A nice 25-year retrospective from one of the original FPS title DOOM's team.
> The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio.
It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly exclusively were single screen affairs.
Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly revolutionary.
I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't always TCP everywhere).
Something most people don't mention is that if you were lucky enough to have three DOS machines side by side, and also have them networked (IPX or TCP/IP) you could run DOOM in 'ultrawide' mode by bringing up the game across all three monitors, with the -left and -right command line options on the respective machines.
I'm not sure if any of the engine ports (zDoom etc.) still support this though.
There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion.
> MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the concept of deathmatch combat.[1]
[snip]
> Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port.
Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack.
On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy:
> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed]
Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.
Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs).
Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.)
Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it was head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long.
Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.
That's awesome. It makes me happy that you enjoyed and remember the game. Robert Champagne, the real genius, coded the Game Boy and I rode his coattails. I was responsible for the Game Gear version, a PC prototype, and other things. My code ran a lot slower than Rob's and I was never happy with the final frame rate. :-( The GG had a nice colour screen but horrible battery life and poor market share compared to the GB. [Aside: the Atari Lynx was a slightly earlier platform and technically interesting but its market share was zilch.]
We were pretty proud of Faceball 2000. James Yee, the non-technical founder behind MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, was a visionary guy. Keeping the aesthetic abstract (smiley faces, minimal texturing or "realism", etc.) was way easier to code but it also won us some parental advisory awards in the industry because we avoided gratuitous violence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm glad you remember the music. The GB and GG music were composed by David Whittaker. Very talented. When you unavoidably listen to your game's music over and over and over and over, it's nice when it's actually well composed and sonically interesting. The SNES music is also great, composed by George Sanger, and the SNES had better audio hardware by a long shot but I actually prefer the tunes and instrumentation of the GB/GG intros, outros, level music, etc.
Nice chat. And as the game says, when you get whacked by a smiley face, "HAVE A NICE DAY."
David Whittaker was my favorite back in the day. Sometimes I fired up "Feud" simply to listen to the music. It was funny to hear his "Lazy Jones" track later in the clubs, albeit covered by Zombie Nation.
I was pretty young when DooM came out and getting IPX to work was (and still is to this day) one of the most frustrating experiences that I can remember. That being said, when it did work, it was an absolutely marvelous experience. This was really the first game that I can remember having the realization that I was playing against another person and that they were probably going through the same mental gymnastics that I was while we were playing. It was really a life-changing experience for my perception.
A friend and I were so desperate to play over serial that, lacking the proper serial cable, we "shimmed" the PCs with books to get the serial ports at the same height, put them back-to-back, and made a "cable" out of gender changers and null modems that we had sitting around.
I can do you one better. We emulated IPX over serial so that we could have have 3 players.
I can't seem to find any information on the net regarding this, but I know that we managed to get it working somehow.
There was some dirty TSR hack that intercepted IPX calls and sent them via serial.
One of the PCs (with 2 serial ports) had to act as the "gateway" and run the game first, then the "edge" PCs could connect.
Fortunately my best friend had 2 serial ports and a seperate PS2 port for his mouse (although whenever he rage quit both of our PCs hardlocked for some reason).
If I recall correctly it only worked with a particular version of the DOOM exe - so we could only play the shareware version (despite having access to the full game).
6 months later we pooled some cash and got NE2000 cards so that we could play properly without dicking around with crazy hacks - I do recall my friend being disappointed that he could no longer crash our PCs and end the game when he lost anymore :)
Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time.
I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!
I try to tell people this exact same story whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be the first thing I've noticed similar to a "When I was your age story", except movie theaters were not 25 cents... We had multiplayer online shooters in the mid-90s.
The first real-time multiplayer game I played 'online' was Modem Wars for the Commodore 64 by the now deceased Danielle Bunten Berry, who also made lots of other incredible ground breaking games like M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold.
I wish Modem Wars was rebooted, in many ways, it was the first "Starcraft 2" game for modem play, and was incredibly fun.
