MAJOR MAYHEM Developer Capitol Ideas Software Publisher Nibble Magazine Format Apple II Release 1987
DANGEROUS DAVE Developer John Romero Publisher UpTime Disk Monthly Format Apple II, PC Release 1988
WOLFENSTEIN 3D Developer Id Software Publisher Apogee Software Original format PC Release 1992
DOOM Developer/publisher Id Software Original format PC Release 1993
QUAKE Developer Id Software Publisher GT Interactive Original format PC Release 1996
DAIKATANA Developer Ion Storm Publisher Eidos Format PC Release 2000
RED FACTION Developer Monkeystone Games Publisher THQ Wireless Format N-Gage Release 2003
RAVENWOOD FAIR Developer Lolapps Publisher 6waves Format Browser Release 2010
SIGIL Developer/Publisher Romero Games Format PC Release 2019
As you enter one of the final rooms of E1M2, fireballs bombard you from multiple directions. The demons casting them are on raised platforms, obscured by flickering lights, while a swarm of enemies lies waiting in a pit below. After you survive the onslaught and approach a darkened section of the wall, a switch reveals itself, opening up two paths to the exit. This level, Doom's second, was the turning point for John Romero in the development of what would become an era-defining shooter. But the seed of his action gaming heritage was planted over a decade beforehand at an arcade in Tuscon, Arizona.
It was here, at Spanky's, that the young Romero was first exposed to pinball machines and electromechanical games, along with the likes of Atari's Pong. But, as he succinctly puts it, "everything changed with Pac-Man". This early exposure to fast-paced action left an indelible impression, leading to excursions to his local university to code simple games on mainframe computers. "I was 11 years old, so I was sneaking in only during the summer when there were hardly any students and no one would kick me out. I could just sit there and program and learn, and nobody cared," he recalls fondly. "During the school year, I would go to computer stores." It was a self-structured education that saw Romero create dozens of games while still in his teens, and led to his first industry gig with Origin Systems in 1987.
We catch up with Romero ahead of his Wolfenstein 3D post-mortem session at Develop Brighton in July, for a retrospective look at what must be one of gaming's most varied careers, encompassing everything from the genesis of the firstperson shooter genre, social game development, the foundation of multiple legendary studios, and even an unreleased educational MMOG aimed at children.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/1011181108.jpg]
MAJOR MAYHEM
Developer Capitol Ideas Software Publisher Nibble Magazine Format Apple II Release 1987
I knew early on that I needed to learn how to make stuff fast; I needed to know how to code really well to make my games feel good when you played them. Because I was on an Apple II and every dot on the screen had to be put on there manually, to do that fast you have to learn assembly language. I was driven to learn as much as possible to make it go as fast as possible.
I was probably 15 or 16 when my first game got accepted and published in a magazine. That's how I started writing my games for publication. As much BASIC as I could, and then a little bit of assembly, because assembly is not easy to type in.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6906836186.jpg]
That ended up being the magic formula for me to just get all my stuff accepted and published, so I just started writing a bunch of games. Major Mayhem was game number 49. I think I was 18 when I wrote that one. [Making games] was what I was going to do, there's no question. I knew that early on, and that's why I made so many games, because each one of them is some sort of learning experience.
From the very beginning, the publication of the game was going to be in magazine form, printed on the page. I wanted to make sure that it was going to be a good learning tool for programmers, so if people read it, they could understand it. From the comments that I put in there, they would learn what that code does.
I only went to college for two semesters total. I think I had already done the first semester at Utah Tech, and I was in the wrong major. I was taking accounting classes on a data processing course - which was not computer science. The counsellor told me the wrong thing to go into, and I had already basically wasted a semester, and so I was like, forget it. I had a full-time job, so when I came home from work, that's when I was programming this. It probably took me two weeks, maximum.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6886865866.jpg]
DANGEROUS DAVE
Developer John Romero Publisher UpTime Disk Monthly Format Apple II, PC Release 1988.
