On December 10, 1993, DOOM was on the verge of release and everything in the world of games was about to change. It had been an intense eleven months, and we had achieved everything we set out to accomplish in our initial press release. We were completely exhausted, and Sandy was sleeping under his desk. We had been up and working for thirty straight hours to get DOOM to this point.
We planned to upload the shareware version of DOOM in the afternoon to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s FTP site. We wanted it out on the internet first, and then on smaller BBSes second. Unfortunately, there was a glitch.
We probably should have thought about it ahead of time, but this was all new territory for us. Interest in DOOM had been building, but none of us grokked that DOOM was set to become “a pop-culture phenomenon.” One hint was that fans found our unlisted number and called the office to ask questions:
“When are you going to upload the game?”
“Where’s DOOM?”
“Release it already, man!”
Another indicator was that we started seeing posts on bulletin boards talking about DOOM in anticipation of its release. On Usenet, someone created the alt.games.doom newsgroup. It was the birth of the DOOM community, a community that is still going strong to this day. In the upload directory at University of Wisconsin-Madison, people even created joke files to send us a message with file names like “when.is.doom.coming.out” and “we.want.doom.now.”
Back in our office, Jay Wilbur had the shareware “doom1_0.zip” file ready to go. Around 2 p.m., he signed on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison FTP, issued the FTP upload command, and waited for the file to upload. Cheers came from Jay’s office! We were done! DOOM was unleashed!
And then nothing happened.
The expectant fans had created a logjam on the university’s site, which had a capacity of 250 people. He only thought he uploaded the file, but the server was locked up. Imagine a massive, snarled traffic jam around a concert venue that is so congested, it keeps the headline band from reaching the arena. That was what was happening online. id Software’s DOOM was the headliner, but its file couldn’t get through.
Jay called his contact at the university, the perfectly named computer whiz David Datta, and explained the issue. David said he would increase the capacity of users and told Jay to stay on the phone so that he could start his upload at the precise moment the new user spots opened up.
David did what he needed to do behind the scenes. “Now!” he told Jay.
But that didn’t work, either. Eager fans filled the queue in the literal second between David yelling “Now!” and Jay issuing the upload command. We’d just added to the logjam. People waiting for the download were preventing the upload!
Eventually, Jay went on the site’s chat channel and posted to the fans who were hanging out. He explained that unless everyone left the FTP site, DOOM couldn’t be uploaded. “Either I kick you off, and I get this done, or it doesn’t get done at all.” The fans took the hint, and Jay initiated the upload.
Once the DOOM file was successfully uploaded, there was still trouble. The site crashed twice from all the traffic as thousands swarmed to download DOOM.
But the launch was on.
And then, for real, everything changed.
We felt DOOM was the best game we had ever played. We put everything we had into it, and we hoped fans would feel the same way. Even with those expectations, the success of DOOM surprised us. DOOM was an unqualified smash. Critics and reviewers loved it, and so did gamers. Our new distribution arm received $50,000 in orders every single day. That was an inconceivable amount of cash. We unseated Myst, the game that had ended Wolfenstein 3-D’s year-long run, on the Usenet list of Top 100 Games in the World. id Software ruled the gaming world. I was on cloud nine.
A few days after the release, I came back to earth. Jay had hired a Dallas fulfillment company called Digital Magnetics to ship our game to customers with the clear understanding they would do so in time for Christmas. With the surge of orders, we figured it wise to check on this new business wing. When Jay, Shawn, and I arrived at their offices around 5 p.m. Friday, December 14, most everyone was gone, but all three of us noticed there were stacks of newly duplicated DOOM disks and paper inserts waiting to be placed inside stacks of DOOM boxes. We expected to see those boxes finished and shrink wrapped, or at least in that process, which was the whole point of hiring Digital Magnetics in the first place.
“Where is everybody?” I said to the manager who let us in. He could sense the concern in my voice. We had counted on them to handle the surge and to get extra help if necessary.
“They worked their shift and went home.”
“This stuff needs to be shipped tomorrow so people can have them in time for Christmas. That’s why we hired you.”
The manager shrugged.
“We need to get this shit done right now,” I said to Jay.
