In 1991, Wolfenstein 3-D assumed the #1 spot on the Usenet list of the Top 100 Games in the World and planted itself there for an entire year. A journalist at a local radio station called us up, and suddenly we were on the airwaves with our first radio interview. Channel 8 in Dallas drove to our office, shot a short clip of our space, and then went over to Apogee. id Software became news, not just in the gaming universe but in the world at large.
Flush with cash, we gave our annual salaries a raise to $45,000 each. I remembered that just four years earlier, my friend, partner, and mentor John Fachini at Origin Systems had told me that no programmer made more than $30,000 and most left the industry before they were thirty years old. That July, we also treated ourselves and our significant others to a week at Disney World on a mega package deal called the Grand Plan. We just had to flash a “Grand Plan” card anywhere in the park, and whatever we were buying—four-course dinners with champagne, cotton candy, or sweatshirts—was paid for. Magic Kingdom indeed!
During our stay at the Grand Floridian hotel, some of us were lounging in one of the hot tubs. There was a bunch of chatter about games and gaming, and a group in the next tub overheard us. As they were leaving, they asked, “Are you the guys who made Wolfenstein 3-D?”
“Yeah, that’s us,” we said.
“Dudes, that game is awesome!”
We thanked them and enjoyed our first buzz of celebrity. Complete strangers knew about us as a result of our work, our games. It was a little unexpected; being recognized and becoming almost famous wasn’t something we thought about. That was for rock stars and Hollywood celebrities.
Returning from vacation, we began work on our next game, a prequel episode of Wolfenstein 3-D to satisfy the FormGen contract. The original trilogy of Wolfenstein 3-D resulted in the player killing Hitler, and its three additional episodes took place on the same timeline and sent players on missions that led up to that pivotal moment. For a prequel, Tom wanted to explore that time in history with a storyline that had Hitler searching for powerful artifacts that he believed would help him win the war. One of these was the spear that pierced the side of Christ, the Spear of Destiny. We thought it was a good idea and a great name. To make it quickly, we planned to reuse the Wolfenstein engine, add new bosses, and make it twenty-one levels in a row instead of dividing the levels into multiple episodes. With only a single episode, we didn’t have to concern ourselves with unique bosses and the other trappings that came with those divisions.
Since we were using the same engine to make Spear of Destiny, Carmack decided to work on a more advanced version of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine and see where he could take it for our next big game. He was happy going back into R&D (research & development) mode. Meanwhile, I thought it would be a great idea to see if Raven Software was interested in licensing our existing Wolfenstein tech for a new game. For us, this was the beginning of what would become a familiar pattern: Carmack improved the tech while I explored and pushed its potential from a game design and gameplay perspective. At the same time, I worked on licensing the tech. When it came to licensing or gameplay, a thorough understanding of the code base and its strengths and weaknesses was necessary.
We last talked with Raven when we were still in Madison. As I mentioned, we hoped that they would license the Keen 4 engine and build a new series of plat-formers. Brian Raffel sounded excited about the PC market, but in the end, Raven decided to stick with the Amiga, and so we went our separate ways. As it turned out, shortly after our call, not only had they given up on the Amiga for monetary reasons, they were already working on game concept demos for a couple of big publishers. Their company was a little bigger than before, too. I asked if they had interest in the Wolfenstein 3-D tech, but they said it was a little too simple for the kind of environments they wanted in an RPG. I wasn’t dissuaded.
“John’s working on improvements to the engine to make it look better,” I said to them.
That got them interested. I remembered that their reluctance to leave the Amiga behind was primarily down to its graphics ability over the PC.
“John’s new engine will deliver several graphics features beyond Wolfenstein,” I continued. “The new version of the engine has more sophisticated lighting and fog, improved texture mapping so you’ll get greater image detail, and the ability to vary the height of walls and ceilings.”
The last point was critical to making levels feel less repetitive. Hearing about the new tech, Raven was in. We signed a deal, and I let Carmack know that his R&D was going to be used for a game by Raven.
With the new licensed tech, Raven crafted ShadowCaster, a shooter/role-playing game about a long-running war between shapeshifters.* They decided to use a control scheme similar to Ultima Underworld where you click to move rather than using the arrow keys. They were fine with the engine speed being a little slower due to the graphical advancements, since it wasn’t a fast-action game. Their successful pivot to PC development put them squarely on my radar, though. I wanted to work with them again, thinking that they might develop a PC game for us.
It was important to keep in touch with people in business and a useful skill to grow. It helped us make connections that led to opportunities and, sometimes, useful information.
I developed a good working relationship with Shawn Green, Apogee’s head of tech support, and he was sharing a few stories that bothered me. The one I liked the least concerned Apogee’s order-taking “process,” or lack thereof. Shawn talked me through it: Fans of the game called Apogee’s 800 number to reach sales representatives, who sat in a room completely unsupervised. Since they employed a bunch of college students, that meant that chaos sometimes reigned with rubber-band wars breaking out.
When they answered the phone, they wrote down the customer’s credit card number, shipping address, and the game they wanted on a piece of paper. Then the rep spiked this ragtag order form on a metal rod on their desk like a waiter in a restaurant. At the end of the day, they took their bundle of pierced papers to Scott Miller’s mother, who typed the info into a word processor, and the fulfillment process officially began.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. When I relayed the tale to Kevin Cloud, he immediately dialed the 800 number. It was the middle of the day, and the reps left him on hold for thirty minutes.† There was no excuse for this and no way to calculate the impact of a negative customer experience on lost sales and future sales. A bad experience buying an id Software game was a reflection on id Software, and that was infuriating. We worked incredibly hard on every one of our games, seeking to make each a visceral, fun, bug-proof experience. Apogee’s sales team was the first real bug in our system.
I told Scott he had three months, until November, to fix his fulfillment issues, which I’m sure he didn’t appreciate. No CEO wants a lecture about how to run their company, but this was absurd. He needed a computer network, templated order forms, and a fulfillment workflow. He also needed a customer database. This wasn’t just Business School 101, it was common sense, and since Apogee was making 50 percent on every sale, it’s not like the company didn’t have the money to upgrade its business. Even if they did have cash flow woes, I didn’t care. Any normal business would seek out a loan and get it done.
I talked to Carmack about all this and brought up distributing our next game independently. This time, he agreed with me. If Scott and Apogee didn’t upgrade, we would cut the cord. As much as I was grateful to Scott, their current process left too much at risk and made us question everything. The clock was now ticking.
In August, we got a surprise call from Atari. They loved Wolfenstein 3-D and wanted it on the Lynx, their handheld color game system, a system we were more than familiar with. In fact, Commander Keen (in Keen 4 through 6) has a stylized version of one on his wrist. As an additional request, they told us they needed a mascot to match Nintendo’s Mario and Sega’s Sonic and wondered if we were interested in that creative conundrum. It took Tom Hall just a few minutes to design Pounce the Lynx, a cat that jumps like Mario and runs fast like Sonic. He told our contact at Atari about his design, but curiously, nothing came of it. Adrian filtered a bunch of his Wolfenstein art to the more limited color format of the Lynx system, and Carmack started writing code to get the Lynx version working. Working on a new technology, even if it was not a superior technology, was always interesting to us. For programmers, learning new tech is a thing unto itself. However, only a few weeks passed before things changed. Jay got off a call with our Atari rep and told the team to stop working on Lynx stuff—Atari was troubled, and their issues would probably end up with them not paying us or worse, Atari going bankrupt. So Carmack went back to work on the ShadowCaster engine, and we got back to work on Spear of Destiny.
Meanwhile, Wolfenstein 3-D’s reach kept growing. We discovered the PC version’s popularity in Japan when Imagineer, a Super Nintendo publisher, contacted us and asked if we could make a Super Nintendo version for them. Jay fielded the call.
“They’re offering $100K up-front,” he told us afterward.
Carmack spun around in his chair. I did, too.
“No way. You’re kidding.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am totally serious.”
