DOOM’s Development: A Year of Madness

[Music] hello is this thing on can you guys hear me alright alright thanks for being here I have not given this talk since 2011 so it's been a while I gave this talk at GDC in San Francisco with Tom hall and this is what we called the doom post mortem so it was the first time that we talked about the creation of our game Doom so as you can see doom came out in 1993 just a second here alright so the story of doom has roots in August of 1991 let's see make sure is is there audio on this there's a lot audio in this presentation I'm not sure if it's hooked up we wanted to move its software basically from Freeport Louisiana to somewhere else like anywhere else it was really hot anywhere that was you know not 40 degrees Celsius so Tom Hall went to college in Madison Wisconsin and he offered the city as a suggestion for us to move to so I flew out to Madison with Tom we checked out the city it's pretty cool a really cool place and we just decided that we're gonna move the company there were only four of us so not a big problem but you know by December 1991 we were found dead the snow victims of Wisconsin's insane winters we made a huge mistake good thing that we were working 16-hour days and we stayed inside so during this December John Carmack discovered the next computer by Steve Jobs his post apple company and we he wanted one so he saved up the money that he'd been making it did software until that time and as it was Christmas time then the other three of us decided you know we're gonna go somewhere else that's warm for two weeks of vacation during Christmas you know in John just stayed behind you didn't want to go anywhere so he ordered the computer cash on delivery so John who had no car he had to walk through the snow to the bank to get a cashier's check for $11,000 so he could buy the computer okay so the computer arrived and it was pretty awesome and John learned how to program the computer over the holiday break objective-c and next step were like a total dream compared to Doss we all got when we all got back from our vacation we decided that we were gonna make another trilogy of commander Cain games we'd already made to two trilogies at that point of commander King games and Tom had this song it was this George Lucas vision of three trilogies so you know we had to work on the third one so we had just shipped Keene six and we were starting nineteen seven eight nine this is a screen from the like a prototype of Keene 7 and the trilogy was called the universes toast so it should have been called the commander keen universes toast because we decided that we'd had enough of commander keen and we wanted to explore 3d games some more we just delivered catacomb 3d in November of 1991 and used texture mapping which was a hot new technology this was six months before Ultima Underworld was released we decided that we would make an updated 3d version of the 1981 classic Apple 2 game Castle Wolfenstein we called our game Wolfenstein 3d and it took us four months to ship the Scherer episode and two months to add five more episodes and a handbook and we created the handbook on the next computer so a month after releasing Wolfenstein we were contacted by a Japanese Nintendo game publisher called imaginaire they wanted Wolfenstein on the Super Nintendo since we're about to start developing a prequel to Wolfenstein called spear of destiny we hired a contractor to start working on that Super Nintendo version so then it's November 1992 we ship spear destiny and then we decide that we're gonna make another first-person shooter we thought that Wolfenstein turned out pretty well could actually we could tell that uh-huh although this early date the term FPS didn't even exist we don't know what to call our games other than 3d at that point so we decided to call the new game Doom at this point just a word no logo exists or even an idea of what that logo would look like doom would be our fifth fps the term FPS didn't exist you know the first FPS that we made hovertank one was a solid filled polygon maze catacomb 3d was our first texture mapped 3d game and Wolfenstein 3d it would be our first VGA 256 color fps and doom would be a pretty huge jump in technology beyond that so we moved the company from one bedroom a loft apartment that was in Mesquite Texas to this black cube that was just down the street we we were located on the sixth floor of this building eventually it was suite 666 so he continued to play Dungeons and Dragons as we had for years while writing the doom Bible we needed a new file name suffix so up until that point every game that we had made in DOS had a shortened version of the game's name as the suffix Oh Wolfenstein 3d was w3d so it was like you know wolf you know what IX II but graphics w 3d spear of destiny was s OD but for doom Tom decided on WOD which was short for where's all the data that's all in one giant file that's where it's at so tom was working away on the doom Bible which even back then we didn't call them design documents we just had to come up with a name so we called it he called it the doom Bible the early design doc for Doom was basically completed on November 28th of 1992 so he came up with several characters their names or backgrounds lots of other stuff it's a really it's actually a pretty big book this is one of the pages from the doom Bible describes a preview of what the game will have in it so some of these features were not in the game like cinematics up until this point our games progressed by going from one level to the next you know always reaching the end of a level where the game would then load the next level John Carmack had a more advanced vision of progression one where players could smoothly progress within one huge streaming map not unlike World of Warcraft so in practice as he was writing this doom engine it proved to be very impractical for several reasons so John's new world of a vision of level progression became more traditional so we were back to level by level progression there was just too much other tech in the engine so Tom worked for a month on a really big seamless world and he had to toss it away and get to work on creating new discrete level locations so now it's November 1990 we started getting the enginetech working and the level editor dumat up on the screen Tom Hall pictured here was playing with it he was offering suggestions he was in the big open room that we had and not actually in an office like the rest of us so he just drew lines on the floor with masking tape on Tom's