12 ms·

Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat

330 points by WithinReason 5y ago

flatiron 5y ago
Masters of doom goes through these stories in detail. Very good book.
- ydnaclementine 5y ago
  I'll never be able to make games while listening to Metallica with my bros in the 90s :(
  - flatiron 5y ago
    Quake 1 used to play the music via cdda. I “borrowed” my copy as a teen which did not include that music. My friend at school burned me a cd of Led Zeppelin 1. The summer of me playing quake listening to zeppelin is nostalgia heaven for me.
    - junga 5y ago
      But don't play that data track on your stereo as it might destroy your speakers! I was really afraid of this back in those days.
- kqr 5y ago
  I had a very weird relationship with those games. Technically, I was probably born into a world where they had already revolutionised gaming -- I was a couple years late to watch it unfold personally. On the other hand, I didn't grow up in an extremely well-off household, and our computers were for a long time pretty much dumpster-dive finds. This meant I was always exposed to hardware a few years old, which in turn meant I got to witness the technical revolution in real time, a few years after the cultural Revolution. (In other words, when Doom had taken over the world, I still couldn't play it. But a few years later, I could, and marvelled at what the computer could do.) In another twist of fate, one of my parents strongly disliked that type of entertainment, and once they understood what I was doing, there was a strict ban on (most) violent media. (With very unclear boundaries of what constitutes violence.) So, in effect, I missed the revolution, caught a glimpse of it, and then got cut off from it. Reading Masters of Doom gave me back a chunk of my childhood that I feel was taken from me, in a weird sort of way.
  - gabereiser 5y ago
    You needed that DX turbo boost too, huh? You pretty much sun up my experience as well except I had an older brother that gave me his old PC when he went to college.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Agreed. ID was really a dream team at that time (probably before Romero left). Small team, everyone already bagged multi year gamedev exp before (I think Carmack shipped a few games since 1989 and Romero a lot more from mid 80s); Everyone is passionate so no management overhead; Very disciplined; A dream team.
- eljimmy 5y ago
  I really enjoyed that book and highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't!
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    The book made me dislike everyone involved with id. I'm still not sure if that was the author's intent.
    - chevill 5y ago
      It makes Carmack out to have some sociopathic characteristics and it makes Romero seem like he became lazy due to being famous (A lesson from which he has learned some hard lessons), but why the intense dislike of American McGee, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, Michael Abrash, Sandy Peterson, or any of the others?
aresant 5y ago
If you enjoyed the Romero article there is an informative & belly-achingly funny podcast of Blindboy interviewing John and his spouse Brenda in front of a live audience in Ireland -> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brenda-and-john-romero/id1300577518?i=1000475893421 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brenda-and-john-romero... John is great in that interview, but Brenda almost out shines - she has a really fascinating history and experience in the gaming industry. If you're not far enough down the rabbit hole after listening to the above Brenda does a solo interview on the similarly awesome "Retro Hour" podcast that is a great listen as well -> https://audioboom.com/posts/7797932-brenda-romero-wizardry-sir-tech-the-retro-hour-ep262 https://audioboom.com/posts/7797932-brenda-romero-wizardry-s...
- corysama 5y ago
  And, for something completely different: Brenda's GDC talk about her board game Train is deeply moving. It's a tear-jerker. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train- https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train-
- lenova 5y ago
  Thank you sharing this, I just had a chance to listen to the Blindboy interview, and Brenda's story telling was an absolute joy to listen to.
markus_zhang 5y ago
He has a presentation about the same story but goes into more details. Principles of early ID software IIRC.
walrus01 5y ago
- LosWochosWeek 5y ago
  As a matter of fact - yes you can.
memish 5y ago
"In the last six months of 1991, we started and shipped five games," What was so different about development back then that they were able to do that? That's unheard of today despite better hardware and a lot more tools. And they didn't have stackoverflow.com!
- vinyl7 5y ago
  Programmers like to overengineer everything, so there's a lot of unneeded complexity slowing down development time
- vikingerik 5y ago
  You can do that today, you could ship five Chess or Candy Crush games in six months if you wanted to. It's just a matter of where you set the bar for complexity and effort.
- brink 5y ago
  My thoughts are - 1. Less distractions (no Youtube, social media, etc..) 2. Games were simpler 3. The games produced probably weren't that good
  - awelxtr 5y ago
    Less distractions? They were gamers, they could've been playing games instead of working their asses off internet and social media here are not to blame. They were _really_ driven and passionate
- layer8 5y ago
  Games were simpler, computers were simpler.
