Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
Speaker 1: an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you.
Speaker 1: It's a Friday. That means it's time for a tech
Speaker 1: Stuff classic episode and we've got a two parter to
Speaker 1: go through. So part one is this week. Part two
Speaker 1: will be next Friday. And this is the ID Software story.
Speaker 1: So ID Software very important video game company back in
Speaker 1: the day. And yeah, I did a two parter back
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: So this episode.
Speaker 1: Originally published on April fifth, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy. Hello,
Speaker 1: really loved your flashback MP three episode. I'd start with
Speaker 1: Vangeli's theme songs, but please do a podcast on the
Speaker 1: creators of Doom ID Software. Well, David, this one goes
Speaker 1: out to you. This is going to be all about
Speaker 1: ID and because ID software story stretches back quite a
Speaker 1: ways and a lot has happened with it, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a two parter. So here's part one of the
Speaker 1: ID Software story. And you guys know me, if I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you the history, I go back before the
Speaker 1: story begins right. In this case, the story of ID
Speaker 1: software really begins with another company called soft Disk. Soft
Speaker 1: Disc started off in nineteen eighty one as a publisher
Speaker 1: in Louisiana and it created magazines on disc and you
Speaker 1: would get programs on disc. You would subscribe to a service.
Speaker 1: Every month you'd get a new disc and that would
Speaker 1: have various articles on it as well as programs that
Speaker 1: you could run on your computer. It was actually related
Speaker 1: originally to another company called soft Talk, and soft Talk
Speaker 1: was a print magazine company, but soft Talk eventually went
Speaker 1: out of business. Soft Disk continued. It managed to stay afloat.
Speaker 1: So besides publishing a magazine on a disc, they created
Speaker 1: this utility software that you would subscribe to, you know,
Speaker 1: boring useful stuff. Now, those programs were sold through that
Speaker 1: subscription on that monthly basis, so you didn't go to
Speaker 1: a store and buy a box with soft Disk's name
Speaker 1: on it. Instead, you would subscribe to this service and
Speaker 1: they would send it to you. As the computer industry grew,
Speaker 1: soft Disc did pretty well, but there was a major challenge.
Speaker 1: As computers were becoming more sophisticated, that meant software also
Speaker 1: got more complicated or bloated, and that meant that your
Speaker 1: team of developers who had to create new software every
Speaker 1: single month had an increasingly difficult challenge ahead of them.
Speaker 1: Delivering a disc with programs on it on a monthly
Speaker 1: basis was really hard to do as time went on.
Speaker 1: So imagine that your job is to write a new
Speaker 1: program every month, only the programs are getting more complicated,
Speaker 1: which means there's also more potential for computer bugs.
Speaker 2: In the code. It was by the early nineties.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety at least, it was getting to be
Speaker 1: pretty rough now. They were also looking to expand around
Speaker 1: that time, so in August of nineteen ninety, Soft Disc
Speaker 1: launched a new bi monthly gaming disc magazine called Gamer's Edge.
Speaker 1: By going bi monthly, you would have more time to
Speaker 1: develop games. Programmers could take a little bit more time
Speaker 1: to design and polish a game before shipping it. However,
Speaker 1: two months is still incredibly short. I mean to tell
Speaker 1: someone today like you've got two months to create a game,
Speaker 1: you'd probably see them flip out because a lot of
Speaker 1: modern games take months or even years to develop from
Speaker 1: the concept to shipping it, So a two month window
Speaker 1: is super tight.
Speaker 2: The gamers among.
Speaker 1: Your really probably hyper aware of that based upon shipping
Speaker 1: dates slipping from now and again. Like whenever you hear
Speaker 1: about a company having to miss a ship date, that's
Speaker 1: usually because the game ended up being more complicated than
Speaker 1: they had anticipated at some stage of the development process. Now,
Speaker 1: the head of the Gamer's Edge project was a guy
Speaker 1: named John Romero, who was originally from Colorado's Springs and
Speaker 1: had moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to work with Soft Disc.