We were stunned. That was a lot of money for an advance, the biggest in our history. At times, our business success and our lifestyle almost seemed unfathomable, like a dream. It was hard for me to square my early life with the amounts of money that we now discussed, not to mention the respectable salaries we made.
We said yes immediately and had a meeting about what we should do next. Obviously, we had to finish Spear of Destiny and then start concepting our next game. At the same time, we had these other opportunities. We wanted to say yes to everything, but it just wasn’t possible. Which direction to go? We didn’t want to turn into a porting company when there were only six of us. I brought up the idea of asking Robin,* a technically competent person we met at KansasFest, to do the port. They were using the Sluggo III, an unauthorized device used to develop Super Nintendo games to avoid going through the long process of becoming a Nintendo-authorized developer. Games developed on the Sluggo III were okay to publish on the SNES, though. We knew Robin knew far more about it than we did. Jay called Robin up and they agreed to do the port. All the source code was zipped up and sent, and all we asked for were periodic updates. id Software was growing again as we learned how to outsource our growing amount of work. I suppose that we could have just turned it down, but a $100K up-front payment is hard to say no to, particularly if we had a way to make it work.
As Spear of Destiny neared completion, we looked forward to seeing a preview of its box art. After all, the last time we worked with FormGen was on Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter, and its final box art was great, even when compared against all the other big boxes out there at the time. For Spear of Destiny, FormGen got the same artist, Ken Rieger, and, true to form, he did an amazing job. The box art is an interesting collage of B.J. swinging his rifle into the glass case holding the Spear of Destiny, with the outer walls of the castle above him. The FormGen guys were clearly excited at this point, as Wolfenstein 3-D’s blitz of reviews hadn’t stopped. Randy made sure the front of the box had “Wolfenstein” on it twice for that reason. Even better, the title was printed in holographic foil, which really made it more impactful and, yes, intrinsically cool. To top it off, we got our names printed on the sides of the box—you can see them when the lid is lifted. I always smile reading Adrian’s credit: Master of the Pixel.
We finalized and shipped Spear of Destiny to FormGen on August 31, 1992. We spent almost two months creating it, starting just after our Disney World vacation ended. While we were busy working away on Spear of Destiny, Carmack was a couple of buildings away in his apartment refining the ShadowCaster engine. For him, it was a much quieter working environment than our Spear of Destiny workday punctuated with sound effects and jokes. In silence, he focused on solving the problems that come with implementing advanced features like slopes, fog, and diminished lighting with a limited 256-color palette.
Carmack came back to the office, done with his ShadowCaster engine, and showed it to us. It was impressive: The entire view could recede into fog or darkness, the floors and ceilings had slopes and variable heights, and he added a sky for outdoor sections. Even to a non-technically trained eye, it simply looked better than Wolfenstein 3-D. It was slower, sure, but we could see some features we would like in our next game. We wondered, Could this engine get us there? Carmack knew he’d taken the architecture of the engine as far as it could go, but we knew it was not good enough for our next game. For that, he had to architect a new engine to render more complex scenes. He headed back into R&D mode, thinking about that.
We soon found out that some rather enterprising hackers had figured out how to extract and decompress the levels from Wolfenstein 3-D and modify them. This was a big surprise to us—not only was it a lot of work, but it required a high degree of technical expertise to hack the Wolfenstein 3-D executable and get the maps decompressed. Soon after, several map editors appeared on the internet, and people were busy making levels and expanding the base game. We left in the ability for the engine to load decompressed levels, so it was easy for players to load a new home-brewed level into Wolfenstein 3-D. The era of modding our games had begun.
On September 18, Spear of Destiny arrived in stores. For the second time, we could walk into a store, point to our box, and say, “We wrote that.” It was beyond cool. As kids, all of us spent time staring at shelves in software stores picking up boxes, looking them over, and in most cases, wishing we had the money to purchase them. To see our own games on the shelves was the equivalent of a Dallas kid saying, “The Cowboys? Sure, I play for that team.” We couldn’t get over it.
We had T-shirts made with the Wolfenstein 3-D logo on the front, and B.J. blasting a chain gun while stepping through a destroyed stone wall. On the back was our id Software logo. Walking around in any game store, id shirt or not, we were recognized, and I realized it was a rare occurrence to meet a game developer out in the wild—they don’t normally advertise themselves.
Soon after the Spear of Destiny launch, we gave ourselves a raise to $60,000. With money he had saved, Carmack decided to buy a red Ferrari 328. To him, his Miata wasn’t a real sports car. I bought the Miata from him, and soon he and his Ferrari were the talk of the apartment complex. That car had a distinctive growl to it, like none other. However, it wasn’t enough growl for him. He decided to get it turbo-charged at Norwood Autocraft. Carmack’s car progression went from MG to Miata to Ferrari. Not bad for your third car.
Carmack also had some news for us. His cat, Mitzi, was angry that he’d come back to the office and was spending so much less time with her. She retaliated by pissing all over his new leather furniture.
“I took her to a new home,” he told us.
“Mitzi? What!? Why?” we asked. A lot of our collective history somehow involved Mitzi. She was always around, and we had memories of her sitting on top of monitors, enjoying their warmth, until she was eventually shooed away when the screen started to overheat and change color.
John’s answer was nearly robotic. “She was having a net negative impact on my life.” We missed her being around, but she was John’s cat.
When November rolled around, Apogee had yet to upgrade its infrastructure. Orders were still taken as if the fulfillment team were short-order cooks. They had blown our deadline and, with it, our relationship. Jay called Scott and told him we would be publishing our next game.
There was one other big change that November. We had only signed a six-month lease on our apartment/office headquarters at the La Prada apartment complex, and for the first time, we decided to get a real office. The official name of the building that housed our new space was Town East Tower. Unofficially, we called it the Black Cube, which was fitting because it wasn’t actually a tower; it was a seven-story building made of black glass, and each side was as wide as it was high: a cube.
We moved into the sixth floor, office 615, the only office available at that time, and hired an office manager/secretary, Donna Jackson, a big-haired Southerner whose nurturing “feed the boys” instincts earned her a nickname, the id mom. We had a reception area where we showed off the awards we’d won. There was even a designated meeting room outfitted with sleek, custom-made black furniture. From the front reception area, there was a hallway to all the development offices. That area was prebuilt with two offices and a large developers’ room. Carmack and I grabbed the two separate offices, the artists took one room for the both of them, and Tom set up shop in the big room along with his workstation and a full-size pool table. He marked off the area surrounding his desk with masking tape, which showed “where the walls to my office would be—if I had an office.” Everyone had a ton of space. In the kitchen, we parked our foosball table and our Pac-Man machine. There was also a large closet that we turned into a dedicated game room with consoles and a table that we regularly kicked apart out of anger at a game, or rather our failure to progress in a game.
The most important additions to the new offices were our brand-new, state-of-the-art NeXTSTEP workstations to join Carmack’s NeXTstation. As far as I know, the only other game dev to use them besides us was Graeme Devine for The 7th Guest and its sequel, The 11th Hour. They were three times the cost of PCs. The dazzling thing about NeXT computers wasn’t the hardware, it was the operating system. It’s hard to explain the glory and, at the time, incomparable power of the NeXTSTEP operating system to non-programmers, but it was much more robust and useful than a PC running MS-DOS. NeXTSTEP’s operating system had the power and flexibility to let us code more complex apps faster, and those apps were better looking. In the age of the internet and the rise of application programming interfaces (more commonly known as APIs), it is normal for computers to be able to communicate with each other in a more standardized way—APIs essentially provide the interface to talk to an app—but in 1992, when MS-DOS only ran code written for Intel’s chips, and Apple’s Macintosh only ran code written for Motorola’s chips, the NeXTSTEP operating system was the only OS that took care of compatibility on the fly, supporting four different types of chips—PowerPC, Intel, Motorola, and PA-RISC. NeXTSTEP included the code for all these CPUs in one app. It was nothing short of amazing. You just copied your file from one machine to the other, and it automatically ran the correct code for that hardware.