Why was it the "Starcraft 2 of modem play" rather than the "Starcraft of modem play"? Especially since the two games are so similar & the first Starcraft was already renown for its network play (asking genuinely not sarcastically)?
>and for the first time we were putting multiplayer into our game with a mode I called Deathmatch because that name just made sense.
I never really thought about this. Deathmatch is just what generic multiplayer without teams or goals is called, and has always been called. Someone had to come up with the name Deathmatch. I was around for DOOM's release, and this term has always just felt ubiquitous. Cool!
>> It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for the stars.
They did it again with Quake, but then it was the end of a small team being able to beat the AAA development houses. I was in awe that it was created by a few guys, no huge budgets or huge team.
Quake was again a technological tour-de-force, and its moddability and multiplayer opened up a whole new world of gaming, but as a single-player game I find it strictly inferior to the original DOOM.
Quake has some of the most amazing maps/episodes and utterly terrifying aesthetic of any FPS, despite how disparate levels were at times.
I can think of few older FPS that hold up as well as Quake 1's single player campaign to this day, and the mapping community is still running amazingly too.
Quake certainly took its toll on ID, and was when Romero was ousted. It may not have been the original game they planned, but I don't think the game turned out any bit less amazing of a campaign than OG Doom IMO.
> and boldly stated in a press release in January 1993, that DOOM would be a major source of productivity loss around the world. We truly believed it, and worked hard that year to make it happen.
DOOM was before my time, but I really enjoyed Masters of Doom which is the story of id up to right before DOOM III. Wil Wheaton did a fantastic job with the audiobook.
DOOM was one of the first 3D games I played and the first I played with a Soundblaster (a GPU like card you'd buy to hear sounds other than beeps and boops). I've never been so amazed at a game since. I literally had my jaw open for minutes. After fiddling with a set of drivers that allow me to have enough RAM to boot it of course.
I was just learning how to draw pixels on screen with BASIC and could somehow extrapolate that if I get good enough I could maybe do a game that resembles a 2D game but when I saw DOOM I realized how little I know. There's no way I could to this day write a 3D engine which makes me a bit sad but at least I understand most of the math behind it after working in games.
"The year of 1993 was a magical one ... The engine was revolutionary in that it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen before. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance."
(obligatory old-man-shouts-at-cloud post) pfft, nobody who hadn't already played Ultima Underworld II, released in Jan 1993, maybe
but seriously, great game (both of them!), and always interesting to read about
I think they key difference here is sheer speed. At the time, Ultima Underworld may have been the more technically impressive game in terms of graphics, but the id's focus on framerate and simplicity over graphical complexity had something over Ultima Underworld's slow-paced dungeon crawling, a pace mandated by the 10-20fps that it ran at.
Both are fantastic games, but Doom's speed was a marvel for how good it looked.
In 1991, I owned a Commodore Amiga, which was generally regarded as one of the best computers for audio-video work at the time. Abrash had stumbled across something amazing at the time:
He figured out that you could just 'invent' your own displays on the IBM PC.
So he took the IBM PC, which was really optimized for high resolution work like spreadsheets, and he hacked the display modes so that you could have LOW resolution and HIGH refresh rates.
It was completely brilliant. When I first saw what Abrash was doing, it was a revelation. If it wasn't for Abrash, gaming would be very very different today.
At the time, there were high performance video cards for the PC. The thing that was brilliant about Abrash's work was that it worked on any ol' PC. He was just taking the existing video modes and changing them. For instance, instead of having a video mode of 640x400 with 16 colors, Abrash figured out that you could have a video mode of 320x200 with 256 colors and most importantly, a buffer. It was that buffer that was absolutely critical; it changed the game completely. It allowed programmers to draw a screen, flip a bit, and change the entire screen in a millisecond. Until Abrash came along, IBM PC graphics were sloooooow. The key to all of this is that the amount of memory did not change, the only thing that changed was the resolution and the number of colors.
If you're a Linux dude and you're over 40, you may recall hacking video modes to get the UI to work. A lot of that was based on Abrash's work also.
Abrash continued to work alongside Carmack for his entire career, and is currently at Oculus.
