this more analog-like nature.

That pretty much decided what the development flow was going to look like. We needed a fancy custom tool, and then what we were doing with the workstations and cross development [between NeXTSTEP and DOS], I decided how much the flow [between them would be]. Although it was very interesting to see that once the open-source stuff got out, the rest of the world did just fine developing a lot of things with more conventional DOS tools than we used.

Romero: We not only changed the system that we coded on, which was NeXTSTEP; DOS became the target platform we ran the game on. We did nothing else on it. All the art was done in Deluxe Paint 2, but it was rotoscoped, and we'd never done that before. It was like, let's try another way to get graphics into the computer, because we're gonna have even more than we had with Wolfenstein. What if we put a weapon up in front of a video camera? That workflow was totally changed from, I'm just gonna pixel-art this from nothing. At one point, we hired somebody to clean up pixels from the grabbing of stuff, because [we just used] a wall; we didn't have a green screen or anything, so we just grabbed the wall [in the image] and everything else, and we had somebody come in and start killing the transparency in the pixels. That was really different.

Making levels, we would have to write a tool on NeXTSTEP for level design that was much easier to deal with than doing it in DOS. What was useful in that workflow was being able to have the editor open on NeXTSTEP and having DOS running the game. If I see that there's a problem, I just leave it running and I fix it on NeXTSTEP, and I just keep going through the level and fixing. That gave us such an iterative speed. If you can increase iteration while you're developing in any, especially in the core loop you're making, you can get through stuff so much faster. You can find problems and solve them much, much quicker. I’m always focused on how long does this take?

Carmack: That really hurt us on Quake. Taking that next step in graphics fidelity for the six-degrees-of-freedom stuff, the iteration times just sucked. It was really bad with offline processing. I mean, yes, we got the glorious lighting and we had our freedom to have relatively high performance six degrees of freedom, but I know many of our licensees built what they wanted and didn't pay attention, and they had things that were running overnight for their processes, which just meant that tuning the levels was just ridiculously less efficient.

Romero: BSP in maps and lighting maps was super-painful. We even bought alpha machines to just grind on these things.

Carmack: Doom had BSP, and that part only took a minute or two [to process] even on the Quake levels. There was one period that was kind of neat where I thought if we just doubled the size of our SGI Origin server, we would have squeaked into the top 500 supercomputers as a game development company. We were leaders in being able to throw some of the hardware at a problem.

Romero: It's interesting because we were talking about the fact that the big jump into 3D was one thing that kind of took its toll on the team just because of how long it took, and that we could have actually done two games and taken two steps in tech and said putting it all into one [big step]. That actually would have been pretty interesting. We could have been doing internet gameplay, with the Doom II engine, putting more tech into that, instead of going full 3D after that.

Carmack: I like this retrospective tech speculation about what we could have done. We could have taken like the networking aspects and/or the modding, the Quake C aspects, and basically done that in a Doom-generation engine. Or you could have added things like arbitrary 3D models still inside the Doom maps version of things, keeping map development faster and not doing light map lighting [from Quake]. There are a couple of steps we could have taken, and I think we probably did not pick the optimal direction. But we kept wanting to make this throw-everything-at-it [game design and tech], and we had the idea that if you can think about something that's going to be better, we should strive to do that. It was kind of perfect storm of pretty much everything went right with Doom.

Romero: When you look at the Mt. Everest that was Quake, I don't think people really appreciate the insane amount of technology you took on with that. I mean, even adding Quake C on top of internet client-server, on top of full 3D. It was so much tech. It was a whole new engine. It wasn't Doom at all. It was all brand-new.

Carmack: That’s one thing that while I look back and say, “How I could have made Doom more efficient or made Quake more efficient,” Quake technically ran on a 486 processor, but nobody could really play it well on a 486. We could have had a different tech stack that was more Doom-like that could have played fluidly there, but I have found over the years that as much as I might want to have made something more efficient, every time we really went out of our way, like the CGA versions of Keen, it turned out that the market didn't really reward you for making things work better on less capable hardware. You were usually rewarded by going ahead and pushing in: let's do that, let’s require an FPU; let’s require a GPU [for Quake III], something like that.

I still wonder in technical situations today where I kind of struggle with that: Do you ignore a giant user base and just concentrate on the fun cutting-edge stuff? Or are you doing yourself or your user base a disservice? I'm honestly still not at peace with exactly what the right call for that is. [Author’s Note: A floating-point unit, abbreviated FPU, takes the burden of performing complex mathematical operations away from a computer’s main processor, freeing it up for other functions.]

Romero: Yeah, but I think between your engines and my designs that we did the best we could.

Craddock: One of the big advancements from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom was that rooms could be a variable height, and that gave you the possibility of architecture like stairs and lifts. All of that led to Doom’s famous abstract level design. How did the engine make that design style possible?

Carmack: In terms of what we got out of it, every few years I'll go back and play Doom most recently in virtual reality on one of the Quest ports. I do always come back saying episode one of Doom still holds up really well. It still really feels great and it looks good for what it's doing. But I felt that like the second and third episodes when we got more abstract and went into hell, it felt more like Wolfenstein or Catacomb 3-D trying to say that this block is a tree when it's just a block. That sort of industrial, military complex stuff played very well to what the engine could do. I am happy still just seeing screenshots of the old stuff with good, crisp graphics rendered out well. Why you would have this weird zigzagging passage in a military base doesn't make sense, but somehow the design aesthetic still feels good, and it still holds up.

We found something that worked well with the combination of the geometry and the lighting. Those were really the two aspects that balanced off against each other. And then the dynamism, the fact that we could just be moving these things continuously all around, doing sort of crazy things like that, we'd clearly found a sweet spot that still feels pretty decent 30 years later.

Romero: About the problem that we had to solve with the ability that you gave us in the engine, with the non-orthogonal walls and the heights and lighting control—we didn't know that what we could make was something that no one had ever seen before. There was no game that was an example of what we could do. All the way back to the ‘70s, every time you saw 3D world, it was 90-degree walls and hallways. They were all maze games, just like Wolfenstein was a maze game. Wolfenstein was so great because you could move around smoothly in real time. Most games that were 3D like that were in chunk steps where they moved you into the next matrix block. That was the big breakthrough. But with Doom, it was like, we’ve got to make something that no one's ever seen before. Mentally, it was difficult, because we'd never had an example. Just looking at the data structure of the line depths and sector depths, that is all the ability that engine had, but it had massive amounts of ability in those areas.

And it took time. Not all of our earliest concepts of Doom had 90-degree walls. The first levels we made were the same height as Wolfenstein, and they were bright, and they just had better-looking walls, floors, and ceilings. It took time to solve that problem. I remember when I was doing E1M2, and I was just like, “Okay, I'm done with DoomEd, and I need to make levels, and we have nothing that takes advantage at the engine yet. We’re using it, but it’s not next level, it’s not next gen.” I made this room, and that became kind of the testbed level. And it wasn't it great-looking; it looked much better on release, but when I made it, we knew what it meant. I think anyone else looking at it would go, “How was that different from Wolfenstein?” There were little, subtle ways it was different that showed us the potential. That’s how basically all the games that came out after Doom could try to create worlds better than these 90-degree-wall spaces engines had done before that.

Also, E1M2 was the map that had the recursive stairway that killed those sector lists you had. You had to come up with BSPs.

Carmack: It was interesting how the structure of the limitations of the system did really turn out to be a sweet spot where lots of people could make levels in that. We really saw, kind of painfully getting into Quake and beyond, that there were a lot of potentially great game designers who just hit their limit in terms of compositional aesthetic, in terms of like what something is going to look like. When you've got the ability to do full six-degrees-of-freedom modeling, you not only need to be a game designer, but you also need to be an architect or a photographer working through your composition. The structure of Doom was again right at that sweet spot where it helped you along by keeping you from wasting time doing some crazy things that you would have had to be a master of a different craft to make pay off.

Romero: Games that came after us had team that had different phases of level development because they all recognized that would make better levels. Star Wars: Dark Forces had a lighting artist. The level designers made the shapes, and then the artists came in and textured the walls, and then somebody else lit the areas. That was a proper workflow.

Craddock: As a writer and a narrative designer, many people ask what they need to know to write for video games. I tell them they need to study environmental design, and I pointed to E1M1 as a perfect example. You start in a large room with windows overlooking a courtyard, a staircase off to the left, and a dead marine, one of your comrades, in front of you. That’s a great story. John Romero,
what went into designing the story of that one room that first screen specifically?

Romero: That level got done last. That was important: After you learn everything about the game you’re making, the smart thing to do is make the first level so it has everything packed into it the player needs to understand about the rest of the game. E1M1 had gone through a lot of revision. The computer room after the first door differed completely from the room you see now. It just needed more revision at the very end, so it was the last room. Originally, we had a story with four marines around a poker table when pandemonium breaks out, and it was gonna be multiplayer and all that stuff. Instead, I basically needed to show the player: you're in this tech base, you can look outside and see that you're not on Earth, and you can see there's a sky. That was new tech for us. We’d never had a sky in anything before, so that was exciting to people.

For me, it was important to show that you can you have a destination, you can see out the window where you're going to go and where you want to go, and that you can get attacked by an Imp from all the way across the level as well. It's like, “Oh, that's what those things do” or “There's something over there that's throwing something toward me.” And then having the stairs leading up on the left side of the first room onto a platform where you can see outside again. It gives you just a good feeling for a space and it's not very big. People were just learning how to navigate 3D spaces, so it couldn't really be too complex. That first door was a big deal to a lot of people, like “This looks like a door. What do I do?” And then you open it up, and there's two zombies firing at you. They’re just puny humans, but it was like, okay, now you can press the button to shoot things.

I was trying to tell a story without narrative. We had no text popping up on the screen saying, “You're in the hangar.” None of that. At the start, you’ve got some blue carpet, which is not something you see in most of Doom. That level was just about showing and teaching the player a bunch of the mechanics and the environment that they're going to be spending a lot of time in. It’s a good training wheels kind of room, that first room in the first level. The Imp was the scary thing, so I put him on a ledge so he couldn’t come and get you. That level also established my idea of horseshoe design. Where do you start? Now where do you end? Look out the window to the right; you’re going to end up over there, and it’s not that far.

Carmack: Gamers did not have the rich history of what's expected in games that they have today. Opening the door was an enormous challenge for many people. I remember [former id Software level designer] Tim Willits commented how he walked around that first room for a long time until finally he hit the right key and the door opened up and his world changed. All we had was that one basic “use” action, and it still took some education to onboard people. When we went to Quake, the whole looking up and down, there were huge debates about what people could handle. We would see people get stuck looking at the floor, the ceiling, and it was horrible. Now everybody finds it as natural as walking.

Romero: Yeah, mouselook was turned off by default in Quake because I remember we spent almost the whole development not having look up and down be controlled by the mouse that way. We had automatic looking up and down; we used the Page Up and Page Down keys to look up and down. We were just trying to figure out how to do this.

Carmack: We even had it spring-loaded by default where you mouselook up or down, and then the view would snap back into place.

Romero: Yeah, as soon as you moved.

Carmack: We were so worried about that because we’d seen it with our own eyes that it was bad for users when that happened.

Romero: yeah, I remember whenever you're looking up and down, it moved the camera back to center as soon as you started moving; it was such a problem with people not understanding that, hey, this is how you control your head. The funny thing is Quake isn’t the first mouselook game. I thought it was, but Terminator Rampage actually had mouselook. I remember we had seen that game at some point.

Carmack: I remember critiquing all the pixel cracks between everything and not having sub pixel accuracy on all the vertices, and this laundry list of stuff that I was going through that we did right in Doom.

Romero: I was just gonna say that was one thing about our engine—and I don't even think that John and I had long discussions about it, because I think we both of us understood—that the engine is our world, and it’s the player's world. You want it to feel as solid as possible. There’s no texture shimmer in our game, so you don’t walk up to a texture and watch pixels stretch, and you don't watch them shift around like there's some bad math happening. That made it feel more solid and more immersive. To us, I think it was just common sense. You just don't want technical problems in the engine at all. I'm still making levels in my spare time for Doom, and it's just super, super solid. It was such a solid engine. And Quake, when the grenade bounces off a wall, it feels like it's a real, solid world. It's not some little stick bouncing around with bad physics. It feels great.

Carmack: Yeah, that was always a great deal of pride for me, the solidity of the worlds. The id games had a feel to them. I mean, even in Wolfenstein, where there are not many things going on, that carried through from Wolfenstein to Doom to Quake where maybe there would be some more kind of flashy things you might do, but if they didn't feel solid, I didn't want to do them. In hindsight, I would bend a little bit more in the name of kind of cool, flashy-flash stuff I am that might not be as solid. But it was it was my look and my vibe for things, and it stood us well.

Craddock: We’re creeping up on one hour, but we should have time for a few more questions. You’ve both made so many foundational games, but Doom seems extra special. I don’t want to ask you to choose between your children, but what is it about Doom that’s special to you?

Carmack: I would agree. I think that Doom is probably the most culturally iconic thing that we did, where it seemed like this perfect storm of everything landing right. Everything can be improved. I could have made everything better—graphics, networking, gameplay, all of it could have been better. But we talked about S curves where you've got a sinusoidal improvement, and Doom is way up on this curve where you could push a lot harder and not make much absolute difference in it. It was as close to the perfect game as anything I think we made. Quake was much more ambitious, and it did not reach all of its goals. It probably did, like I said earlier, lead to more careers in software development. There's more software developers and game developers that would look back on Quake as the thing that kind of pushed them into their life path. But Doom landed broader for almost everyone. Just recently, I was talking to a musician, and he was like, “You made Doom?” That was something that stuck with them.

At this age now, 30 years on, everybody's aged up. Kids now have their new generations of games, but now you run into the CEOs of the major corporations that are like, “Oh, Doom was formative in my college years.” It was something where it's rare to have things come together and probably exceed even your initial [expectations]. We didn't get all the things that we thought we wanted at the beginning, but the sum total impact of it really was greater than my high expectations for it. I think Doom as the full, holistic release and culture around it exceeded anything I imagined.

Romero: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think one of the interesting differences with Doom’s development than any other game that we've made together was the earlier games were training wheels. We were really making them fast; these were games being done in two months, sometimes one month. We learned a lot there. With Wolfenstein, we finally had the time to spend as much time as we wanted on the game. To us, four months to a shareware release was crazy. It was twice as long as we’d ever spent. I think with Doom, just because of our ambitious, we started with this cross development, NeXTSTEP systems and the scanning of the models we wanted to do. That was the only time we really said, “This game has to be the best thing that we can imagine playing.” Multiplayer was one of those things. I’d never made played a multiplayer game like Doom, and that was something we didn't even put in until late until October. I remember when it was in your office, and I was like, “Oh, man, we don't have multiplayer yet.” You were like, “Oh, shit. That's right. I gotta get that book out and learn IPX.” And that was so fast. Like nowadays, if you're going to build a multiplayer game, you're doing it on day one. You don't do it at the end of shipping the game. But

Carmack: We had demos earlier of Doom’s multiplayer. If you could do demos in some ways, you could do the peer-to-peer networking. So, it's not as crazy as it would sound, really, starting in some massive established game engine, just hacking it in. But yes, that's the classic fan request for game developers. It's like, “Oh, can't you add multiplayer now?” That's a completely unfair thing to say to a game developer.

Romero: Yep. And the funny thing about the demos, speed running has been a thing for a long time since Doom. The speed running history books say Doom started speed running because you could save and load your demos. I look back at that, and I'm like, speed running could have started 1990 with Keen because we had all that.

Carmack: Yeah, that whole looking back and saying when things that later became important could have been started, like so many of the multiplayer things we could have wound up doing in Doom if we just kind of pushed on that. But things that seem obvious decades later, after somebody else has gone and made something a phenomenon, are not as obvious when you're in the thick of it. But we went above and beyond what we had originally kind of hoped and targeted for. But there is a lot more that could have been done. I think that's what's made it feel like it's gotten legs all this time, because there was still untapped potential and things that could still be done on top of it.

Romero: And I think even though the game was moddable, which was critical to it staying alive for so long, and people loving it, because we embraced people's creativity to make the game what they wanted, that when the source code was released, that really made the game live through today. The game can be kept current on everything, and as a side effect, it can now run on everything like pianos and toasters and even CPU coolers, you name it.

Carmack: I wish we had more time to talk about things like that, because it was interesting, where there was a significant debate about releasing the tools. And I know once we had the things that were sort of everyone's worst nightmare like D!ZONE making more money than Doom II, basically off the mods of our games, and the struggles in [the discussion to release source code]. But clearly, it helped so much through all of this, but it's still far from standard. You do not see game companies nowadays releasing source code or even releasing most of the modding stuff; the modders have better tools to reverse engineer everything, but it's really not with the help and support of the studios. That's still a shame.

Romero: I remember getting the game running and seeing the 3D world in Doom and how it was going to look better than Wolfenstein, and the impact of seeing multiplayer running on your computer for the first time when you got two computers going. Remember that? Oh my god. I went into my office and I was making E1M7. And I was just imagining this, like, I'm looking out the window and I'm seeing two characters fighting, rockets are flying up at a high-up window, and someone else is firing plasma at another guy. I was like, “This is going to be the coolest fucking game the planet has ever seen. Oh my god. I can't wait to play that.”

Craddock: Are there any final words about Doom’s anniversary you’d like to say to fans?

Carmack: It’s been a happy year for me with the legacy stuff here where I had a few tense years with id Software over corporate stuff. We've made up now, and I was at QuakeCon this year, bringing back some good memories. And then being able to do this. I’ve said before that I'm not a very sentimental person; that I don't spend a lot of time kind of reminiscing about the good old days, but they were really quite good. I'm very proud of the things that we built back then, and that they have this legacy that has lasted to this day. I'm super-happy we could put all this together.

Romero: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for coming on. And just thanks a lot, John. We really gave many people a lot of fun for a long time. It was really great to talk to you, and it was really great to work with you. I'm really glad that we did all the things that we did.

Carmack: It would have been awesome if you could have made it out to QuakeCon this year with us. We should do that in the future.

Romero: Totally. I will absolutely do that. Because I really love QuakeCon and its community, and I really want to thank you, everybody in the Doom community, for keeping this game alive. Thank you for playing our games, everybody. We’ll see you all later. It’s been fun.

John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall on id Software’s 33rd Anniversary

When you get a last-minute call to moderate a conversation between three of id Software’s four co-founders, you don’t stop to think. You don’t worry about your schedule. You do it, because you’d be honored to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, let alone invited by name.

Id Software and its games have played a part in my life since I was 10 years old, when a little old lady opened my eyes and ears to the thrill of blowing away Wolfenstein 3D’s Nazis on my brand-new SoundBlaster 16 card. That was my first id game; the second, I believe, was Catacomb 3-D. Commander Keen was in the mix before Doom’s release, and I played Hovertank One (aka Hovertank) years later. By the time Quake hit my hard drive in June 1996, I’d played every id game to date and couldn’t get enough.

