'The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles' by John Romero (Strange Loop 2022)

As co-founders of id Software, John Romero and John Carmack created the code behind the company's seminal titles. The principles they defined through experience in id's earliest days built upon one another to produce a unique methodology and a constantly shippable codebase. In this talk, John Romero discusses id software's early days, these programming principles and the events and games that led to their creation.

John Romero
Romero Games

John Romero is an award-winning game programmer, designer and level designer whose work spans over 130 games, 108 of which have been published commercially. Romero is the "father of first person shooters" having led the design and contributed to the programming and audio design of the iconic and genre-defining games DOOM, Quake, Heretic and Hexen. Romero was also one of the earliest supporters of eSports and a current competitive DOOM and Quake player. To date, Romero has co-founded eight successful game companies including the likes of id Software. He is considered to be among the world's top game designers, and his products have won well over 100 awards. Romero most recently won a Lifetime Achievement award at the Fun & Serious Games Festival in Bilbao and the Legend Award at 2017's Develop: Brighton. One of the earliest indie developers, Romero began working in the game space in 1979 on mainframes before moving to the Apple II in 1981. He is a completely self-taught programmer, designer and artist.

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[Hobbitstomper]

Developing 13 games in a year, porting Wolfenstein in 3 weeks to the SNES, those time frames are insane. Nowadays a meeting can take longer than 3 weeks...

[DramaticalyEffective]

I am completely addicted to the story of ID. I don’t really know why. It’s just so inspiring. I listen to Masters Of Doom at least once a year.

[RewdanSprites]

No matter how many time I hear the story I always show up to hear it again. I even have the book! (There's a new one coming out next year apparently!). Rock on John, rock on.

[anthonyobryan]

That was the fastest 1.25 hours I've ever spent listening to a lecture. I was engrossed the entire time.

[ovinophile]

That answer to the D&D campaign question was so good. Depending on who you are, hearing it could be either terrifying or amazing.

[andrewgbliss]

Its just as entertaining to hear the dev stories as playing the actual games. What a legendary time.

[AstronautDown]

Just a huge thank you to the person who asked the DnD question.

[TaranovskiAlex]

It is always interesting to listen to John's Romero wisdom

[ReleeSquirrel]

Well that was exceptionally fantastic. Thanks for hosting and publishing that! Thanks to John Romero, too. Even though I'm a gamedev and often watch stuff like this to glean gamedev wisdom, I think my favorite part was hearing about John Carmack's D&D game.

[jberg]

This is the most complete story I've found so far. Excellent talk

[JohnDlugosz]

17:00 Develop on a system that's superior to your target.
I can relate to that. In the early 90's I took over the group developing the software for an industrial machine that used a '286 motherboard. The development machines were PCs built around this same board, because my predecessor wanted the development system to match the target system.
It had a detrimental effect on the code, big time.
The developers were loathe to change a header, because of the long compilation times. So instead of fixing or updating a core data structure, they would come up with crazy work-arounds that could be done in one CPP file.
I came in with my personal '486SX budget machine, and quickly slashed through some of these outstanding issues, rebuilding clean in the time they took to incrementally make.
As for needing the same hardware, that applied to the installed cards not the base PC, and targeting the 286 for generated code, and having a "slow clock" or "de-Turbo" mode for testing.

[qwertyman]

just like the development style, the presentation was quick and concise, leaving room for other things.

[johnmendon]

As a kid who grew up on Doom IN Shreveport its funny to hear about id working off of Lakeshore Dr only a few miles from my childhood home.

[_Hawk_]

Id Soft made the best games I grew up with. Thanks so much for it! 🕹👍😀

[amonynous]

I'll never forget the amazement when I first saw Doom on my friends computer as a kid.

[GuyRutter]

What a joy listening to John. Reflecting on my own life in software through the same eras and of course the awesome nostalgia of playing Doom and Quake. Carrying our whole system (with CRT) around to friends houses to deathmatch.

[Novous]

IIRC, Death Rally, and Tyrian, were both successful 90's shareware/DOS games that started from demoscene groups. There's probably a ton more. There were a lot of Finnish DOS indie games with stellar soundtracks in the 90's.

[AppliedCryogenics]

I was in high school for WOLF3D, college for DOOM, and at my first tech job for QUAKE3D. I <3 THIS TALK SO MUCH! (And I wish I had 25% of the dedication of these godlike coders.)

[proosee]

I think the most influential bug that became a feature was strafe jumping/bunny hopping in Quake, the fact that it is quite essential in some games to this day says a lot.

[oopus]

I could listen to Romero talk for hours