So we had new offices, new technology, and new levels of financial freedom. Now we needed to decide what our next project would be. We gathered in the meeting room to discuss game ideas. Everyone liked the direction we were going with our last few games, and we believed 3D was the future. So we decided we were going to make another first-person shooter. Although at this point, the term and its popular acronym, FPS, didn’t yet exist. We didn’t know what to call our games other than 3D. We knew we were making technical and design progress with each iteration, though, and this new game was to be our fifth (Hovertank One, Catacomb 3D, Wolfenstein 3-D, and Spear of Destiny were the previous four).
Carmack began talking about borrowing the narrative he’d crafted for our epic D&D game. Instead of battling Nazis, what if a portal to hell was accidentally opened and demons poured out into the base and killed everyone? That sounded great! Then Tom suggested plots that explained how demons arose from the underworld, and a story began evolving that offered an alternative from the typical sci-fi narrative of space-travel-and-aliens drama that fueled nearly a century of fantastic stories. A demonic invasion was cool, but we decided to base it in the future, where we could have some really powerful weapons. Four characters in the game, all stationed on the planet Tei Tenga Darkside, would journey to hell to do battle. We ended the meeting stoked about the hellscape concept. Unlike so many of our other games, however, there was no plan to rush ahead.
Instead, we had a series of meetings. This was an unheard of, never-before-contemplated luxury. For three years, we’d rushed from one game to the next, rarely stopping to reflect on high concepts beyond vertical and side-scrolling and the evolution of 3D. Hovertank One and Catacomb 3D got two months each and introduced the world to EGA texture-mapped walls at a decent speed. Wolfenstein 3-D got four months and featured VGA texture-mapped walls at high speed. Spear of Destiny was another two-month effort. I don’t want to shortchange these games or their contributions. They revolutionized the industry, but our breakthroughs in game design and tech had been executed on the fly, with tight deadlines looming over us, in the middle of death schedules, fueled by our passion and smarts and a few tons of Diet Coke, Dr Pepper, and pizza.
Now we had time and resources to breathe, think, and dream. At one of the first meetings, someone asked about a possible title for the game. Carmack said he had the perfect name.
“I was watching the movie The Color of Money,” he told us.
We were all familiar with it. It’s the one starring Tom Cruise as a pool hustler.
“There’s a scene where Cruise walks into a pool hall with his cue case and hands over some money to challenge another guy. So, the guy looks at Cruise and says, ‘What you got in there?’”
The camera then pans up to Cruise, who has a confident, ear-to-ear smile; Carmack had the same smile on his face. “And Cruise looks at him, smiles, and says, ‘In here? Doom.’”
We cracked up. It was the perfect name for the ominous hellscape game we wanted to make.
With a title and concept, Tom Hall set about writing the DOOM bible. He worked at a feverish pace, first writing up thirty pages of handwritten notes and then producing a seventy-eight-page document by the end of November. In Tom’s vision, DOOM opened at a military base where scientific experiments backfired and opened a portal to hell, paving the way for an onslaught of demons. The DOOM bible was filled with details: character sketches (complete with backstories), lists of weapons, lists of sounds that would need to be created, lists of graphics. But it was too much detail—or maybe I should say too much narrative and character detail, from my perspective. I wanted to extend the horror, tension, gore, and violence of Wolfenstein 3-D, to make a faster, more brutal, kill-or-be-killed game. This was the essence of all my favorite arcade games: survival. Tom wrote characters and tried to create and convey drama in more sophisticated ways, but that missed the point. At a basic level, the fun of a shooter game is the visceral thrill of blasting your enemies at high speed.
Other details in Tom’s document were fueled by our meeting room discussions, which served as a sort of programming fantasyland. We talked about doing the impossible—creating gaming innovations that no one had ever done before.
In the land of id, John Carmack’s brilliant engines dictated the look and feel of the games we made. That isn’t to denigrate anyone’s contributions. As I hope I’ve made clear, Keen benefited enormously from Tom’s sense of humor just as Wolfenstein 3-D showcased Adrian’s entertainingly savage visual sensibilities. I shared both Tom and Adrian’s interests, loving laughs and gore in almost equal measure, and was passionate about game design and playability—making sure our work was fun and fast—but now we actually had the time to influence Carmack’s engine work, which was how, in a perfect world, every game should be built.
Technology should enable, serve, and inspire design, and vice versa. So ideally, when a game designer talks about their vision, the technical architecture should begin to formulate in the brain of the engine architect. Technical specs must be mapped not only to optimize the look, speed, and efficiency of the engine but to deliver the best gameplay, too. When there is planning, discussion and dialogue, engine architecture evolves with the demands of a game, but development can work the other way, too, as Commander Keen did, because an engine creates new gameplay opportunities.
My point here is that while the DOOM engine was unquestionably a phenomenal achievement, Carmack didn’t just say, “Here, use this.” DOOM was a collaborative effort. As the possibility space for gameplay began to take shape after the first few meetings, I wanted to make sure everyone realized the opportunity we had. We had all seen Carmack do the undoable multiple times, so it was time to think big. Really big. I wanted each one of us to do the undoable. I delivered an impromptu mission statement for the project:
“We need to make this game the best thing we can imagine playing. We have to think of all the amazing things we’ve never been able to do and put them in this game.”
At that point, the floodgates opened. We talked about our frustration with the level of graphic detail and variation in Wolfenstein 3-D. We wanted more textures and lighting. As a horror movie fan, I knew that shadows and light were tools to increase tension, to boost the fear factor, and to introduce elements of surprise. I wanted these tools in our games.
We also discussed gameplay. What if Tom and I could play against each other, head-to-head in real time, with each of us trying to kill the other the most times? Is two the right number of competitors? What about three or four? And would it be fun for multiple players to team up to defeat the enemies together? Nothing like that existed, but faster modem speeds and local network connections in an office or university made interactivity in real time seem possible.
Other push-the-envelope concepts we kicked around included abandoning the traditional level-based gameplay and devising a streaming game that never stopped. Instead of reaching the end of a stage and loading in a new level, the program just streamed new content continually. Adding cinematics—an element where the game plays a short movie—was another enhancement on our wish list. The idea was that the game perspective would shift so that the camera pulled away, changing from the dominant FPS view to a long shot that includes the player. This cinematic feature would briefly create a whole new point of view that might reveal unknown vistas, hidden demons, and new weapons before returning to the standard perspective. Needless to say, we were enthusiastic about these ideas.
In the original Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement” side-scrolling demo, John had inserted the ability to capture every keystroke made during a game. Now we discussed sharing that ability with gamers, so they could watch the game they just played and save it as a file that could be shared with others. We liked this idea, although we had no idea how important it would be to the development of gaming and speedrunning, in particular. It went on the list.
Above all I wanted DOOM to be visceral and scary, and for everything in the tech to support that. Diminished lighting was an important engine feature that made normally lit areas eerie and darker areas terrifying. I wanted to hear the demons moving around before you saw them, because suspense is a huge driver of fear. I wanted the ability to put in as many secret areas as I desired, and a wide variety of ways to implement that. Since the demons were going to be coming in through portals, I thought it would be amazing to look at a portal and see hell through it, and possibly go there, even if it was just a small area. I wanted far better weapons than Wolfenstein 3-D—and more of them. I wanted the violence to feel more visceral, and to keep the player moving fast, so fast that movement control became a necessary skill like it was in driving games. Wolfenstein 3-D was full of mostly gun-based enemies, and I wanted a more interesting mix of gun and projectile-throwing enemies.
On November 28, 1992, Tom finished his draft of the DOOM bible, and in our meetings we fleshed out all the goals for the game. It was going to be the fastest, most violent, most immersive computer game in history. Our initial planning mission accomplished, we took two weeks off for Christmas vacation, and then, on January 1, Tom banged out a press release. It was informative, it was funny, and it was brazen. Given the state of game technology, it also must have seemed implausible to everyone but us. From a quality control perspective, it was exceedingly risky: We were declaring we would do the impossible before we had actually done it! We were setting ourselves up to overpromise and under-deliver. Here’s the entire thing:
For Immediate Release:
Id Software to Unleash DOOM on the PC
Revolutionary Programming and Advanced Design Make For Great Gameplay
DALLAS, Texas, January 1, 1993—Heralding another technical revolution in PC programming, Id Software’s DOOM promises to push back the boundaries of what was thought possible on a 386sx or better computer. The company plans to release DOOM in the third quarter of 1993, with versions for the PC in DOS, Windows, Windows NT, and a version for the NeXT.