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Games had to be smaller projects. The console and home computer hardware at that time put a tight limit on how much code and data you could ship. Filling that up wasn't hard. It was mostly a matter using these resources well. This changed a few years later when CDs came along. Many game devs originally didn't quite know what to do with so much storage space. Then processors also got much faster still and 3D acceleration became a thing. Game dev project scopes exploded accordingly to give you the game industry we have today.
thecrumb 5y ago
I remember waiting for Carmack to update his .plan file and have some other date other than 'when it's ready' LOL.
- sedatk 5y ago
  Finger was the OG Twitter IMHO. Decentralized too :)
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Indeed it was! Also an insider kind of thing. To get info directly from the .plan file, one had to be on the network and generally running a UNIX, or able to build tools on whatever OS... Was really fun to get online early on. I had a shell account, useful for the many times I was using a DOS PC On occassions, I would end up showing people "the Internet" and explaining things like finger, email, USENET were fascinating in what people would ask, or when they wanted to drive. People would often want to print stuff out so they could read it later, like USENET, or talk about it with others. "I was on the Internet with a friend, lookie here..." I did that too and which I had kept a few pages. But yeah. Kind of amazing really. We all would just read John's file, in his home directory, no worries. Crazy to think about today.
blibble 5y ago
keen 7 tech demo mentioned in article (but not linked): https://vimeo.com/148926335 https://vimeo.com/148926335
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Was that music actually in the game playing on a DOS PC, or added separately to the video? If the former, it sure doesn't sound like the usual game music of that time playing on an Adlib or Sound Blaster. Maybe it was using a higher-end sound card of that time, like a Roland MT-32.
  - blibble 5y ago
    afraid not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7qVmKDDVYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7qVmKDDVYM
aksss 5y ago
I was in the habit of getting games via shareware, through one of the common catalogs then - yep, an actual paper catalog of shareware games you could order for price of shipping, or close enough. They were cheap and I was entertained by them - Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Pharoh's Tomb, etc. My friends and I all played some awesome games of the day, but I remember loading up W3D and just being blown away - it really was the first fps I ever played. Many of the other first-person perspective games I had experience with were the D&D games which were largely still-frame, turn-based games like Eye of the Beholder from SSI[0]. Also played Falcon 3.0 over modem, which was super cool; Gunship 2000 where I first started using a hex editor, diff'ing pre-and post-mission save game files via stare-and-compare to understand how to give myself more medals. But W3D was a whole different level, game-wise. I called all my friends and told them, basically, "holy sh*t, you're not going to believe how flipping awesome this is! It's like nothing you've ever seen before, come over. It's better than anything you've ever played." To a man (teen boy) they were all dismissive - like, whatever dude. Until they came over to my house and I loaded it up. I think I got it on a bunch of 3.5" floppies, and quickly handed it out, made copies, etc. I played that game so much I would go to bed, close my eyes, and still be running down the hallways, so burned into my retinas were the graphics. Truly the first game I was completely and unapologetically addicted to. Then some time later a kid at school who wasn't into computers handed me an unopened game box he had gotten as a present from his folks. He didn't care about it, knew I liked computer games, asked me if I wanted it. I had no idea what was in that box, but said sure, why the heck not? The thing was like a black monolith. It was Ultima VII - The Black Gate. It had a cloth world map, a book to translate runes. I pretty much forgot all about Wolfenstein after that, mostly. A friend and I would play it "together" while talking over the landline for hours (local call). Doom was cool, so was Descent, played the heck out of them. Was also the time I started taking programming classes in school, including a semester of Pascal. It was always in the back of my mind that Pharoh's Tomb was programmed in Pascal. It was a fine time to be a young nerdling. :D [0] https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-online/play-eye-of-the-beholder-online/play/# https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-onlin...
- ddingus 5y ago
  Was first for me too. I was amazed and immediately hooked. Managed to cobble together my first 386 machine trading code and CAD / CNC programming work for parts. Had 5 Mb of RAM. Just enough to run a browser and Winsock. Bo sound card. I had an amazing experience on that machine playing W3D: Got whomped on a level, and I forget which one, but the gist of it was having a couple health points, no ammo and ended up in a long, narrow hall, at the dead end. I turned the other way, knife ready, determined to finish the level and proceeded to knife a nice string of baddies with god line speed and precision! It was three or four and I just had to knife them all, right at the end of the hall, poking each of them often enough to keep their shots at bay! Truth is my 386 was a bit pokey, and that gave me just the little edge I needed to take them down and score that ammo! From there, and a couple more quick pop out and shoot kills later, med pack! Home free, gonna make it... This was in the middle of the week, me up super late, tired at work the next day, no regrets. I love how raw, simple, maybe pure is the right word, the game is. Twitchy as hell. Distilled down to the elements needed for fun.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang 5y ago