We started packing the boxes at a furious pace for their staff to mail the next morning. I was pissed, but what choice did I have? I was the one who had been banging the drum for distributing the games ourselves. I got my wish and then some, not that moving inventory was new to me; I’d spent months of my life unpacking boxes and shelving groceries at the commissary in Alconbury, England, during my last two years of high school, and, of course, anything was easier than working in Maria’s sweatshop.
That evening, after having packed hundreds of boxes, Jay, Shawn, and I left for our holiday break along with the rest of the id crew. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people downloaded DOOM’s shareware version and the registered DOOM boxes made their way around the world. Players started to post on alt.games.doom and share copies of the first episode with their friends. Game distributors, free to copy the shareware episode at will, did so and sold those copies with our blessing at software stores big and small for $5 or $10 a pop. Since they got to keep all the money, hundreds of distributors and resellers got in on the act. It was big business, too. Even though players could get it free online, in 1993, people were used to purchasing their games at software stores. Modems with good connections were not the norm. With the distributors’ help, DOOM was getting around in a big way.
Due to DOOM, massive changes were in store for the industry and games as a whole. I’ve been asked a thousand times if we anticipated its profound effect. The answer is no, unquestionably no. We couldn’t have, not the full reach of it.
The multiplayer aspect of DOOM transformed games, opening a path that has led to competitive gaming as we know it today. That’s why id is often credited with spawning competitive gaming. However, competitive gaming had been around for a while. The 1980s were incredibly active with arcade tournaments all over the nation. Even I competed in a tournament in 1981 at a local arcade, Video Bob’s, and it was packed full of kids and excitement.
That said, our games did drastically change gameplay and unquestionably influenced competitive gaming. DOOM was used for the first modern computer-based tournaments, giving rise to a fledgling eSports community. With arcade games, the object was always to make your quarter last as long as possible. With Wolfenstein 3-D, I created “par times”—the amount of time we thought it would take players to complete a level. We added the same feature to DOOM, but as I mentioned in the previous chapter, we combined par times with functionality for players to capture keystrokes, which would let them see the game they just played. I thought it would be a cool feature; gamers could relive great moments, like blowing away a rival in a deathmatch, or it might help them learn from previous mistakes, but it never occurred to me that the combination of par times and the ability to save keystrokes and replay gameplay demos would radically reshape gaming by leading to the invention of speedrunning.
Speedrunning, completing a game or level in the fastest amount of time possible, is now a fundamental tenet of gameplay. We take it for granted, but before par times and DOOM’s replay functionality, there was no way to prove that you completed a speedrun in record time. Our replay functionality allowed players that proof by capturing not only the time but replaying the exact means by which they did it. It was a critical tool for speedrunning and competitive gaming. Within two months of DOOM’s launch, a gamer created a speedrunning site for players to upload their demos. As I write in 2022, a Google search result on the query “Speedrun YouTube” reveals more than 10 million results, and Twitch, the live-streaming site for games, averaged 2.93 million concurrent viewers throughout the first quarter of the year, according to Statista. Live-streaming a video game is, in a sense, the opposite of speedrun demos, but I believe there is a connection. The DOOM speedrun demos were an evolutionary forerunner of Twitch; both allowed players to share their gameplay with others for the purposes of showing off, challenging them, or demonstrating how something challenging might be done, whether live or in replay mode. The idea of gaming as a spectator sport still strikes some as bizarre, but as someone who grew up watching other kids play games for hours in arcades, I have the opposite reaction. I see Twitch as a modern-day arcade, a digital re-creation of the experience of watching someone play at a bar, pizzeria, or game room. Like arcades, people gather online for that purpose, whether to play or to watch, and to find new games.
Modding, the ability to edit existing levels or create new ones, transformed players’ ability to interact with and extend their favorite games. One year earlier, our press release had declared DOOM an open game and noted our intent to share information about how modders could take advantage of that. Within two weeks of releasing DOOM, we put the data structure used to build the game’s levels on the internet. Sharing that data made good on our promise. The decision to open our game up to the public was something that John Carmack and I felt strongly about. It was part of our core as programmers; we believed in sharing technology so that players could build their own creations and, ideally, lead to new improvements. We wanted and expected people to build editors, create new levels, make new sound effects, add new wall textures, and design new monsters. In fact, we looked forward to it!
