Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/12/john-carmack-doom/

by adventured • 13 years ago

115 39 13 years ago

bitwize3• 13 years ago

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

CREATED DOOM AND QUAKE, THE EXEMPLARS OF ADRENALINE ACTION FPS

[Good Guy John Carmack]

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

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

deletes3• 13 years ago

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

barrkel2• 13 years ago

Doom's level design was a lot less linear than CoD and other shooters on rails.

bitwize3• 13 years ago

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

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

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

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Yes, but no. Quake and especially Quake II multiplayer back in the day was a crazy and super intense experience that still hasn't entirely been replicated in the modern era. Everyone running around in their custom skins on custom maps, like threewave, grappling everywhere, leaving grenades and trip mines everywhere, trying desperately to get the flag back to base. It was delicious chaos, and it was so incredibly fun.

A lot of modern games are still fun, TF2 still captures a good bit of what the old times were like, but many modern multiplayer games have a lot of MMO and leveling mechanics added to them which introduce a fair amount of "grinding" into the game which makes it a bit too much like work and not enough like just raw fun.

saltado• 13 years ago

The original Call of Duty from 2003 is built on the Quake III Arena engine (id Tech 3) so John Carmack and ID made money licensing it. So of course he has kind words for that franchise.

eps• 13 years ago

[Good Guy John Carmack]

Your reddit is leaking.

mercurial2• 13 years ago

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

I'll go on record as saying I liked the first few CODs (up to the first Modern Warfare). Sure, they were full of scripted set pieces, but pretty enjoyable set pieces. A completely different experience than Doom, to be sure, but atmospheric in their own right.

rpm4321• 13 years ago

This was interesting:

"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: 'It’ll be done when it’s done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game."

subsystem• 13 years ago

More on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKKvnKQkkE

aryastark• 13 years ago

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

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

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

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

joepour• 13 years ago

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

CaptainZapp2• 13 years ago

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

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

A real interesting read for anybody interested in the subject.

Bamafan• 13 years ago

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

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

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

talmand• 13 years ago

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

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

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

CaptainZapp2• 13 years ago

I think it's exactly this, which makes the comparison to Lennon / McCartney so apt.

Even as readers of the book learn that they are rather compared to Metallica.

I agree that it needed the two Johns to make iD happen.

On a sidenote: To me John Carmack is one of the true hacker heroes. That's for his almost militant stance aganst patents and for his generousity in sharing his code.

tripplethrendo• 13 years ago

I enjoyed this book SO MUCH. I've actually begun learning C++ because of it. The world of programming is just fascinating. I know I'll never be the next Carmack, but I really want to turn some of my ideas for fun games into a reality.

acomjean• 13 years ago

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

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

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

EvanAnderson• 13 years ago

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

peterashford2• 13 years ago

Ahh.... me too. The Amiga community was great. sigh

schainks• 13 years ago

Sigh... wired fails at citations again.

From Masters of Doom:

"A sympathetic computer administrator at the University at Wisconsin, Parkside, named David Datta volunteered to let id upload the Doom shareware to a file transfer site he maintained on the school’s network." (page 123)

Edit: formatting

bitops• 13 years ago

I was struck by this statement:

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

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

TillE• 13 years ago

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

Crito2• 13 years ago

I'd say that psDooM is more rewarding, though less pratical, than ps/kill.

prawn• 13 years ago

Someone might find this article about the psychology of first-person shooters interesting: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/the-p...

brianzelip• 13 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

pmarin• 13 years ago

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

What atrocity! Only us the programmers can apreciate his brain dump style of writting.

AJ007• 13 years ago

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

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

Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem

Related Stories