I had left Origin and started at my second game company, called Inside Out Software. I was porting Might And Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 - that's what I was doing during the day, and then at night, I wrote Dangerous Dave. Then, I worked on another game after I got Might And Magic II to a specific level. At a certain time, February of '89 I'd say, the contract was cancelled on the game that I was on. I volunteered to leave the company because we just didn't have the income to support me with all the other people that were coming in. I knew that that was a signal that 8bit was dying.
[UpTime magazine Apple II editor] Jay Wilbur was going to interview at a company called Softdisk in Louisiana. I was like: 'Louisiana - it's nice and warm down there, that would be cool for all of us to just hang out. So I called Softdisk, got an interview, came down, got hired, and then we all moved in March of '89 to Shreveport. I worked for a little over a year doing PC stuff there, fully learning everything about assembly language, all that stuff.
I hired John Carmack, because he was a submitter to Softdisk, and then Adrian Carmack, who was an intern in the art department at that time for, like, five bucks an hour. They needed two games to go on a disk so they could put that with the Big Blue Disk, the PC monthly that had 50,000 subscribers. They told us we had to do two games in one month, so John and I basically said, "We can't invent something new - we don't have time" John had just finished making a game called Catacomb, and I had that Dangerous Dave game I made two years earlier. So that was my decision, to port the game to the PC.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/1656563363.jpg]
WOLFENSTEIN 3D
Developer Id Software Publisher Apogee Software Format PC Release 1992
When John and [Id co-founder Tom Hall] did the Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement demo, they used the character from that exact DOS game that I had just made. That is what led to Id Software: as soon as I saw [the demo], we had to make that company. We founded the company officially, going to work full-time every day, on February 1 of '91. That year, we made ten games. When we were done with 1991, we started working on a Commander Keen prototype for the next set, and decided, 'You know what? We're done with Keen.
We'd already made two 3D games, with Hovertank One and Catacomb 3D. I knew that the next game, if we used 3D, could be even better. I came up with the idea of taking Castle Wolfenstein from 1981 and putting that in 3D. There was only four of us. All of them were like immediately, "Oh my God, yes", because they're massive Wolfenstein fans as well. We spent four months making the shareware version of the game.
When we started making it, we were trying to copy the things that you did in Wolfenstein in 3D. As we started putting those things in, it started slowing you down, because you're stopping, searching, and dragging bodies. It was like: this game is not about that. That was the [original] idea, but the speed of this game is more important than dragging around bodies and [looking at their shit. Mowing down the enemy and running fast was the killer hook of this game.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6568666835.jpg]
The game design was simple, but we were doing something brand new. Gameplay literacy-wise, it was the very first high-speed FPS, so people had to get used to it. [We had to] not overcomplicate it with a lot of different key commands: navigating and not getting sick in that viewpoint was important.
When we actually finished fully with Wolfenstein, by the middle of June, we went on vacation to Disney World. When we were in the hot tub, in the hot tub over from us some guys were like: "Hey, you guys are talking about Wolfenstein - are you the guys that made it?" We were like, "Yeah"; and it was like: "Holy shit!" [The atmosphere at Id] was nuts. There were only six of us at the time: Jay [Wilbur] was our biz guy, and everyone else was doing development. Everybody was in a really great mood: when Wolfenstein came out, we gave ourselves a raise, and then by the end of the summer we gave ourselves another raise. We didn't know that we were starting a genre. We just wanted to make something that we thought was fun.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/7856256185.jpg]
DOOM
Developer/Publisher Id Software Original format PC Release 1993.
When we started making Doom, we basically said, "This has to be the best game that we can imagine playing - ever" It was the only time we ever did that for any of our games. [Level design] was one of the most difficult parts, just trying to define a style. Here's an engine that has a really great data structure that we can do anything with, but we're not doing anything with it. [We were] just making levels that looked like Wolfenstein: they have better textures, but we're still making 90-degree walls. It was around March or April, the levels just weren't looking good, and we [couldn't] waste any more time, so I just basically said, "I'm going to solve this problem we have to have a really cool look to this game".