monitor at the top is the word quality in case you were wondering what that was at this point tom was kind of a little unhappy after having to redesign the game to play level by level and this is after you know earlier in the same year 1992 having to you know fight for push walls in Wolfenstein 3d so creatively it was kind of a struggle so unbelievably we issued a press release just as we started working on the game not before we release it just as we're starting to work on it we basically said that doom was going to be have the greatest technology ever in a computer game at the time so you do when you're 25 so this is a list of the features that the game would have the most important being the last line an open game so the month this month in January we wrote a tool called the fuzzy pumper palette shop which took video captured images and palletized them to our custom VGA palette that we had hand created for for doom so I create I continued working on doom ed and things were you know starting to really begin on the game after the holidays like this was the month that we started for real so if February this is Adrian Carmack he's modeling the Baron of Hell based on his sketch that's right in front of him Kevin which was the other artists on the game there were only two kevin created the imp in deluxe paint too on the pc and when clay ended up being a bad idea for animation we turn to a Hollywood monster creator and he made a few models for us so the first one that we needed was the spider mastermind it was made with latex and metal and we needed him for the end boss of Episode three and he could tell that everything moved on him so animation was actually possible we decided that since we're scanning most of our models why wouldn't we scan weapons as well so even though it was Texas we decided to get toy guns from the store as the dennis is safer that way as the I mean we're game developers I'm gonna shoot somebody accidentally as the design of the game was influenced by the movie Evil Dead we decided that you know we wanted a chainsaw on a shotgun in this game so this is the actual chainsaw that Tom Hall brought in his girlfriend had one so he just borrowed it it was called the eager beaver and we kept it in a bowl because it leaked oil Tom actually still has this chainsaw so the shotgun was actually a what's called a Tootsie toy dakota cap gun we got it at Toys R Us which was like around the corner so at the same time that we're trying to figure out what levels would look like yeah you know as we're building the game we're trying to figure out like whatever the levels going to look like this technology can do a lot of stuff so for our entire lives until that point the only kinds of game levels that we'd really seen were 90-degree block walls like Wolfenstein 3d so might magic Ultima wizardry MIDI maze labyrinth way out you name a maze game it had 90-degree walls in it there really weren't any examples of anything else so so it was a struggle trying to come kind of break out of that mindset John Carmack told Tom hey get get some books about military building construction maybe that'll help Tom did that and he got really bored with it as you know they're not very inspiring places to play in so it was kind of burning Tom out this this wall that he had so the first level in Doom was called the hangar and originally it started like this actually it started with this other thing there's four four Marines were playing cards on a crate you'll see it in a second here this is this is like the original UI that we had in the game because we thought we're gonna have an auto map in the corner and everything you know all kinds of stuff like you have this cool helmet on and there's the there's the crate that you would start at but we have we eventually removed all that UI because we want to see more of the game world and we could actually do it at a good speed so here is what Doom looked like on February 4th after one month of work it didn't have any sound there was no sound in it at that point so as evil Unleashed was like a subtitle for the game so you can kind of see just barely moving around I don't know if he can even hear that off of my headphones yeah no I see all right we will have sound in a second okay got it okay now you can hear the music that was treated in the future beyond this prototype barren of hell you can see that we had the UI on top of everything the engine still wasn't as fast is it was going to be but it was it was actually rendering you can see the mouth it even has an orange color of a red color lots of little details that changed over time so it's now March which is our third month of actual game development something kind of random happened one day [Music] [Music] no we're not going to watch movie 20th Century Fox offered us the use of the aliens license so we seriously thought about theming the game around aliens around the game or the movie alien it totally matched a lot of the ideas that we had wanted to put in the game and what we wanted the game to be but then you know there weren't any demons and aliens just alien monsters and that wouldn't really be a new idea so we just scrapped the concept of using the license after talking it over for about 30 minutes so one of the biggest problems obviously was trying to come up with a new way of creating levels you know that did not look like Wolfenstein in fact that became one of the one of the the defining concepts around level design was if it looked like Wolfenstein any room looked like Wolfenstein you have failed so the military bunker style just wasn't cutting it something needed to be done so one day I decided to solve the problem and I created this abstract 3d level design style I used ET 1m2 as my experimentation location so you can see we still had that Hut up there but now I'm putting or putting shadows in that's a wall you don't really ever see in the game because it doesn't look that good but this was the room that this was the entry room but this room right here is the room where actually created the height of the game where kind of felt like like it was kind of cool back then it was really really cool right now it doesn't look so cool but it was awesome back then so that was you know I even brought everybody in the in the room to see this this this piece of the level that I had made and everybody agreed holy crap this is it so this was the beginning of the abstract level design style so then out of nowhere disaster struck all work undo mopped if you remember there was a Super Nintendo version that