That’s why it was such a pleasure to join Tom Hall, John Romero, and later John Carmack, who joined mid-chat, to reminisce about the early days of id Software on its 33rd anniversary in February 2024. The chief topic of discussion wasn’t just its founding, but the disk onto which Tom Hall and John Carmack copied Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement—and if you don’t know what that is, just read on—and left on Romero’s keyboard. That disk and the simple platforming demo it contained launched id Software, and that’s what the guys wanted to talk about the most during their conversation.

We started there, and so can you, below.

**

David L. Craddock: We're going to work backward a little bit. Before we talk about what’s on the disk and its significance, because there’s a lot more to it than most people realize, let’s set the stage. You two met at Softdisk magazine. Tom, starting with you, how’d you come to work there, and what do you remember from the first time you met John Romero?

Tom Hall: I graduated with a degree in computer science systems programming. I interviewed with IBM and a bunch of other companies. They planned trips for me and everything, and they said, “We'd like to hire you, but is this what you really want to do?” They all asked that question. And I basically thought, No, this is boring. I want to make games. I applied to 50 companies and got rejected because I just knew Apple II. Then a couple months later, I applied to 27 more companies and one letter came back, and it was amazing and glowing. It said, like, “You are exactly who we want to hire. Oh my gosh, you have so much experience on the Apple II. Please come down and interview.”

I went and interviewed at Softdisk, which had its offices jammed into an old car garage with leaky ceilings. It was sort of like the McDonald's of gaming. We were making a monthly software collection every month, sort of a magazine on disk. It was cool because you can read the magazine and then run the programs. We accepted submissions from other people. It was the McDonald’s of gaming because you worked really hard for no money, but boy, did you learn your craft. It was great. The people there were fantastic. That was my first real job out of college. Occasionally we got to work on games, but sometimes it was a spreadsheet or a utility or something like that.

We had a competitor called Uptime, and they did really cool games with their monthly magazine. We looked at the people who were submitting [games] to Uptime, and there was one really great person who was making a lot of cool games, and that was John Romero.

Craddock: John, that brings us to you. How did you get started at the magazine, and how did that lead to your gaming disk there?

John Romero: When I came to Softdisk, that was basically me coming down with Jay [Wilbur] and Lane Roathe. All three of us were interviewing over a weekend. We had a really good time. It was like, hey, let's move down here where it’s nice and warm, because I was in New Hampshire, so it was freezing. Softdisk hired all three of us at the same time. We drove down from New Hampshire all the way down to Louisiana, with a stop at Disney World and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I started to work in what was called a Special Projects Division that I just created, which was basically to make commercial games. The first thing I needed to do was learn how to program on the PC because I’d never coded on a PC, just the Apple II and the Commodore 64, so I needed to learn that as fast as possible. I started learning the PC and making games for Big Blue Desk, which was the PC disk at Softdisk. I did that for probably a couple months. I was getting stuff done quickly, and they said, “Forget Special Projects. We need you on Big Blue Disk.”

I was added to that staff, and I made stuff every single month. It was a game or it was a utility, and all of it was geared toward me learning how to use a PC really well. I made a lot of tools, a lot of TSRs, or terminate-and-stay-resident [in the computer’s memory] programs. Everything had to be written and launched in one month. After doing that for a year, I told Al [Vekovius, boss at Softdisk], “I need to make games. These are games I’ve already designed on the Apple II; I’m just implementing them on the PC, so it’s boring. I’m probably going to go somewhere like LucasArts because I want to be somewhere I can make stuff.” They said “No, no, don't leave. We'll start a game disk.” I told them I needed two months, not one month, and a team of people, not just me on my own. If I had a team plus two months to make each game, they would be insane. They said yes. It took a couple of months to get the [Gamer’s Edge disk] department set up and in their system for marketing, business, a whole new SKU. While they did that, I needed to find a programmer.

I made games all the time. I would go home after work, and I would make games and sell them to Softdisk. My game Sub Stalker was on one disk, and there was another game on it called Tennis by John Carmack. Tennis is boring, except the way John programmed made it really good. I said, “How about this John Carmack guy? Can we hire him?” They said, “That’s not going to happen.” They’d already tried to hire him twice. I said, “Just tell him it’s making games all the time and to come down for an interview. I think I can convince him.” He came down for an interview. And when he came in, it was the best interview ever. Lane came in, so we just talked assembly the whole time. It was really, really great. John said he totally wanted to work with us. He moved over, and there wasn't anything for him to do yet because the department did not have an office yet. I was still waiting to get an office. I just told John, “Here's a computer. Just make a game. When you're done with the game, hopefully we’ll be in a new office and on our way.” He made an Apple II game called Catacomb, this great little game. He gave it to Softdisk when he was finished, to Tom, probably, to put on the disk that month. And luckily, we were ready to start the department.

We got an empty office, and new computers, and we got these little desks. It was a 10-by-10 room, tiny, but big enough for us. I didn't want to do anything with business stuff, so I brought Lane over from Special Projects to be our editor, dealing with across the street, and John and I could code all day long. I also needed an artist. I found Adrian Carmack in the art room next door; he came over after a month or so. We could start making a game, but we had to make a demo disk first. We spent a month making two games, a demo disk. We could work on a game together for the first time ever, and that was a game called Slordax; that was September 1. I gave John this book called Power Graphics Programming that explained everything technical about the EGA graphics controller, and VGA, and everything. It was written by Michael Abrash [who would help John Carmack develop the Quake engine] and had all the technical information John said he was interested in. He took it and decided he was going to make a vertical scrolling game like 1985’s Xevious. I thought that was cool and would be great. I started working on an editor to make the levels for it, and I think it was Adrian who started working on the graphics.

Hall: No, that was me.

Romero: Was that you?

Hall: That was the difference between the early Gamer’s Edge games and the later Gamer’s Edge games: I did art for Slordax, the bullets and star fields and stuff like that. Even up into id as it was being incorporated, I was like, this is real art now, not just tiny drawings.

Romero: Yes. Tom did all the art for the first three Commander Keen games.

Hall: From my perspective, I'm sitting there, like “We’re making a disk with a game every two months,” and, “Hey, I wanna make games!” I would sneak into their office late at night and say, “Dudes, I want to make games with you guys. What do you need doing?” They’d say, “We have some levels that need made,” or “You can draw this thing.” We got along great and bonded over the Apple II, and it was We worked really well together and all had the same interests.

Romero: Basically, when John decided to make the vertical scrolling game, he was using these hardware registers that made the screen scroll extremely smoothly. It was a great graphics trick. I told him, “Wow, that's pretty great, but man, if you can scroll horizontally, that's totally different. Vertically is okay, but horizontally? That’s really hard but the most important way to scroll. But we’re not doing that in this game, so never mind.”

Hall: [laughs] “It’s a pipe dream!”

Romero: [laughs] It’ll never happen! John decided he was going to start researching the horizontal scrolling register. What happened was on one day, I went home around ten at night, the usual, and then Tom comes into the room…

Hall: I go over there, because we work late at night. The workday would end, and I’d go over to Gamer’s Edge and do levels or graphics or whatever. I walked in, and Carmack was like, “I’ve got something going.” On his screen, it was just a bunch of brick tiles scrolling around with his Dangerous Dave character moving around.” It was like, oh my god. It was smooth and amazing. The potential was there. We had a Nintendo Entertainment System in the corner. My family always thinks about what would be funny. I looked over at the NES and said, “You know what would be funny? if we did the first level of Super Mario 3 tonight?” He was into it. He was sitting there coding and made it so you could actually jump on tiles. He said, “Okay, put a flag so one means solid [to jump on].” I was copying and pausing Super Mario 3’s first level to copy all the bricks in my art style, setting the data flag values on it and just blasting that out. We’re on the sneaker net, going back and forth, like, “Okay, here’s the level for you to jump around in,” and “I’ll draw some coins!” We’re just doing every single thing you saw in the first level.

It was super fun. The joy of creation without thinking about it. I recommend that people who make games have that sense of timeless play, to just have fun with what you're doing. We did that until we ended the level. I made a crappy second level, and then it was like, okay, we need a title screen. Well, we’d get sued if we actually publish this, so I drew a title screen that said Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. I had Dangerous Dave on one side and a Nintendo lawyer looming, like, “No, you will be sued to death.” We stuck that into the game, and I was like, “Ha-ha, what a funny joke! We should leave it for Romero.” It was around three a.m., and we knew we were going to crash and get in late, so I wrote up a note, stuck it on the desk, and put it on his desk.

Then I went to sleep and came in late. But in the meantime…

Craddock: John, just for a little bit of context, who is Dangerous Dave?

Romero: Dangerous Dave is a little character that I made in 1988. I made a game called Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirates Hideout on the Apple II in 1988. It was published through Uptime; it was actually on the last issue of Uptime. Softdisk actually bought Uptime’s assets. Dangerous Dave is a character that I wanted to make like Apple II’s Mario, to have in a 10-level game. I did that. But during that one month that John and I made a game for the demo disc, I remade Dangerous Dave on the PC. When I did that, I redrew all the graphics in CGA, EGA, and VGA modes. That’s four colors, 16 colors, and 256 colors. That 16-color version of Dave is what John Carmack used because it was already animated. I had running, jumping, everything. There was no need for him to do it or make anything else. Back then, it was a lot of work to do any kind of animation. John had my character and used it as the character in this little demo.

Craddock: So, what that means is not only did Carmack and Tom infringe on Nintendo, but they stole Dangerous Dave!

Hall: [laughs] Sue me, buddy!

Craddock: So, John Romero, Tom left this disk on your keyboard. You booted it up, and it blew your mind. Before you talk about the game demo, I want to get into why it was mind blowing. I feel like many people in chat who grew up with an NES might think, Oh, scrolling? Like Mario? That’s no big deal, right? Why was this a big deal on the PC?

Romero: The funny thing is people who are watching this probably don’t understand that games didn't scroll on the PC back then. Games were single screens, like chess, where you’re looking at the screen and things move around on that screen, but the screen doesn’t move. The memory architecture of the PC meant that in the 16-color graphics mode—16-color mode was the dominant mode; VGA was almost futuristic—every byte in memory represented eight pixels on the screen. If you're going to move the screen left or right, you would move a whole byte. You would copy the byte over, which meant the screen scrolled by eight pixels every time, which was very chunky.

Hall: Yeah. It was blocky like grid paper.

Romero: It was very slow, and it looked terrible. There was a really popular freeware game out at the time called Captain Comic. That was the best game, I think, and it was free. The screen scrolled chunkily, just like every game trying to scroll on the PC. The PC was released in August 1981, and it had never had a smoothly scrolling screen by a pixel or a sub-pixel. John figured that out. When I ran Dave on the little disk, first I saw the funny title screen Tom made. I'm like, oh, I wonder what this is going to be. Obviously, they’re using Dangerous Dave, but what’s going on?

Hall: We have a special announcement brewing.

Romero: Yeah, let me see if I can do this.

Craddock: While you do that, I have a question for Tom. We know that John Romero realized the tech’s potential and wanted to start a company rather than give it to Softdisk. Tom, when you and Carmack were making this, did that even cross your mind?

Hall: No. That's what that's what John Romero's great talent is, seeing the potential of something. I thought it was a lark, and Carmack was like, “I finally did it. That’s cool.” We were more like, ha-ha, this will be something cool for a game disk or something. But it was funny to come in all tired around ten or eleven and for John to grab us, pull us into the office, slam the door, and be like, “We’re so out of here.” BOOM—seismic explosion. So, I thought it was amazing, but I never dreamed we could make games for a living. It was impossible!

Romero: I think also it was that you did not know the PC market. If we saw a game scrolling on the Commodore 64, that was normal. We wouldn’t be blown away by that. But if it scrolled that way on an Apple II, that would have been nuts, too.

Craddock: John, put us in your shoes.

Romero: Well, first, as soon as I saw the screen scroll smoothly, I was done. I couldn't even think anymore. It was like, “Oh my God. This doesn't exist on the PC.” I’d played everything by that point. I’d played so many PC games because my research was the game market on the PC.

[Author’s note: At this point, John Carmack joined our chat.]

Craddock: This is a question I have for Tom and Romero, but I think it might be appropriate to start with you, John Carmack. What I’ve always thought about Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement is that it was sort of the first game engine. It wasn’t complete, obviously, but much of its principles would inform Commander Keen? Am I completely wrong in thinking that?

John Carmack: You know, in a certain way, it was. We were so forced by this kind of crushing load of doing games every month or two, or multiple games in that timeframe, that we had to reuse so much of what we did: the same tools, much of the same code. It wasn't organized really like an engine, but we copied over a lot of code and modified it, and we started naming them more like functional subsystems that were copied over almost directly into the later versions. But we never got to the point of actually making libraries, which was kind of interesting because I know Lane and John Romero used some explicit libraries for their Ideas From the Deep code that was set up across multiple projects. Honestly, I wasn't really that mature of a programmer at the time to set up sort of classic abstractions and different things. I was learning as I went.

Romero: The code was basically the beginning of Commander Keen. It was a horizontally scrolling piece of code that was made just for that demo. So much stuff happened right then. It was so crazy. Scott Miller was trying to get in touch with me, and we had this cool demo. When I ran that demo, I couldn't work for three hours. Nothing like that existed. I knew this would change everything, and we needed to figure out what to do with it. It was funny because we had the NES in the corner of our room, and it was almost like, “We really hope to be as good as these games over here.”

Hall: So we could finally, somehow, make a platforming game.

Romero: When I ran the demo and I couldn't do I couldn't work, I took it to two people in the Big Blue Disk Room. I showed it to them, and they were like, “Oh. That looks neat.” And I was like, “It’s more than neat. Holy shit.” I was just like, I'm not saying shit to anybody else. There are enough people who know. No one else needs to know about this. When John and Tom came in, I came into the room and was like, “Guys, you have no idea. This is unbelievable. This has changed everything.”

Carmack: Wasn’t Jay Wilbur in the cabal really early on?

Romero: What happened was Jay was walking down the hall and I said, “Dude, get in here.” I closed the door and was just like, “Look at this demo. This does not exist on the PC. Holy shit.” Jay was the head of the Apple II department. He wasn't a PC person either, so he didn't understand the impact of it. I just said “No, seriously, we're gonna leave. This is unbelievable.” And he was like, “Oh? Leave? Let’s close the door if you’re talking that way.” So, we're all in the room, and I was like, “Nothing like this exists. We need to start a company to do something with this, but we need to make a really good demo.” Then we said, “Why not make the actual Super Mario 3? We’ll have all the characters and send it to Nintendo.” If Nintendo wanted us to make Super Mario 3 on the PC for them, that would have been insane.

Hall: Didn’t Jay know a guy?

Romero: He knew we could send it to where [former Nintendo of America counsel] Howard Lincoln was heading up NOA in Seattle. We did that after work, meaning when it was six o'clock, we’d start working on the Mario 3 demo. We took the computers home at night, on Fridays. We only had to do it for two weekends because it only took us those two weekends to do this whole demo. When we were done, we had had a really great Super Mario 3 copy: the title screen, the world map, moving around on the world map and everything.

Carmack: Refresh my memory. The very first demo [Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement], it just had a static world. You could run and jump and get through there, but nothing was animated and nothing [like warp pipes or “?” blocks] worked. And it was only after all the hacking to get the full demo, the Mario 3 game, that was what we sent to Nintendo?

Hall: Yeah.

Romero: Yeah, the [first] demo was the screen scrolling the world super smoothly, and you can jump around the same level and get to the exit. There were no enemies. There was nothing animated in there. It was just jumping around.

Carmack: By the time we were done, we had the animated blocks you could bonk with your head.

Hall: And mushrooms and the star, yeah. And then the second level just said, “Like it?”

Romero: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right.

Hall: How could they not do it? And apparently it got up to the head table.

Romero: It got to Japan where they had to make the call.

Hall: Because it was, “Do we want to be in the PC market?”

Romero: Yeah, “Do we want to do this?” And they basically decided no, because they controlled their hardware, and their IP needed to be on their hardware. The funny thing is at that same time, Scott Miller was trying to contact me.

Carmack: It is interesting how consistent Nintendo has been over decades and decades. Their strategy has clearly played out well for them. Every decade, they try to branch out one little bit into some other platform, and they keep coming back to owning the platform. It's interesting to see something in the technology world kind of stay that much of a constant for that many decades.

Romero: Yeah, it is. It's pretty great. It's worked for them. Things change, but it’s still doing well for them. Their hardware is like, “Yeah, I’m buying a Nintendo machine.” But yeah, so at the same time, Scott Miller was trying to get in touch with me.

Hall: The funny thing was that John was so happy he had all this fan mail all over the wall. And then one day, notice they had the same return address.

Craddock: I mean, he was a fan.

Romero: [laughs] He was!

Hall: Schizophrenic three fans.

Carmack: It was interesting back then the difference where once we actually got started and made Keen, the mailbags full of fan mail is something that’s just very different with gaming today. Today you’ve got millions and millions of people [playing games], but there's a lot more negativity and other things associated with it, where we had thousands of people getting out and paper and writing letters about the games. That takes a level of effort that just tossing something on social media doesn't. Getting fan mail was actually a big thing back then.

Hall: It was fantastic. And they would draw little pictures of all the characters. One of them said, “I had this dream. There's a sort of fire creature that would wander across the…” We actually thought that was so cool. We put it in another game.

Romero: In Keen 4. The Berkeloid.

Hall: Same with Princess Lindsay. A girl wanted a Princess Lindsey as opposed to a Commander Keen. It was like, sure. It was a pure joy relationship, which was great.

Romero: Yeah. The parents were writing letters and including their kids’ pictures of Keen stuff because the kids loved it so much. And when they sent letters in the mail, they would also get handwritten checks in the mail to pay for the game. There was all this mail going on back then because [email and similar tech] was just barely gaining momentum. It was amazing. We had hundreds and hundreds of those letters.

But when Scott got in touch with me, he’s like, “I want you to make Pyramid of Egypt for shareware.” I was like, “Dude, that game is garbage. You’ve gotta see this demo we just did.” I sent him the Mario 3 demo, and he was like, “Oh my god.” He saw the same [potential] because he was in that market. He was like, “Whatever you guys want to make, I will totally publish it.” He said he was making a bunch of money every week [selling full games from shareware].

Carmack: And of course we totally didn’t believe him at the time.

Hall: It was like, “Yeah, right.”

Romero: He was saying something like $20,000 a month. Like, what? I said, “Really? Well, we want $2000 [in advance] so we can start working on a game for you.” He said, “All right. Done.” I was like, that’s $666 for [all three] of us. Really, it was just us: Me, John, and Tom. Adrian was not part of the group yet; his day job was learning how to do graphics. Scott said he would give us 2000 bucks, but he said, “I want to know what it’s about.”