I was working on E1M2 as a test level, and I just envisioned: what would look cool that I haven't seen in a game? It was just trying to do something that wasn't just this rigid 90-degree wall thing, and had height and contrast: the room was dark, but the areas where the monsters were was light. So I did that room, and I was like: this is it. If we could constantly replicate that kind of feeling, the whole game would just be overloaded coolness.
People hadn't played anything highspeed multiplayer, ever. It didn't exist. People played stuff over the modem and it was turn-based, it was slow. When we made Doom and we made it on a modem and on LAN, that's when multiplayer really took off. Like, massively took off. That's when all the LAN cards were sold; networking took off [in 1994] and the world transitioned to networked multiplayer gaming based off of Doom.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/5225356858.jpg]
QUAKE
Developer Id Software Publisher GT Interactive Original format PC Release 1996.
Originally, the idea for Quake was that he has this huge hammer and he just smashes things with it, basically like Thor - he could throw it, and it would come back. It was more of a hand-to-hand idea. But before we could make it, we had to make an engine, and it took a whole year to get that engine to a point where we could actually use it to make a game. Everybody was creating levels. I was making [level editor tool] QuakeEd, we were making master levels for Doom II, The Ultimate Doom all these things in the meantime waiting for this to happen.
We were making levels for a medieval game, but we were not at the point where we could actually get code in there to see: is this going to work? Is this hammer going to be cool? We needed the tech to actually be there. But by the time we got to the point where We could do that, everybody was really tired after working for a whole year on just making levels, levels and levels that weren't going anywhere yet.
I wanted to innovate in design. I was not [thinking] 'this is an FPS engine, I was like 'this is a 3D engine what can we do with full 3D? A third-person game could have happened; we could've done all kinds of things. When the decision was made in November of '95 to just make it an FPS, that to me was kind of it. I'm all about pushing design, and if this company is just going to be sitting there pushing tech only, then I'm out.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles...
DANGEROUS DAVE Developer John Romero Publisher UpTime Disk Monthly Format Apple II, PC Release 1988
WOLFENSTEIN 3D Developer Id Software Publisher Apogee Software Original format PC Release 1992
DOOM Developer/publisher Id Software Original format PC Release 1993
QUAKE Developer Id Software Publisher GT Interactive Original format PC Release 1996
DAIKATANA Developer Ion Storm Publisher Eidos Format PC Release 2000
RED FACTION Developer Monkeystone Games Publisher THQ Wireless Format N-Gage Release 2003
RAVENWOOD FAIR Developer Lolapps Publisher 6waves Format Browser Release 2010
SIGIL Developer/Publisher Romero Games Format PC Release 2019
As you enter one of the final rooms of E1M2, fireballs bombard you from multiple directions. The demons casting them are on raised platforms, obscured by flickering lights, while a swarm of enemies lies waiting in a pit below. After you survive the onslaught and approach a darkened section of the wall, a switch reveals itself, opening up two paths to the exit. This level, Doom's second, was the turning point for John Romero in the development of what would become an era-defining shooter. But the seed of his action gaming heritage was planted over a decade beforehand at an arcade in Tuscon, Arizona.
It was here, at Spanky's, that the young Romero was first exposed to pinball machines and electromechanical games, along with the likes of Atari's Pong. But, as he succinctly puts it, "everything changed with Pac-Man". This early exposure to fast-paced action left an indelible impression, leading to excursions to his local university to code simple games on mainframe computers. "I was 11 years old, so I was sneaking in only during the summer when there were hardly any students and no one would kick me out. I could just sit there and program and learn, and nobody cared," he recalls fondly. "During the school year, I would go to computer stores." It was a self-structured education that saw Romero create dozens of games while still in his teens, and led to his first industry gig with Origin Systems in 1987.