Nitpick: 320x200 in 256colors is a standard VGA mode, but what Abrash came up with was "Mode X" - which added a higher resolution (320x240), 1:1 square pixels(!), and doublebuffering. There were also even higher resolutions available based on the same concept (up to at least 360x480) by (others?)
> He was just taking the existing video modes and changing them. For instance, instead of having a video mode of 640x400 with 16 colors, Abrash figured out that you could have a video mode of 320x200 with 256 colors and most importantly, a buffer. It was that buffer that was absolutely critical; it changed the game completely. It allowed programmers to draw a screen, flip a bit, and change the entire screen in a millisecond.
To be more specific: 320x200x8 was a standard documented VGA video mode (13h), but it lacked the ability to page flip. There were other video modes that did allow page flipping - the idea itself dates back to some of the earliest text-only modes - but none of them were 8-bit color.
Mode X (which Abrash discovered) allowed page flipping while retaining all 256 colors.
Page flipping is different from double buffering, though. Double buffering is when you render to an offscreen buffer, and then bulk copy the resulting pixels into video RAM (usually with vsync to avoid visible tearing). This could be done just as well with regular mode 13h, and it was pretty common for games to do exactly that. Page flipping made things much faster by avoiding the need to copy anything - everything is in video RAM, you just switch which parts of it are currently visible on screen.
"Since multimedia on Windows had a bad reputation back then, we were adamant not to have our stuff associated with “multimedia” and so we called the first beta the “Game SDK”. We got the idea to name it DirectX because some reporter made of fun of how we had DirectDraw, DirectSound, and DirectPlay – Direct “X” they wrote. We took it and ran with it, and so every set of functionality became DirectSomethingOrOther (Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound3D all followed)."
And "direct", of course, was in a sense of direct access to the hardware (more direct than GDI, anyway).
No, the X in DirectX is used as a sort of variable with X referring to the many subsystems of DirectX (e.g. DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound, etc).
Abrash's Black Book of Graphics Programming is an absolute classic. I devoured it when I was a young programmer at video game shop in '97. Although outdated, it's still gold. If nothing else, read the stuff at the end where he talks about the development of Quake, working with John Carmack at id.
I remember being amazed by the 3D first person perspective in Total Eclipse on the Commodore 64 back in the 80's. The framerate was atrocious, and you moved like molasses, but the feeling of immersion that came from being able to move freely in the first person perspective was not matched by games for me until Doom. (Wolf3D's 90 degree movements was very mechanical and did not capture that feeling.)
Neither of those were true 3D. In fact, even Doom wasn't fully 3D.
The view could only ever be at 90 degrees for example (no looking up or down) and the environments couldn't have more than one floor and one ceiling at any given location.
I think the limitations made the genre even more successful because it forced people to "evolve" into 3D by going from Wolf3D > Doom > Quake. Step by step. True immersive 3D was actually a jarring (but undoubtedly fun) experience for the first time. Anyone here remember Descent?
By Heretic, you could look up or down in Doom engine, although the way that was done distorted perspective (it basically kept all vertical lines vertical, while distorting proportions horizontally, to approximate the effect).
I would also add Duke Nukem 3D to your step-by-step list. Reason being, firstly, it had sloped floors. But also, as I recall, it was the first 3D action game to have what was then called "room over room", even though the engine was fundamentally limited in the same manner as Doom - it achieved that by utilizing portals. So actual architecture was still one-level, but portals transparently connected it in a way that simulated multiple levels.
There were also some really crazy hacks to achieve something like that in Doom. Like, bridges that you could walk over or under. The way it was done is by having an invisible platform that was lowered and raised as the player approached the "bridge" from the corresponding direction, combined with a fake middle texture that wasn't actually solid.
Descent was another favorite of mine! Really used to get my heart racing at the end of every level when you were close but you had to brave the final room and manage to escape before the countdown.
The point is that Wolfenstein 3D did not have "angled walls and halls that darken in the distance". Ultima Underworld did, although it did not have level geometry as complex as DOOM did.