Another thing I found impressive is how fast Carmack grew in term of technical skills. In 1989 and 1990 he was still programming Apple ][ tile engine games, which are Ultima spinoffs. Not bad but not a new thing either. Starting from 1991 when he joined Softdisk it took him a few months to figure out smooth horizontal scrolling, and in just a bit more than one year, around late 1992 he managed to go from it to a mature ray casting engine, and you can see his evolution from hovertank to wolfenstein. And it took him another year to go from Wolfenstein to shadow caster to Doom. Quake took longer but it was still impressive considering he has to got it before anyone else solved it. I mean this guy learns really fast. It's not only the rendering engine remind you, he had to do a lot of other parts of the engine too.
- twistedpair 5y ago
  Read "Masters of Doom" To solve a new problem space, Carmack would buy a bunch of college text books, then check into a rando motel for a few weeks, and just dissect all the topics and books, until he'd come up with the design of, for instances a new ray tracing engine. Crazy smart, focuses, and talended.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  A lot of the skills were very similar back then, with almost everything just about how to blit 2D data to the screen in the shortest amount of time. At the time period you're talking about communities were starting to appear, certainly on Usenet and BBSes where coding techniques were discussed and traded. There was a huge amount of competition too between coders back then to get more and more out of the limited hardware we had to work with. And you had to code everything yourself from scratch. There was no throwing a bunch of vertices and textures at some hardware and getting back a fully rendered scene. It was a fun era. I know I did the same as Carmack and went from writing 2D platformers to writing Phong-shaded, perspective-corrected texture-mapped worlds in under a year. Everything that Carmack did had been done before, but Carmack made it cool. He had way more vision and imagination than the guys that had done it before.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
Ansil849 5y ago
Here's the path through the Aardwolf Maze that id tech support would fax to callers who asked about it: https://joesiegler.blog/images/aardwolf_maze.jpg https://joesiegler.blog/images/aardwolf_maze.jpg And a great first-person (lol) history of the secret/Easter egg/contest by Joe Siegler: https://joesiegler.blog/2016/08/call-apogee-and-say-aardwolf/ https://joesiegler.blog/2016/08/call-apogee-and-say-aardwolf...
- ddingus 5y ago
  FAX! That's a pretty good looking one, given the time period.
adamredwoods 5y ago
I wonder if any of these are brought up in "Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D"by Fabien Sanglard? https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/
bsimpson 5y ago
When I was a kid, my dad was a member of some club that would send you shareware floppy disks of Mac software every month. The first few levels of Wolfenstein arrived via that club. 30 years later, when I think of a floppy disk, it's probably the one that had Wolfenstein on it.
agrippanux 5y ago
When I was at Zynga, I helped start the publishing dept. One of our first published games was Ravenwood Faire done by Romero and Hall. My primary memories of that engagement are that Tom Hall was one of the nicest people I ever met in gaming, and Romero had the best conditioned hair of anyone on this planet.
mattigames 5y ago
Romero recently put to sell a new level for doom and all funds go to Ukraine relief programs: https://romero.com/shop/p/onehumanity https://romero.com/shop/p/onehumanity
- ddingus 5y ago
  I love that he does this. Nostalgia runs strong in him even after all this time.
bigmadshoe 5y ago
I attended this talk and afterwards was sitting at a table outside focusing on some work when I looked over and noticed Romero was sitting at the table next to me. He was surrounded by fans listening to some stories and asking him for advice. He seemed like a very chill guy, and I thought it was nice that he took the time to chat with everyone.
adastra22 5y ago
> secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat Can someone explain this to me?
- slim 5y ago
  post mortem does not mean post mortem. it's a trendy word in dev circles that means roughly "lessons learned"
  - adastra22 5y ago
    Ok thanks. I assumed there wasn’t candles and a spirit medium involved, but I still didn’t get the word choice.
somedude895 5y ago
I can't wait for this to go up on Youtube. GDC post mortems are amazing, especially the ones on Diablo[0] and Fallout[1]. I've loved Fallout since I was 12 and it really got me into post-apocalypse fiction. I ended up watching and reading all the media that Tim cites in his presentation and discovered some wonderful things like On the Beach (the book by Nevil Shute AND the movie), A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc [0] https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E [1] https://youtu.be/T2OxO-4YLRk https://youtu.be/T2OxO-4YLRk
throwaway7483 5y ago
romero , steve jobs . This is what i fear to take cofounders, the marketing types steal all the credit and try to downplay the techinal cofounder after being successful.