Remember, though, we built the game using NeXTSTEP computers, so sharing our Objective-C-based level editor was useless to 99.9 percent of gamers who played on PCs running DOS.* By sharing the data structure, on the other hand, programmers could figure out how to make their own tools to edit the levels, and that’s just what happened. Within two months, utilities and level editors were being traded in the DOOM community.
The first level editor to be released was called DEU—Doom Editing Utilities. It wasn’t just a level editor, though. DEU also integrated a WAD editor, which allowed players to add custom graphics to their levels. New community-created BSP (binary space partition) programs were next; they compiled maps for DOOM so it could run them.† More utilities to edit WAD files were released, and one, DeHackEd, allowed players to modify the hard-coded values in the engine for everything from bullet damage to rocket firing rate to Cyberdemon health points. Players had the tools in their hands to create their own versions of DOOM.
With the release of so many editors, a flood of player-created levels soon appeared. One of the most impressive early efforts was STARDOOM, a Star Wars–style level with stormtroopers and laser sounds. It was impressive and showed everyone what could be done with WADs. Another impressive level was UACDEAD, which featured some tricky use of the sector format and line segment data to create invisible stairs with candles on them. The level was eerie and darkly atmospheric. These levels surprised and delighted us, and also showed off the potential and extensibility of DOOM.
Our decision to encourage modding created an entirely new paradigm. Fans were able to create DOOM mashups, like inserting famous images and sounds into our game. I thought it was hilarious—we had set the stage for fans to make DOOM in “Copyright Infringement.” Although some of the id team objected to our sharing of our information, there was another selling point to the move: It was a marketing tool on several levels. First, players shared their work, which built awareness (nobody said “viral” back then). Also, no other game did this, so the move showed us as we really were—hard-core gamers and technologists who cared about game creation and the sharing of technology more than we cared about nickel and diming gamers to death. Today, lots of major games allow modding; it’s a cheap way to provide added value to fans, extends the life of the game, and it’s a viral marketing tool for any game brand.
What really set DOOM apart, however, was deathmatch. I imagined players all over the world reacting as I had initially reacted. That incredible moment—that first jaw-dropping second where I witnessed someone else controlling a character on a screen, and I blew them away—has never left me. It was such a monumental leap forward. Playing a game against a computer is challenging, provided the AI is good. Playing a game against another human is the apex, and the world was seeing it for the first time. It was an addictive, visceral thrill. No wonder sales were through the roof. Deathmatch added an X factor that made competition spellbinding in a way that other games couldn’t rival.
Deathmatch was also the ingredient that created a perfect storm that the media couldn’t resist. A revolutionary game was making millions and turning the entire industry upside down, and the tiny company behind the game was filled with long-haired guys obsessed with D&D, heavy metal and fast cars. What could be better? When the media came calling—and they called every day—we weren’t exactly prepared for it. We had no PR or marketing agency. So I became the talking head of id Software by process of elimination. It wasn’t a role I jumped into. Carmack had no interest in talking to the media and wasn’t comfortable with that role. Adrian and Kevin were art guys, so they couldn’t really speak about the engine or the game design, both of which required a degree of expertise. Jay was comfortable with the media and could talk about business and numbers, but not the engine and game design. So, many of the interviews fell to me—the only person on the team who could discuss all of it.
That said, thanks to “Programmer Nuance Deficit Disorder,” when an interviewer asked me if I expected DOOM to be a smash, I answered directly, “Yes, of course.”
I never stopped to think how that might sound or how a writer might hear my words. I was just stating facts. I mean, it was true. We intended to create the greatest game we had ever played and released a press release eleven months before stating exactly that. We expected DOOM to be huge because our previous games were popular and we knew this was a much more awesome game. It never occurred to me to say something more measured, like, “Well, we hoped this would be the case, and we’re glad it has resonated with gamers.” All of this, plus my long black hair, my unabashed passion for gaming, and my well-known love of metal and fast cars rolled into one and resulted in some magazines calling me gaming’s first rock star. I still laugh when I think about this—the notion of a programmer being called a rock star. I unintentionally fueled this image by playing DOOM deathmatches with an unreserved intensity.
