In a recent appearance on Nightdive Studios’ Deep Dive podcast, Doom designer John Romero talked about the ways id Software casually revolutionized PC gaming in the early ’90s, all on a blistering release schedule where “taking their time” meant cranking out an all-time classic faster than most hero shooters are able to add a new character.
“We had a technology that no one had yet on the PC, that had been sitting there, ready to be taken advantage of,” Romero said of id’s early days and the juice behind Commander Keen, its first game. “The PC shipped in August of 1981, and it’s September of ’90, and in nine years, no one has done what John [Carmack] did in just a few hours at night.”
That particular technology, the beginning of Carmack’s programming legend, was fast-scrolling 2D graphics for platformers. Though such capability is taken for granted today, PC platformers before Keen weren’t able to keep up with the specialized hardware powering console platformers.
Famously, id pitched Nintendo on a port of Super Mario 3, only making Keen after the publisher’s rejection. Romero credited this coup, in part, to Carmack reading programmer and future id employee Michael Abrash’s book, Power Graphics Programming. In 1991 alone, id released three Commander Keen sequels, Wolfenstein precursor Catacomb 3D, and a host of other games.
“Wolfenstein was the first time that we were able to say, ‘We’re gonna take as long as it takes to make a game,'” Said Romero. “Before that, it was always two months. We were making games for two months for like, a year and a half. So finally it’s like, no more time limit, we do it as well as we can, and it took us—to upload the shareware version of Wolfenstein—it took us four months.”
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As for why the team decided to take more time on Wolfenstein 3D, Romero said that, “We knew that we were doing something really special, because, well, for one: We’d never seen anything like it. We boiled the essence of the game down to the speed of the player and the movement, and got rid of everything that stopped the player from doing that. The results spoke for themselves.”
Romero quipped that this cycle was a “luxury” for the four-person team comprising id at the time, but it’s mind boggling when compared to the multi-year development cycles of today. Making games has grown exponentially more complicated in the intervening years, and I don’t want to indulge in insufferable, armchair, “devs these days” finger wagging.
But there’s no way around it: That id team was built different, inventing technical and design solutions for 3D worlds at a breakneck pace in a hothouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, and that’s still an incredible place and time in gaming history to contemplate.
Romero’s interview with Nightdive covered a wide range of topics, including the strange birth of the hunting game genre, and why Romero thinks indies are the future of the industry. Though released afterward, the interview was recorded before Microsoft unceremoniously pulled funding for Romero Games’ triple-A shooter project, though the studio is still looking for a new publisher.
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