330 points by WithinReason 5y ago

flatiron 5y ago

Masters of doom goes through these stories in detail. Very good book.

ydnaclementine 5y ago
I'll never be able to make games while listening to Metallica with my bros in the 90s :(
- flatiron 5y ago
  Quake 1 used to play the music via cdda. I “borrowed” my copy as a teen which did not include that music. My friend at school burned me a cd of Led Zeppelin 1. The summer of me playing quake listening to zeppelin is nostalgia heaven for me.
  - junga 5y ago
    But don't play that data track on your stereo as it might destroy your speakers! I was really afraid of this back in those days.
kqr 5y ago
I had a very weird relationship with those games. Technically, I was probably born into a world where they had already revolutionised gaming -- I was a couple years late to watch it unfold personally. On the other hand, I didn't grow up in an extremely well-off household, and our computers were for a long time pretty much dumpster-dive finds. This meant I was always exposed to hardware a few years old, which in turn meant I got to witness the technical revolution in real time, a few years after the cultural Revolution. (In other words, when Doom had taken over the world, I still couldn't play it. But a few years later, I could, and marvelled at what the computer could do.) In another twist of fate, one of my parents strongly disliked that type of entertainment, and once they understood what I was doing, there was a strict ban on (most) violent media. (With very unclear boundaries of what constitutes violence.) So, in effect, I missed the revolution, caught a glimpse of it, and then got cut off from it. Reading Masters of Doom gave me back a chunk of my childhood that I feel was taken from me, in a weird sort of way.
- gabereiser 5y ago
  You needed that DX turbo boost too, huh? You pretty much sun up my experience as well except I had an older brother that gave me his old PC when he went to college.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Agreed. ID was really a dream team at that time (probably before Romero left). Small team, everyone already bagged multi year gamedev exp before (I think Carmack shipped a few games since 1989 and Romero a lot more from mid 80s); Everyone is passionate so no management overhead; Very disciplined; A dream team.
eljimmy 5y ago
I really enjoyed that book and highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't!
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  The book made me dislike everyone involved with id. I'm still not sure if that was the author's intent.
  - chevill 5y ago
    It makes Carmack out to have some sociopathic characteristics and it makes Romero seem like he became lazy due to being famous (A lesson from which he has learned some hard lessons), but why the intense dislike of American McGee, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, Michael Abrash, Sandy Peterson, or any of the others?