In DOOM, you play one of four off-duty soldiers suddenly thrown into the middle of an interdimensional war! Stationed at a scientific research facility, your days are filled with tedium and paperwork. Today is a bit different. Wave after wave of demonic creatures are spreading through the base, killing or possessing everyone in sight. As you stand knee-deep in the dead, your duty seems clear: you must eradicate the enemy and find out where they’re coming from. When you find out the truth, your sense of reality may be shattered!
The first episode of DOOM will be shareware. When you register, you’ll receive the next two episodes, which feature a journey into another dimension, filled to its hellish horizon with fire and flesh. Wage war against the infernal onslaught with machine guns, missile launchers, and mysterious supernatural weapons. Decide the fate of two universes as you battle to survive! Succeed and you will be humanity’s heroes; fail and you will spell its doom.
The game takes up to four players through a futuristic world, where they may cooperate or compete to beat the invading creatures. It boasts a much more active environment than Id’s previous effort, Wolfenstein 3-D, while retaining the pulse-pounding action and excitement. DOOM features a fantastic fully texture-mapped environment, a host of technical tour de forces to surprise the eyes, multiple player option, and smooth gameplay on any 386 or better.
John Carmack, Id’s Technical Director, is very excited about DOOM: “Wolfenstein is primitive compared to DOOM. We’re doing DOOM the right way this time. I’ve had some very good insights and optimizations that will make the DOOM engine perform at a great frame rate. The game runs fine on a 386sx, and on a 486/33, we’re talking 35 frames per second, fully texture-mapped at normal detail, for a large area of the screen. That’s the fastest texture mapping around—period.”
Texture mapping, for those not following the game magazines, is a technique that allows the program to place fully drawn art on the walls of a 3-D maze. Combined with other techniques, texture mapping looked realistic enough in Wolfenstein 3-D that people wrote Id complaining of motion sickness. In DOOM, the environment is going to look even more realistic. Please make the necessary preparations.
The release went on to detail the key features of the game, providing a paragraph on each feature: a texture-mapped environment, non-orthogonal walls, light diminishing and light sourcing, variable-height floors and ceilings, environmental animation and morphing, palette translation, multiple players, smooth seamless gameplay, and an open game. What looks like a long list of never-before-seen technical enhancements also telegraphed a new form of gameplay and a new way of designing game environments. The thing is, implausible as it was, we knew we could do it. We felt like we commanded computers and game design and not the other way around. We were not limited by any constraints. And now, thanks to the success of Wolfenstein 3-D, even time and money couldn’t hold us back. Our imagination was our only limitation. DOOM’s features also introduced a new means of interacting with our community. Of all these, an “open game” was the most important. Wolfenstein 3-D taught us a lesson. People will mod our games to share them with each other. With DOOM, we wanted to make that easy.
DOOM’s development started in January 1993. This was to be our first game developed fully on NeXTSTEP machines. Carmack began work on its engine in earnest while I started on DoomEd, the level editor. DoomEd defined the visual presentation of the game and essentially allowed us to construct a map of the physical layout of each level and all the objects that appeared there—walls, windows, buildings, enemies, ammo, weapons, candelabras, whatever. The objects themselves were defined, and their functionality was designed and codified. For instance, let’s take DOOM’s keycard. First, we needed to have the concept of keycards that open doors. Then, we came up with the specifics of how they work (the design), and then we coded them into the game. So, to open a colored locked door, the player needed the matching-color keycard in their inventory. Red keycards open red doors. I am oversimplifying things here, because at its core, DoomEd was doing some sophisticated data management for a tool in 1993. DoomEd also allowed for fast design iteration—I could create and quickly test any object in the game within minutes. This capability was essential to my design process. Every time I added any functionality to a level or extended or altered its architecture, no matter how small these changes were, I played the level to see how it worked and felt. To this day, every level I design is the result of thousands of playthroughs. Doing the same thing on a PC instead of NeXTSTEP would have taken far longer and would have been less elegant.
By the end of January, I had the basics of DoomEd in place and Carmack had the beginnings of the DOOM engine running. Tom was following along, getting new builds of the MS-DOS game, NeXTSTEP updates of DoomEd, and working on building the opening level. As the author of the DOOM bible, Tom was understandably focused on the vision he’d laid out, a vision that nobody else had critiqued or edited. The problem was that Tom had some serious designer block happening. He just couldn’t come up with interesting-looking places for gameplay.
“Maybe take a look at some military buildings and that style of construction,” Carmack offered.
It seemed like a good enough idea. Tom followed Carmack’s suggestion and got some books on military bases and buildings. The military installations he built looked clean and realistic, with straightforward, antiseptic lighting. However, when we reviewed his first level, “Hangar,” we were less than inspired. The level started with you and three other marines playing cards and standing around a crate emblazoned with UAC logos—for Union Aerospace Corporation. Though it had not yet been implemented, the DOOM bible revealed what Tom envisioned would happen next:
There is a flash of horrible light and energy and two gates open at equidistant points on the moon’s surface, the larger of the two at the light-side.* Every[one] awake is quickly killed. One reaching for the alarm button has his hand chopped off. Briefly your friend is grabbed, his hat falling off in the lab. Then they† spread out through the air ducts and possessing [sic] sleeping people with magic.
It was enough to deal with enemy AI. We didn’t want to deal with non-player characters and magic as well. The look of the level also didn’t fit with what we were hoping to achieve. Except for the computers in the background, it looked like a conference room in a Marriott hotel, with plush blue carpet, fluorescent lights, and gray drapes. It didn’t have the dark, suspenseful feeling that both Carmack and I imagined. We wanted a shadowy, grim, foreboding ambiance, a look and feel to foment Stephen King-level horror suspense. We wanted nothing but blood, fear, and fast action. We wanted Aliens. We wanted Evil Dead. The design laid out in Tom’s game bible was intent on fostering relationships with the character and injecting humor and nuance into the narrative. It was on-brand Tom Hall, but it was also the opposite of the blood and guts, murky shadows, and endless tension that Carmack and I were looking for.
We told this to Tom, who was understandably frustrated—he liked characters and humor much more than horror. He had poured himself into the project, but it seemed like he had hit a wall.
Or maybe he had just run smack into a competing vision that Carmack and I shared.
By February, while Tom wrestled with level and game vision issues, I started to design levels of my own, splitting my time between designing levels and programming DoomEd. Adrian and Kevin were working on monster and weapon designs. After sketching out characters, Adrian went out and bought a ton of modeling clay. His plan was to sculpt his characters, which we scanned into the game using a video camera connected to the NeXTstation. The camera was pointed at a lazy Susan that rotated, allowing Adrian to take photos of a model at eight different angles. Instead of creating characters pixel by pixel the way he had been doing for years, this process saved him a lot of time. Rotoscoping, as the process was called, was used for Prince of Persia in 1989, and in films before that. We thought might improve our process, and so we decided to try it.
Adrian created the marine main character, the Cyberdemon, and the Baron of Hell in clay. As soon as he was done with the first set of rotations and started animating the walk cycle, however, the clay began tearing. This was a problem Adrian hadn’t foreseen. After animating and repairing the model for each frame of animation, Adrian knew he needed to figure out a better way of creating physical models of these characters. Better yet, having someone else make them would save him even more time. Jay contacted Hollywood monster-maker Gregor Punchatz, who had made models for RoboCop and other movies, and contracted him to build the Spider Mastermind, a gross, menacing creation with four metal legs, bug eyes, and spindly arms on a brain. It even sported a chain gun in front. Gregor made the model out of a steel-frame skeleton covered in foam latex.