Prior to launch, we played a lot because, as any game designer will tell you, play is essential. We refer to it as “eating our own dog food.” Deathmatch was one of the last things we added before launching the game. We didn’t have much time to refine play and explore multiplayer, so we played by necessity, and that play resulted in better levels, better co-op, better deathmatch, and, ultimately, the game players held in their hands. The quality of that experience didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we put a lot of hours into making sure it felt great. This process isn’t just true of DOOM, it’s true of all great games. After release? I played for the same reasons the rest of the world did. It was thrilling, challenging, and addictive. Far from being mindless self-indulgence, though, all that play factored into the design of our future games.
There were plenty of other “firsts” and breakthroughs for DOOM. Its use of 3D set a new standard for games that everyone had to match. Most games became 3D post-DOOM. It spearheaded a tidal wave of similar games, which the industry referred to as simply “DOOM clones.” At that point, the genre didn’t even have a name. Within a short amount of time, however, the first-person shooter, or FPS, became the dominant genre in the industry. Thirty years later, the biggest selling, most highly regarded games are still FPSs, including the Call of Duty, Halo, Half-Life, Battlefield, Titanfall, Borderlands, Destiny, and Far Cry series as well as titles like Overwatch, Valorant, and PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds). Of course, the Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake (more on that later) series continue, as well. Surprisingly, first-person shooters still use most of the original keyboard control scheme I designed for Wolfenstein 3-D.
Carmack’s implementation of Bruce Naylor’s BSP algorithm to speed up culling and rendering affected the programming of 3D games for decades. It was such an elegant solution to the problem of determining what should be drawn on the screen that it was the best choice for most games for many years. The use of diminished lighting gave the DOOM engine an automatic spookiness, turning light into darkness as it recedes into the distance. As a level designer, it made my job easier, made the game look more realistic, and made the player nervous.
DOOM’s distribution model—free to play (F2P)—has become the most popular video game business and marketing model of our times. We can’t claim to have invented F2P, which evolved out of shareware, but DOOM showed just how powerful a tool it was for video games, particularly when integrated with our innovative physical distribution approach. The predominant distribution model was rooted in selling completed boxed games in stores. The id Software model relied on making an ass-kicking, fun game and providing two ways for players to get it: online or at a software store. Remember, in 1993 most people did not have the internet, and if they did, it was often slow and costly. They were used to going to the local computer store for software. By giving any software distributor the ability to sell the physical shareware version of the game, physical copies were distributed worldwide at no cost to us. If they were willing to pay for the packaging and the disks, they got to keep all the profit. The upside for us was free physical distribution for our shareware, and of course some percentage of those people ended up ordering the full registered version from us.
Because DOOM was one of the best games around, and the shareware version was free and legal to copy, all retail-only game publishers felt the pressure—they now needed to create demo versions of their games to entice players, too. Even game magazines got in on the act, distributing cover disks in the mid-1990s. DOOM has also become the de facto litmus test for all new tech. “Does it run DOOM?” has its own website, and as of this writing, DOOM does indeed run on everything from a pregnancy test to a piano.
Of course, DOOM was also a target for others immediately after its release. We found that out when a lawyer from Data East in Japan contacted us and told us that we were infringing on their trademark. As any dutiful company would, they filed trademarks for every game they created, and during the time Gamer’s Edge was starting up, they released an arcade game named Gate of Doom. They claimed that DOOM infringed on their trademark.
Jay immediately flew to Japan to try to work out a deal. He said the negotiations took about five minutes. They all sat down around the Data East conference table and their lawyer demanded $1 million. Jay countered with $250,000. They countered with $500,000, and Jay said, “It’s a deal.” Case closed. Jay flew back, happy we didn’t have to pay more. We felt like he might have been able to lower the price a little more, but the game was making so much money that we didn’t press the issue. We avoided the risks and costs associated with a protracted trademark battle.
As much as DOOM changed the industry, it changed our fortunes, too. Jay told us that id was on track to easily make a million dollars in DOOM sales in the first month, so we immediately met and gave ourselves another raise, boosting our salaries to $100,000 a year. We also began discussing awarding ourselves bonuses. A collective car-buying binge ensued. Adrian scored a Dodge Viper, Kevin got a Corvette, and Carmack told me he was eyeing a new purchase, too.
“You should come with me to the Ferrari dealership. There’s a red Testarossa I’m thinking of buying.”
I didn’t need to be asked twice.
“Oh my god,” I said, arriving at the lot. My eyes were fixed on the Ferrari, a red, low-slung masterpiece, barely three-and-half feet high, with side strakes, and embedded headlights that literally rose out of the car. It was stunning.