aresant 5y ago

If you enjoyed the Romero article there is an informative & belly-achingly funny podcast of Blindboy interviewing John and his spouse Brenda in front of a live audience in Ireland -> https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brenda-and-john-romero/id1300577518?i=1000475893421 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brenda-and-john-romero... John is great in that interview, but Brenda almost out shines - she has a really fascinating history and experience in the gaming industry. If you're not far enough down the rabbit hole after listening to the above Brenda does a solo interview on the similarly awesome "Retro Hour" podcast that is a great listen as well -> https://audioboom.com/posts/7797932-brenda-romero-wizardry-sir-tech-the-retro-hour-ep262 https://audioboom.com/posts/7797932-brenda-romero-wizardry-s...

corysama 5y ago
And, for something completely different: Brenda's GDC talk about her board game Train is deeply moving. It's a tear-jerker. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train- https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train-
lenova 5y ago
Thank you sharing this, I just had a chance to listen to the Blindboy interview, and Brenda's story telling was an absolute joy to listen to.

markus_zhang 5y ago

He has a presentation about the same story but goes into more details. Principles of early ID software IIRC.

walrus01 5y ago

LosWochosWeek 5y ago
As a matter of fact - yes you can.

memish 5y ago

"In the last six months of 1991, we started and shipped five games," What was so different about development back then that they were able to do that? That's unheard of today despite better hardware and a lot more tools. And they didn't have stackoverflow.com!

vinyl7 5y ago
Programmers like to overengineer everything, so there's a lot of unneeded complexity slowing down development time
vikingerik 5y ago
You can do that today, you could ship five Chess or Candy Crush games in six months if you wanted to. It's just a matter of where you set the bar for complexity and effort.
brink 5y ago
My thoughts are - 1. Less distractions (no Youtube, social media, etc..) 2. Games were simpler 3. The games produced probably weren't that good
- awelxtr 5y ago
  Less distractions? They were gamers, they could've been playing games instead of working their asses off internet and social media here are not to blame. They were _really_ driven and passionate
layer8 5y ago
Games were simpler, computers were simpler.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Games had to be smaller projects. The console and home computer hardware at that time put a tight limit on how much code and data you could ship. Filling that up wasn't hard. It was mostly a matter using these resources well. This changed a few years later when CDs came along. Many game devs originally didn't quite know what to do with so much storage space. Then processors also got much faster still and 3D acceleration became a thing. Game dev project scopes exploded accordingly to give you the game industry we have today.

thecrumb 5y ago

I remember waiting for Carmack to update his .plan file and have some other date other than 'when it's ready' LOL.

sedatk 5y ago
Finger was the OG Twitter IMHO. Decentralized too :)
- ddingus 5y ago
  Indeed it was! Also an insider kind of thing. To get info directly from the .plan file, one had to be on the network and generally running a UNIX, or able to build tools on whatever OS... Was really fun to get online early on. I had a shell account, useful for the many times I was using a DOS PC On occassions, I would end up showing people "the Internet" and explaining things like finger, email, USENET were fascinating in what people would ask, or when they wanted to drive. People would often want to print stuff out so they could read it later, like USENET, or talk about it with others. "I was on the Internet with a friend, lookie here..." I did that too and which I had kept a few pages. But yeah. Kind of amazing really. We all would just read John's file, in his home directory, no worries. Crazy to think about today.