We also thought about how we would deal with the game’s weapons. These needed to be modeled and scanned, too. We were all fans of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movie franchise, and we wanted to use a shotgun and a chainsaw as demon destroyers. Rather than go to a gun shop to look for the real thing, we hit the local Toys“R”Us and purchased an American West Dakota Shotgun Rifle Cap Gun, a single-shot weapon from the charmingly named TootsieToy company. As for a chainsaw, Tom Hall borrowed one from his girlfriend. It had an amusing name, too: Eager Beaver. Less entertaining was the oil leak it had; the engine end of the chainsaw sat in a big plastic popcorn bowl in our office until we were done with it.
By March 1993, just as we were entering our third month of development, something rather surprising happened: Executives from 20th Century Fox contacted us.
Jay walked into the main area and said, “Hey guys, I got some interesting news.”
The tone of his voice told us he was serious, and whatever it was, was something big.
“20th Century Fox is offering us the license to Aliens.”
Our jaws dropped. The James Cameron sci-fi classic was one of our favorites. It was one of the inspirations for DOOM.
“That’s awesome!” I said, and I meant it. In fact, it was better than awesome. It felt like winning the geek lottery. DOOM wasn’t going to be inspired by Aliens. It was going to be Aliens.
It was a tempting offer and fitting aesthetically. We wanted gamers playing DOOM to feel as desperate and on edge as Sigourney Weaver’s heroic character, Ripley, does during her life-or-death encounters with the lurking, almost invisible killer. We also loved the Alien xenomorph, one of the most amazing creatures in film history. Who wouldn’t want to make an Aliens game? We discussed it, but after a thirty-minute deep-dive into the concept, we couldn’t think our way around one major stumbling block: There weren’t any demons in Aliens—just alien monsters—and that wouldn’t be a new idea. Aliens in space had been done to death. Plus, we would lose full creative control, and we’d be making someone else’s franchise more valuable instead of creating our own new intellectual property. After a breathless roller coaster of a half hour, we scrapped the concept of using the license.
We didn’t have long to dwell on it because a sudden, unexpected curveball upended our development schedule: a long-forgotten and still outstanding contract. As I mentioned, seven months earlier, we signed a deal with Imagineer, a Japanese Nintendo game publisher, to port Wolfenstein 3-D to the Super Nintendo. Within a matter of days, we’d also hired Robin (a pseudonym), a contractor we met at a retro computer conference, to start working on the Super Nintendo version.
We cashed Imagineer’s check, paid our contractor, and promptly forgot about it—until Imagineer called up and asked us where their game was. Good question! The answer, we quickly discovered, was not good. Our esteemed contractor completely flaked on the job, so we needed the entire team to stop working on DOOM to get the SNES version made as soon as possible. We had never programmed a Super Nintendo, so we needed to consult all the hardware notes we could find. The cartridge start-up process was particularly complex and hard to find documentation for. We turned to some early 65816 Assembly language code that the contractor had shared with us early on in the project. It wasn’t much, but it did show how to set up the hardware switches to the right graphics mode. It was enough to get us going in the right direction.
Not only did we need to figure out the memory layout of the graphic mode, we also had to translate all the graphics to this new type of hardware, get the music in a format that could play on the SNES, and lots of other technical details. Imagineer also had more requests. They wanted us to change the dogs into rats, the red blood to green, and remove all Third Reich imagery. Of course, in addition to those requirements, they wanted it to be done as fast as possible. Before starting development, we needed to ask Robin a question. However, we couldn’t reach them. We knew their boss, Brian Fargo, the CEO of Interplay, so Jay asked Brian where the contractor was. Brian wanted to know why. In spite of Brian’s question, Jay knew it was all on the up-and-up. After all, we were told by the contractor that doing work on the SNES version was cleared in their contract. There was no harm telling Brian that Robin was porting Wolfenstein 3-D to SNES for us.
As it turns out, Brian didn’t see it that way. “Oh really? Because that is not allowed. They work here, and everything they do is owned by Interplay. Did you use any of their code?” Brian asked.
“Yes, we used a small bit of start-up code, but that’s all,” Jay said.
To Brian, that was a problem. He mentioned to Jay that he certainly wanted to avoid any kind of lawsuit and suggested a deal: We pay them $10,000, they get the rights to publish Wolfenstein 3-D on the Mac, and we port it.
Seeing no other option and hoping to head off a lawsuit, Jay agreed.
We were furious. Instead of making easy money, we were saddled with a giant headache—one that could have been sorted out months earlier with a simple “I screwed up” phone call from the contractor—but the thing that really made me mad was that we suspended work on DOOM while we worked on the Super Nintendo port.
We spent three weeks hammering out our frustration and anger in code. We wanted this thing behind us and worked constantly to get it done so we could get back to making DOOM. From having never worked on a SNES before to finishing the port in three weeks was an impressive effort. Although we were clearly irritated for having been put in this situation, we took a moment to recognize our achievement: This was id Software at peak performance.
Having cleared the decks, I went back to working on levels in earnest and finalizing DoomEd while the others picked up where they left off.
By the end of March, we got a shot of adrenaline when legendary illustrator Don Ivan Punchatz, the father of our model maker, finished creating the DOOM logo. Over decades, he had provided book covers for some of the most important science-fiction writers in history: Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Kevin Cloud was familiar with his work and thought he would be a perfect choice as an artist for DOOM’s logo design. So we called him in and discussed the game.
“It’s a 3D game called DOOM,” I told Don. I wasn’t sure that this particularly mattered to him. What he needed most was the setting and the overall aesthetic of the game. “The story line is a futuristic sci-fi space marine who meets hell and all its demons. It’s an ancient, timeless thing, good versus evil, but good is a space marine with guns.”
With that description, Don was good to go.
Fittingly, his DOOM logo was a multi-dimensional masterpiece: geometrically complex, visually striking, symbolically appropriate, and, most importantly, instantly readable. I loved that Don combined hell and technology together with a two-toned treatment. The top half of the logo incorporates the circuit boards we used as textures in the game, colored blue to indicate the coldness of technology; the bottom half, colored yellow through orange, implying fire and heat, used textures that were made of metal. So you had cutting-edge motifs set against complex materials. I also admired the logo’s layered dimensions, not just because they looked cool but because the execution echoed so much about the 3D world of the game, one in which new dimensions would surface as the game progressed.
With the logo done, Don moved on to illustrate DOOM’s box cover. He came to Suite 615 with an expensive-looking camera and a male body model. The model’s job was to strike various poses for the marine who would be on the cover of the box.
We set up Don and the model in the same room where Adrian and Kevin spent their days creating new textures and modeling clay characters and digitizing them with the NeXTstation workstation. Adrian, who worked at a hospital prior to joining Softdisk, had a collection of hospital photo slides that he was in the process of scanning for DOOM’s bloody walls. Adding to the ambience were the periodic sounds of a drill and patient screams through the walls from the dentist’s office next door.
The model took his shirt off and started posing with our plasma gun toy. Don asked us for suggestions, so I started telling him that the marine was going to be attacked by an infinite number of demons. It would be cool if he was on a hill and firing down into them. The model was holding the gun in various positions while Don snapped photographs. I watched, but none of the stances were interesting to me. I couldn’t see them conveying the “hero-under-siege” aesthetic.
I kept trying to tell the model the scene I wanted to capture. He just wasn’t getting it. Frustrated, I took off my shirt and told him to give me the gun.
“Now kneel on the floor, and pose as a demon grabbing my arm,” I said. I aimed the gun in a slightly different direction and told Don, “This is what I’m talking about!”
Don took several pictures. I moved the gun to a different angle, the model/demon grabbed my other leg, then we switched to him grabbing arms. At the end of the session, we decided the arm-grabbing pose was going to be the most dramatic. I had inadvertently become Doomguy.
On April 2, 1993, we were ready to give a select group of people a small taste of what we’d created. The title screen featured Don’s DOOM logo along with fuchsia “Alpha” below it, and a readme.txt file told them what to expect.