was supposed to be worked on and we hired somebody but it wasn't done yet we weren't even paying attention to the person who was supposed to be working on it and the publisher was not pleased that the game was not done I mean this was like nine months after so we had to do the port to the Super Nintendo internally ourselves so we had to stop work to stop working on doom and just start working on the Super Nintendo version so we had to we had to actually learn the hardware I mean it's a Super Nintendo it's not a PC so we had to go back to 65 816 assembly language had learned the hardware and then we had to actually code the game do all the graphics for the Super Nintendo and all that stuff and it took us three weeks to do it [Laughter] not too bad I mean we used to make games in two months so three weeks was turbo mode so then work on doom resumed so we're all very you know back in the happy space okay so we're now in April you can't tell this is month by month recreation so while creating a one M to the the fun experimentation lab I actually created a problem for John Carmack surrender er the stairs that I show you there they slowed the code way down because of the way that he was ordering the sector's so John had to find a solution it was basically rehearsing through a sector list which kills things so he found a white paper from a person named Bruce nailer about the Status structure called a binary space partition so as originally designed for backface culling of 3d models but John adapted it for 3d levels it's just basically speed up rendering and this solved the problem with E 1 M 2 and it solved the problem for the entire industry for years so this was a month that we hired done punch hats who was an illustrator and to create the doom logo and to work on the doom box cover we also created our first alpha version that we could send out to our testers we're pretty happy to show some people what we were up to and this is what the alpha version looked like after we've been working on the game for three full months [Music] no das doesn't play this music this was added later still no sound driver's so yeah we were spinning titles around doing some fun 3d tricks we had a just rotating in place in the menu choosing levels you know if this gets out you can all kiss your version of the game goodbye we had Rolie chairs that you could bump into which we're not fun and removed we even had our our rifle had a had a knife on the end of it for a while we took that out we can see how basic it is in just very boxy this was one of the earliest levels in the game you can see that we had really limited in our textures that we had at that point the artists were but going as fast as they could generating textures but they you know we we could only get so much done as fast as fast as possible with six people on the team I think actually was five people so there were five of us working on the game at this point until August as you can see we're kind of using a lot of different textures here cement and in this crazy wall texture a lot of you can tell that Wolfenstein influence is still here because the height of the ceiling is is kind of the Wolfenstein height but then we eventually kind of break out of that but the final level this is e1 m7 and you can tell the fine level looks way better than this but this is only after three months so this version still I believe exists on the net so you can I think you can grab these versions I'm showing from a there's an eID history archive that you can grab these down from and use DOSBox to rent them these things leaked out somehow and there's the exit so we're in May now Greg punch hats dawn punch hats his son he was a you know Hollywood monster model monster maker so after you know we had to clay malls ripped apart you know he basically started started making stuff for us he got several of them done this month our favorite I think was was probably the spider mastermind that was his first one and it was very very articulated and in detailed so this month we put out a pre beta it's how fast we're moving and just another month in a few weeks beyond the last one so almost five months worth of work now you can see we're using black darkness more the previous versions were less scary no kind of bright now we're actually kind of darkening the game you can see like there's a menu that didn't exist in the final version using high color DAC and some other modes so we actually have a menu system in the game now we're putting some options in there definitely there's a bobbing bobbing of the character and we had named the the difficulty levels we have the key cards in there we're experimenting a lot more with light and darkness we decided that the game experience should have a lot of contrast in yeah just disappeared no animations at that point we decided to contrast in the game in a lot of different ways was really good so if we had you know light and dark tall areas in in claustrophobic areas suspenseful exploration and then insane combat and just mixing the entire game up with those three different things would make for something that will kind of felt like a roller coaster so nowadays if you front if you run the game it looks a lot better than this just because we're using you know 4k monitors and and the game has been updated but but back then this was this was pretty cool we can see you know we're discovering that having dark things you know things moving around the dark is actually scary and that was our world map in progress so we'll go through all the levels but but this demo is he's probably showing all of them okay so we finally are Hinda in June halfway through the year Chris Lombardi from computer gaming world he came over to get a sneak peek of the game and he wrote a really great preview article it's the only one written about doom this was the only preview ever about doom and we also realized that we have too many biped monsters in the game and we really need some flying ones so so kind of an oversight by Tom and it kind of drove him further away from the team as he was just like getting upset creatively so it's July and Tom feels kind of isolated and alone he's not inspired anymore feels like kids over here Tom's over there Tom's not happy so that's what happens in July and then in August basically Tom decides to leave it gives our creative director from the beginning of the company so he came up with all the ideas for the games that we had made up until you know probably about Wolfenstein and and so he went over to Apogee who was our publisher