Yes, that's what I meant, thanks, and I was thinking particularly of the 2nd game - though on closer inspection I think UW2's walls are all only 45 degree and 90 degree just like the 1st game, except the UW2 map is higher res and a lot better at mixing them up so it's less obvious. So Doom does win there after all, but I didn't notice as a kid. Wolfenstein's are all 90 degree bends, I think.
Both Doom and UW2 were essentially still a 2d map but in UW2 I remember going down a descending corridor and swimming under a bridge I'd previously walked over and being amazed. There's another level full of aerial paths which cross over each other too, and a level where you flick a switch and flood the map and open up some walkways above the flooded area iirc. I don't know how it represented these over-under areas internally but even if no more 2d than Doom (though you could look up and down a bit) it was a nice trick.
Then again, Doom has similar tricks - teleports set up to act like lifts, where the top of the tower looks out apparently over where you've already been (actually a facsimile to get round the 2d addressing).
But yes, Doom did win out for speed and sheer frantic joy/terror. I couldn't convert any friends to Ultima but Doom won everyone who saw it over instantly...
Doom is such a foundational game. My friend and I both got into tech by making doom wads and playing them over our modems in the mid 90s. Fond memories. I still remember some of the maps I made, they were a blast. Hilarious too since we would mod various sound effects to play funny things :-)
Serious question, are Romero and Carmack still friends? I think they're both brilliant and a great example of a duo.
For some reason the internet paints them as rivals, or that Carmack was the one who succeeded (continuing with ID and now at FB) and Romero faded away and was never really technical (and works at a gas station).
Literally the last thing Masters of Doom talks about is how Carmack and Romero are still friends. Maybe not best buddies - they have completely different personalities - but I don't think there's much animosity between them.
There's no basis for the claim he's working at a gas station. He runs a game development company in Ireland.
A lot of the time, John Romero (thinking he could make everyone his bitch) was often painted as the Steve Jobs to John Carmack's Woz. Carmack really had most of the technical talent but little of the personality or boisterousness to properly market id's games. Romero on the other hand started off as the nerdy kid who got popular and kinda let it get to his head. He's way more humble now and I still think he's a cool guy but, even back then, magazines and media were always trying to portray them as allegories to other tech figures when they really weren't much like them at all.
Romero was fairly technical - he did a large chunk of the level design and coding around that with the editor. I think him and Tom Hall split that work.
A: Yes, we talk from time to time. I see Adrian a fair bit since he has a place here in Ireland (The Heritage in Killenard). I also talk with Tom (Hall) and American (McGee) every once in a while. I’m in contact with John where there’s something specific that we both have interest in.
Reading between the lines: no, they're not friends.
I suspect it’s more that Carmack isn’t one to reminisce to the same degree as Romero. Romero clearly makes games because he loves playing them, whereas Carmack does so as a technical challenge. For Romero, Doom is a highlight of his life for emotional reasons, Carmack, on the other hand, mostly seems to view a game being fun as an unnecessary side effect of it being technically impressive.
They are different types of people, and they both are probably adults at this point, at least sufficiently to acknowledge that their common ground is having a beer and discussing cool new stuff once in a while rather than the style of friendship which would involve being willing to take a bullet for one another. If their interests intersect then they can talk and be excited but those points are too fewer to call it a deep friendship. It is mutual appreciation of technology and cool stuff.
I would not read into it that they are unfriendly though, just that the type of friendship is bounded by interests and passions and I doubt either one has hard feelings about the past.
I don't know if they're still friends, but there's clearly been some animosity in the past.
Carmack isn't constantly humping the successes of his distant past trying to use them to generate hype and interest in himself, even though he's been largely responsible for them.
Romero just seems like a slacker, riding on the coattails of those early shared successes, milking the association dry.
Romero was just as responsible for the success of id as Carmack was. He wrote the tools and editors the team used to get everything into the game and was probably the single biggest proponent of opening up the game to the public and allowing for custom content. As pointed out in the OP post, he was also the one who both came up with the idea and the name for Deathmatch which, although it would have eventually found its way into culture through another game, was really the reason that DooM became as big as it did.