“Dear id Beta-Tester,” it began. “Yes, it’s the DOOM ALPHA! (Actually we’re just trying to release these every two weeks or so. This WAS going to be a pre-beta, but a certain person let us down Super-Nintendo-cart programming-wise, so it’s just an alpha. Nonetheless, here ’tis.”
We also included what sounded like a personal diary in list form. Among the items we listed: the id crew taking partners to see The Phantom of the Opera, Carmack going to Kansas City, the birth of Jay’s son Nicholas, and Kevin’s softball game scheduled for that very night. After three months of development, DOOM featured animating floors, functional doors, flickering lights, and strobe lights—all features I coded into DoomEd and the game itself. Items were visible, and Kevin and Adrian had added a lot of new art. At that point, thirteen distinct levels existed in various stages of completion. We had two guys periodically playing builds for us, Charlie Davis and Doug Howell, both of whom had been beta testers with us since 1991, on Keen 4 through 6, Wolfenstein 3-D, and Spear of Destiny.* They both loved the game and couldn’t believe how great it looked even at this early stage. Having outside eyes validate our early direction was reassuring.
In May, I finished DoomEd and decided to turn my attention to the levels themselves. Tom’s clean, lean, military bunker style just wasn’t cutting it, and Tom knew it, too. He was still struggling with a creative block. I ran through a bunch of his levels and the lighting, ceiling height, and overall shape of the spaces looked like they came from Wolfenstein, but with nicer textures. There weren’t dark areas—walls were at 90 degrees to each other, and there wasn’t much variation in room size. This engine could do so much more: We could even have windows and outdoor areas! I took a stab at a solution, creating an abstract 3D level design style, something new that could not have existed in any of our previous engines. My first attempt was an empty room with a lofty ceiling, dark lighting, and a couple of brightly lit, inset areas up high where imps could be placed to shoot fireballs down at the player. The corners of the room became angles so the place had eight sides. A switch in the far wall, when flipped, raised two doors simultaneously, revealing even darker hallways. Nothing was realistic—abstraction was the point—but it all looked cool. I called Tom and the artists into my office and I said, “This is what I’m talking about.” The space felt decidedly new and innovative, unlike anything in our previous games.†
Everyone, including Tom, agreed this was the direction we needed. No doubt this increased Tom’s frustration. Because he had designer’s block, he had listened to Carmack and made these military block–style mazes, but it led to something neither he nor anyone else found interesting. Hearing our feedback about the state of the game was difficult for Tom, and I’m sure my rejection hurt the most; we were best friends, and as I’ve said, Tom is the most creative talent I’ve ever worked with. His range is staggering—visual, linguistic, comic, narrative—and his work ethic, up until the end, was always faultless. He was a veteran game developer, though, and a consummate professional. As much as it stung, he saw the same things as we did.
DOOM doomed him.
The team opted to steer toward my designs, abandoning the four-marines-playing-cards scenario from Tom’s bible, and the bible itself, and opting for a more simplified, visceral shooter. As we moved deeper into development, Tom lost interest and focus. At one point, examining the levels and characters, we realized we had too many bipedal monsters in the game and needed more flying ones. It was an oversight and another indicator of how out of sync he’d become with the whole DOOM project.
Since the abstract-level design style breakthrough, I continued designing episode one’s maps. I started with E1M2 (Episode 1, Map 2), the level where I’d had the breakthrough, but halfway through I left it to start working on E1M6. I had an idea for an interesting starting area that had several choices, so I finished that one first. Then, I moved onto E1M7, crafting more ways to hide secret areas. In E1M7, I also started to explore the concept of backtracking—making the player backtrack through the map to finish it. I hadn’t played levels in a 3D game that required the player return to places they’d conquered, and so it felt fresh and new. This also meant I needed to make their return more interesting, so when the player came back to get the blue keycard, for instance, I opened up new monster closets (secret areas with enemies in them that open up and release the enemies into the path of the player) so they’d be surprised when they turned around and went back to use the keycard. I also hid a huge secret area inside one of these monster closets, so you couldn’t reach it until the player got to the blue keycard.
Around the start of June, we decided to answer a press inquiry about doing a preview. We figured it was time to show off some of our work. Chris Lombardi of Computer Gaming World, the biggest publication for games at the time, came to the Black Cube for a sneak peek. He had written about Wolfenstein 3-D before and really liked it. To say he was impressed is an understatement. His preview of DOOM ran under the headline: “They’re Going to Hell for This One”, and he was effusive in his praise: “Doom is not a typical next-generation jump. It’s a high-altitude, wind-aided Carl Lewis of a leap ahead.”
Lombardi’s reaction was gratifying. Having seen the potential of some of our previous work go over people’s heads, it was nice to see a savvy critic instantly understand we were breaking new ground. As it turned out, Chris’s preview would be the only preview of DOOM.
In July, the biggest breakthrough for me was personal. Throughout the development of Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM, Beth and I had been on-again-off-again. Fortunately, things had really turned around with Beth, and our relationship was going so well that we decided to get married. She was always understanding about my relationship with my sons, which was important to me. We honeymooned in Aruba in the middle of July.
When I returned, Carmack approached me. He wanted to fire Tom. He’d had a talk with Kevin and Adrian, and they agreed that he wasn’t aligned or bringing the creative superpowers we knew he had to DOOM. They both asked to have lunch with me, where they laid out all their concerns and said that they wanted him out of the company. My inclination was to protect my friend. He’d been a key member of id. It didn’t feel right to me.
One of the things that influenced my thinking was id Software’s termination policy. When we formed the company, we decided that founders could only be fired by unanimous decision and that departing founders would sell their shares back to the company. If we fired Tom, he would never see another penny from Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D or DOOM, but he’d be paid for the value of his shares as the company took them back. Since we were not a public company, we determined the value of our shares by the last 365 days’ profits multiplied by the shareholder’s ownership percentage.
I stalled for a short time, but eventually, I had to give in. It was a tortuous decision. Tom was struggling with the subject matter. We were starting to get further into development; he was making uninspired levels and spending more time out of the office. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t protect him, and the friction was jeopardizing the company as well as what we hoped would be the greatest computer game in history. So the one truly negative chapter of DOOM unfolded.
I was hoping I could soften the impact of the upcoming meeting. The night before, I had Tom over for dinner and planned to give him the bad news, or at least a heads-up that there was serious trouble coming, but I froze. Maybe it was my respect and admiration for his ability. Maybe it was our close friendship. Maybe it was a reaction to growing up in families that believed in nothing but tough love and knowing the incredible hurt that comes with rejection. Whatever it was, I just couldn’t do it. Part of me feels like I let Tom down, but as it turned out, I think it might have been the best decision for him. He was struggling at id and unhappy.
The next day, we called Tom into the conference room for a meeting with Carmack, Adrian, Jay, Kevin, and me, but it was really a funeral, and that is exactly what the mood was like. Nobody was talking or even looking at each other. Finally, Carmack delivered the news.
“Tom,” he said. “This isn’t working out. We’re asking for your resignation.”
It was a horrible moment. “I tried to tell you last night, Tom,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized they did nobody any good.
Tom had just been somewhat blindsided by the people—friends—he’d spent years collaborating with. There were multiple points along the DOOM development timeline where Tom realized his work wasn’t what the game needed. He even apologized for some suboptimal decisions and for not being inspired. Though he was trying on a daily basis to get into some kind of groove, ultimately, DOOM was just not Tom’s aesthetic. He started talking about his value to the company, defending his work, but when no one responded, he knew it was a done deal. The meeting was an inevitable and painful endpoint, and he realized it.
We talked about how we had noticed that Tom was not having a good time working on DOOM, that we felt it didn’t match his style, and it was at odds with his personality.
Tom agreed and talked about how the transition to Wolfenstein 3-D from Keen was a major blow. He had found himself in a creative abyss while making levels for Wolfenstein 3-D and fighting over pushwalls. To him, DOOM was even darker than Wolfenstein 3-D, and it didn’t match his spirit. In the end, Tom agreed to resign.
Carmack asked him to leave the room so we could figure out next steps, which included going over the company policy of buying back Tom’s shares.