“That is beautiful.”
“I’m going to get it.”
“I want one, too—but in yellow.”
Unfortunately, the dealership didn’t have a yellow Ferrari in stock. So we left with John’s used $100,000 purchase and took it straight to Bob Norwood’s automotive shop. Bob had become a trusted associate, souping up John’s previous wheels, and John wanted him to outfit the new engine with twin turbos. I asked Bob to keep an eye out for a yellow version of the car. Within two weeks, he had one, a 1991 with 5,000 miles on it. It was in perfect shape, and the owner, who was asking $107,500, had installed stealth radar and laser detectors to help make it speeding-ticket-proof.
I needed to buy this car. There was, however, one slight hitch. I might have been making a hundred grand a year, but I couldn’t get a loan if my life depended on it. I’d declared bankruptcy after cluelessly rolling up debts during my first marriage. Renting furniture, maxing out my credit card, leaving a car in storage—you name it, young, eternal optimist and credit risk John Romero did it. In 1989, with collection agencies tying up the Softdisk office phone trying to shake me down for money I didn’t have, I decided to surrender and declare bankruptcy. At the time, there was no way for me to dig my way out of that debt, and I certainly didn’t foresee my fortunes changing to the degree that they later did.
All of which meant that I needed a big cash infusion to buy my dream Ferrari. I went back to the office, where everyone knew about my credit woes, and said, “That’s it. I want this car. Let’s give ourselves $110,000 bonuses.”
That motion carried immediately. id Software was making more than $50,000 a day.
When it came time to drive the Testarossa away, I was terrified. I had spent my entire life driving used cars with 75,000 miles on them. I sat in the Ferrari, closed the door, and the seat belt whirled into action, traveling on a rail and encircling my body so all I had to do was snap the buckle into place. It was as if I had stepped into the future. Putting the key in the ignition and driving it off the lot was scary. I was absolutely petrified that I would wreck my new machine.
Of course, I got over it, and years later, on an empty Texas highway, I decided to see how fast the car could go. It reached 175 miles per hour on the speedometer. That was scary, too, but in a different way. At that speed, I was worried about ruining me, not the car. If the car hit anything, it would be destroyed—and I’d be dead.
The Testarossa didn’t change me. At least, I don’t think it did, but it changed how the id team rewarded itself. Beth and I moved into a rental house in a suburban neighborhood in Plano. I felt proud to park a $100,000 car in my driveway. As the revenue from DOOM poured in—not to mention Wolfenstein 3-D and Keen—more bonuses followed, and for me, so did more cars. I got Beth a Chevy Tahoe and told her she could get whatever else she wanted. Looking back, there were smarter ways to spend cash than on fast cars, but I only knew what I knew. The concept of investing money for the future wasn’t something I’d encountered before. In my family, having enough money to get to the next payday was the measure of success. I was having fun. We all were.
As far as my family was concerned, my constantly improving financial situation allowed me to do things that once seemed impossible. I bought houses for Kelly, the mother of my boys, and got rehab help and a house for my dad and paid off all his many debts. I got my mother a new car and whatever else she wanted. Various relatives needed help covering college tuition, and I wrote frequent checks. I funded business start-ups for my brother, Ralph, and my aunt Fay. I gave away cars or got them for friends in need. It felt great to provide for the people I loved. That is one of the most wonderful benefits of financial success.
My family was thrilled for me. Interestingly, neither my mom, my stepdad, nor my father had any interest in playing my games. As far as I know, they never played a single one. I give them points for consistency; some generational divides are impossible to bridge. Many years later, though, my mother traveled to Ireland and attended Dublin Comic Con with me and Brenda. There was a DOOM exhibition deathmatch area set up, and I finally got my mom playing DOOM. Against me.
“Stand still so I can shoot you,” she yelled.
And I did. I walked around and let her shoot me until I died. She was delighted, and truth be told, so was I.
* Objective-C is a language unique to NeXTSTEP computers.
† The binary space partition, or BSP, was created by Bruce Naylor at AT&T Labs. It breaks a level into logical pieces that allows for the level to be drawn quickly from wherever the player’s viewpoint is. This is a simplified explanation. Programmers can find a much more detailed analysis as well as Naylor’s original white paper online.