blibble 5y ago

keen 7 tech demo mentioned in article (but not linked): https://vimeo.com/148926335 https://vimeo.com/148926335

mwcampbell 5y ago
Was that music actually in the game playing on a DOS PC, or added separately to the video? If the former, it sure doesn't sound like the usual game music of that time playing on an Adlib or Sound Blaster. Maybe it was using a higher-end sound card of that time, like a Roland MT-32.
- blibble 5y ago
  afraid not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7qVmKDDVYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7qVmKDDVYM

aksss 5y ago

I was in the habit of getting games via shareware, through one of the common catalogs then - yep, an actual paper catalog of shareware games you could order for price of shipping, or close enough. They were cheap and I was entertained by them - Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Pharoh's Tomb, etc. My friends and I all played some awesome games of the day, but I remember loading up W3D and just being blown away - it really was the first fps I ever played. Many of the other first-person perspective games I had experience with were the D&D games which were largely still-frame, turn-based games like Eye of the Beholder from SSI[0]. Also played Falcon 3.0 over modem, which was super cool; Gunship 2000 where I first started using a hex editor, diff'ing pre-and post-mission save game files via stare-and-compare to understand how to give myself more medals. But W3D was a whole different level, game-wise. I called all my friends and told them, basically, "holy sh*t, you're not going to believe how flipping awesome this is! It's like nothing you've ever seen before, come over. It's better than anything you've ever played." To a man (teen boy) they were all dismissive - like, whatever dude. Until they came over to my house and I loaded it up. I think I got it on a bunch of 3.5" floppies, and quickly handed it out, made copies, etc. I played that game so much I would go to bed, close my eyes, and still be running down the hallways, so burned into my retinas were the graphics. Truly the first game I was completely and unapologetically addicted to. Then some time later a kid at school who wasn't into computers handed me an unopened game box he had gotten as a present from his folks. He didn't care about it, knew I liked computer games, asked me if I wanted it. I had no idea what was in that box, but said sure, why the heck not? The thing was like a black monolith. It was Ultima VII - The Black Gate. It had a cloth world map, a book to translate runes. I pretty much forgot all about Wolfenstein after that, mostly. A friend and I would play it "together" while talking over the landline for hours (local call). Doom was cool, so was Descent, played the heck out of them. Was also the time I started taking programming classes in school, including a semester of Pascal. It was always in the back of my mind that Pharoh's Tomb was programmed in Pascal. It was a fine time to be a young nerdling. :D [0] https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-online/play-eye-of-the-beholder-online/play/# https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-onlin...

ddingus 5y ago
Was first for me too. I was amazed and immediately hooked. Managed to cobble together my first 386 machine trading code and CAD / CNC programming work for parts. Had 5 Mb of RAM. Just enough to run a browser and Winsock. Bo sound card. I had an amazing experience on that machine playing W3D: Got whomped on a level, and I forget which one, but the gist of it was having a couple health points, no ammo and ended up in a long, narrow hall, at the dead end. I turned the other way, knife ready, determined to finish the level and proceeded to knife a nice string of baddies with god line speed and precision! It was three or four and I just had to knife them all, right at the end of the hall, poking each of them often enough to keep their shots at bay! Truth is my 386 was a bit pokey, and that gave me just the little edge I needed to take them down and score that ammo! From there, and a couple more quick pop out and shoot kills later, med pack! Home free, gonna make it... This was in the middle of the week, me up super late, tired at work the next day, no regrets. I love how raw, simple, maybe pure is the right word, the game is. Twitchy as hell. Distilled down to the elements needed for fun.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

markus_zhang 5y ago

Another thing I found impressive is how fast Carmack grew in term of technical skills. In 1989 and 1990 he was still programming Apple ][ tile engine games, which are Ultima spinoffs. Not bad but not a new thing either. Starting from 1991 when he joined Softdisk it took him a few months to figure out smooth horizontal scrolling, and in just a bit more than one year, around late 1992 he managed to go from it to a mature ray casting engine, and you can see his evolution from hovertank to wolfenstein. And it took him another year to go from Wolfenstein to shadow caster to Doom. Quake took longer but it was still impressive considering he has to got it before anyone else solved it. I mean this guy learns really fast. It's not only the rendering engine remind you, he had to do a lot of other parts of the engine too.

