DOOM’s Development: A Year of Madness

“Does it run DOOM?” is the oft-heard phrase as it is the canonical first-port for any system, be it a toaster, touch bar or printer. Programmer, game designer, level designer and DOOM II final boss John Romero delivers a postmortem on the game showing rarely seen material, memorializing its immersive but nerve-wracking 3D environments, networked multiplayer deathmatches, demonic imagery and themes, Barney WADs, exploding barrels, and BFG 9000.

The global dev community meets at WeAreDevelopers, an event dubbed by many as the “Woodstock of Developers”. The WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2019 will be in Berlin on June 6&7 and John will be there again! Get your ticket now.

Visit the largest developer playground in Europe!

#WeAreDevs

©2018, WeAreDevelopers

[StubenhockerElite]

"John Carmack had to find a solution" I've never heard a more assuring line.

[alienresearchlab]

Doom was such a revolutionary game. I was working in a manufacturing plant making min wage when it came out and the guy who ran the shop had a PC in his office. He loaded Doom on it (back when you could do stuff like that and not get a memo from HR) and was like - 'check this out'. We were blown away! From then on our whole group came in to work early at 6 a.m. just to play Doom for an hour until we had to punch in at 7 a.m. Good memories.

[Artefact]

That person in the audience screaming for version control saved my day. I was getting pissed the question wasn't asked!

[InfernalStateMachine]

John's my hero, he even used Celcius for temperature

[austinnorth]

John Carmack is an inter-dimensional space wizard and I promise you in several alternate universes he does kill us all.

[fzysknr]

I'm still waiting for that port of Doom to an electronic pregnancy test.

[CarlMGregory]

My mom worked on the top floor of the "black cube" building in Mesquite Texas. I remember finally beating Wolfenstein 3d. My mom, wanting me to stop bugging her so she could work, told me that the people that made that game are on the 6th floor, go see if they have another game. So I made my way down to meet the id Software folks. They showed me their office, computers, and even tried to explain WAD files, mapping, and so forth. But, being 12 years old, I didn't really understand it much and was more amused by the foosball-type games they had in their big open space in the office. They gave me a copy of Doom for free and sent me on my way. I ran back to my mom's office to install Doom and left her alone to do her work. Good times. (Update: please note; I don't care if you don't believe me, I know the truth and that's all that matters.)

That guy asking for the version control absolute legend - saved the day.

[ianbrady]

Can we just talk about how they turned down ALIENS for a moment? That, to me just sounds like a total cash grab and amazing opportunity, but for them to say "no, we want to make OUR game", that speaks volumes. If they really tried to make Aliens work, they might have had to force a lot of things causing their true vision of the game to suffer. That's the kind of "stick to your guns" attitude that is really inspiring. That's an amazing story to me.

[NGRevenant]

Mad props to the illustrator who did the logo and boxart, it's still the coolest game logo I've ever seen. Awesome hand drawn art style and the blue/orange contrast before it was standard in everything. Makes me nostalgic for the 90s every time I see it.

[PeteRoyJackson]

Doom 1 and 2 actually had a better feel than most modern games. They nailed the walking sway movement just right.

[ratchex]

He never lost the hair. What a legend.

[wrkey]

Just found this video and really enjoyed it. Back in mid-1990 I was IT manager that was introducing networking to a business and installing the very first LAN and we were running IPX. I was concerned about the performance of the servers, routers, switches, etc with lots of traffic. Knowing that DOOM had a multi-player capability over IPX gave me the inspiration to test my network with it. So I got 4 of my buddies and put each one at a different location in the buildings behind different devices we fired up DOOM! We played from about 6:30pm till sometime around 8:30am Saturday morning. None of us had ever experienced anything like that before. We did a conference call using our PBX system so we could all talk to each other on speaker phones while we played. We truly had a glimpse of the future of gaming. Thanks to these guys for making a game that I still love to play today!

[cometogether]

At the pre-alpha version main screen:
"If you have a copy of this, you are naughty."
lol

[scottfranco]

Its so funny he mentioned they left the game running to test computers. For many years in those days, I would leave doom running on computers that I had just built to test them. It was a better and more stressful test than anything else I could find. If the machine ran Doom overnight, usually it was a solid machine.

[danmanx]

The BSP trick, the highest ceilings, the lightning....pure genius. Look at EVERY single game that came out at the same time as Doom in Dec '93. It's downright crazy how advanced Doom was back in the day. What a great time to be a PC gamer.

[itchyisvegeta]

3 weeks to make a super nintendo game, on hardware that was not exactly user friendly back in the day. These guys were true programming gods!

[davecarsley]

So awesome that we live in a world where this stuff is free and available to everyone to watch.

[THB]

...Did he just present about doom history at a con called WAD?

[grayfoxfive]

My son bought me the book "Masters of Doom", a fascinating read. Carmack and Romero were absolute maniacs during that whole Commander Keen to Doom period, with Carmack maybe a little crazier with the insane hours he poured into the work. That had to be an amazing experience for all of them.