The three of us are in the Gamer’s Edge room, and I’m like, “Okay, what kind of game are we gonna do?” And then Tom says… [laughs]

Hall: I said, “I can make up anything.” Carmack just goes, “A kid that saves the galaxy.”

Romero: And his parents don't know.

Hall: I went off to my room and spent 15 minutes writing up exactly what you see in Commander Keen 1: “Defender of Justice!” I came back and read it in a Walter Winchell voice. Now, Carmack is brilliant—John, you’re brilliant—but not very emotional. You don’t get a rise out of him very much. But he stood up [applauding] and was like, “Yeah!”

Romero: [laughs]

Hall: It was fantastic, and we were off and running. But we had done the [Mario 3 demo for Nintendo] under another company or something, so we also needed an entity name. We talked about a bunch of them, and I had read Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents in college. There's a theory of the superego and the ego, and the id, which sort of responds to the pleasure principle. It goes toward things it finds pleasurable and gets away from things it doesn’t. That seemed a cool concept. That’s what games are: You want to do fun stuff. It’s what I literally said out of college: “I want to do the fun stuff, not the boring stuff.” It was kind of close to the previous name so we just kind of rolled with it—and it’s been mispronounced for 33 years.

Carmack: So, when the first demo went out, we [listed the company] as “IFD,” Ideas from the Deep, right? Romero, were you partners with Lane on that?

Romero: Yeah, Lane and I started that in 1989. We published a few games through it. Zappa Roidz was our first one. We made a PC, an Apple II, and an Apple IIgs version of that game, and a couple more games after that. So, we put Ideas From the Deep on the front of the Super Mario 3 demo. But then when we were forming this group, we were playing Dungeons and Dragons a lot in John's world. John had an incredible D&D campaign that he'd been running for years. Our garbage little group [in the game] was joking around, like, “We’re so great. We’re In Demand.” That was our motto.

Hall: It sort of justified “I.D.” being the spelling, but then it caused everyone to think it [is pronounced] “I.D.”

Carmack: It will be a problematic name forever.

Together for that being a problematic name forever

Hall: It’s really short, though. [laughs]

Romero: There’s a little screen in Commander Keen that has lights animating around it, and it’s like, “We’re in demand!”

Carmack: I remember when we first tried to register an internet address, we were like, can we get id.com? No, that’s Internal Defense. Of course, a few years later, every two-character name was gone and cost millions of dollars.

Craddock: John Carmack, we were talking a little bit about this before you joined, but John Romero had posed this challenge to you, can you make a horizontal smooth-scrolling game? I wondered, what was the moment for you where you had this breakthrough, like, “Oh, this is how to do it?”

Carmack: So, just making it scroll wasn't that hard. There was a hardware register for it; there was a little bit of tricky stuff dealing with the overscan so that you didn't see like something moving across it; it gets clipped by the border. The challenge was there was only enough memory to have four screens’ worth inside the normal display. Some other people did figure out later, and it's still surprising that it wasn't earlier, that you could make a four-screen game that scrolled around and not really have to do anything very challenging. You just kind of set up a couple of registers. But figuring out the different strategies for how you can make an infinite-sized world was where it was a little bit more unconventional. We actually changed the way that was done between the first and the second Keen trilogy. But overall, looking back, it's just surprising that there weren't more people kind of hacking with that type of stuff. Because the type of people who worked on the Commodore 64, the Commodore Amiga, I would have thought, given the same book, that there were 20 people who would have come up with the same technical direction. They just weren't looking at the PC because it was the more expensive, business focused system.

If you go back and break it all down, it's using a half dozen registers that are documented in a few places, but they don't tell you, “This is what [each register is] actually for.” All the stuff back then was fundamentally pretty simple. In talking about game engines, all the way up through like Wolfenstein, all the code for these files sat in one directory. For Keen, it was 10 files or something. You get hundreds of files now just by creating a new project in Android Studio or something today. There's literally a couple of 1000 files in a default install. All our games, these legendary things, were just little directories full of code. It didn’t have the engine abstraction, and it was all really pretty simple. I mean, even when you get to Doom, if you look back at it, it's quaint seeing these little global variables like “multiplayer = 1” rather than being buried under layers of abstraction.

Hall: Well, I mean, you say it's simple, but very few programmers at the time would read like hardware manuals like a bible the way you did every waking moment. I learned Apple II assembly from a book called Programming the 6502, which was a horrible, really hard-to-understand book, but doing the same thing for the PC is what led to that insight.

Carmack: I actually remember you saying back at the time that when you saw all the stuff in there, you figured you probably could have figured out how to do the smooth scrolling there. Some of the adaptive tile refresh was a little bit more out of left field, but the gist that “This register does this and these pixels move over here,” if either of you had sat down and really looked over those same things, you had the background necessary to at least get halfway there. Again, it’s surprising given the size of the PC industry and everything that there weren't more people who actually made that leap.

Romero: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's because the scrolling on the other systems was actually made a little bit easier.

Carmack: They were designed for it, whereas the people who built the EGA had no thought whatsoever about games. It was just how the hardware worked. Some unsung engineer in one of those companies said, “Well, we should put a certain offset register in here to offset by a pixel at a time.” It’d be neat to hear the history about that because that didn’t need to be there for text mode or slow CAD-drawing stuff, but somebody somewhere slipped in a little horizontal offset register.

Romero: And the CRTC start for where vertically in memory you're going to start rendering.

Carmack: It seems like lots of the different ones would have that so they could work inside different [types of computers]. You know, they'd make a CRT controller that was going to go in 10 different microcomputers, and so they'd have to have some level of compatibility for that, although it contrasts with like the Apple II.

Romero: Also, with the CRTC start, you could do underscan if you needed to on a CRT. If it was too big or small or whatever, you could go negative and pull it up.

Carmack: You know, that was one that got away. I remember a couple times playing with trying to get overscan going all the way off all the screens. We were always worried when you hear that high-pitched whine coming out of the monitor.

Romero: [laughs] Yeah. “Turn it off!”

Carmack: Because the lore was that you could actually mess up your multi-sync monitor if you sent the wrong time to it. I remember trying to stretch things off the sides and the top, and not turning off the CRT gun, so when it's retracing, you'd see a few zippy lines going everywhere. Things like that. I tried using the PC DMA controller to update screens that I never really got working right. Sometimes wonder like, could I go back and fix some of those things now?

Romero: You know, the Atari 2600, you could burn out a monitor with that code.

Carmack: Really? Well, on TVs, there were no ways to change those displays. I mean, the 2600, you drove everything directly. But I think the NTSC or PAL was pretty much hard coded into that. It's funny because I'm actually playing around a lot with 2600 stuff in the AI reinforcement learning work that I'm doing now. I literally earlier today was checking some scoring thing in Atari 2600 Pong.

Romero: Chasing the Beam? Did you get that book?

Carmack: I did. I read that. Honestly, I remember being a little disappointed with that book. I was hoping it was going to be a little bit crunchier in the things that I wanted, but just bringing that term out into more common usage was a great thing. And then I got to reuse that throughout the VR era. It’s like, no, we're going to render the front buffer. And it's not really chasing the beam, we’re pacing the beam because we don't want to go over past it.

Romero: Yeah, that makes sense.

Craddock: This is something we discussed during the Doom 30th anniversary live stream, but I’d like to bring it up again. As a kid, I remember having to learn about things like boot disks and my computer’s hardware to get Commander Keen and other games to run. Today, games are more plug and play: You download, you update, you play. Let’s start with you, John Carmack: Do you feel any educational value of playing and figuring out how to play games has been lost?

Carmack: There's definitely different things that people learn today: the whole going through and configuring a system and dealing with firmware updates, and then going in and doing some hacking and overclocking, and things like that. It's still learning some computer skills, but I think there is something lost where it's all accidental complexity rather than fundamental complexity. So much of the things people have to deal with now are not things about the way the hardware works but it's the way the mountains of system software that have been built up around them work, where you're learning how to hack the way Windows does something, which is not the same as hacking how the graphics, the CRTC controller does things.

I'm always hesitant to do a “kids these days” or “back in the good old days” sort of thing because, you know, technology is just mindblowingly amazing right now. But there are always some things that are lost as you go forward. I spend a nontrivial amount of time thinking about how some of these older things could still be relevant in the modern world and figuring out, you know, there is this wheel of reincarnation where at some point it is time to scrape all that cruft away and go back down to something more fundamental. You saw it in games, also, where things built up and triple-A is this magnificent cathedral, but then you will sometimes get something like Minecraft that comes along and it's much, much more fundamental, and it winds up being a profoundly good thing.

I do always encourage people to be aware of the history and to look at it with an open mind to see what could be learned about it. But no, I don't think people are missing too much. On net [value], it's awesome today.

Hall: Back then, it was very hard to make games. But if you could stand out… Now it's very easy to make games but it's hard to stand out. You have to do something fundamentally disruptive, like Minecraft.

Romero: Back then, because so much focus was on detail-oriented assembly language and registers and all the low-level stuff, a lot of the game design took a backseat to the programming of it. And so, people didn't have teams really back in the ‘80s. It was like one person doing everything: the graphics, the sound, the design, the programming, even the marketing. It was a lot of work just to make one thing. A lot of times the game design was the spark of the idea, but implementing it took so much effort that the game design didn't become a really big thing, it really took a lot of effort, like Richard Garriott with Ultima—making something that really was huge and seeing it through and designing the whole thing. But as teams happened, like Tom joining [our group at Softdisk] and being a creative force for design, we could actually focus on the code and not worry about the design; Tom could worry about the design. And then when we got Adrian, and he's doing the art, then everyone was focused on their area, and we could actually be way more effective, making something better.

Carmack: You know, there was something really valuable about constraints. And that's something that in game design today, there really aren't constraints; you can do anything. When you don’t have constraints, I mean, I've wound up seeing this in a lot of different areas, people don't make the best decisions when they're not forced to make hard choices. When everybody can just say, “Why not both?” and throw everything in, that's actually not as good as making a principled, careful decision about a lot of things. In the old days, there was no choice you because you just did not have the opportunity in either hardware resources or people to do everything you wanted to do. You had to prioritize, and being forced to prioritize is a valuable thing that I that I think is, you know, missing more today.

Hall: I think one reason both you [John Carmack] and I checked out Pico 8 was because it has severe constraints. It feels like maybe I'm making weird choices between map and sprites, and that feels like the old-time decisions you would make, like, “I can’d have a map this big, so how am I going to do this? Maybe I’ll write a compression algorithm.” There are a bunch of interesting trade-offs that today amount to, “Get a bigger hard drive.”

Romero: One of the coolest examples of constraint on the Atari 2600 was Pitfall!, you know, you had an entire world of different screens based on zero data.

Carmack: Yeah, that was like one byte per screen, and there were eight different things that may or may not have been there, and you've got 256 screens in the world. I had a point where I tweeted the code for Pong, and it was just a little block of code. It’s so tiny.

Romero: Wow.

Hall: Yeah, just so crazy. And they did chess on the 2600, and they only had five sprites, so they had to do interweaved lines and interrupts. They tortured it to put that many sprites on the screen.

Carmack: Yeah, so that's actually an interesting thing, where there's sometimes when you're just fighting against a constraint that needs to be a little bit more. And sometimes that leads to messy decisions, but there's the whole crafting the entire design inside, like the factor of two there, which is usually where the brilliant design side of things come in, where you say, “I'm not going to try to do this because we'll barely be able to do it, and it's going to be kind of not great by the time we get there.” But it's about figuring out just the right things you can actually squeeze in there. Sometimes people make mistakes when they just push too hard to say, “I really want 2X of what I've got here, so I'll do the compression and I'll do the paging and I'll do these other things.” In hindsight, five years later, when you look at that, you're probably not going to feel super-great about it. That's not going to be the reason Joust or Tempest still feels great today. It's not because it had 16 colors instead of eight.

Romero: Yeah, yeah. Just because they focused on the core [feature set].

Carmack: That is an interesting way to think about the older games where it is great that a lot of the classic games that we played when we were kids still are good games, but then there are some things that pushed really hard in the wrong direction and you don't look at them as classics. The ones that did exactly the right thing for their resources are the ones that largely still wind up looking good decades later.

Romero: Yeah. And it's not the number of things. It's how good that core loop is and how it feels and what you're doing. Defender, Tempest, Joust Pac-Man, all those games just have this core that's great. Pac-Man didn't need 256 screens; it had one, and it was one of the biggest games in the world. So yeah, it really was just making something that felt really good and it was really fun, especially if it was unprecedented on the platform. That was what was really different about Commander Keen.

Carmack: The truth is it [Commander Keen] is still a good game. It was not just, wow, look at this scrolling. It was good in many ways. Although when I look back at it, I think our jump mechanic felt a little peculiar.

Romero: [laughs] I know.

Carmack: But still, when you showed the game to people who weren't PC players and didn't know to be amazed by it, it was still a good, successful game.

Romero: Yep. Yeah, the jump was the only thing I was not a fan of. That jump delay. We fixed it in Keen 4, but that initial delay was not good. I think we were like, oh, let's try to make it behave like an actual pogo stick. No. We don’t have to do the pogo stick exactly right.

Hall: In the context of what we made Dangerous Dave was just a little triangle jump, a set path. Keen’s jump was actually an improvement, but it just wasn't the final elegance we wanted.

Romero: Yeah, and Super Mario was the template for that kind of jumping.

Carmack: Yeah, we have that right in front of us. That thing happened so fast. There were not cycles of playtesting, but we had our jump mechanic, Mario was right there, and it was better, but I don’t remember why we didn’t change it.

Hall: We could have studied Mario like you studied your book.

Romero: We got the game done so fast, though. I mean, three games in two and a half months.

Hall: John [Romero], do you have the artifact?

Romero: [Holds up the disk containing Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.] We do the Mario 3 demo, Scott Miller contacts us, we give him the pitch, and I think we did that over the phone and also sent him a letter, and we all signed it. And then we started. He basically sent us $100 in pizza money every Friday. Like, “Hey, would you guys work this weekend [after doing your jobs at Softdisk]?” Like, we were living for the weekends. That was when we could work all the hours [on Keen] and didn’t have to do work things during the day. When we were making Commander Keen, basically at six p.m. we changed directories is at work and started working on Keen. And then when Friday comes along, instead of changing directories at six o'clock, we just unplugged the computers, loaded them in the cars, and took them to the lake house.

Carmack: Of course, we did pay for that later.

Romero: Yes, they weren’t our computers. [laughs]

Carmack: At the big Zenimax versus Facebook trial, at the end of it when they were closing down their arguments, they had me on the stand, and they're like, “Did you make a game called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement?”, trying to show my disdain for intellectual property laws and everything. They didn't have it right. They thought we had sold it. And I was like, “No, it was just a demo. It was never sold.”

Hall: Yeah, like, “It’s called a joke. I don’t know if you understand jokes.”

Romero: Wow. That's funny. Well, that's lawyers. [laughs] So, in about two and a half months, we made Commander Keen. We had to make three games because that's how shareware worked: One of them was going to be given away for free, the other two, people would buy. And to do that, we had to actually make Commander Keen into an engine-type piece of code that would operate on different types of data. I think we had three separate executables because we shipped them on different disks, but it was basically the same code. It just had different actors code in it for the different characters in each of them: different data, different levels, different graphics. The shared data was really Commander Keen and probably some of the sky tiles and stuff.

Carmack: That thread of being data driven did carry on through all the later things and led to all the modding and everything. I think it's fair to trace it back to those early roots.

Romero: When we decided that, okay, we have to make three games in two and a half months, so how do we do this? It needs to be data driven. That was the decision. We did it, and on December 14, it was uploaded: Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons. The first episode, Marooned on Mars, was uploaded, and the rest is history. It's funny because a lot of people even today were not around when Commander Keen came out, so they don't know that the rave reviews for Commander Keen were just as [ecstatic as the reviews for] Wolfenstein and Doom. No one had seen this on a PC before. It was crazy. I have some of those reviews from people back then, like, “For velvet-smooth scrolling on the PC, there’s nothing like this,” and “Commander Keen is what you’ve got to get.”

Carmack: I remember one of the reviews I was happiest with was a tiny blurb from Jerry Pournelle in Byte magazine, just mentioning this neat little game.

Hall: Like, “He knows who we are!”

Carmack: moving on to the space scene around space access, I have, you know, a couple of decades later, which was fun.

Romero: That's cool. So yeah, we immediately started on Keen 4 after that, but 1991 proved to be id Software's insane year of 13 games. Three of those games were made outside of the Gamer’s Edge stuff, because John did a double-res Catacomb on the Apple II; I did a double-res version of Dangerous Dave; and also Dark Designs 2, I think. And then halfway through the year, we start on Commander Keen 4, 5, and 6.

Carmack: Were we a legit [registered] company at the start? Did Jay take care of that for us, or were we skating for a long time?

Romero: We started February 1 officially out of Softdisk, but it took until June to become an incorporated company, to be an LLC. So, it was June, and Jay did all the paperwork for that. He might have thought that we weren't gonna last that long. [laughs]

Hall: We got the first check from Commander Keen, and it was like $10,000. It was like, “We can live on this!” It just exploded our brains.

Romero: Yeah, it was great. Back then it didn't cost that much to live. Rent was cheap.

Hall: Especially in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Carmack: Crammed into one house.

Romero: So anyway, that's the origin of id Software. We came from this amazing demo that took [six hours to make] starting probably at 11pm and done at 5am, and putting it on a three-and-a-half-inch floppy. It took the three of us, all of our different skills, to come up with the idea of doing it, being able to do it, and recognizing that this could be pretty amazing. It showed that we were a really great team.

Carmack: Yeah, and it really was Romero that drove the, “We are out of here. We're gonna make a new company.” Tom and I were like…

Hall: “Isn’t this [demo] a funny joke?”

Romero: I had already founded three companies, so id was my fourth company. It was like, this is the actual company. So yeah, it was great. Scott and George [Broussard] were really great to us back then. That probably wouldn’t have happened if not for Scott trying to contact me like a madman.

Carmack: I don’t know what the history might have been [without that]. You might have been able to convince us to go out and shop to a traditional publisher or something. But the best world happened with Scott getting us on the shareware side of things.

Hall: I think his Miller model really made it sell well. To say, you get the first part of a trilogy, and you get two more whole games if you send a check.

Carmack: Yeah, there’s nothing technical about it, but it's all about the mindset. The way community was at that time, nobody else was making money in shareware, and Scott just came up with the right little hook on it. It was working great for him and it worked phenomenally for us.

