Alex Railean's Reviews > Doom Guy: Life in First Person

This is a detailed overview of the technical, creative and team effort behind games like Doom or Quake. It is written and narrated by John Romero - so you get to hear it straight from the man himself. I appreciate his openness and willingness to share episodes from his childhood, and the fact that he acknowledges his mistakes.

Thank you, John! For the many hours of fun id games gave me, for the book, and the inspiration as a programmer, as well as a human being.


-----------Notes

- Alcoholic dad.
- Mexican background.
- Hyperthymesia - top notch autobiographic memory.
- first child at 20 year old (Michael)
- early projects
- original games
- porting others' games to new platforms
- id software
- id, not eye-dee
- team "in demand", "ifd=ideas from the deep" - >id
- Freud's term for "primitive, instinctual part of the mind" (спинно-мозговик :-)
- "great tools make great games, I think it is important to spend as much time on tools as possible".
- tool for transferring data between different computers [and different architectures], a proto-network; prior to that they'd just re-type the code!
- installer that makes it possible to write a game to several floppy disks
- game engine
- level editor
- music tool
- Apogee sales process = bottleneck
- call a 0800 number, dictate card number
- it is written down on paper and pinned on a metal rod
- at the end of the day someone would type them all into a word processor and eventually ship the items
- test call: they were put on hold for 30min
- > a non-technical bug
- idea to log all keystrokes and timings and allow players to replay a game (and share replays) - >speedrun


Doom
- first id software game developed entirely on nextStep machines
- doomEd: level editor baked into the design
- it made it easy to quickly prototype
- change, review, iterate



Design documents
- They didn't have them
- projects grew organically
- the game was the design document

Buy a cray supercomputer
- deal to put them somewhere in the game
- get a discount for a real one
- cray was very powerful and useful in their map processing
- deal was accepted, they got a cray for 500k usd


Found a floating point division bug in an Intel CPU
- not immediately clear
- but after thorough debugging they were certain the code was right
- asked a friend who knew someone from Intel
- it was a Hardware bug

Quake was initially planned as an RPG, but was then turned into an FPS.
- because of time pressure, low morale
- they didn't have enough energy to implement their original vision
- so it was "doom-like, but with a new engine"


Quitting id
- Romero got 0 money from quake
- because their rule was to calculate compensation based on the revenues for the past year



# terms
- deathmatch
- frag (reference to Vietnam war era military slang)
- fps - first person shooter
- ftp model - free to play
- wad file = where's all the data
- crunch time in the war room =everyone working in the same room when pressure arose, to increase efficiency and synergy :-) (what I call "zombie mode", but without a room)
- mouselook = use mouse to look around and keyboard to move


# lessons
- don't let problems magnify: deal with issues as they arise
- don't hype what you don't have
- never insult your fans
- trust your gut instinct
- treat people well
- focus on the fun
- surround yourself with good people and give them what they need to do something great
- support others who want to do great things (even if they do it without you)
- vet your co-founders
- fail gracefully, failure is a part of life; accept your flaws and try again