That's a very revisionist view of their development taking into account that the Daikatana/Ion Storm debacle never would have come about if it wasn't for DooM.
Look I enjoy a good Daikatana joke like any other, but while Carmack was the technical wizard, Romero was every bit as important in regards to getting those games to pop with the character and attention to detail -- maybe more than any other person at ID at the time.
He deserves his props too, and I think its awesome he's still so engaged with these games and helping keeping them going after all these years.
Absolutely! You have to do something really, really right to have the confidence (however misplaced) to think that you can tell the world you're going to make everyone your bitch and have people believe you and only be upset when you can't deliver.
Wat? Who believed Romero was going to make anyone his bitch? That marketing was such a failure Romero himself won't even own it. In an interview he deferred responsibility for it to the marketing/PR folks and was apologetic to the gaming community.
When that advertisement first came out, most gaming media was still in print and magazines. Online media still viewed the potential of Daikatana as pretty favorable and PC Gamer even did a preview story of the game that was incredibly well-received yet was based only on screenshots and Romero's reputation. It wasn't until the demo of the game came out and, shortly after, the release where people turned on ION and Romero because the game was nowhere near what it was hyped to be and, although there were positive aspects to it, it was nowhere near what the preview had suggested it would be.
Dunno, 25th anniversary seems like an appropriate time to reminisce. I’ve gone to some of his GDC sessions and he talks other things too. In a way I’d think it’s less about self aggragandizing and more what happens to any artist when one piece overshadows their whole portfolio
It is a little bit sad to realize that this amazing game that took so much effort and ingenuity can now be easily run at a full speed in an emulator of 8086 written in JavaScript. Inside the browser, on a Raspberry Pi.
A modified Doom codebase can run on a Gameboy Advance with an acceptable framerate.
Doom's rendering trick wasn't dependent on CPU power as much as it was cache manipulation, memory access speed, and VGA card speed. Everything was already pre-computed, so the rendering engine only needed to look up a binary tree and spit out to the screen exactly what it was told. Even the game logic reused some of the renderer's LUTs when the code could get away with it, which was a lot.
320x200 is 64,000 pixels. Assuming 20 fps, that's 1,280,000 pixels per second that need to be rendered. It ran at least 20 fps on a 66 Mhz CPU, meaning that each pixel had at most 52 clock cycles to render, and that's not even handling game logic. Certainly some optimizations involving not re-rendering pixels on the HUD come into play, but still I'm blown away that that they figured out such crazy optimizations.
I feel like if I were to try to write Doom's engine that I would struggle to reach 60 fps on my i7 CPU, even rendering in Doom's original 320x200 resolution.
It was 320x200 - which is why many modern Doom ports have a switch to stretch pixels vertically to properly emulate the original aspect ratio.
It did use Mode X, but that was because it could do page flipping, and allowed for certain other rendering optimizations enabled by its more complicated video memory layout.
IIRC Quake was the first id game that fully exposed various X-modes (i.e. not just 320x240, but anything your video card supported, and your CPU could handle...).
"I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that."
So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?
It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.
Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.
> (...) he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?
I think it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. You might want to change the direction into something that is not only doable but _better_. Remember Quake? It was supposed to be something completely different, based on their plans [1].
Maybe it's just more specific to games? I feel like games require a lot of iteration of figuring out where the fun is and balancing that with other subjective elements; not too much grind, growing and increasing challenge through the game. Tech can come in and out of the game and a lot of the "fun" is built around that--your level design will be very different if you could look up/down or jump. Just like if you lighting/shadowing method changes it would affect things. This is probably controversial, but I think some games are just fine at 30fps while certain games do benefit from 60+fps.
I think committing too much up front to tech features or a checklist pushes you to later lose face by dropping the feature or including it at the expense of fun. You might have a very clear idea of what the game is upfront, and the result might be a great game, but you're not pushing boundaries.
> The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio.
It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly exclusively were single screen affairs.
Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly revolutionary.
I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't always TCP everywhere).