before doom and we licensed Wolfenstein to let him make the sequel to Wolfenstein so he's just called it well filleting to at that point and then we decided you know what we don't want other people to make our sequels so we just we told them you can license the engine but not the not the actual IP so we told him we're not going to do that so then John Tom just made Rhys the triad instead which ended up being a really great game and then he started developing a game called prey I don't think you can see that on there okay okay there it is okay so we hired a couple new people to help us finish doom we hired Dave Taylor and then the legendary game designer sandy Peterson who made kala Cthulhu and now we are in September getting close Dave gets to work coding the automat feature in doom Sandy's cranking on making levels he took a lot of Tom Hall's half-finished designs and he finished them with all the tech being made during the year the sound drivers to backseat to the game engine basically the technical hurdle with the sound drivers with the game was now in 32-bit mode and we couldn't just use our own our old 16-bit drivers so we found this a library called the DMX sound library and we included it in Doom so now we can actually get Bobby Princeton in the office and start making music and start making sound effects ASAP so now it's October and we created a press release version of doom at the beginning of October and this is what the press release version looked like so this is with the actual music now sound effects I believe the sound effects came in probably two weeks or so after this this press release so you can see the design is getting a little more polished it feels more like a like an actual game you know AI is moving around we have platforms doors and all kinds of stuff working in Doom everything that you see that moves around in the level that's not a monster was something I programmed so if you're going through lava or you're going through slime and taking damage or you see flickering lights or doors opening or stairs building up or pretty much anything happening in the environment I get to program all that stuff got power-ups and then we have these unholy Bibles I think you can see it down there to the bottom we had a lot of demonic artifacts in the game originally and also the sky didn't look like that when we released the game we thought that having the blackness of space up there even though it was more realistic it just didn't he didn't look that good so we switched out the sky with a with a much better one that was taken from a book that had that was pictures of China really cool pictures of China people actually sourced the every piece of art that we ever liked may have scanned in or anything has been fully sourced so everyone knows where everything came from so now it's actually a game you can tell how long it takes to get a game feeling like a game I mean we're in October now finally after 9 months of development now we have something that actually feels like it's gonna be an adventure still getting stuck on walls that that that part doesn't exist anymore there's several things in this press release version now this is the e 1 M 2 room that I originally created to do the abstract level design style and now it's actually as scary as it should be blinking lights and everything so this is what the game looked like then all right so we're getting close to wrapping up the game you know progress quickened you saw that even in early October we still had pickup items that were useless like demonic daggers demon chests and other unholy items so I decided to get rid of those things because they just made no sense to the Coralie game and earlier on I even removed the concept of having lives in the game lots of games in the past had three lives so now it's November it had to be just about the most insane month of development for doom so what we got done in November was the first IPX multiplayer was created that month the word deathmatch you know in that just that mode of play and co-op play and putting that all in all the levels the final systems are all coded everything we had serial code for modems so the game would work over over modems and then all the maps have been modified to use these brand-new versions of the game that we had just created it was a ton of work and a lot of polish at the very end so the day before doom happy note that before we released doom it just happened to be a really important day in the United States violent video games was a topic hotly debated in Congress so games like Mortal Kombat and night trap are shown as examples of the moral level that games have sunk down to they had no idea so we basically said don't care and we were released doom next day okay so it wasn't quite released there was one final bug the last day we worked 30 hours straight basically getting the game ready for launch so there's this one bug when we left the game running on all of our computers as like a burden test just let the game run some of those computers would lock up like they would just stop working the menu the menu could pop up but the game behind it would just freeze so John Carmack thought about what could possibly be happening like this is insane we're trying to release this game he thought about it and he figured out this problem and then he fixed it and it took like five minutes to fix the game and this was a problem that was in the engine from the first day we started working on it that's how good he is so he did some more testing and the bug was totally gone and we could finally upload the game to the University of Wisconsin's that's their mascot University of Wisconsin's FTP server so we basically begin uploading the game you can hear it we were uploading through modem took a long time and then the server blew up and then the server blew up a second time because there were there were basically too many people on the server everybody knew doom was going to be released and and before we even uploaded it the the maximum number of people that could even download anything on the server was filled and we had to have the the SIS off basically dump everybody off so we could log in to do it again blew up again and then we finally had him give us some more time so then the game finally got uploaded and then it went everywhere it went all over the place that day so after that after Doom was released basically the world changed 3d games were absolutely here to stay shooters would dominate the industry for decades its biggest selling game today that were