Romero: Because everything back then was “nagware.” It was always stopping games and popping up messages like, “Hey, buy me for 15 bucks,” you know? No one had come up with this idea of, hey, you can have this one for free, and when you exit the game, if you really like it, call this 800 number and give us a credit card number over the phone.

Hall: You're getting twice as much.

Carmack: We did have our sell screen at the end after you’d presumably had a great time. You couldn't do something like that today because you just close the window and it's gone. But running things from a command line had you thinking, Time to quit out. I had a great time—oh, what’s this right here? And our conversion rates were pretty darn respectable.

Romero: And it had to be a really nice-looking, colorful ASCII screen. Because if it was just pure black and white text, people would have just [thought it was boring]. We had an arted-up screen; we even joked around in those screens, like with Wolfenstein. It was really funny, some of the text on the screen. I even have the tool we used. I used Laughing Dog Screen Maker to make those screens.

Hall: Oh, yeah, I remember that. It was fun to edit those and add little funny things, just get people to continue that kind of happy feeling after finishing the game. It was just a more pleasant way to approach it instead of just, “If you want more, you must pay.” That's not cool. It’s not fun.

Romero: I think it was also very viral. People could just give it to their friends because it was free. Like, I can download it for free. I'll give it to my friend for free, spread it around. And then people start selling it and it's in stores.

Hall: No restrictions. It could be on every demo disk. It was just easy to spread around.

Romero: But yeah, we started the company in February 1, 1991. It's been going for 33 years. Kevin Cloud just retired in December 2023. Donna Jackson still works there. We hired her in January of ‘94. She’s gonna be the longest-tenured id employee after another year.

Hall: All the keen folks are gone. Wolfenstein folks are gone.

Romero: I'll probably be seeing her in the summertime. Probably gonna go back to the US and go through there. She's still loving her job and still remembers the crazy antics of early id Software.

Hall: Semi dangerous crazy antics.

Romero: So anyway, there it is. David, thank you very much for emceeing this thing. And thanks for all of your incredible chronicling FPS history and being the foremost FPS historian.

Craddock: All I have to do is let people talk. It's very easy. But I actually thought, if you guys don't mind, I'll kick you one last question. Romero, we’ll start with you. As you look back 33 years, what do you think the legacy of id software is all these years later?

Romero: You know, it's funny. At the very beginning of it, on the PC, I saw us as a comparable Sirius Software, which had really fast games back then on the Apple II. It took a lot of work to program those games. It was hard to make things fast on an Apple II; Nasir Gebelli did that. John was the next one to do this on the PC and make amazing stuff. I feel that with Doom 2016, they spent so long trying to get the essence of that id speed again. It took four reboots and seven years, and they made Doom 2016 feel like what Doom would be like if it was made for the first time in 2016. That essence of speed, violence, movement, shooting, all of that stuff was so good. I think a lot of people felt like it wasn't as revolutionary as the original games because no one had seen anything like that at the time, but they had to recapture that feeling for today’s audience.

Hall: Scary, dark, and fast was what I was waiting for, and it was fantastic.

Carmack: I think John really nailed the salient points there. There was 3D graphics in other things, but it was mostly simulation based. You had Battlezone and flight simulators, but I don’t think it was obvious and inevitable that things would be going for these super-fast, first-person, violent gunplay sort of games that it turned out have all the legs in the world and are still going strong. Because, you know, for a while, I thought the world was trending more toward third-person, that the narrative and cinematic view of what you'd want to do with 3D would overwhelm it, because not everybody wants that fast, violent feel of things. It has been really heartening to see that the genre seems to have all the legs it needs. It's gonna be here forever, you know, FPS will be here 15 years from now in some form.

Hall: Yeah, when we originally did Wolfenstein, we were testing it, and we were kind of sitting there going, “No one's made this before. Is that okay?” We were like asking the gaming gods if that's okay. What a what an honor to be in the people who started a genre. Who gets to do that? It was this sort of magic mixture of great technology, great tools, great art and design, and it just does kind of all come together. Carmack was saying, oh, anybody could do this. But when you do it twice? This revolutionary type of thing? Seeing exactly where to pull back, like, don’t do full 3D; do two-and-a-half-D. You figured out a way to do that, and that sort of made the difference between making something stellar as opposed to something incremental. All of that coming together made the magic.

Romero: When we were making Wolfenstein and we got that chaingun sound in there, I was on the floor laughing.

Hall: That is my favorite sound in all games.

Romero: It was like no game ever. And all the blood? Oh, my God, nobody's played anything like. It’s going to be the best. It was awesome.

Hall: And sorry about the dogs.

Carmack: I was just retelling that about Nintendo making us change them to rats [in the Super NES version] a couple of days ago, actually.

Hall: Take out the blood, take out the symbols.

Romero: In a nutshell: It was awesome. Thanks everybody for watching this. Id Software is 33. That’s a third of a century. That's pretty crazy. I never thought we’d start a company that would live to be a third of a century old.

Hall: Id is older now than we were at the time.

Romero: Yeah, yep, that's right.

Hall: Well, I gotta go take my pills.

Romero: All right, everybody. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time we celebrate something.

Hall: Yeah, id turning 66.

John Romero on Speedrunning and More

Working at id Software in the 1990s was like working inside a bunker, only with more pizza, soda, and video games. The studio started small and remained small through development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom. After Doom's release in December 1993, John Romero turned his attention to scouting for opportunities to collaborate on external projects related to id's games, namely strategy guides and ports.

Romero set aside time to talk with me about multiple ports of Doom, as well as a wild three-week period spent converting Wolfenstein 3D to the Super Nintendo. We also found time to talk about Doom's brand of narrative design and how speedrunning has become a meta form of storytelling in games.

**

David L. Craddock: The interesting thing about Doom ports, for me, is that they were faithful to the original game. The versions on SNES, Jaguar, and 32X were missing bits and pieces here and there, but they were still Doom. Then came the PSX port. It's my favorite port. It's missing some geometry and levels, but it adds so much: new levels, new lighting, new audio. What was id's level of involvement with this port relative to the others, and why was it such a different type of port—still Doom, but more its own thing?

John Romero: Midway had been around for decades. We respected Midway. Other companies that worked on Doom ports, we didn't know them that well. But Midway was known as a quality company back then. Jay Wilbur and I drove down highway 45 on the way to Houston. They had an office probably halfway to Houston, two hours down highway 45. [Video game producer and director] Michael Gottlieb was there. That was the first time I met Michael. We met so we could talk about Midway working on ports of Doom.

We decided that because we trusted Midway, we wanted them to do their own thing. That's why they had the freedom to add colored lighting, add a whole new soundtrack—just do what they could do with Doom to make the PlayStation version more special than the other versions, which were straight ports from the PC. Even the Jaguar version, which we did [in-house], we didn't do anything special with it. We just wanted to make sure it ran as fast as the Jaguar's chip could allow.

For PlayStation, we decided to give Midway creative license. They did a really great job on the audio and level design. We were very happy with it.

Craddock: That set the stage for Doom 64, then? Because that was another instance of a game with "64" appended to the title, but instead of a port—like Quake 64 and Duke Nukem 64, for instance—it was a completely different game.

Romero: Yeah. With Doom 64, because the PlayStation port was a great job, we decided to let them really go all out with Doom 64. They could do what they wanted: make it a different story, not even on the same narrative path. That's what they did. They wrote a whole new engine, completely new levels, higher-res graphics for characters.

To make sure it was a fast game on the N64, Aaron Seller, the lead programmer, came down to Texas. We got him an office on our floor. That way he could ask [John] Carmack questions anytime he got stuck. It was almost an embedded port job. Aaron was a super-nice guy and very dedicated, just so focused to make it really good. He was like us: a great programmer who worked really hard. We liked seeing that Midway had programmers like him.

Craddock: How important were ports to id? You've told me in the past that you were pushing to do more work with external studios so that id would continue to grow.

Romero: For sure. It was ports, hint books, and making sure they were high-quality. I think Cybex came out with one of the first [guides for an id game], and it had these black-and-white pictures. I thought, No way am I ever doing this again. I asked Jay, "Could you get in touch with Prima? They're high-quality." Prima did the Hexen hint book first, and they did an amazing job.

The cool thing was Prima Publishing was located in Rocklin, California, where I grew up. When I went home to visit my parents, I went over to the Prima office and hung out with them for a while.

But the ports of Doom were... [laughs] There were a bunch of them. Even Sega, when they were doing the 32X version, it was iffy. The 32X didn't have a very powerful co-processor. [Author's note: Sega's 32X add-on for the Genesis commandeered the Genesis as a co-processor.] Sega sent an engineer over with a motherboard that was the prototype of the 32X. He laid it out on our pool table, hooked up a monitor to it, and we got to look at the code. Carmack got as much information out of him as he could give about the processor, and then gave the engineer suggestions to make the blitter [circuit or coprocessor that moves and processes data quickly] go a little faster.

That's how Sega got the 32X version running. It didn't have a very large [on-screen] view. It was very under-powered.

Craddock: I was even more surprised Doom existed on the Super Nintendo. I found that version in a bargain bin at my local K*B Toys for, like, 20 bucks. I remember it came in a red cartridge. I also remember it wasn't very good, simply because the SNES was so old by that point.

Romero: We didn't even think to do a Super Nintendo version of Doom. That hardware was absolutely not made for 3D. It was kind of like the Amiga: the Amiga was doomed to not play 3D games back then. Super Nintendo was good for horizontal scrolling, parallax effect, all that stuff, but Mode 7 was as crazy as it got.

So we were really surprised when a Doom cartridge for Super Nintendo showed up at the office. We were like, "What?" We plugged it in and ran it, and were like, "Oh my god. Doom is on the Super Nintendo." Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City had decided they were going to port Doom. They reverse-engineered it and sent it to us, and we said, "Um. Okay. We'll get this published." That was probably one of the rare times when a company decided to do a port and then just did it for free.

We were really surprised. We didn't think the Super Nintendo could do it, but incredibly, that was so many people's first exposure to Doom. When that cartridge arrived in our office, my dad lived in Salt Lake City. I'd lived there for a little bit. The next time I went to see my dad, I went to Sculptured Software's office to say hi and compliment them on their work.

So, I went, but I didn't tell anyone [from the company] I was coming. I just showed up. The woman at the desk thought I was there for a job interview. [laughs] I met the Mortal Kombat team there. Sculptured was one of the best Super Nintendo developers around, and they'd gone over what they needed to do for Mortal Kombat.

I was walking down a hallway with some of those guys, and I noticed this door. There were generally two people per room back then, and on this door, I saw the name Peter Ward. Being an Apple II nut, I knew Peter Ward had made one of the coolest Apple II games, called Black Magic. I knocked on the door. This guy opened it. I said, "Are you Peter Ward?" He said, "No. Peter's sick today."

I said, "Oh my god! Well, can you tell him John Romero came by and said Black Magic was incredible?" The guy said, "No. Way. You played Black Magic, too?" I said, "Yeah, and South Pacific Quest. He [Peter] won't believe I played that, and it was really fun." It was one of Peter's first games. I said, "Peter is badass."

I never heard from Peter. He stayed in Salt Lake City and worked for a few companies there.

Craddock: Peter wasn't able to come to any of your Apple II parties?

Romero: Nope. I never heard from him. We did hold another Apple II party before we moved to Ireland. There were a couple of people who were kind of obscure who I got to meet. There was one guy, Hunter Hancock, who wrote one game in his entire life; it was called Cyclod, published through Sirius Software. [Author's note: Cyclod was Hancock's only original game, but he also converted Sneakers, a Space Invaders clone, to the Atari 800.]

I also met Stuart Smith, the guy who wrote Ali Baba and Adventure Construction Set.

Craddock: At what point did Sandy Petersen jump on board to re-engineer Doom's levels for the SNES port?

Romero: I don't quite remember. When [the port showed up in the office], it hadn't been published yet, so there was still time to modify stuff. Sandy was the right person to do it.

It was funny: We [didn't do many ports in-house], but we did do Wolfenstein 3D for Super Nintendo. That was a time-crunch job. Have I told you about that one?

Craddock: No.

Romero: Oh my god.

Craddock: [laughs]

Romero: When Wolfenstein 3D came out, that was the first time we'd seen one of our games blow up like that. Around the same time, Imagineer, this Japanese company, calls and talks to Jay. They want to publish it on Super Nintendo, and they would give us $100,000 down to start. It was like, "What?! This is amazing!" Now, Wolfenstein 3D made something like a quarter of a million the month it came out. With no advertising. Everything was just insane, and another $100,900 sounded cool.

We knew that we ourselves would not be doing the port, because we were busy making Spear of Destiny. Also, we were working with Atari to do a signature character for them, the way Mario and Sonic were Nintendo's and Sega's signature character. We created this character called Pounce. We were also working on porting Wolfenstein 3D to Lynx. I think I still have some of the graphics for that.

So we didn't have bandwidth to do this Atari character, and the Super Nintendo [port of Wolfenstein], and Spear of Destiny. There were only four or five of us back then, plus Jay and Kevin [Cloud]. So we contacted a programmer we knew, who had been around forever in the industry. He was as technical as it got. He'd programmed the Super Nintendo, the Mac, the Apple II—everything. We contacted him and he was super-excited about the SNES port. We gave him all the assets, and continued working on our own thing.

We kind of forget about it. Then, it was March of '93 or so. Seven or eight months had passed. Imagineer came back to Jay and said, "Is the Wolfenstein 3D port done yet?" Jay said, "Oh. Shit." He ran to us and said, "Guys, what's the story with the port?" We said, "Oh. Fuck."

Craddock: [laughs]

Romero: We tried to get in touch with the port guy, and for a while we couldn't. Then one day his wife answered the phone and said, "He's sick," and all kinds of bullshit excuses. We hung up and said, "We have to do the Super Nintendo port as fast as possible, because this guy can't or won't do it." Now, we were busy making Doom at that point. We stopped all work on Doom and had to learn how to program a Super Nintendo. Learn about the graphics: what format they're in, the layout of the screen, all that shit.

To convert the whole game over, we couldn't have dogs [due to Nintendo's family-friendly] policies. We made them rats. We did all this shit, and it took us three weeks. We were on turbo speed. We needed to get back to Doom, so we had to port Wolfenstein as soon as possible. It took three weeks in crunch mode to get it done. That was the first time we'd had to do that kind of crazy bullshit.

We went home to sleep, but came back in. Those were 16-hour days. We had to get back to Doom, so we worked really fast. Adrian [Carmack] had a process where he could take the game's VGA art and convert it pretty quickly. He didn't have to do too much special stuff other than resizing, and making sure the overall feel of textures was similar to the PC version. John had to create the engine. I think he may have done it in C, which then got compiled into assembly language. The renderer was written in 65816 assembly language; that controlled the hardware. That's when he figured out how to do the blitter quickly with a piece of hardware that was not made to do that, so he could help the Sega guy [with the 32X port of Doom].

Craddock: As a kid, I didn't have a Jaguar, but I remember the marketing hype. Atari promoted it as the first 64-bit console. What did you think of the hardware?

Romero: Yeah. The next [port] was the Jaguar version of Doom. It was probably another three weeks to a month of work, something like that. It wasn't a big crunch. Shawn Green came into my office and stayed there so he could code as well. Carmack was doing the renderer; Shawn and I were doing everything else. That was kind of fun.

The Jaguar was not 64-bit. I think the address bus was, but we had no control over that. It was like, "Nice try, Atari." It was really 32-bit.

Craddock: That's on par with Sega's "blast processing" marketing, although that did exist, just not exactly in the way they advertised.

Romero: [laughs] I know. We tried our best. It was not a bad version, but the PC blew everything away back then. I don't remember that port being too tough. I think Jaguar's resolution supported Doom in its native 320x200. If that worked, that meant everything else would be a lot easier.

Craddock: These experiences sound like game development in a nutshell: Every day you face new problems, and you need a solution for all of them yesterday.

Romero: Yeah. It was an Apollo 11 situation, basically. Except we weren't going to die. [laughs]

David L. Craddock: This feature covers the many types of narratives than can exist in games, from traditional stories you take part in to models of non-authorial storytelling. An increasingly popular one of those is the speedrun, and one of the first games I recall that took a huge step in formalizing the idea of beating a game as fast as possible was Wolfenstein 3D. You'd finish a level and see a par time. Wolf3D cracked open that door, but Doom kicked it off its hinges thanks to technology, introduced just a year after Wolf3D, that let players record gameplay and upload it. How did all of that, the idea of par times and letting other players record their records, get started?

John Romero: In the '80s, nobody wanted to speedrun. Everybody needed to play as long as they could on one quarter. It was all about, can you beat this game on a quarter? Can you break Pac-Man or Donkey Kong by getting to the game? [Records were] all about the longest time spent in games; nobody focused on getting through fast until computers and the fact that you could record gameplay and play it back.

There's a website called Doom Honorific Titles. It opened in May 1994, and it's the Twin Galaxies of Doom speedrun titles. These are demos you can play back [in-game], made by people who played Doom with certain designations in mind, such as a pacifist run where you only use fists or something; and a Tyson run, which may also include the pistol. There are Schwarzenegger titles, epic titles--all these titles. The rules say exactly what you need to do to get that title, and you have to submit your demos. All demos are checked to make sure they weren't made with machine assistance [author's note: programs that optimize gameplay as players play], and they'll give you a title on the site. That's how speedrunning stuff started in 1994.

Craddock: You're the one who set all the par times, right?

Romero: Yeah, yeah. That was all my idea. This started with Wolfenstein 3D, and the game was so fast--it ran at 70 frames per second, because VGA monitors synced at 70 frames instead of 60 like most monitors today--and we wrote the game with super-fast assembly code. The program's mouse sensitivity was so high that I could strafe with the mouse at this insane speed. Doom couldn't touch it; it was crazy.

Doing this, I could get through all the levels of the first episode within five minutes. That's in the hint book, at fast: My time to get through is something like five minutes and four seconds, something like that. I can't remember exactly, but it was really fast. With a mouse plus a game running at 70 frames per second, I wanted to see how fast I could get through this stuff. When I started finishing it pretty quickly, I thought, I'd better add par times. The par times in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake are not the length of time it takes me to get through as fast as possible; that's a really shitty time rounded up to 30 seconds. The closest 30-second increment is what I could do.

Craddock: Let's deviate for a second. id had this reputation for breaking boundaries in the early days of computing technology. When everyone said smooth-scrolling graphics couldn't be done on a PC, John Carmack did it. Was getting Wolf3D to run at 70 frames per second another hurdle, or was it relatively simpler?

Romero: Ray casting was really fast. There are only 320 operations maximum to render a full screen back then, because VGA mode was 320x200. To do each vertical column required one ray cast to see which pixel it hit on a wall, and then render that part of the texture. If you shrink your screen [viewing area] down, that's far fewer ray casts for that 90-degree field of view. If you have your screen really small, you're only drawing 10 pixels or something; every nine degrees, you're getting a pixel, and you're only scanning it 10 times, so it's super, super fast.