twistedpair 5y ago
Read "Masters of Doom" To solve a new problem space, Carmack would buy a bunch of college text books, then check into a rando motel for a few weeks, and just dissect all the topics and books, until he'd come up with the design of, for instances a new ray tracing engine. Crazy smart, focuses, and talended.
kingcharles 5y ago
A lot of the skills were very similar back then, with almost everything just about how to blit 2D data to the screen in the shortest amount of time. At the time period you're talking about communities were starting to appear, certainly on Usenet and BBSes where coding techniques were discussed and traded. There was a huge amount of competition too between coders back then to get more and more out of the limited hardware we had to work with. And you had to code everything yourself from scratch. There was no throwing a bunch of vertices and textures at some hardware and getting back a fully rendered scene. It was a fun era. I know I did the same as Carmack and went from writing 2D platformers to writing Phong-shaded, perspective-corrected texture-mapped worlds in under a year. Everything that Carmack did had been done before, but Carmack made it cool. He had way more vision and imagination than the guys that had done it before.
- markus_zhang 5y ago

Ansil849 5y ago

Here's the path through the Aardwolf Maze that id tech support would fax to callers who asked about it: https://joesiegler.blog/images/aardwolf_maze.jpg https://joesiegler.blog/images/aardwolf_maze.jpg And a great first-person (lol) history of the secret/Easter egg/contest by Joe Siegler: https://joesiegler.blog/2016/08/call-apogee-and-say-aardwolf/ https://joesiegler.blog/2016/08/call-apogee-and-say-aardwolf...

ddingus 5y ago
FAX! That's a pretty good looking one, given the time period.

adamredwoods 5y ago

I wonder if any of these are brought up in "Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D"by Fabien Sanglard? https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/

bsimpson 5y ago

When I was a kid, my dad was a member of some club that would send you shareware floppy disks of Mac software every month. The first few levels of Wolfenstein arrived via that club. 30 years later, when I think of a floppy disk, it's probably the one that had Wolfenstein on it.

agrippanux 5y ago

When I was at Zynga, I helped start the publishing dept. One of our first published games was Ravenwood Faire done by Romero and Hall. My primary memories of that engagement are that Tom Hall was one of the nicest people I ever met in gaming, and Romero had the best conditioned hair of anyone on this planet.

mattigames 5y ago

Romero recently put to sell a new level for doom and all funds go to Ukraine relief programs: https://romero.com/shop/p/onehumanity https://romero.com/shop/p/onehumanity

ddingus 5y ago
I love that he does this. Nostalgia runs strong in him even after all this time.

bigmadshoe 5y ago

I attended this talk and afterwards was sitting at a table outside focusing on some work when I looked over and noticed Romero was sitting at the table next to me. He was surrounded by fans listening to some stories and asking him for advice. He seemed like a very chill guy, and I thought it was nice that he took the time to chat with everyone.

adastra22 5y ago

> secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat Can someone explain this to me?

slim 5y ago
post mortem does not mean post mortem. it's a trendy word in dev circles that means roughly "lessons learned"
- adastra22 5y ago
  Ok thanks. I assumed there wasn’t candles and a spirit medium involved, but I still didn’t get the word choice.

somedude895 5y ago

I can't wait for this to go up on Youtube. GDC post mortems are amazing, especially the ones on Diablo[0] and Fallout[1]. I've loved Fallout since I was 12 and it really got me into post-apocalypse fiction. I ended up watching and reading all the media that Tim cites in his presentation and discovered some wonderful things like On the Beach (the book by Nevil Shute AND the movie), A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc [0] https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E [1] https://youtu.be/T2OxO-4YLRk https://youtu.be/T2OxO-4YLRk

throwaway7483 5y ago

romero , steve jobs . This is what i fear to take cofounders, the marketing types steal all the credit and try to downplay the techinal cofounder after being successful.