Speaker 1: John Romero's a pretty famous name in gaming, so the
Speaker 1: gamers among you, I'm guessing I've heard of him, but
Speaker 1: everyone else might not know who he is. He's got
Speaker 1: a really long history in the computer game business and
Speaker 1: has been involved in some major successes and big names,
Speaker 1: as well as some pretty popularized flops. Romero already had
Speaker 1: a history in computer game design before he took on
Speaker 1: a job over at Soft Disc and became the leader
Speaker 1: at gamers Edge. His very first published game was for
Speaker 1: the Apple two and it was called Scout Search. That's
Speaker 1: from the early eighties. He's also the guy behind Cavern
Speaker 1: Crusader if you remember that game. For a while he
Speaker 1: worked at Origin Systems, which was the company behind such
Speaker 1: games as The Wing Commander franchise and the Ultima series,
Speaker 1: although he didn't work on those titles. He then went
Speaker 1: on to co found a couple of companies between then
Speaker 1: and working for Soft Disk, and he was still working
Speaker 1: in games. But you know, being a self starter is
Speaker 1: sometimes pretty hard, so eventually he decided to move to Shreveport,
Speaker 1: Louisiana in nineteen eighty nine and worked for Soft Disc
Speaker 1: because it was a steady gig. Now, Romero brought over
Speaker 1: a guy named Adrian Carmack from Soft Disk's art department
Speaker 1: over to Gamer's Edge, and Adrian Carmack was originally from Shreveport,
Speaker 1: so he grew up there and he had taken on
Speaker 1: a job at Soft Disk to make money while he
Speaker 1: was searching for a way to a mat a living
Speaker 1: in the fine arts. He was twenty one when Romero asked.
Speaker 2: Him to join Gamer's Edge.
Speaker 1: Then he also asked another Carmack, this time John Carmack,
Speaker 1: no relation to Adrian Carmack.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: John Carmack was a programmer for Soft Disk who specialized
Speaker 1: in the company's monthly Apple two GS publication. Those among
Speaker 1: you who remember the Apple two Gs, make sure you
Speaker 1: give me a shout out. I'm curious to hear from you.
Speaker 1: I never owned an Apple two GS.
Speaker 2: I couldn't. I had an Apple two E and that
Speaker 2: just had to suffice. Well.
Speaker 1: John Carmack came originally from Kansas City, and he had
Speaker 1: a bit of a past, which he has talked about publicly.
Speaker 1: So I'm not really spreading dirty laundry here. But John
Speaker 1: Carmack said that when he was a kid, he was
Speaker 1: really interested in how stuff works, which I can easily
Speaker 1: relate to. But Carmack would push and prod around the
Speaker 1: edges of what is consideredly legal. You know, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: he wanted to see how stuff worked a little bit
Speaker 1: beyond what is legally allowed. Sometimes he leapt right over
Speaker 1: those limitations. He was really interested in things like computer
Speaker 1: hacking and freaking phone freaking. That's where you're hacking the
Speaker 1: telephone system. I did a whole episode of tech stuff
Speaker 1: about phone freaking. You can find that in my archives.
Speaker 1: He experimented with stuff like thermite and explosives. Now, while
Speaker 1: a teenager, he took part in what was supposed to
Speaker 1: be an Apple to heist, And I am not making
Speaker 1: this up. John Carmack was part of an elite group
Speaker 1: of teenagers who had determined that they wanted to take
Speaker 1: possession of some apple to computers that were residing in
Speaker 1: their local school. So his part was mixing up a
Speaker 1: miasma of stuff that included thermite in order to melt
Speaker 1: through the windows of the school without setting off the
Speaker 1: alarm system. However, during their robbery attempt, they triggered the
Speaker 1: alarms somehow anyway, and the police showed up and Carmack
Speaker 1: was arrested and after a psychological evaluation, he was sentenced
Speaker 1: to a year in a juvenile home. A lot of
Speaker 1: kids were there for drugs. John Carmack was there for
Speaker 1: the apple too. He described his younger self as being
Speaker 1: an a moral little jerk, and that is a direct
Speaker 1: quote by John Carmack himself. He attended a couple of
Speaker 1: semesters of college once he got out of juvenile the
Speaker 1: juvenile home. He finished high school went on to college
Speaker 1: at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, but he
Speaker 1: didn't complete his studies there. He dropped out when he
Speaker 1: found the classes to be boring. He later said that
Speaker 1: he probably would have found the classes to be helpful
Speaker 1: if he had stuck around, but his attitude was what
Speaker 1: made it challenging. So he fully admits that as an individual,
Speaker 1: he had not yet matured enough to benefit from a
Speaker 1: college education, that it wasn't necessarily the fault of the college. However,
Speaker 1: he credits his employment at soft Disk for really opening
Speaker 1: up his realization and helping him mature as a person,
Speaker 1: because he was doing what he loved, which was programming,
Speaker 1: and he was making enough money to do it to
Speaker 1: afford a place to live and food to eat, and
Speaker 1: that was all that was important to him. So once
Speaker 1: he started doing that, he started to realize, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of how his attitude had gotten in his own way,
Speaker 1: and so he really matured quite a bit while working
Speaker 1: at soft Disk, and that ended up benefiting him more
Speaker 1: than a college education.