We catch up with Romero ahead of his Wolfenstein 3D post-mortem session at Develop Brighton in July, for a retrospective look at what must be one of gaming's most varied careers, encompassing everything from the genesis of the firstperson shooter genre, social game development, the foundation of multiple legendary studios, and even an unreleased educational MMOG aimed at children.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/1011181108.jpg]
MAJOR MAYHEM
Developer Capitol Ideas Software Publisher Nibble Magazine Format Apple II Release 1987
I knew early on that I needed to learn how to make stuff fast; I needed to know how to code really well to make my games feel good when you played them. Because I was on an Apple II and every dot on the screen had to be put on there manually, to do that fast you have to learn assembly language. I was driven to learn as much as possible to make it go as fast as possible.
I was probably 15 or 16 when my first game got accepted and published in a magazine. That's how I started writing my games for publication. As much BASIC as I could, and then a little bit of assembly, because assembly is not easy to type in.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6906836186.jpg]
That ended up being the magic formula for me to just get all my stuff accepted and published, so I just started writing a bunch of games. Major Mayhem was game number 49. I think I was 18 when I wrote that one. [Making games] was what I was going to do, there's no question. I knew that early on, and that's why I made so many games, because each one of them is some sort of learning experience.
From the very beginning, the publication of the game was going to be in magazine form, printed on the page. I wanted to make sure that it was going to be a good learning tool for programmers, so if people read it, they could understand it. From the comments that I put in there, they would learn what that code does.
I only went to college for two semesters total. I think I had already done the first semester at Utah Tech, and I was in the wrong major. I was taking accounting classes on a data processing course - which was not computer science. The counsellor told me the wrong thing to go into, and I had already basically wasted a semester, and so I was like, forget it. I had a full-time job, so when I came home from work, that's when I was programming this. It probably took me two weeks, maximum.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6886865866.jpg]
DANGEROUS DAVE
Developer John Romero Publisher UpTime Disk Monthly Format Apple II, PC Release 1988.
I had left Origin and started at my second game company, called Inside Out Software. I was porting Might And Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 - that's what I was doing during the day, and then at night, I wrote Dangerous Dave. Then, I worked on another game after I got Might And Magic II to a specific level. At a certain time, February of '89 I'd say, the contract was cancelled on the game that I was on. I volunteered to leave the company because we just didn't have the income to support me with all the other people that were coming in. I knew that that was a signal that 8bit was dying.
[UpTime magazine Apple II editor] Jay Wilbur was going to interview at a company called Softdisk in Louisiana. I was like: 'Louisiana - it's nice and warm down there, that would be cool for all of us to just hang out. So I called Softdisk, got an interview, came down, got hired, and then we all moved in March of '89 to Shreveport. I worked for a little over a year doing PC stuff there, fully learning everything about assembly language, all that stuff.
I hired John Carmack, because he was a submitter to Softdisk, and then Adrian Carmack, who was an intern in the art department at that time for, like, five bucks an hour. They needed two games to go on a disk so they could put that with the Big Blue Disk, the PC monthly that had 50,000 subscribers. They told us we had to do two games in one month, so John and I basically said, "We can't invent something new - we don't have time" John had just finished making a game called Catacomb, and I had that Dangerous Dave game I made two years earlier. So that was my decision, to port the game to the PC.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/1656563363.jpg]
WOLFENSTEIN 3D
Developer Id Software Publisher Apogee Software Format PC Release 1992
When John and [Id co-founder Tom Hall] did the Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement demo, they used the character from that exact DOS game that I had just made. That is what led to Id Software: as soon as I saw [the demo], we had to make that company. We founded the company officially, going to work full-time every day, on February 1 of '91. That year, we made ten games. When we were done with 1991, we started working on a Commander Keen prototype for the next set, and decided, 'You know what? We're done with Keen.
We'd already made two 3D games, with Hovertank One and Catacomb 3D. I knew that the next game, if we used 3D, could be even better. I came up with the idea of taking Castle Wolfenstein from 1981 and putting that in 3D. There was only four of us. All of them were like immediately, "Oh my God, yes", because they're massive Wolfenstein fans as well. We spent four months making the shareware version of the game.