We made it that fast with assembly language, using what we called a vertical span blitter. We took a column and made sure it was zoomed in. If you're near a wall, it's a hugely magnified texture versus a wall off in the distance. That's less texturing that you have to draw: the faraway walls are faster to render because you're not rendering as many pixels vertically. The walls you're close against eat up more time. The span blitter handled a pixel column for every column you were trying to render. Normally, full-screen was 320x200, so it was only looking 320 times. It's super-fast because it's all 80x86, optimized assembly in VGA mode.

The reason Doom didn't run at 70 fps was because there was so much AI going on in the background, and it took more time to render every pixel than Wolf3D did. Wolfenstein didn't have lighting in it. Everything was always at the same brightness, so it rendered as fast as you could render things. Doom had more operations. There's a light value we have to index into. In assembly, there are more instructions for pixels. We still did a vertical span blitter in Doom, and it was optimized for not tilting left and right; the walls were straight and vertical. Just to make sure the game didn't have any dips in [performance], to stay at a nice, even speed with all the extra AI going on, we limited Doom to 35 frames per second.

Back then, the CPU drew pixels. GPUs didn't exist. Everything you had was trying to put pixels on the screen.

Craddock: One of the stories I told myself as I played Wolf3D was trying to creep around and stab guards in the back, just trying to be stealthy as much as I could. Was that an homage to Castle Wolfenstein?

Romero: Yeah, and it was really hard to come up behind somebody like that, so [one-hit kills were] a reward.

Craddock: id's shooters tells stories through level design: lighting, environment, flow, positioning of enemies and items. What was your process for designing levels in Wolfenstein 3D to tell these stories, since that was a game where you were all still kind of cutting your teeth?

Romero: Building maps was the most boring part of making that game. Tom Hall and I were both like, "Oh my god, this is the most braindead shit ever." It was easy to make maps. The only interesting part of making maps was setting up sound areas, and putting secret areas in with pushwalls.

It was easy. We'd draw a bunch of rooms, figure out the pathing, make more rooms, put some secrets in every once in a while, put some keys in, place Nazis and dogs, and then fill in sound zones. For that, we used colored background tiles. If we filled a room with yellow and the hallway outside was blue, if I shoot a gun out in the hallway--I'm on blue--everyone in the room, in the yellow sound zone, can't hear me. If I open a door, the hallway's blue floods the room and changes yellow to blue. Now we're all in the same sound zone.

In Wolfenstein, you could go up to a door, open it, and run backwards down the hall while shooting. Everyone in the room would hear you because the sound zones were connected.

Craddock: Yeah, all the hallways were orthogonal, and levels couldn't have multiple floors. What were some of the ways you and Tom flexed your creative muscles to make maps as interesting as possible?

Romero: It was funny. Tom would imagine what a place would look like, and try to make it look that way. In Hovertank 3-D, he would drop green squares. They were huge walls, but to him, it [represented] a hedge. He's imagining a park, and there were hedges, even though there were no textures. When we got to Wolfenstein 3D, we were just trying to bash out levels as fast as we could.

It's easy to draw a level, but making sure it plays well takes time. You have to start it, pick stuff up, make sure where the map falls in the sequence of maps has the right difficulty, that the placement is good so there's no unfair stuff like enemies that just mow you down. If you get mowed down on a later level, such as map 7 or 8, you want to make sure you hide a powerful weapon near the beginning of the level, maybe in the first room behind a hidden wall. We had secrets to place, and we had to constantly test to make sure levels played well.

We wanted to make surprises for players. Maybe you're in a blue hallways and the next room over is yellow, but somewhere far away we put yellow on the floor of a little closet with a Nazi in it. As soon as you open the door to a connecting yellow room, that monster gets activated and starts coming for you. Things like that make a map more interesting and fun, because players can hear doors opening at a distance and realize an enemy is looking for them. That was the Wolfenstein 3D version of hearing monsters [snorting and growling] as they hunted for you.

It was all about suspense. I was just talking to someone about the importance of audio in Doom. We had to make sure the audio was super-suspenseful, so you were terrified hearing monsters move around. Monsters make different sounds: the Pinky's sound, the Imp's sound. You hear these things and don't know when or where they're going to pop out, but you know it's around a corner somewhere.

Craddock: That's a great point. I've told you how much I love the PlayStation port of Doom, but they had to cut down on sound effects. One result of that was monsters all made the same one or two sounds. That made it harder for me, as someone who had played countless hours of Doom on PC, to know what was coming. That's part of a level's story: Being able to hear a monster and know exactly what it is so you can prepare to fight it.

Romero: Yeah. That was a great version of Doom in all other areas.

Craddock: I prefer Doom over Doom 2 even though they're both great, because I feel Doom has better pacing and a better mix of horror and action. Midway leaned into that by composing its own sound track and sound effects for the PlayStation port. I'd never thought about how much the atmosphere of a game, and my approach to playing it, could be altered by changing audio.

Romero: Yeah, I liked it. We really trusted Midway when they worked on ports. Doom 64 was an excellent example of totally trusting Midway to make something new with Doom. Every other version of Doom were ports: Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, even the Jaguar version, which we programmed ourselves; it was as faithful a reproduction as possible. Doom on PlayStation had new music and sounds, extra levels. It was very cool.

With Doom 64, Aaron Seeler was this great programmer who made sure he got as much information from Carmack as possible by having an office right outside his door. It was such a different version of Doom, but it was really well done.

Craddock: It was its own beast. What I loved about Doom 64 was, after playing Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom, I wanted something different, and Doom 64, although it had action, was heavier on exploration and simple puzzles.

Romero: I really liked it. We knew we could trust Midway.

Craddock: I was replaying Wolfenstein 3D, and one thing that stuck out to me was how the starting room of a level sets the tone for that level. In E1M1, you're in a cell. You go into the corridor, and there's one guard around the corridor. Next corridor: one guard. After that you come to a larger room and there are two guards. There's an escalation to tension. The secret level of episode one is this giant maze with colored walls, and you have to explore for a little while before you find an enemy. How important did you consider starting rooms when you were building a level?

Romero: Hugely important. Before Doom--I'd say starting in Wolfenstein--I wasn't thinking much about how visually great a level's first room was; we were really limited in what we could show. We had no lighting. It was barebones. We just tried to make maps fun.

With Doom, that's where design thoughts started happening. I thought, I want a level to look really cool at the start so they can take a minute to just look and wonder what's out there. I wanted to make sure when a level started, there was something interesting about [that location]. That's what I did with all my levels with Doom, and with Sigil [Romero's fifth episode released in 2019] as well.

Craddock: Doom's first visual, the first room of E1M1, kind of follows the story from the manual. That story is simple: you're a lone marine assigned to guard a door, you hear your peers fighting and dying, then silence. You open the door, and that's where the game begins, and the first thing you see is the corpse of a marine. What did you want that room, and the placement of that corpse, to convey to players as the very first sight they'd see in Doom?

Romero: I didn't want it to be a massive bloodbath right away, because otherwise you should have been involved. I wanted you to think, That guy just got killed, and then I guess the demon took off. Maybe it was a shotgun zombie who went off to the left, or an Imp killed the marine and went a few rooms deeper. You think, Oh, wow, some shit happened. I'd better watch out. I want you to explore, but also know bad things can happen to you.

If you're playing on Hurt Me Plenty or any easier difficulty, you won't get attacked in that first room or the one to the left, where you go up the stairs to get green armor. That's because I want you to explore, get used to the controls, get used to going up and down stairs, check out the lighting, look outside and see lighting--all this stuff you can do before you get to the first door. You still know someone was killed, so you have to watch out.

In fact, if you look through the far window, the Imps [on the ledge] will throw fireballs at you from across the level.

Craddock: I liken the marine corpses to bread crumbs. You see one or two in every level, and I think, Wow, this guy, my fellow marine, made it this far. That makes me feel like even more of a badass because I'm still alive and still pushing through.

Romero: Exactly!

Craddock: I love that you can open a wall to enter that courtyard with the blue armor, too. You look out the window, see that courtyard, think, How do I get in there?, and if you explore, you'll find a way in.

Romero: Yep. We added that in version 1.9, the switch that opens that wall. If you played an earlier version, you couldn't go outside until you made it to the zig-zag floor room [bordered by slime].

Craddock: What prompted you to add that switch in such a late update?

Romero: It was for deathmatch. The rocket launcher and blue armor are out there, and it opened the far wall [leading into the zig-zag room] too. If I'd have thought about it more, I could've made that switch accessible only in deathmatch, but I didn't think about how I could have done it.

Craddock: I read in Masters of Doom that Carmack was initially opposed to adding secrets in Wolfenstein 3D, but I wasn't clear on why he put his foot down.

Romero: It had to have been both Tom and me together. I don't think either of us said, "We need pushwalls." We didn't even have that word available. Coming off of Commander Keen maybe two weeks earlier, after making seven Keen games and hiding a ton of secrets everywhere--they were elaborate and fun to find; making levels for Keen was so much fun--we started Wolfenstein and thought, Well, [secrets] are gone. That was the fun part. We were moving around killing stuff, but thinking, Where's the rest of the gameplay? Picking up score items isn't fulfilling. That's not even an objective. If we'd had objectives like "Find the golden cross," that would have been cool. I'd have found the gameplay more fulfilling, but it would have also led me to say, "Well, could we hide them somewhere?"

Tom and I said, "We need hidden areas for 1UPs, treasure for points, and guns. You could get the machine gun earlier than normal because we hid it on the first level. We wanted to hide things to make the game more fun. We told John, and he said, "I don't want to do that." We said, "Why not?" He said, "Because that violates the purity of the engine." Wolfenstein's engine was really clean, the way it worked. It was simple and elegant, and he didn't like putting pushwalls in because it was a hack to the engine; it wasn't made to do that. We said, "We have to have this." He said, "No."

It was probably a month and a half, and we kept on bugging him. He finally did it. Do you know how long it took us to make Wolfenstein's shareware? Four months. Just the shareware episode, so 10 levels. That was the whole package: the "Read This" in the menu with all the instructions, the visual layout [of menus] with text and graphics, all the enemies you see--which are only a couple--and then the boss at the end. I think the officers came in on episode two. So, there weren't that many characters, but there were enough that it took four months to get everything together, including the engine.

That's really fast. Most people can't do anything in four months nowadays. Then it took us two more mnoths to deliver 50 more levels with five more bosses, and a hint book, which was really fun to write. When we were working on the game, Scott Miller had this idea of different packages. The first package was for the trilogy, then $15 for episodes four through six; and $10 for the hint manual. You could buy any of those separately, or get the whole package for 60 bucks. Everybody bought the whole package. It's like, "I might as well. I don't want to wait." Remember these were snail mail days.

Craddock: I love strategy guides. I have a modest collection. I was one of those kids who bought them to read them, like a novel. Cover to cover. Writing strategy guides is just writing a different kind of story.

Romero: Making the levels was more boring than writing hints for the levels. We had to do layout, and we had a NeXTSTEP machine to make the manual. Putting those together was easy. Tom and I traded off: We wrote hints for our levels. I made maybe less than half the levels in Wolfenstein, and I wrote the hints for them.

It was really creative: How many times can you say "Shoot the Nazi?" It's boring to say that. "Shoot the Nazi in the corner and take the whatever." We had to come up with so many ways to make reading that book interesting. It's such a funny book to read. You get to the end of a level, and you could just tell we were going nuts writing this damn strategy guide.

There was a point, probably at the beginning of the '90s, when "users" was not a term specified for games. People said it all the time, but that belonged in a fucking checkbook program. "User" isn't someone playing a game. That's "gamer" or "player." But what else can you call them? That gets old after a while, too.

Craddock: Finding secrets in Wolfenstein was difficult. That's not a criticism, but there were only so many textures to work with, far fewer than in Doom. Textures played a huge role in finding secrets in Doom levels: you learned to look out for things like a stain on an otherwise clean wall, or a misaligned label. Given that Wolfenstein was so limited in comparison, what was your process for deciding, "Well, this portrait of Hitler has a secret room behind it, but that same portrait over there does not?"

Romero: The only thing we cared about was that we tried to put textures on walls that hid secrets. That's so people weren't [pressing] every wall. There were some secret walls that were plain. We'd say, "Let's mix it up. We'll have a picture, a blank spot, and another picture, and the blank spot will hide the secret." We would make little patterns like that, and that was about it.

While we were drawing levels, we would create the [main] path and say, "Hmm. This might be a good spot," because it was a room the player was doing something in. Normally, if there was a long hallway, we usually wouldn't put a secret there. A hallway is just a path to get from A to B; we didn't want players to hump the wall nonstop. Usually secrets were found in rooms where shit happened. It was an extra reward if you decided to explore the room. We didn't want to encourage [searching out secrets] in hallways.

Craddock: Did you and Tom have most of the maps done by the time Carmack came around to secrets, or did you have to go back and insert them?

Romero: It wasn't too bad to go back through them. By the time we got to secrets, we probably had a month of development left on only the shareware episode, so we only needed to revisit 10 levels. If that would have happened at the end of [having to release] 60 levels, it would have been insane. We probably wouldn't have done it, because there were no patch updates and stuff like that back then.

Craddock: What would you consider some of the most important design lessons, the dos and don'ts, from making Wolfenstein that you wanted to inform Doom?

Romero: The stuff we took out of Wolfenstein, we definitely would not do in Doom. Stuff like searching dead bodies and dragging bodies around hallways, stuff like that. We knew that anything that was not involved in the core loop, shooting and moving, was slowing down the essence of the game. We knew that's what Doom should be: Blasting shit, solving puzzles, getting to the exit. That's still the goal [in modern shooters]; they just look cooler. We didn't throw in shit that meant nothing in Doom, because we'd already experimented with that in Wolfenstein.

Craddock: Coming off of Wolfenstein, what would you point to as the defining moment of Doom's level design?

Romero: Yeah, and the thing is, I'd just finished making DoomEd [the game's map editor]. This whole time, Tom had been struggling because Doom wasn't the kind of game what he really loved, which was Commander Keen-type stuff: happy and fun. First we blew away Nazis; now we were blowing away hellspawn. He just wasn't as excited, so he wasn't as inspired to see what Doom could be. John [Carmack] had said, "Go get a book on military building construction." Because Doom took a place in a military installation on a moon. Tom followed that, but it was just a bunch of offices. It was really boring.

When I finished the editor, I said, "I need to focus on the levels because they need to look really cool and we're not there yet." The day I started, I was playing around in E1M2, seeing what the engine could do within the editor I'd just finished. I said, "I need to define our style for building levels," because that hadn't happened yet. We needed a direction. I said, "What would be a really cool-looking room that takes advantage of heights and lighting?" We didn't want Wolfenstein-angled [orthogonal] walls and stuff like that.

In E1M2, I made the lift that you take down into a dark room. Imps on ledges above you start hissing and throwing fireballs; monsters down below, on your level, shoot at you. That was the room I made. And when I first made it, it wasn't as dark. It was a bit brighter, but there was a contrast between the lighting where the Imps were, and down where the player was. It looked really cool, but more importantly, it didn't look like anything else we'd done.

I got Tom, Adrian [Carmack], and Kevin [Cloud]--that was everybody except John Carmack, because we only had five people--and I said, "Look at this room." They were like, "Whoa, yeah!" It's funny because today it doesn't stand out, but back then it did when we had nothing else to look at and describe as cool. We realized, "This is it. This is the style."

Tom was making stuff for the second and third episodes, so I started making levels for the first episode. It was an abstract type of style. I wasn't trying to make anything realistic, so that military construction book can just get the hell out. I wanted to make levels that I thought were fun to play and looked cool, and wanted to use whatever the engine had to do that.

Beyond that, I needed the power to do whatever I wanted. When I was in a level and came up with an idea--like, "I want a broken florescent light" or something--I'd go into the editor, add that type of light, a special sector light, into the editor, and then I'd write code to make that kind of sector [possible] in the game, and then I'd run the game and see how it looked. I'd repeat that until it looked like the right type of blinking. There was light flickering around fire, like torches; there were blinking lights synced to one or two kilohertz of time frames; there were all those glowing lights. I programmed them because at some point I'd want them for what I was designing.

John Romero: Apple II, id Software, and First-Person Shooters

Over 10 years before John Romero and his cohorts at id Software created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake on IBM PCs, Romero wrote and sold his first commercial games on Apple's pioneering machine, the Apple II. And even though Apple ceased production of the Apple II family of computers all the way back in 1993, he's still active in the scene today. He gave the keynote address at the 2012 Kansasfest, an Apple II-centric convention, and as of this writing, he's hosted three reunion parties where trailblazers from the halcyon days of green screens and dual Disk II drives come face to face and compare notes—often for the first time.

Over the course of two interviews—one for an article on first-person shooters that I wrote for Retro Videogame Magazine in 2016, as the publication's editor-in-chief; and a second chat for Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution, my hardcover about formative Apple II games—Romero talked to me about his earliest experiences as a programmer, the magazines he submitted early games to, and why so many of his peers owe their careers to the Apple II.

**

Craddock: How did you become interested in video games?

John Romero: I used to go to the pinball arcade in Tucson, Arizona, called Spanky's. It was full of pinball machines on one side, and a snack bar on the other side. After I did that for a while, they started to replace some of the pinball machines with electromechanical games like Dune Buggy. This was around 1974, 1975, around there.

After that, they brought in Pong and Targ, and they got rid of electromechanical once everything was black-and-white video games, like Gun Fight and stuff. That was yellow, but still. [laughs]

I was very excited about video games, and in 1976 I moved up to northern California from Tucson. Around '79, I saw Space Invaders, Tail Gunner, Asteroids, and then in 1980 came Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the one that got me super excited about video games, even though I was already playing them a lot back then. I started programming games in 1979, and in 1980, I decided it was something I had to do [as a career].

Craddock: What was the first computer you learned how to program?

JR: The first computer I ever used was a terminal connected to an HP9000 mainframe located at Sierra College in Rockwell, California. My friend and my brother came to the house and said, "Oh my god, you won't believe this. We can play video games for free up at the college." I went, "What?!" and I jumped on my bike and we rode our bikes all the way there. This was in the summer of '79.

We got to the college, and it was summer, so there weren't many students there. We went into the computer science building, which was about 60 degrees. There were some students on computers in there, these black-and-white terminals, and I saw they were doing some programming stuff. My friend had access to an account from another friend who lived down the street, so he logged in to that account, and that account had a bunch of games of the time, like Poison Cookie and Hunt the Wumpus.

We were playing those games, and they were very different than video games. That was another interesting thing. Then on a Saturday, we got up there early because one of the seniors got access to [Colossal Cave] Adventure. I got to see Colossal Cave Adventure being played, and that was way more exciting than any of the other [computer] games I was playing, and really wanted to code at that point. I started asking students in the lab questions: "What are the words you type in?" and they started telling me how to do stuff. I started making my first adventure game that summer.