Speaker 2: In the long run.
Speaker 1: Now, along with those two Carmacs, Romero enlisted the help
Speaker 1: of a guy named Lane Roath. Roath had been a
Speaker 1: programmer throughout the nineteen eighties and he had joined soft
Speaker 1: Disk in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2: He had known.
Speaker 1: Romero before they worked at soft Disc. Romero had co
Speaker 1: founded a company called Capital Ideas, and both had founded
Speaker 1: a company called Blue Mountain Micro. Eventually, they decided they
Speaker 1: wanted to work together and they wanted to create a
Speaker 1: new company and merge the names of their old organizations
Speaker 1: together to create a company called Ideas from the Deep.
Speaker 1: This would later serve as the inspiration for ID Software's
Speaker 1: name ID because Ideas from.
Speaker 2: The Deep is just too long to say.
Speaker 1: But by the time ID software became an official thing,
Speaker 1: Growth was no longer part of the equation. He did
Speaker 1: not go on to join the others when they founded
Speaker 1: ID Software.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The last piece of the Gamer's Edge puzzle was a
Speaker 1: guy named Tom Hall. Hall had a degree in computer
Speaker 1: science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Hall
Speaker 1: was another programmer and editor over at soft Disk. He
Speaker 1: wasn't officially part of the gamers Edge project, so his
Speaker 1: work was mainly done after hours because he had an
Speaker 1: interest in games, but he wasn't officially on the projects
Speaker 1: for gamers Edge, so any work he did had to
Speaker 1: be off the books. Gamer's Edge gave the developers a
Speaker 1: chance to try new things, and one of the things
Speaker 1: that John Carmac was really interested in was designing game engines.
Speaker 1: He really wanted to create something that would allow PCs
Speaker 1: to create a smooth scrolling method similar to what you
Speaker 1: would find in video game console games. Now, this was
Speaker 1: huge because video game consoles are dedicated machines.
Speaker 2: That means every.
Speaker 1: Element inside of video game console, everything that you put
Speaker 1: in there, is meant to make the games work. At
Speaker 1: least in the earlier video game consoles. You could argue
Speaker 1: that today they're more media centers than they were before,
Speaker 1: but at that time, video game consoles that's all they did.
Speaker 1: They just made games work. That's what all the horsepower in.
Speaker 2: The machine was focused on.
Speaker 1: Whereas PC's are general purpose devices and they have to
Speaker 1: be able to do lots of stuff, not just play games.
Speaker 1: That means they're not nearly as good at performing video
Speaker 1: game console functions the way a console could back in
Speaker 1: these days. Anyway, today it's a different story. PCs are
Speaker 1: so powerful and video game consoles are essentially proprietary PCs
Speaker 1: that the differences are much less apparent than they were
Speaker 1: back in the day. At that time, video game consoles
Speaker 1: had the edge over PCs, and so what CARMAC wanted
Speaker 1: to do was find a way to let PCs play
Speaker 1: games that were similar in in scale and in play
Speaker 1: to video game console games.
Speaker 2: So how do you do that?
Speaker 1: How do you make a game engine that can allow
Speaker 1: this to happen. You see, the real problem was that
Speaker 1: a side scrolling game, or really any game where the
Speaker 1: image is the backgrounds scrolling across, whether it's up and
Speaker 1: down or left and right or whatever, that means the
Speaker 1: computer has to constantly redraw the screen as you move around,
Speaker 1: so elements that are changing have to be redrawn. You
Speaker 1: can't just have a static image there. Older computer games
Speaker 1: usually did have those static environments. You could move a
Speaker 1: character around within an environment, and the character might be
Speaker 1: animated a little bit, but the environment itself would stay
Speaker 1: pretty much exactly the way it is. Think of like
Speaker 1: an old school game like pac Man, where you've got
Speaker 1: the full maze on the screen at one time. The
Speaker 1: characters move around, but the screen remains static throughout that level.