Tom departed, but within five minutes he was back with the look of a changed man. The shock and horror that filled his face moments earlier was gone.
“Guys,” he said, “I think this is really the right thing to do.”
He spent the rest of the day packing his stuff and saying goodbye. It was a major blow losing someone so talented and a friend with whom I enjoyed working. Anyone who knows Tom knows what an incredibly funny, light, and positive person he is. DOOM was not for him. Still, it hurt, and I missed working with him.
Now, with deadlines looming, the id team was concentrated on DOOM. With Tom’s departure, there was work to be done and shoes to fill. In mid-August, we hired a new programmer to join the team. Dave Taylor was a young electrical engineer from the University of Texas. We assigned him the task of creating several systems: the intermission screen, all the menus, and the automap. The automap was a navigation tool that let players quickly see all the areas they had traversed from a top-down view, and then get back into gameplay.
Our other potential hire was a game designer named Sandy Petersen. Kevin found out about him and wanted to bring him over for an interview. I must admit that I was apprehensive about hiring Sandy. His design background seemed great. The problem, as I saw it, was that except for our id mom Donna Jackson, we were sometimes a foul-mouthed, dark-humored bunch. In contrast, Sandy listed his Mormon religion on his résumé—something I’d never seen done before. Given my experiences with my ex-wife Kelly’s family and with friends in Utah, I didn’t think our gruesome, demonic games or our curse-filled culture would be a good fit for a Latter-day Saint, but Sandy told me I was wrong. He didn’t care about the carnage of our cartoon world, or the obscenities that filled the air at the id Software office. We decided to give him a shot. When he came in for his interview, I sat him at Tom’s old desk, fired up DoomEd, and told him what I wanted.
“This is a level editor. I want to see what you can do with it to build levels.”
Sandy seemed excited and eager to get going. “Sure, this sounds like fun!”
I showed him the way DoomEd worked, how to compile a level, and how to run it. After a few hours, he had done some good work. Sure, it was slightly Wolfenstein-like, with same-height ceilings, but he had slime you had to get through, and he used lighting in ways to heighten tension and change the mood of the space.* I felt he was going to work out well. We hired him, and his task was to make as many levels as possible using Tom’s levels as a starting point.
“Change whatever is needed,” we told him, “but get levels done.”
By this point, my own level design style had become codified. What started as an experiment in April was now a philosophy, and one I shared with Sandy. I believed in these design rules:
• Design Rule 1: The start of the level should present interesting choices or look impressive.
• Design Rule 2: The start of the level should fit its purpose. Do I want to teach the player or make them feel scared? If the former, there are no enemies. If the later, watch out.
• Design Rule 3: Reuse areas in the level as much as possible, as it reinforces the understanding of the space every time the player goes through an area again. For example, if players come back to a central hub before going out to a spoke, they will remember the hub the most.
• Design Rule 4: Provide contrast in every element of the design: light, sound, and action. This keeps a level fun and interesting and prevents it from falling into a monotonous loop of gameplay. We want the player to feel like they are on an exciting roller-coaster ride.
• Design Rule 5: Changes in wall or floor texture should be accompanied by a height change or border texture.
• Design Rule 6: Include at least four secrets in your level.
• Design Rule 7: When the player solves a piece of a puzzle, they should already know where to go next. An example would be that you have already tried to open the red door before you found the red keycard. A bad design would be to flip a switch, then see and hear nothing that shows you what you just did.
• Design Rule 8: If an area in your level looks like it could be made in an earlier tech, you have failed. Make the area more interesting and use more of the engine’s features to ensure that.
In September, we had to solve our sound issues. The DOOM engine had been in development all year, and so the sound code took a back seat. Our new engine wasn’t compatible with the previous sound code written for Wolfenstein 3-D. We needed a solution. We learned about a digital sound library—DMX—owned by Illinois-based software engineer Paul Radek, and Jay promptly called him up to license it.
At the end of the month, there was a minor shift in the gaming cosmos. An adventure game titled Myst unseated Wolfenstein 3-D on the Top 100 Games list. We immediately went out and purchased a copy of the game. When I looked at its static images, I was stunned.
“Why the hell is this game popular?” I wondered aloud.
I couldn’t figure it out. The images were beautiful, certainly, but so were some photographs. The future of games was not static images. The future of games, I thought, was dynamic and real-time. That’s where we were headed.
“This game is prehistoric,” I mused. “It just looks nice because it’s using high-resolution SVGA graphics, and it’s an excuse to buy a new CD-ROM drive, but it’s a boring, static, old-school adventure game!”
Everyone agreed. Obviously, it looked good, but technically? We couldn’t believe people were falling for it. To us, what mattered was the player’s story, the narrative arc they created ripping and tearing their way through game worlds, whether those worlds were D&D or Wolfenstein 3-D.
The public, obviously, didn’t agree with my analysis, because Myst sold millions of copies. I came to realize the importance of game narrative to players. It was for the masses. It looked great on a computer monitor, there was no pressure for players to rush and make a move, and it provided challenges that players could solve at their own pace. At id, we were so focused on innovating in real-time fast 3D that any game that wasn’t was a joke to us.
In early October, we were getting close to wrapping up the game, so progress quickened. On October 4, 1993, we issued the DOOM beta press release version, a build of the game we distributed externally to journalists and video game reviewers to allow them to try the game before its release. Concerned about security and leaks, we coded the beta to stop running on DOS systems after October 31, 1993. We still had useless pickups in the game, like the demonic daggers, demon chests, and other unholy items. I decided to get rid of those things because they made no sense to the core of the game and they rewarded the player with a score, which was a holdover from Wolfenstein 3-D. I removed the concept of having lives for the same reason. It was enough to have to start the level over after dying.
There was still one missing piece from the game, and it was a substantial one. We hadn’t done anything about the multiplayer aspect. In modern game development, multiplayer would be a feature factored in from day one, and architected accordingly, in an integrated fashion. Not with DOOM. It was November, and we were releasing in a month.
I brought it up to Carmack. “So when are we going to make multiplayer mode?”
The short answer was that Carmack was ready to take it on. Looking from the outside in, I suspect some might wonder if I wasn’t just more than a bit concerned since we were hoping to ship in 1993. After all, John had never programmed a multiplayer game before. The truth is that I never had a doubt, not for a second. Back in March, Carmack had already done some innovative network programming in DoomEd. He wanted to play around with the distributed objects system in NeXTSTEP, so he added the ability to allow multiple people who were running DoomEd to edit the same level. I could see him drawing lines and placing objects on my screen from his computer. Then, I’d add to his room by making a hallway, and so on.
For multiplayer, Carmack’s plan was to explore peer-to-peer networking. It was the “quick and dirty” solution instead of a client-server model. Instead of one central computer controlling and monitoring all the action between two to four players, each computer would run the game and sync up with the others. Basically, the computers send each other updates at high speed over the local network. The speed of Carmack’s network programming progress was remarkable. He had some excellent books on networking, and fortunately, those books were clearly written and explained the process of using IPX* well. In a few hours, he was communicating between two computers, getting the IPX protocol running so he could send information packets to each computer. I’d worked with him for three years and was used to seeing incredible things on his screen, but this was awe inspiring, even for him. In a matter of hours, he got two PCs talking to each other through a command-line-based tool, which proved he could send information across the network. It was the foundation needed to make the game network-capable. It was great for two players, and good for four, so we capped it at that. We were still on track to deliver on our promise of the most revolutionary game in history before the end of the year.
Carmack called me into his office to tell me he had it working. Both PCs in his office had the game open, and they were syncing up with two characters facing one another. On one PC, Carmack veered his character to the right. On the other monitor, that same character, appearing in third person, moved to the left. It was working!
“Oh my God!” I yelled, throwing in some other choice words to convey my amazement. “That is fucking incredible.”
When I’d first truly visualized the multiplayer experience, I was building E1M7. I was playing the game and imagined seeing two other players firing rockets at each other. At the time, I thought, “This is going to be astonishing. There is nothing like this. This is going to be the most amazing game planet Earth has ever seen.” Now, the moment had finally arrived.