Craddock: How did programming on those old terminals differ from writing code on the PCs that came later, like the Apple II?

JR: It was HP BASIC, so the language was BASIC. Our friend told us not to save anything into his account because he didn't want to get into trouble, so to save a game I was making, I used punch cards. I had to type the whole thing in one card at a time, per line. That was a hassle. It was nice when you came back to load it up, but you wanted to change your code in a way that didn't violate your original cards unless you want to type them up again, and keep track of which cards you're replacing..

It was a total nightmare, but I did it just so I could save my stuff.

Craddock: What is your earliest memory of the Apple II?

JR: I saw the Apple II in, I think, 1980. That was when Sierra College opened up another room close to the main room [computer lab] I was in. They put Apple II+s in that room, and as soon as I saw that those computers had color graphics and sound, I was done with the other room. Then I started asking the students in there, "What are some of the commands you use to program?"

I spent the next two years going to the college, going to computer stores, and, when I got to high school, going into the computer lab and doing whatever I could [on the closest Apple II] in the time I had. I told my dad what I was learning and what I was doing. Eventually, in 1982, he got us an Apple II. That was pretty much the beginning of a ton of code.

Craddock: Nowadays, most people are familiar with the accessories they need to use their computer: keyboard, mouse, monitor. The Apple II was released at the dawn of the PC age, and few people knew how to use it once they took it out of the box. Could you describe your Apple II setup? For example, did you hook it up to a TV screen?

JR: At the very beginning, I believe we had the green screen. I told my dad I really wanted to get a color monitor. "I want to program games in color, and I can't do that unless I get a color monitor." He went and got one. It was an NEC monitor, and it wasn't that good, so it wasn't long before the color started to flake out and I had to punch it on the side to fix it. [laughs] My dad would yell from the other room, "Stop beating on the monitor!"

So, yeah, I had a green screen for a short period, and after that I got a color monitor. Then I could play games in color.

When my dad got the computer, he kind of went all out. He got Microsoft Soft Card, which was a CPM card that went into slot four. He got a serial printer card for slot one, and he got a printer; it was a dot matrix, and an NEC model. He got disk drives, two of the Disk II drives. We had a Kensington power saver fan on the left side of the Apple II, so you could switch it on from the front and the fan would pull the hot air out. We had an eighty-column card, which was really nice. The CPM soft card used that, so it was 80x25.

That was a lot of stuff for back then. I then it came to around $6,000. We didn't buy anything else for the computer after all that stuff in the beginning. I got an Apple IIe in 1985, and I got a Mockingboard C [sound hardware]; I got a mouse. I think those were the only two things I got for it. I also got an RGB monitor, but the Mockingboard was a big deal for me. And I needed a printer because I was writing newsletters.

Craddock: Was your newsletter your gateway into the larger Apple II community?

JR: The newsletter was just for my family. [laughs] What I did, though, was when I was in high school, I did a lot of emulating. When I saw a game, the author's name would be on the front cover of the game, and when you ran it, their name was right on the title screen. They went through a publishing company that put their game in a box or a Ziploc bag, and sold it in stores. So what I did was I came up with a company name, which was Capitol Ideas Software, and that was because I used to go to Capitol Computer Systems in Roosevelt, California. That was the store I went into and tried to get access to their Apple II.

When I made games, I would write, Developed by Capitol Ideas Software. I'd draw advertisements and covers for my games, and then I wrote up flyer advertisements and handed them out to members of the computer club at school. I was just trying to do the same thing [other programmers were doing]. I thought, Well, when you make a game, a company publishes it, and you have advertisements, and covers, and packaging, and all that stuff.

So I really wasn't part of an Apple II community. It was just family and people at school. I didn't have a modem, so I wasn't even online in that era. Not until '93, probably.

Craddock: What were some of your favorite Apple II games? Did any of them excite you the way Pac-Man had?

JR: There were so many of them; it was crazy. I played all the really big ones from back then, like Lode Runner and Choplifter. I played Sirius Software's whole catalog of games. Nasir Gebelli's work was very important to me. Anything by Brøderbund, and also Sierra and Origin. I played Ultima I all the way through Ultima Online, and beat Ultima I through V. I loved the series so much that I went to work for Origin Systems in 1987.

Sierra and Brøderbund were the companies I really looked up to because they had a really high quality bar, and Nasir Gebelli put out such great games in the beginning. Everyone was just amazed by him. Also, Bill Budge's work on Pinball Construction Set and Raster Blaster.

Craddock: Other developers I've spoken with described the piracy scene from back then as having a different vibe. It was less about stealing games and more about learning about software. How does that gel with what you remember?

JR: Back then, everybody knew you were stealing when you copied games and gave them away, but most people didn't feel they were hurting anybody by doing that. It was like, "I wasn't going to buy it anyway," but if the game was really good, you'd buy it. I considered pirated games demo copies; if they were great, I'd buy the actual game. There were very few demos back then because disks were expensive.

People would get together at user's group meetings and basically copy the shit out of everything. Most of the games I played were all copied like that. Then I started to get ones that were really great, and I wanted to have disks with the gold labels on them.

Craddock: Your first published game, Scout Search, appeared in the June '84 issue of Apple InCider. How did you discover InCider?

JR: Magazines were in computer stores back then. When I went to Capitol Computer Systems, they had a magazine rack, and they had Nibble and some of the really early ones. They might have even had Hardcore Computist. Softalk was the best one out of all of those, and that started in September of 1980. Softalk had covers that were way more interesting, and the articles had techy parts, but there were also accessible parts that anyone could read. It had a great mix and a really good vibe. Softalk and Creative Computing, in December of '82, were the first two magazines I got.

I saw those in the store, and not until I was in England—I went in 1983 for high school, graduated in '85, and then came back to the U.S.—but from '83 to '85, I got subscriptions to Softalk and Creative Computing since we were over there. The Apple section of Creative Computing was called Apple Cart written by David Lubar, a really great programmer. He was basically taking apart Mark Turmell's Beer Run!, drawing code just from what he could see on the screen, and had assembly language detailing what Mark must be doing in Beer Run!. I saw that and was like, "Oh my god! He's talking about assembly language. I need a subscription to this magazine."

Then, that January, I found out that someone else had taken over Apple Cart, and David Lubar had left the magazine. Luckily, the guy who had taken it over was John Anderson, who was an author for Adventure International. He wrote The Eliminator and Sea Dragon, so he was still a good guy for the magazine.

When InCider came out, I started seeing magazines on the Air Force base [in Huntingdon, England] and I picked up some InCider issues and saw that they took submissions. I submitted my game to them from England, and they accepted it. They accepted some other games of mine as well.

Craddock: Your games made the cover of several magazines, such as a cover of Nibble.

JR: Actually, I made three Nibble covers: December 1987, '88, and '89. That was the fun issue; they put the type-in games into the Christmas issue, and I made the cover for those big issues three years in a row. That was really cool. The games were City Centurian, Major Mayhem, and Twilight Treasures. Those were some really cool, pretty long assembly language listings that had lots of combats. In fact, one of the guys from Raven who worked on Heretic, Chris Rhinehart, had learned how to program assembly language from one of those listings.

Craddock: During your first year of publishing, you won a programming contest conducted by A+ magazine. How'd you learn about that contest?

JR: A+ was another magazine that had come out in '84. I saw that at the base, read through it, and said, "Oh, they're having a programming contest. I hope it's not too late to enter." I learned of it around June or May. I decided to make a new game and submit it. I made a game called Cavern Crusader and submitted it [to A+ magazine]. It took forever, but I think I won in December, the last month they were doing the contest. Then it was in the running for the big prize, a program called VisiCalc, and I won that. It also came with a $500 prize. It was a big thing. I got written up in the school newspaper for winning it.

Craddock: What made the Apple II so appealing as a programming platform?

JR: It came with what was called a monitor that was built in. That meant you could go look at memory directly. You could type a command, hit Return, and how you have a different prompt. Instead of a BASIC prompt, you had an asterisk; that meant you were in the monitor.

There was a whole different list of commands. It was basically saying, "Let me look at the contents of memory." You could dump the contents to the screen, and you could see machine language and assembly language together; you could look at memory dumps to see what the values were in memory, and it was all in hexadecimal. You could type in new values to change memory; you could run programs from there; you could move memory [contents] around. You could just do a ton of stuff with it.

That was not available on the Atari [computers] or Commodore 64 unless you bought or somehow downloaded a monitor program on a cartridge that was plugged in. So the Apple II was already accessible at that level. The Apple II Reference Manual that came with every Apple II had the hardware schematics in the back, so you could unfold these giant pages in the back that would show you the wiring and hardware layout for the computer, all these different chips. The computer had slots, but the Atari and Commodore computers didn't, so you couldn't expand them except for cartridge plug-ins.

The Apple II was just a great hobbyist machine that had low-level access. It had a nice keyboard, which is very, very important. The Commodore and Atari 800 keyboards were not as good as the Apple II keyboard. The Atari 400 keyboard was membrane, and that was awful for typing. The Commodore 64 keyboard was also awful for typing in code compared to an Apple II keyboard. So it really had a lot going for it.

What the Apple II didn't have going for it was any kind of hardware to do graphics or sound. Those other two computers [Atari 800 and Commodore 64] had excellent hardware to do sprites and really nice sound. On the Apple II, you had to program even harder to make that work. You had to learn how to generate square wave in code, in assembly language, to make sound, and you had to know that that takes processing time, which means it takes time away from your game. You had to write a lot of code to interweave your sound card with other card to draw graphics on the screen manually, by putting values in memory, to draw things on the screen and animate it.

It was way more complex to make things happen on the screen, and to make the sound decent. To do that, you had to be a better programmer. In doing it that way, every programmer on the Apple II made games that looked different than everyone else's games because the way they put graphics on the screen was up to however they decided to do it, which could be completely different from everyone else. It was great for artistic expression. It was like a blank canvas, and you could paint however you want. It was great for that, compared to Atari or Commodore; when you used their graphics API, you were going through their hardware, and the graphics would be restricted by their technical limitations, and the games could look very similar. On the Apple II, there was no API; you created whatever you wanted.

Craddock: You've hosted several Apple II reunion parties. How did the first party originate?

JR: The first party happened on August 8, 1998. I figured that I had this really great company, Ion Storm, and had amazing office space. It was 1998, so it had been more than a decade past the heyday of the Apple II. I thought, You know, I could probably put an Apple II party together, and I bet you lots of people would show up, especially if I got some of the most revered people there and listed them on the invite. I wanted to get Woz, Steve Wozniak; Bill Budge, and Nasir Gebelli, maybe Jordan Mechner. I thought if I could get those guys to agree to come, I could put them on the invite and hopefully get everybody else.

That's what I did, and I got so many people. There were at least, minimum, forty Apple II [game developers] who were massively influential. They made some of the most popular stuff on the platform. I think I had more than that, probably fifty. Then I got people from the games industry in Dallas coming in so they could meet these Apple II developers. It was a huge event, professionally videotaped, great photos.

When the Apple II programmers got there, they all knew who they were, but had never met each other; only a few had actually met because they were spread all over the U.S. back then. They were blown away by getting to meet these people who they'd thought were amazing. So it wasn't like everybody was crowded around Woz; they wanted to meet Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli as well. I had Steve Kent, who's been covering the gaming industry for a long time; he was there to do interviews. I had Greg Kasavin [then-executive editor of Gamespot.com] and some other Internet writers and journalists there. It was a really amazing event. It was awesome.

I had another one in 2004, at John Garcia's house in Malibu. Woz showed up for that one as well. Then we had one not that long ago here at our house near Santa Cruz, and that one went really well also. If I have another one, I'll always try to invite more people, like the people who run Kansas Fest as well, so people can meet each other as soon as possible. People are getting older. Bob Bishop passed away a whole year ago, and he was at the first reunion I had in 1998.

Craddock: I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at that party. What were some of the conversations that stood out to you?

JR: It was really amazing when people were getting interviewed, and there was one interview—I can't remember if I was doing the interview, or if it was Steve Kent—it was with Mark Turmell. He was at Sirius Software in Sacramento, California, and there was one programmer who made games for them; his name was Larry Miller. He made a couple games there, one was called Epoch. These were 3D games. I found out that the way he made these games was he wrote them down on yellow legal pads, he wrote his assembly on these things, and had tons and tons of them. Then he had his secretary type his code into the computer. But she only typed it in one time: when she was finished.

So Mark and some other people who worked at Sirius were at the office when Larry Miller came in one time with his secretary, and she had this massive stack of probably twenty of these notepads, full of his assembly language for his latest game. It was going to get typed in at the publisher, and run on the computer. They sat there talking the whole time, like, "I can't believe this is happening. You normally come in with a disk to show the publisher, but this guy did it all in his head."

It got all typed in, they ran it, and it worked almost perfectly. There was a bug with the score, but all the graphics, all the game logic worked, right off those legal pads. It was one of those crazy-genius stories.

I remember when I was working at Softdisk magazine, there was a Commodore 64 department. Loadstar was the name of that disk. They had somebody who had submitted code to them. It was a game, I believe, and they liked it and wanted to publish it, but there were a couple of bugs in it. The author lived nearby, and they had him come in to fix the code right there. The guy came in, and I was there, and they listed his program. His program was basically a loop that ran through data statements written in decimal. It was: data, number, number, number, until the program was packed full of numbers.

All this stuff was getting read in from data statements and them POKE'd into memory. So instead of putting machine code into memory, he just had data statements that had operands and decimal values that got read in and POKE'd into memory. He went and edited those data statements directly, and he knew what the codes were and where to insert new ones. It was insane.

Craddock: The fact that so many Apple II developers, game programmers on contemporary games, and journalists converged on one place obviously speaks to the importance of the platform. Could you talk about what the Apple II meant to you?

JR: A lot of the game genres that we have today, originated on the Apple II. A lot of the reason is because it was one of the first computers that everybody started making games on, because it came out years before the Commodore 64 and the Atari. So it was the first PC that the earliest pioneers jumped on, like Dani Berry making M.U.L.E., a great multiplayer game, and creating an interface for four players using four controllers with Wheeler Dealers in 1978. The earliest gaming pioneers just jumped on this machine and started pumping out games, and they were inventing genres.

The first game Will Wright made was Raid on Bungling Bay, and that came out on the Commodore 64, but Will was not a Commodore programmer. He was an Apple II assembly language programmer, and he cross-developed the game from the Apple II to the Commodore because the Commodore's keyboard sucked. He wrote his game on an Apple II, for the Commodore. All the graphics routines in his code would only work on the Commodore; he had to transfer it all over. He created the whole sim genre; it started with Raid on Bungling Bay. The things he did in that game with cities were more interesting him, and that led to him making SimCity, which then spawned The Sims.

SunDog was an early Grand Theft Auto. Wizardry, the first RPG on a computer. Economic simulation games? What Will Wright created [Raid on Bungling Bay] was something independent of economic city building sims. That genre started in 1962 on IBM mainframes. A woman in a university, her economics department was paid by IBM to make a game to each people economics, so they made a very verbose game around that concept called "Sumer. It then turned into this Sumerian game, which then turned into Hamurabi, and so on to an Apple II version. But it started in 1962 on an IBM mainframe, and a woman programmed it.

Several genres popped up on the Apple II, and they were also being furthered very quickly on the Apple II before other platforms were really out. Akalabeth came out in '80; the IBM PC came out in August of '81, before the Commodore 64 in '82. The IBM PC was just a copy of the Apple II, basically: it had CPM for DOS, and a similar slot configuration. So, the Apple II influenced the entire PC industry as we know it today with slots and all the hardware designs that came from copying the Apple II's layout.

Game-wise, so many different games appeared on the Apple II and turned into full genres later.

Craddock: You're even more well-known for your pioneering efforts in first-person-shooter games than you are your passion for the Apple II, a genre in which you innovated alongside fellow id Software co-founders John Carmack, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack. Could you trace the team's interest in first-person perspective to a specific game or moment in time?

JR: Hovertank 3D was the very first [FPS]. I believe that was May of 1991. Actually the very first 3D thing that John wrote was a spinning cube in January of 1991. We finished making Commander Keen on December 4th of 1990, and we took Christmas vacations, and when we got back, we were still working at Softdisk at that time. We started work on Quake. It was called Quake: The Fight For Justice. It was a top-down RPG. We spent about two weeks working on it and decided, "You know, Quake should be so much better than this. It doesn't look good. It's not going to be Quake. Let's just wait until we have the tech."

So we canned it, but during that time, John wrote some code to make a spinning cube appear on the screen. That was his first 3D thing. That was like, okay, he's excited about this 3D thing; maybe that will turn into something later. He thought about it more, and finally, around April of '91, we were making games every few months. February and March was Dangerous Dave and the Haunted Mansion. In April, we took two months to make another game, and John decided, "Hey, I think I want to try to make a 3D game."

He started working on Hovertank. That was solid-filled polygonal walls, ceilings, and floors. That was his first real 3D code, and it was the only time he felt real stress while making a game because it was hard to do. In fact, he didn't get the game done until the two months. It was just grinding constantly, trying to get 3D working, getting rid of problems like the fish-eye lens—it was his first really, really hard [project]. He got it done under deadline, but that was really, like—and it was all him. He wrote all that code.

In October of '91, we needed to make another game. We decided we were going to work on texture mapping, which I'd heard about from Paul Neurath, who was making Ultima Underworld. I'd heard about texture mapping a whole year earlier in October of 1990, but we didn't do anything about it. I talked to Paul on the phone, and he said, "We're making a game. I can't tell you what it is, but it uses a technique called texture mapping that takes a graphic and maps it onto a polygon." I was like, oh, wow, that's interesting. John Carmack said he could do it, but it wasn't until a year later that we could make a game that could use that concept.

So in October we started making a game called Catacomb 3-D. It took two months and was much less painful than doing Hovertank. It was in EGA [graphics mode], which was actually the painful part of it because EGA is a total pain to write for. VGA mode, 256-color mode, was so easy to write code for, but EGA was a nightmare. Anyway he got C3D written, which used texture mapping in a 3D game. We finished it in November of '91, and in January we started working on Wolfenstein.

Craddock: You've said in conversations with me and in other interviews that Quake's development was the most tumultuous during your time at id. Did the crunch schedule you all worked result in many ideas left on the cutting-room floor?

JR: Really, only for Quake. For Wolfenstein and Doom, there was stuff we came up with, and we put it in and then took it out because it wasn't true to the essence of the game: run and gun, basically. When we were doing Quake, we actually had a totally different design for it that was more like a medieval world. It wasn't even a shooter in the beginning. It was first-person, but not a shooter, and we were going to use other weapons. But it took so long to make the engine work at a good framerate, and the company was just too tired to innovate on the design and see if it would work. No one had the stamina to try and push through this possible new gameplay, so we went with the Doom-style shooter and finished it in seven months.