When we started making it, we were trying to copy the things that you did in Wolfenstein in 3D. As we started putting those things in, it started slowing you down, because you're stopping, searching, and dragging bodies. It was like: this game is not about that. That was the [original] idea, but the speed of this game is more important than dragging around bodies and [looking at their shit. Mowing down the enemy and running fast was the killer hook of this game.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/6568666835.jpg]
The game design was simple, but we were doing something brand new. Gameplay literacy-wise, it was the very first high-speed FPS, so people had to get used to it. [We had to] not overcomplicate it with a lot of different key commands: navigating and not getting sick in that viewpoint was important.
When we actually finished fully with Wolfenstein, by the middle of June, we went on vacation to Disney World. When we were in the hot tub, in the hot tub over from us some guys were like: "Hey, you guys are talking about Wolfenstein - are you the guys that made it?" We were like, "Yeah"; and it was like: "Holy shit!" [The atmosphere at Id] was nuts. There were only six of us at the time: Jay [Wilbur] was our biz guy, and everyone else was doing development. Everybody was in a really great mood: when Wolfenstein came out, we gave ourselves a raise, and then by the end of the summer we gave ourselves another raise. We didn't know that we were starting a genre. We just wanted to make something that we thought was fun.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/7856256185.jpg]
DOOM
Developer/Publisher Id Software Original format PC Release 1993.
When we started making Doom, we basically said, "This has to be the best game that we can imagine playing - ever" It was the only time we ever did that for any of our games. [Level design] was one of the most difficult parts, just trying to define a style. Here's an engine that has a really great data structure that we can do anything with, but we're not doing anything with it. [We were] just making levels that looked like Wolfenstein: they have better textures, but we're still making 90-degree walls. It was around March or April, the levels just weren't looking good, and we [couldn't] waste any more time, so I just basically said, "I'm going to solve this problem we have to have a really cool look to this game".
I was working on E1M2 as a test level, and I just envisioned: what would look cool that I haven't seen in a game? It was just trying to do something that wasn't just this rigid 90-degree wall thing, and had height and contrast: the room was dark, but the areas where the monsters were was light. So I did that room, and I was like: this is it. If we could constantly replicate that kind of feeling, the whole game would just be overloaded coolness.
People hadn't played anything highspeed multiplayer, ever. It didn't exist. People played stuff over the modem and it was turn-based, it was slow. When we made Doom and we made it on a modem and on LAN, that's when multiplayer really took off. Like, massively took off. That's when all the LAN cards were sold; networking took off [in 1994] and the world transitioned to networked multiplayer gaming based off of Doom.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/AMiC0FRyy1658836137059/5225356858.jpg]
QUAKE
Developer Id Software Publisher GT Interactive Original format PC Release 1996.
Originally, the idea for Quake was that he has this huge hammer and he just smashes things with it, basically like Thor - he could throw it, and it would come back. It was more of a hand-to-hand idea. But before we could make it, we had to make an engine, and it took a whole year to get that engine to a point where we could actually use it to make a game. Everybody was creating levels. I was making [level editor tool] QuakeEd, we were making master levels for Doom II, The Ultimate Doom all these things in the meantime waiting for this to happen.
We were making levels for a medieval game, but we were not at the point where we could actually get code in there to see: is this going to work? Is this hammer going to be cool? We needed the tech to actually be there. But by the time we got to the point where We could do that, everybody was really tired after working for a whole year on just making levels, levels and levels that weren't going anywhere yet.
I wanted to innovate in design. I was not [thinking] 'this is an FPS engine, I was like 'this is a 3D engine what can we do with full 3D? A third-person game could have happened; we could've done all kinds of things. When the decision was made in November of '95 to just make it an FPS, that to me was kind of it. I'm all about pushing design, and if this company is just going to be sitting there pushing tech only, then I'm out.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2022