I rushed to my computer and opened the game, connecting to Carmack’s computer.
When his character appeared on screen, I blasted him out of existence, screaming with delight as I knocked “John” out of the game with a loud, booming, bloody rocket blast. It was beyond anything I had ever experienced before and even better than I imagined it could be.
It was the future, and it was on my screen.
“This is fucking awesome!” I yelled. “This is the greatest thing ever!”
I wasn’t kidding. This was the realization of everything we put into the design months earlier. I knew DOOM would be the most revolutionary game in history, but now, it was also the most fun, all-consuming game in history. Now that all the key elements of our original design were in place, it was obvious. DOOM blew away every other game I’d ever played. From that moment on, if I wasn’t playing DOOM or working on DOOM, I was thinking about DOOM.
Kevin, Adrian, and Jay began running the game in multiplayer mode, too, competing to blow away monsters and each other. They were yelling just as much as I did, cheering every execution, groaning when they were killed and had to respawn. I watched them play. I saw the tension in their bodies as they navigated the dark, detailed world we’d created. They were hunters and targets, engaged in a kill-or-be-killed battle, not just with monsters, but with other, real people. Players were competing in real time with other people in a battle to survive. I thought of boxing or an extreme wrestling match, where you go in a cage to fight. This was much more violent, more deadly. It was all simulated, of course, but in the moment, it felt immediate. It was a new gaming experience, and I searched for a way to describe it.
“This is deathmatch,” I said. The team latched onto the name. It instantly articulated the sinister, survival vibe at the heart of DOOM.
In mid-November, we buckled down, getting in the “closing zone,” where you begin finalizing all areas of the game one by one. Now that Carmack had multiplayer networking figured out, we needed to fine-tune the gameplay and functionality, delivering two multiplayer modes—one in which players work together to kill monsters and demons, and the other where players try to kill each other (usually without monsters around). The first mode was called co-op, short for cooperative. The second, of course, was deathmatch.
Another important word needed to be coined. Deathmatch was all about getting the highest kill count in a game to be judged the winner. What would we call each kill? Well, we could call it a kill, but that felt like a less creative solution to me. Why don’t we have our own word? I went to the art room to discuss this with Kevin and Adrian.
“Hey guys, for each kill in a deathmatch we need a word for it that is not ‘kill,’” I said.
Kevin said, “Well, maybe we could use the word ‘frag.’”
“That sounds like a cool word, but what does it mean?” I asked.
“In the Vietnam War,” Kevin explained, “if a sergeant told his fire team to do something horrifically dangerous, instead of agreeing to it, they would throw a fragmentation grenade at the sergeant and call it friendly fire. The explanation was ‘Someone fragged the sarge!’”
“So, in a deathmatch we’re all fragging each other!” I said.
“Exactly.”
And that is how “frag” entered the DOOM lexicon.
The introduction of deathmatch and co-op play profoundly affected the possibility space of gameplay in the levels. Crafting an enjoyable level for single-player mode with lots of tricks and traps was complex enough, but with the addition of multiplayer we had to be aware of other players in the level at the same time, and we had to make sure the single-player-designed level was fun to play in these new modes. Our levels were doing triple duty, and we had little time to test every possible situation, so we needed some simple rules to ensure quality. Since multiplayer gameplay was coming in quickly near the end of development, I had to define all the gameplay rules for co-op and deathmatch. We then had to modify every game map so that all modes worked in all difficulty levels. These are the rules I came up with quickly to help guide level quality:
• Multiplayer Rule 1: A player should not be able to get stuck in an area without the possibility of respawning.
• Multiplayer Rule 2: Multiple players (deathmatch or co-op mode) require more items; place extra health, ammo, and powerups.
• Multiplayer Rule 3: Try to evenly balance weapon locations in deathmatch.
• Multiplayer Rule 4: In deathmatch mode, try to place all the weapons in the level regardless of which level you’re in.
Additionally, we had to make all the final elements for the game: the intermissions and various menus had to be designed, drawn, and coded; the installation files needed to be created, along with the text instruction files, too. We also had to write code to allow gamers to play these multiplayer modes over their modems, since that was the hardware many people had in 1993. Compared to our previous games, the development pace on DOOM had been relatively relaxed, but in November our to-do list was crowded. Fortunately, everything fell into place. The last job for everyone was to stress-test DOOM.
Preparing for release, we knew we needed someone to handle our customer support, so earlier in the year, we’d hired Shawn Green, who quit his job at Apogee to join us. Throughout development, at every new twist and turn, we kept Shawn up to date. He had to know the game inside out to assist gamers should any issues arise. Shawn also helped us by testing the game as it went through production.
I noted earlier that id Software never had a Quality Assurance team to test our releases. For three years, John, Tom, and I doubled as the id QA team. We played our games on our PCs, pounding multiple keys, literally banging on keyboards to see if our assaults could affect the game. On the verge of release, and with more people than ever before in the office, we spent thirty hours playing DOOM in every way we could think of—switching modes, hitting commands—running the game on every level in every game mode we had, using every option we added to the game to see if there were any glitches.
Things were looking good. We decided to run one last “burn-in” test, a classic test for games where the developers turn the game on and let it run overnight. We ran DOOM on every machine in the office. The plan was to let it run for hours to see if anything bad happened. After about two hours of being idle, the game froze on a couple screens. The computers seemed to be okay—if you hit “escape” the menu came up—but the game stopped running.
We hadn’t seen a bug like this during development, but Carmack was on the case. He was thinking and not saying a word, evidently poring over the invisible engine map in his head. Ten minutes passed before he figured it out. He concluded that we were using the timing chip in the PC to track the refresh of the screen and process sound, but we weren’t clearing the timing chip counter when the game started, which was causing the glitch. Ironically, this logic had been part of the engine from day one, so it was surprising we hadn’t noticed it before.
He sat down at his computer, fixed the bug, and made a new build of the game. We put the update on all the machines and held our breath for the next two hours.
Problem solved.
That was the last hurdle. We were ready to launch. That day, December 10, would be DOOM Day.
• • •
Our timing was ironic.
The day before, December 9, 1993, Senator Joe Leiberman, an advocate of writing federal laws to censor game content, was cochairing a Senate hearing on video games. He opened the session describing and decrying scenes in Mortal Kombat when “blood splatters from contestants’ heads” and for offering a choice of murder methods ranging “from ripping the heart out to pulling a head off an opponent.” He also mis-described the object of Night Trap, a game set in a sorority house, as keeping “hooded men from hanging the young women from a hook or drilling their necks with a tool designed to drain their blood.” Players were actually meant to save the women. The hearings were a big deal. Howard Lincoln, then vice president of Nintendo of America was there, as was Bill White, vice president of Sega of America.
For the members of the Senate committee, video games had hit bottom in terms of depicting graphic violence. They hadn’t seen anything yet. The timing could not have been better. Or worse, depending on your viewpoint.
As news of the hearings broke across the United States, we were too busy finalizing DOOM to even notice.
* We hadn’t figured out how to license engines in perpetuity, and we didn’t copy protect our source. If anyone used our engine without a license, we would be able to tell because the tech was unique.
† Discussing the matter with Scott Miller recently, he was upset and frustrated to hear about the thirty-minute hold time because that was clearly not the experience he wanted anyone to have. He felt it was a rare case and that Apogee was otherwise effective and efficient at taking orders, processing them overnight, and shipping them the following day.
* Robin is not their real name. I’d rather not say who this is, and you’ll find out why later.
* “Lightside” refers to the light side of the moon.
† In this instance, “they” refers to demons.
* Beta testers were disctinctly different from in-house QA, and mostly used to provide periodic feedback on the overall feel of the game.
† This room ended up being in E1M2 (Episode 1, Map 2). The long elevator ride near the end of the level brings players into it.
* The level Sandy started making during his interview became E2M6 and has my favorite Bobby Prince song of the original trilogy in it, “Sinister.”
* IPX is an acronym for Internetwork Packet Exchange. In sum, it is a way in which computers can talk to one another.