But we did have an idea for the game that was really different. Your main character would have had a big hammer, kind of like Thor, because this was going to be Quake. You were going to play as Quake, like we wanted to make in 1991. Quake was almost like Thor, but he had a thing called the Hellgate Cube which was a companion that had its own personality. It would orbit you, and whenever you were fighting it would help suck the souls out of the enemies you were beating on. If you didn't kill stuff fast enough, or kill enough enemies, it would get upset and just leave, and you'd have to find it somewhere and get it back. That would have been an experiment to see how cool it would have been, and to see what kind of world we could have made around those types of combat concepts.

One thing we thought of for multiplayer was you were going to be standing on top of a cliff somewhere, and someone could come up behind you and hit you on the back of your head with a hammer, and you would tumble forward. You'd be looking at the ground, then the sky, like you're tumbling down a hill. I don't think I'd seen that in a shooter, and it would have been a really different point of view.

Another thing I wished we'd put in there were view triggers. If a view trigger was in your field of view, it would trigger just because you looked at it. Let's say you're going down a path through the woods. There's a cave off to your right. You look over and see red eyes peering out of the cave. Suddenly you hear growling, and the creature starts to come out of the cave just because you looked at it. That could have happened at any point, or it could never have happened because you never looked over there, or there could have been a second view trigger and walking through it would have triggered [the first].

It would have been cool to have view triggers back in 1996. I think some shooters have used it, but not in a major way; just in a visual-effect sort of way.

Craddock: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake paved the way for every FPS that followed. If you had to pick one favorite innovation you and the team at id made, what would it be?

JR: That's tough, but I think one of the first ones [that comes to mind] was the design of maps in Doom, the abstract design style. Before then, everything was just 90-degree walls—cubes, basically, from Wolfenstein. When we started Doom, we were just replicating that design aesthetic, and it was just boring and garbage for probably five months.

One day I finally just said, "I'm going to solve this level problem." I spent a few hours going nuts with the Doom tech, trying to do stuff we hadn't done before. I made a really neat room that ended up being in E1M2. When you go into the level, you go through the red door on your left, move down the hall that curves around to your right, go up the stairs, and there's a room that has slime in it. Go over the slime and walk onto the elevator. The elevator lowers into a really tall room that's dark but has some lights on ledges with monsters on it. That's the room that I made.

I brought the artists and Tom [Hall] into the room and said, "This is what we should be doing with our levels." And they said, "Holy shit. That's exactly it. Right there."

Basically, everything made from that point on, in shooters made during the '90s, sprang from that day. Everything before that was [modeled after] Wolfenstein-style levels. All of the games—Ken's Labyrinth, Isle of the Dead, any of the numerous Wolf clones—were all simple copies of Wolfenstein. But Doom was the first engine that was capable of a more interesting world, but we were still replicating that stupid design until I decided I was going to do as much as I could with the engine. We did even more later on, but that was the very beginning of, "We need to stretch."

Craddock: On my social media feed, I frequently see pictures of you grinning after having just thrashed all comers in Doom deathmatch sessions. You were one of the chief architects of the game, of course, so that gives you an advantage. But many pros in eSports say their reflexes start to fail them by their mid-20s. What's your secret to remaining the king of Doom mountain?

JR: It's probably because I am Doom. [laughs]. I made Doom; Doom is me. It was made for me. I made it. The design of everything worked so perfectly, the way I wanted it. It was all about friction, acceleration, and speed. I tweaked all those values until it felt perfect to me. So when I play the game, it's exactly what I want to be playing. To me it's optimal.

Quake was way slower than I like to play; Doom was super high speed. People who are used to playing Quake are used to going at half the speed. Unless they're amazing Doom players who have been playing for years, I can usually win.

Craddock: What are your favorite levels from the Doom and Quake games?

JR: In Doom 2, level 26, The Abandoned Mine—I really liked that level a lot because of the verticality of the design. It's very pleasant, in a vertical way, the very first room you start in, but you don't know [it's vertical]. You can look out the windows at other areas lower than where you're at, and there are monsters that will start shooting at you.

So you're stuck at this little room, and you know you're going to flip the switch and bad things will probably happen. But when you're in that room, you have no idea that there are two other rooms connected to that room, and you can't see them because vertically, one of them is not uncovered and the other one is below you. You need to go somewhere else to get to that main room. It's a really interesting design, but very simple. There's a center to the map that has four different paths from it. It seems simple that you have four ways out of the one center area, but each one of those ways leads to a very strategic way of playing in each of the four areas.

Playing deathmatch on that map was really, really fun. It really rewards the person that knows the map well. For Doom 2, that's the level.

For Doom, E1M7 is probably my favorite. It's a pretty complex, big map, and one of the best maps I made in the original Doom.

In Quake, probably E2M5, The Wizard's Manse. I was really happy with that map. That was a fun one. We submerged the player underwater for probably a minute. [laughs] Something like that. That's the first time I drowned the player, and it was terrifying for them when they played. There was also a room in that map that had three levels to it, and you could see up to the other levels. This was before [people knew] about rocket jumping, so it was like, "Oh, wow, I can't wait until I get up there" instead of just [blasting yourself upward].

Craddock: One of my favorite anecdotes of yours is that no one at id foresaw rocket jumping in Quake. Thinking back to Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, what other techniques did you learn about after the fact?

JR: Probably grenade-jumping. [laughs] I held a speed-run contest in 1996, and I used E2M5 in Quake as the challenge to beat my time. My time back then was 1:05. We put the contest up on the website. Basically, "Quake E2M5 speed-run! Send in your demo files! Beat 1:05 or don't bother." People started sending in all these files, and I was like, oh, man. People were doing little optimizations here and there, really perfect moves.

One person submitted one with a time of 40 seconds. I was like, '40 seconds?!" I checked out his demo, and of course, I learned something. He got to the very top of E2M5—I think he was rocket-jumping—but when he got up there, he got in the elevator that submerges you, and he went to press the button and rocketed himself off the button. So the button [triggered]. There was a door behind you that slammed shut in one frame, but he rocketed himself into the door as it was shutting because you couldn't go faster than the door. He took damage for about 10 seconds until the door let up, but that meant he basically could go anywhere on the level from that point because he'd bypassed the level. He went straight to the exit and got out. Instead of losing one minute underwater, he only lost 10 seconds.

Craddock: The '90s is my favorite era for FPS games. Even though countless Doom clones cropped up, there were so many games that just borrowed a few ideas and seeded them in unique designs. Two of id's biggest competitors from that time were 3D Realms with Duke Nukem 3D, and Epic Games with Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Did you ever play those games and think, Wow, this is cool, I wish we'd thought of this?

JR: I didn't ever think that anything in Duke was something we should have done; I just thought Duke Nukem 3D was amazing. I love that game so much. I listened to the soundtrack to that game every day for years. And the game itself, I was just crazy nuts over it. I played through the whole thing multiple times. The humor was so funny, and the interactive environments and music worked so well together. Some of those sounds were so scary. I mean, the Octo-brain sound? You don't ever want to hear that sound. It's [terrifying]. The boss of the shareware episode? Holy crap. You don't ever want to hear that guy because that sound means you're going to die.

It was one of my favorite games. All of the funny references in there—maybe I wish we would have done something like that in Doom. But the references were great.

Unreal Tournament was really amazing with the variety of levels they had. Playing deathmatch while floating through space and jumping onto a spaceship? That was nuts! I loved it. It was great. I loved the weapons that they had; alternate-firing weapons, which we didn't do in our games. Maybe I wish alternate fire is something we would have done. Heretic did that before anything else did, then [Star Wars] Dark Forces did it. But I had a lot of fun playing Unreal Tournament.

Craddock: Half-Life is viewed as the game that broke the Doom and Quake mold of "find keys and kill everything." How would you quantify Half-Life's and Valve's impact on FPS design?

JR: When you're designing an FPS and you want an FPS to scare somebody, what can you do to make a monster scare the hell out of the player? Make the monster appear where they wouldn't expect. The story of Half-Life supported aliens teleporting right in front of your face. That's one of the scariest things ever: when something just appears in front of you.

They used the Quake engine to make that game, and they did a great job with the programming. Really smooth animations, great AI, and stuff that made the player wonder what it was and how it worked. The way they told a story cinematically, never taking control away from the player.

And just the variety of places you could go. I know some people didn't like it that much, but I loved going to Xen. I thought that was one of the best parts of the whole game, because the way the level design opened up completely was unexpected. Some of the later levels on Xen were linear and [standard], but that first level was just really different. Jumping down from the platforms all the way down to the bottom area where you're exploring and looking at plants, and the plants pull into themselves when you get too close.

What a great game. Great variety, great use of color, great sound effects. They just did everything perfectly. It was a great game. And Half-Life 2 was also incredible; easily one of the best FPSes ever made.

Craddock: I'd say the last huge paradigm shift in FPS design came in 2007 when Infinity Ward released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Why did that game make such a big impact relative to other games in between it and Half-Life?

JR: I think because it's military [in theme], and not going back to World War II. People were glad to get past that [setting in video games]. I had the original Call of Duty. I believe that was also written off of the Quake engine. I wasn't really excited about the original one; the only interesting thing they did there was make these objective points you had to get past. It was like "What else can we have people do in a shooter level?" It was a way to progress a level: have an encounter until you beat it, then go to the next objective.

But [Call of Duty 4] Modern Warfare, which is similar in that respect, modernized the weapons and scenarios. I think people were ready for that. That was the first Call of Duty that I [understood]; like, "I would rather play this than the World War II stuff." I really loved Modern Warfare. It was a really great game. I loved the scenarios where you were trying to go through the building with a sniper rifle, and the Ferris wheel and bumper car area in the abandoned carnival, trying to figure out how to kill everything and in what order you should do it in. It just had a lot of great stuff in it.

I think Modern Warfare was just the right design at the right time for that genre.

Craddock: Another facet of FPS design I miss is built-in modding. Doom and Quake, especially Quake, were so inviting to amateur game developers. In contrast, AAA games are closed off. Some of the most popular and profitable games of the modern era came about from mods: Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2, and Counter-Strike, just to name a few. Do you think the tendency of publishers to build walled gardens has stunted game design?

JR: Yeah. I think there's a middle ground. With poor tools, makes it harder for people to mod the game. But closing the game off, and not allowing people to run their own servers, kills the potential for the game to live for a long time. In the middle ground, you could support modding and release really nice tools for your game, kind of like the way Pinball Construction Set worked. Everybody could make pinball tables on it, and they could come on their own disks, and you don't have to know anything about programming, or format a disk, or anything.

I think with modding games, you should be able to release tools that are easy to use and that keep people away from the low-level details they don't need to know, but still give them the ability to modify config files if you know how those work, and let players run their own servers. As long as it's not for commerce. Look at Minecraft. That's a perfect example of how to open up your server, but a terrible example of how to let people mod your game. Minecraft is probably one of the worst games to try and mod.

Craddock: These days, AAA publishers want FPS games in the vein of Call of Duty 4 and Battlefield. I don't want to take anything away from those games or their ilk, but I don't see nearly as much variety in FPS gameplay, color palettes, or weapons as I did during the 1990s. What are your thoughts on the state of FPS?

JR: More experimentation would be great. The reason those games are stuck in that design style is because of the amount of money it costs to make one. Publishers say, "I don't want to take a risk. I'm not putting that much money into something [unknown]." They're going to do what's expected, and people will buy it, so why would you not do that?

Experimentation is still going to happen, but in smaller-budget FPS games. I think people making more of those, with different themes and ideas, something is going to click the way that Half-Life clicked. It's just that people need to do more experimentation.

Tom Hall: Apple II and the Early Days of id Software

Tom Hall is a game development sage. Since 2013, he's been designing social games at PlayFirst Studio. A few years prior, he set the creative direction for an MMO in development at KingsIsle Entertainment, a studio based in Austin, Texas. A few years before that, he co-founded another popular Texas-based studio, id Software.

Maybe you've heard of it?

Although he's working around the clock to launch new game projects, Hall was gracious enough to set aside time to talk about some of the formative steps on his journey in the games industry.

**

Craddock: I understand you wrote your first games on the Apple II. That computer sent so many designers on their maiden voyage into game programming. How did you discover it?

Tom Hall: We were going to get a family computer, and I was actually lobbying for a TRS-80. But luckily, Dad was smarter and got an Apple II Plus. We got it on June 9th, 1980. So I was 15, and had the whole summer to learn this new computer. It was an amazing time of learning, fun, and empowerment.

Craddock: What were some of the Apple II games that got you excited about playing, and then making, your own games?

TH: One of the first games we got was Scott Adams' [The Adventure Sampler]. (The Apple II coder/designer, not the cartoonist.) They came on cassette tapes, so you'd read them in with the arcade commands that I still remember:

]CALL -151 (to get into the computer's machine language area)
]800.5777R (read in from tape into those memory locations)
]800G       (800 "Go" or run code starting at 0x800)

I loved those games—they really lit up my imagination, even though you just control them [by entering combinations of] VERB NOUN and they were in terse text. The puzzles were fun and the subjects exotic. Early interactive fiction.

So all my first experiences were buying cassette-tape programs in little baggies with labels from THE BYTE SHOP in Milwaukee. And some came in cardboard with Styrofoam holding the tape, like the adventures.

Craddock: Do you remember the first game you wrote?

TH: The first game I wrote on the Apple II that I can remember is TANK. You entered speed and angle to fire at a tank that moves every turn, and then it plots dots (on the HI-RES screen) until your "Mortar" lands and either misses (try again, tank moves) or hits the tank (draws a graphic X on tank, exits game). Just that little inkling of playability, learning, and visual reward was the first little baby step in learning game design.

Craddock: What was it about that experience that caused you to catch the game-development bug?

TH: The Apple II+ made it so easy to start learning to code, as it came with Applesoft BASIC. It was really easy to get an idea going from nothing. You thought of it, then you did it. Learn more, and go a bit further down the rabbit hole. And as I started to do little adventures, they were actually really close in quality to the ones I was buying.

I thought, I can actually do this for a living. My other passion at the time was making little short effects films—being a Trekkie as a kid, and a sci-fi reader, and Star Wars came out when I was 13—but I knew I'd eventually need a crew and others to do stuff. I could do near commercial-quality from the get-go all by myself.

Craddock: What aspect of game programming gave you the most trouble when you were starting out?

TH: Actually, the programming came easy; it was finishing all the ideas I had that was hard! I'd do a ton of little demos, but it was so wide open, I was doing a bit of everything. I finished 50 games, but made probably 100 more little demos. That's still a problem: so many ideas, so little time. But you incorporate things to enhance larger ideas, and of course, when it doesn't fit, you have to kill your darlings. Maybe when I retire, I will do a bunch of little games again.

Craddock: What were some other early games you made?

TH: Since I loved adventures, I made, like, 15 text adventures, each getting better and more elaborate. I had started with code from a book called Strategic Simulations (still have it!) for my first little forays into that idea, but once I started doing my own, I just kept going. My mom and I would play the adventures together, so she would play mine—a built-in audience!

Then I got into graphics, made arcade games, mostly shoot-em-ups, like Gunner, Space Peepers, Superzot, Madvoober, Mass Poopage, Death Ships from the Ninth Galaxy, and on and on. I also did a really horrible three-vine, get-to-the-top-as-stuff-came-down-the-screen Donkey Kong Jr. game. Later, I did an Ultima-style engine in machine language, for a game called The Silver Cow. It wasn't quite Ultima, so I called it Penultima. Heh.

Craddock: John Romero talked to me about getting many of his early games published in magazines. Did you go that route as well?

TH: I read those religiously, entered most of the game programs. I actually got a letter published in Softline magazine. I actually [submitted games for publication] a number of times and got rejected for [submitting] similar games. A coder/designer that later became a friend scooped me like three times; then I wrote The Silver Cow, and it was rejected for being too big! Eventually most of those got published on Softdisk [magazine], so they got their day.

Craddock: You have a reputation for caring about story and character development in games. Was this true during your formative game-programming years?

TH: The adventures were definitely tales of, well, adventure. And a lot of the early graphic games had characters—I really loved Donkey Kong Jr. in college—they had [a coin-op version] at the cafeteria near my dorm at UW-Madison. So as soon as there were characters to latch onto in games, that's the way I went.

Craddock: You entered game development as a programmer, but you are known as the creative mind behind many of id Software's early hits, most notably Commander Keen. Did you find yourself more drawn to designing games than coding them? Was programming more a means to the end of making your own games?

TH: Ha-ha, yeah, exactly. My dad was a professional engineer and my mom was a writer, so I got both sides of the brain. So to me, programming games was just a way to express myself in another medium, like writing fiction or poetry, or doing photography.

Craddock: How often do you get to write code these days?

TH: Rarely, but I want to get back into it. It's another resource for ideas. Probably will [experiment] with some iOS apps.

Craddock: How did you discover Softdisk magazine, and how'd you land a job there?

TH: Well, I graduated from college with a BS in computer science and prepared to get a 'real job." I did a bunch of interviews, they liked me, then I did plant trips, as they were called back then; now it's just "flying you out for a second in-person interview." They all went well: IBM, Gould, and such, but they all said at the end of the interview, "We like your resume, we like your skills, we like you. Just one last question: is this what you really want to do?"

And I flew home and thought. And the answer was, "No, this is boring, I want to make games, however I can."

So I applied to like 30 game companies, and got rejected. I waited a few months until the next hiring phase, and mailed out another set. I got a great letter from Softdisk, saying they were looking for someone "with exactly my qualifications": 30,000 lines of Applesoft [and] assembly language experience. My mom said it was the most positive response letter she'd ever seen. So I interviewed, got the job, and started working for a third the pay of 'real jobs," but infinite times the happiness.

Craddock: What stories can you share from your early years at Softdisk, before other future id Software developers showed up?

TH: I started working at Softdisk as an assistant editor, working for Jim Weiler. He was a great boss. It was super hard work for little pay, but boy, was it a great training ground. Basically, Softdisk was an Apple II "magazine on disk" or a "monthly software collection." So we'd write eight to 10 little utilities, games, applications a month, often just sprucing up submitted programs. We worked like hell to blast out that much content every month.

The product was on one 5.25-inch disk, eventually two, then at last, a 3.5-inch disk. Eventually, I became Editor of the Disk and the Apple IIgs disk, Softdisk GS. They both still kept going beyond when we left for a while, probably the last things professionally written for the Apple II and IIgs.

I remember awesomely spiffing up a game called The Seven Keys soon after I got there—basically a kind of Monopoly game. I made it pretty snazzy. Anagram Challenge, an anagram game, and Magic Boxes, which was kinda like Sudoku, come to think of it.