the biggest selling genre today is our FPS game modding is incredibly popular with many important game franchises that came out of modding such as Call of Duty Team Fortress 2 portal counter-strike and many others multiplayer is a staple of games and free-to-play / shareware is the most popular business model of our times so I like to think those who took the journey with me and made it all possible couldn't have happened without these people at that time and the support of the fans of our games obviously so this was its software at the time [Applause] cool so I think that I'm gonna be doing some QA yeah you have any questions by the way you can email me that that emails Russ thank you so much thank you so much John let's give him another round of applause that was amazing [Music] so we have a bunch of questions for you right so I'm gonna try to get through as many of these as possible alright so first question what is your one one key ingredient you have in all of your successful games she's made them with the team that was very inspired to make the game I think that's probably the number one thing the great nail the the rule the really great games has have a really great team behind them and and people love playing the game or you're making it like if you're not playing the game can't be good so you really need to be playing it and when you have a team that's totally playing a game all the time you know you have a winner awesome a lot of people want to know what do you think about the 2005 movie doing know [Laughter] they're gonna remake it by the way what are you playing in your spare time geez so many games we play a lot well there's a game that we my wife plays drop seven I play drop seven as well not as much as her or as well as she does but we play pretty much everything that comes out we kind of have to stay on top of everything so what rains of Edith Finch is one the one of the newer really cool narrative exploration games fortnight obviously I still play World of Warcraft still play Minecraft and I actually do a lot of doom tournaments like there's a lot of doom tournaments going on all over the place and and I play quake deathmatch in the office every week and we're having a doom tournament in Ireland in July so but yeah we play a lot of I play a lot of a lot of games basically you have to stay on top of everything cool so there's a lot of younger developers in the audience one says I never read D&D and I've not played quake or doom am I too young to become a great game developer no way the games of the future have to be made from these games and these games of the past so yeah everybody everybody needs to learn from you know the games that they're inspired by and it's never too late obviously games are not going to stop being made any time soon yet plenty of time especially if you're young so so yeah fine fine games that you really like and try to make something that's that's that good at least and hopefully better awesome people want to know are there any key lessons that you learned with dr. Tanner and what would you change if you had to do it again Stein Catan is really the the question that's a really interesting question that I answered many times actually with daikatana with actually with doom and with quake having those games be open really created a ton of people that were interested in modding there are a lot of people that became level designers a lot of people started learning how to program by writing quake scripts and so there were a lot there was a lot of talent out there that that I felt was just like myself when I was when I learned like me when I was growing up where I was super driven to make games and I was doing it in my spare time and these people are also doing it in their spare time and I thought that you know if I built a team full of super passionate people that would actually make games at home I would like to have those people on my team and basically see what we can what we can make so the people that I hired for daikatana were all modders they were all people that had been doing this in their spare time and I was the only person that had ever made a game before on my team so it was a lot of teaching that team how to make a game and it took three years to do that and of course there there are some errors in the game you know bugs and stuff because these people were learning how to program even so it was it was a it was an interesting experiment but I think that giving people the chance to do something like that was more important than that game not being the best game ever made amazing ok one last question what is the weirdest device that you have played doom on how about a refrigerator yeah or a printer maybe yeah I think probably you know not a weird device but just like a really old computer like a vic-20 unbelievably people can do that with character sets but yeah that was probably the weirdest one just a really old computer that actually shouldn't be able to do it nowadays you know you can find really fast chips they buried everywhere so so getting them doom running on you know stuff like that isn't as crazy as going back to the old computers and trying to make them do it yeah amazing thank you so much John that was wonderful Oh another question catch John at the break if you can all right oh you want number one version control no version control okay version control guess what didn't happen basically we had floppy disks and we had our hard drives that were making the game on and we had our own disks that had labels that had all kinds of cool art drawn on them so we knew like this is Romero's fortress and this is Tom's you know Tom's disk and in John's disk and the source files that we were working on or the data that we were working on would go onto our disk and when we put it in someone else's computer they would just copy everything over because none of it was going to there was no merging there was no anybody touching anyone elses files so if I'm working on save load I'm no one's touching that I can just overwrite anybody's save load you know file so we just copy everything off the disks over what was in our doom directory and sourcesafe was hey who has a copy of that file on the computer you know if you've ever had to restore a source database for a repo in your scrap in there you know scraping off everybody's hard drives we didn't really have to do that though it was pretty good there's one way to avoid merge conflicts right that's right no more right ok well let's give John a nice big round of applause thank you you