I also spruced up a game I'd made for my first semi-real programming gig. I had made a game called Changemaker for a teacher-friend's class of learning-disabled kids. It had a kid named Eddie and his piggy bank. Eddie's arm could stretch all the way up to the top of the screen, where there were the different coins: penny, nickel, dime, quarter. You had to move Eddie left and right, then press space to get coins to add up to the goal amount, to teach the kids how to make change. I spiffed up a number of [user-submitted] games as well, which was good training for Softdisk later.

Craddock: What was the Special Projects division at Softdisk? What type of software did its developers create?

TH: Our competitor, UpTime, went out of business, so we hired good folks from there. Jay Wilbur came over, and a coder named John Romero, who'd done a number of cool games for them. He said he'd come over if he could work on the IBM PC because he wanted to learn it. Special Projects, if I recall correctly, did one-off disks, like a business app, a game collection, or something like that. I didn't work on it.

Craddock: How and when did you meet John Romero?

TH: When he came to work [at Softdisk], we kind of bonded over Apple games. We were both avid fans of all the classic games. He had Coke-bottle glasses, and liked hair metal [a mix of heavy metal and hard rock] and classic music. I did the Softdisk newsletter for a while, and took his photo for it holding a Great White CD and a classical CD.

Craddock: How did you meet John Carmack?

TH: He was a submitter to Softdisk. He did a cool tennis game. After about three great little games (ones we didn't have to clean up like others' games), we said, hey, maybe we should hire this guy.

Craddock: How did the magazine's gaming disk, Gamer's Edge, get started?

TH: Romero pitched it with Carmack, I believe. We got in a room to name it with the senior staff. I came up with a bunch of names; everyone liked that one the best. It was supposed to be two games a month; eventually it became one game [every two months]. I was buds with Romero and a bit with Carmack, and they were doing the fun project at Softdisk. [I became involved with Gamer's Edge] soon after it started.

Craddock: What was the schedule like, working on Gamer's Edge on top of your other magazine duties?

TH: I snuck in at night after working all day, offered to do levels, graphics, and sounds. I was excited to work on games, so I worked sort of a second job on that product at night. It was fun. Carmack said, "You like doing the stuff we don't like to do." Romero was tools and game code, and Carmack was game engine code. I was design and some art. Eventually we got Adrian Carmack (no relation), and the art obviously got tons better!

Craddock: What were some of the projects you guys worked on for Gamer's Edge?

TH: John did a PC update to his Dangerous Dave, which is crazy popular because it runs on really old computers. Romero gets mails once in a while from [gamers in] developing countries who love the game. John did all the graphics for the VGA game. I had planned to do a port to the Apple IIgs, but that never got done.

The first games were Dangerous Dave and Catacomb, a 2D, action-RPG shooter. We did a sequel to that, and later a 3D version, as our second 3D title, the first with texture-mapped walls. We did two puzzle games, Rescue Rover and Rescue Rover II; a shoot-em-up called Slordax. Shadow Knights, which was a fantasy platformer; and Hovertank One, our first FPS. We were trying all kinds of games and getting loads of experience.

Craddock: Could you share some anecdotes from those days?

TH: This is way easier now, but we were getting to make games. We had salaries and could make games. That was just unimaginably cool.

We had a multi-disc CD player, so each person would get a turn to play their music. And we were all doing discretely separate tasks, so we could just go. We'd ask for various things we needed, but we were just blazing on our own stuff, then playing, occasionally tossing about ideas. We all played games together on the NES and PC, and we all loved Apple II games, so we were always talking about what was cool. We watched Carmack finish Sonic the Hedgehog on the Genesis. I helped Romero get through the maze before the boss in Super Mario World. It was games, games, games.

In the science of happiness (one version at least), there are three things that make you happy. Pleasure-seeking is short-term. But experiencing flow, where you love what you are doing for work so much, you lose track of time and creating meaning for others, people enjoying games, are the things that make people happy long-term. And that's exactly where we were doing. The time working on games just flew by.

Craddock: You and Carmack famously whipped up a demo that recreated the first level of Super Mario Bros 3. That was a big deal because, at the time, sidescrollers were virtually non-existent on the PC. People believed the hardware was incapable of rendering scrolling graphics smoothly. What was your motivation to make that demo?

TH: Carmack had just finished the smooth-scrolling-tile trick and had a sample sprite of Dangerous Dave bouncing around over it—first time there was cool scrolling that we'd seen on a PC. That was like his first amazing hack I remember, one that let technology jump forward. Seeing that, I looked over in the corner to the NES, which had Super Mario 3 on it. I smiled, and said, "What if we did the first level of Super Mario 3. TONIGHT?!?" Carmack smiled and said, "YEAH!"

So we got to it. I started/paused, started/paused the NES, copying all the tile graphics, then grabbing them with a tool, getting them in Romero's editor, setting tile attributes. Carmack and I agreed on what meant "solid," what meant "death," what meant "coin block," and so on. Carmack made the little character behave [correctly]. So I painfully made the whole first level, did some sounds, did the coin graphics, made the title screen, animated the Dave character. I don't think we got any enemies in.

So we did that from the evening to about 3:00 a.m., finished it, put it on Romero's desk, crashed. It was made for fun as a joke, out of pure joy and love of games. We came in the next day. Romero closed the door and said, "I've been playing this all day. We're so out of here."

Craddock: That demo was your golden ticket. How did you plan to cash it in?

TH: Jay knew someone who knew someone at Nintendo. They said, "Make us a demo." We took two weeks to do it, I think, really doing the first level up right. It got all the way to the head table, but [Nintendo] decided they didn't want to enter the PC market.

So, like Homer from The Simpsons: if they didn't want it, we know someone that does.

Craddock: How did the Super Mario Bros. 3 demo become the foundation for the first Commander Keen trilogy?

TH: When we couldn't do Super Mario, we talked about what to do. I said, "I can do anything." Carmack said, "A kid that saves the galaxy or something." I was so there. I left for 15 minutes, wrote the paragraph you see in the game, read it to Carmack in a Walter Winchell '40s newscast voice, and Carmack applauded. That was it.

Craddock: Was your idea for the Commander Keen game entirely spur-of-the-moment?

TH: It was a spur of the moment culmination, but it was also sort of me as Walter Mitty. I had the red and black Converse [sneakers] when I was a kid. I had a Packers [helmet]. I dreamed of space. Keen was really me.

Keen just came to me. Ideas just come to me. They just seem to come out of the ether, but really, as I mentioned, all the ideas of all these different stories and visuals and heroic kids were all swirling around. Steve Jobs said "creativity is just connecting things." And with all those inputs and my dreams, he [Keen] just formed.

All of my characters seem to have two lives, two forms. One normal version and one extraordinary one. I seem to be focused on the different versions we present, or the people we want to be versus what we are.

Craddock: What were some of the influences that informed your creation of the Commander Keen character and his world?

TH: It was mostly Chuck Jones' Warner Bros. cartoons, like "Duck Dodgers in the 24th and 1/2 Century," "What's Opera, Doc," and so on. Plus Mario. Plus the old sci-fi serials.

Plus a little short story called "The Available Data on the Worp Reaction" that I read in a sci-fi anthology, where an autistic kid slowly collects a pile of junk from the junkyard next door, then assembles it, gets in it, and it hovers with anti-gravity for a bit, then he takes it apart piece by piece. Plus hero kid books like Encyclopedia Brown, The Nose Knows, and The Mysterious Inventions of Alvin Fernald.

Craddock: What was the appeal of casting a child as the protagonist instead of, say, a big burly action hero?

TH: It was me. It was my hero fantasy. It seems it was the hero fantasy of a lot of folks, too. I was a brainiac introvert as a kid and got picked on for it. I was so geeky, I got kicked out of a clubhouse by my blue-collar-type friends when I was a kid.

So this was me being the extrovert and being smart, plus having that clubhouse I lost. It was my hero fantasy and, in a way, my revenge against being picked on, excluded. In this universe I made up, I was the hero, and being smart was rewarded.

Craddock: Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee, was a big fan of Gamer's Edge and John Romero, and made contact with John by sending him fan letters under different names. He talked you all into publishing Commander Keen through his company, Apogee. Unless I'm mistaken, the Gamer's Edge crew was still under contract at Softdisk while developing Commander Keen for Apogee, correct? How'd you work around that little detail?

TH: We did Commander Keen by moonlighting at night and on weekends for two and half months. We were working ceaselessly. I don't remember if we actually had non-competes [non-competition clauses], but they weren't happy when it came out. We agreed to keep doing a year of games so they wouldn't sue us. I stayed there in transition for a few months to train a replacement, working at id at night and on weekends.

Craddock: What was your role on Commander Keen?

TH: First and foremost, I was the game designer. But I also did about 80 percent of the art. Adrian [Carmack] came on the team in the middle, and you can see the enemies in the last episode are clearly better than the first.

Craddock: Mario 3 served as a fitting inspiration for Commander Keen. Not only was it powered by a sophisticated scrolling engine, but it was deeper than its predecessors. What other ways did Super Mario influence your design of Commander Keen?

TH: Oh, Mario was genius. Miyamoto's sense of the hidden; cute but menacing creatures; clever mechanics introduced over time; variety of levels—just brilliant. Most of the levels went from left to right. The ways tiles go together. The way you communicate danger. Collection. I mean, Mario games invented the language of platforming. I feel super fortunate I later got to kinda invent the language of first-person shooters.

Craddock: I love the names of people, places, and things in Keen's world, such as the Bean-with-Bacon MegaRocket. What were some of your favorite names?

TH: The MegaRocket was inspired by names from Warner Bros. cartoons and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and lots of jokey takes on cheesy TV products.

Bean-with-Bacon came from the ship that was supposed to be made from stuff around the house, so I remembered a George Carlin routine: If you run out of deodorant, go into the kitchen and put a bay leaf under each arm. It doesn't stop you from perspiring, but you smell like soup! Keeps your friends alert, y'know. "Hey, who's wearing Chicken Vegetable?" "Not me, I have Bean-with-Bacon."

So I added that as a detail, just flowing out in that quick 15-minute origin story. Dopefish was my "Bugblatter Beast of Traal" from Hitchhiker's [Guide to the Galaxy]. It's described as the "Second dumbest creature in the universe," since the Bugblatter beast is number one. I love names that have double vowels. They make me laugh. Foob. Boobus Toober. Bloogs.

I dunno, I am weird.

Craddock: I found it interesting that you took some gameplay mechanics away in every new episode of Keen. For example, no pogo stick for Keen in Keen Dreams. What made you decide to remove that particular mechanic, and add new ones such as crouching?

TH: Well, new things were added, gotta keep stirring it up! And the pogo stick is really powerful for [ascending in levels]. Gotta use that sparingly or make huge levels. Plus Keen Dreams was in his nightmare, so he would feel less empowered and more in danger.

Craddock: Along the same lines, you swapped out the blaster for flower power in Keen Dreams. What was the motivation behind this change?

TH: That was a reaction to parents complaining about the violence in the first—which was intentional, to teach that there are repercussions to your actions. It [flower power] made it interesting in that things weren't out of commission forever; they came back. Always trying new ideas, seeing what is interesting.

Craddock: Commander Keen maintains a nice balance of humor and sobering realizations, such as enemy bodies sticking around to remind players of what they had to do to progress. Did you give thought to striking that balance, or did it just work itself out while you focused on making something fun?

TH: No, that was a conscious decision: your actions have consequences. That's good for a kid to learn. We later changed to a Neural Stunner and did stars around the monster's heads, because parents for some reason don't want any reality to be taught to their kids. I saw characters commit suicide in cartoons as a kid, and didn't think anything of it, because I was taught that that wasn't reality.

And having smart references that people may not get is fun too. Just gives depth for those that notice, like the Standard Galactic Alphabet.

Craddock: Commander Keen featured a fun, colorful, and deep universe, but the technology of the day wasn't exactly cut out for modern amenities like scripted events and cutscenes. How did you convey some of the messages you wanted to pass on to players through Keen, given the technology you had to work with?

TH: Well, framing with a bit of story, then showing the story through the levels instead of telling—that worked. In later Keens, we had a bit more framing text, back-and-forth dialogue for a sentence or two. That's enough to give you a sense of purpose.

Craddock: Many gamers prefer to just play games and ignore the story. Yet, they're bound to notice certain elements (colors, NPCs' reaction to the player's actions, and so on). They absorb the world, characters, and story through osmosis, even when playing a game where story is virtually nonexistent. What steps did you take to pull in players who didn't care much for story?

TH: It was just a fanciful universe. You don't want to have too much story. Like in Parasite Eve, you see a long cinematic, get to walk up a red carpet, then see another long cinematic. Some game [designers] are frustrated movie makers with token gameplay in [their games].

Beyond that bit of framing story, you just want to create a consistent universe. If you create a fun-to-control character, and have the enemies act in a funny, consistent way, the joy is there even if you don't get into the pure context of it.

But I never put so much story in that you were just waiting to get into the game. Keen 1's story is just in the menu mostly. The end uses story as a rewarding finish. And Keen 1's is a cliffhanger to get you to want Keen 2 and 3!

Craddock: You went so far as to create your own alphabet for Keen's aliens. What was your motivation for that?

TH: My mom gave me a love of cryptography. I love secret codes, puzzles, and so on. My childhood was filled with puzzles, cyphers, and such. I love that, so I made a sign for the EXIT, but I wanted it to be in "alien language" but recognizable as an exit sign. So I drew those four characters, then thought, It would be fun to have a whole alien alphabet on signs and stuff. It grew from there. It is just another fun secret to discover.

Craddock: I'd like to talk more about your sense of humor, which finds its way into most of your games. Colleagues have described you as an energetic guy who loves to be funny, and who is likely to blurt out sounds and quotes at any moment. Where did those tendencies and quirks come from, do you think?

TH: I always made sounds effects and stuff as a kid, and my folks didn't stop me; they just let me be creative. They are amazing folks. I was lucky. Also, our family was always joking, telling puns, trying to say the next funny thing, so I just grew up with that sense of humor as a constant thing. I can't turn it off.

Craddock: Designing shareware episodes interests me. You have to give the players enough to whet their appetite for more, yet not so much that they skip the pay-to-play episodes because they feel they've seen enough. For example, episodes two and three of Doom presented new enemies, guns, and environments, which made me want to pull out my wallet (well, actually, my parents' wallet) and go beyond the free shareware episode. Did you think ahead to spreading out such elements when creating Commander Keen, or did you focus more on one episode at a time?

TH: Scott Miller had the idea of the trilogy, like Star Wars, but the first [episode] is free. It was a good sales idea. We made the games in sequence. Romero helped on the levels for episode three because we wanted to get the dang thing done.

We were just flowing, we knew what to do, how much to include. We'd made a bunch of games together, and they just came out. I just designed what I wanted. I think I asked Carmack how many enemies we could budget.

Craddock: What did you enjoy most about designing Commander Keen?

TH: It was really fun thinking of things that pretty quickly came to life. Sonic the Hedgehog came out and had a rotating spiky bar you run across. I surprised the guys with that by staying up and doing the graphics and setting up tile animations. Then we put it in, but with energy posts instead of spikes.

Craddock: What was the most difficult aspect of designing Commander Keen?

TH: Well, we did the original trilogy so fast. It was create and go. Coming up with new ideas was fun. Like having to turn out the lights to get past Vorticons. It was just a flow of ideas. The original trilogy was a joy.

The angle perspective of the next three games made them much more arduous to put together, a lot of fiddling with edges and stuff.

Craddock: How did you discover that Commander Keen was taking the shareware world by storm?

TH: We got our first check for $10,000. We looked each other and said, "We can live on this!" It was a revelation. We could have our own company making games and making a living. The brass ring had arrived. We had to reach for it!

Craddock: Is that level of success something you ever imagined? Do you recommend any budding developer shoot for that level of success, or should they keep their focus elsewhere?

TH: We were just excited to make the games we wanted to play. That should be your goal. Make yourself happy. Make meaning for others. Don't worry about the money. That's the short-term pleasure focus, and a mistake. Focus on what you absolutely love, and what would be meaningful to others. Then if the money comes or not, you made what will make you happy.

Craddock: What lessons did you learn from Commander Keen's development?

TH: Trust your gut. Make what you love. Keep that childlike sense of wonder, exploration. Be open to what you could do, what would be cool, what would be different. Why do we need this game? What makes it new and fun and cool and its own thing?

Craddock: What do you hope gamers took away from Commander Keen?

TH: A sense of wonder, of childlike adventure, of laughing, of the smart geeky kid getting to be a hero.

Craddock: What are some of your fondest memories working on the Commander Keen episodes?

TH: Just the four of us working endlessly together, each in pure creation mode—tools, game, design. We were just flowing, a set of folks each doing their part to the best of their ability. No production. No design docs. Just flow.

About the Author

David L. Craddock lives in Canton, Ohio, with his wife, Amie Kline–Craddock. He is the author of dozens of books including the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen trilogy, Arcade Perfect, and the critically acclaimed Gairden Chronicles series of epic fantasy novels for young adults. Follow David online at davidlcraddock.com and @davidlcraddock on Twitter.

Books by David L. Craddock

Fiction

The Dumpster Club

Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles

Point of Fate: Book Two of the Gairden Chronicles

Firebug: War of the Elementalists

Nonfiction

Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1 – The Fatalities and Fandom of the Arcade Era

Kool Stuff: Bonus Interviews From Long Live Mortal Kombat (2023)

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I – How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense – Special Edition

Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs

Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters

Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution

Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games

Shovel Knight (Boss Fight Books)

Bottomless Pit: Running and Jumping Through Platform Games - Volume 1

GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture

GameDev Stories: Volume 2 – More Interviews About Game Development and Culture

Once Upon a Point and Click: The Tale of King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, and the Queens of Adventure Games

One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge

Making Fun: Stories of Game Development - Volume 1

Angels, Devils, and Boomsticks: The Making of Demons with Shotguns

Anything But Sports: The Making of FTL

Red to Black: The Making of Rogue Legacy

Everybody Shake! The Making of Spaceteam

Dialogue Box: Oral Histories of Video Games (TBD)

Bet on Black: How Microsoft and the Xbox Changed Pop Culture (TBD)

Better Together: Stories of EverQuest (TBD)

Ascendant: The Fall of Tomb Raider and the Rise of Lara Croft (TBD)

Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom (TBD)

Table of Contents

- Introduction

- Becoming DOOM Guy:John Romero’s Life in Games

- A Lot of Fun:John Romero and John Carmack on Doom’s Enduring Legacy

- John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall on id Software’s 33rd Anniversary

- John Romero on Speedrunning and More

- John Romero: Apple II, id Software, and First-Person Shooters

- Tom Hall: Apple II and the Early Days of id Software

- About the Author

- Books by David L. Craddock