Channel: WeAreDevelopers

Views: 391,036

Rating: 4.9126558 out of 5

Keywords: DOOM, John Romero, Romero Games, programmer, game designer, 3D, game, gaming, gaming industry, programming, developer, conference, congress, Vienna, IT, tech, technology, people, code, future, coding, software, software developer, WeAreDevelopers, WeAreDevs, john romera talk, presentation, keynote, game developer, wad

Id: eBU34NZhW7I

Length: 44min 12sec (2652 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JavaSuck]

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

Spoiler alert: They didn't use version control in 1993.

[u/zerexim]

So how did they monetize Doom? (It was free to play, as he says). EDIT: Apparently only the first level was free, then you had to pay.

[u/corysama]

btw: We aggregate material like this over in r/TheMakingOfGames :)

[u/[deleted]]

John Romero liked a tweet of mine, I should frame it.

[u/higzmage]

Some interesting points:

• The first test build he showed (the Feb 4. Pre-Alpha) doesn't have a protected mode runtime in the directory (the April 2. Alpha has DOS4GW.EXE for this purpose). This made the game a 32-Bit executable instead of 16-Bit, which is why they had to sort out the sound drivers (but gave them enough memory to fit everything in).
• Despite iD turning down the Aliens license, an Aliens Total Conversion was one of the most iconic Doom mods.

[u/ssh33]

Enjoyed the hell out of it, thanks for posting.

[u/AyrA_ch]

Here's more on this game for those that have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4-SVUHQYI

[u/andsens]

That intro animation was sweet!