Speaker 1: It might change from level to level, but during a
Speaker 1: level it stays the same. So what could Karmac do
Speaker 1: to simplify this Well, he realized that if he developed
Speaker 1: a game engine where only the parts of the screen
Speaker 1: that change are animated are redrawn, he could cut down
Speaker 1: on the amount of processing power required for a side scroller.
Speaker 1: So if you have a side scroller type game like
Speaker 1: Double Dragon that's a classic, and your characters are walking
Speaker 1: across a background that isn't changing, Like there's a blue
Speaker 1: sky in the background, you don't have to redraw the
Speaker 1: blue sky every time the character moves. You just have
Speaker 1: to redraw the stuff that actually does change. So maybe
Speaker 1: it's buildings or trees or bushes or something like that.
Speaker 1: That saves processing time and made side scrolling on PCs possible.
Speaker 1: This sounds incredibly basic, and by today's standards, it is,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was a monumental innovation. It
Speaker 1: really got the wheels turning, and he showed it to
Speaker 1: his coworker Tom Hall, and Hall was really excited by this.
Speaker 1: He says, this is incredible, and he began immediately to
Speaker 1: start working on a game that could show off this
Speaker 1: side scrolling capability on the PC, and they together decided
Speaker 1: that what they would do is build a replica the
Speaker 1: first level for Super Mario Brothers three, and they used
Speaker 1: assets from an existing game that John Romero had created
Speaker 1: before he joined Soft Disc. It was a game called
Speaker 1: Dangerous Dave. So their original rough version of this was
Speaker 1: the first level of Super Mario Brothers three, but using
Speaker 1: the Dangerous Dave character, and it was all done without
Speaker 1: the authorization of Soft Disc. Or even John Romero. He
Speaker 1: didn't know about it either, and so it took them
Speaker 1: one night to recreate that first level. They then saved
Speaker 1: it to a disc and they titled it Dangerous Dave
Speaker 1: in copyright infringement, very tongue in cheek, and they put
Speaker 1: the disc on John Romero's desk.
Speaker 2: So John Romero gets to work.
Speaker 1: He has this disc sitting there and he puts it
Speaker 1: in this computer and he sees this title screen of
Speaker 1: Dangerous Dave and copyright infringement. He's thinking, what the heck
Speaker 1: because he made Dangerous Dave. And he starts the program
Speaker 1: and he suddenly sees the side scrolling game on PC
Speaker 1: and he goes bonkers. He loves it because it's something
Speaker 1: that had not been achievable in PC games up to
Speaker 1: this point. He unofficially authorizes work on a full replica
Speaker 1: of Super Mario Brothers III. They recreate the game, They
Speaker 1: do every level exactly the way it is in the
Speaker 1: Super Nintendo system, but on PC they had to do
Speaker 1: all of this work off hours. They couldn't officially do
Speaker 1: it as Gamer's Edge employees or soft Disk in the
Speaker 1: case of Tom Hall. They did, however, use soft disk computers.
Speaker 1: At the end of the week, they would take their
Speaker 1: computers home. I'm talking desktops here. These aren't like laptops
Speaker 1: or anything. They would pack them up, they would take
Speaker 1: them home and over the weekend they would work on
Speaker 1: this game, and then on Monday morning they would bring
Speaker 1: the computer back, hook it back and hope nobody noticed.
Speaker 1: After a few weeks, they had built a full PC
Speaker 1: version of the game, and the three of them brought
Speaker 1: this replica of the game to Nintendo and they wanted
Speaker 1: to tell Nintendo, Hey, you can reach a much larger
Speaker 1: audience by releasing your game for PC, and we can
Speaker 1: do it. See, we know the secret to making a
Speaker 1: side scrolling game on the personal computer. If you partner
Speaker 1: with us, we can be the solution and we can
Speaker 1: end up opening up your game to an entirely new audience.
Speaker 1: And Nintendo said no, thanks, not a big surprise. If
Speaker 1: you know how Nintendo works, everyone would imagine that they
Speaker 1: would turn down such an offer. For one thing, Nintendo
Speaker 1: relies on titles like Mario to sell Nintendo consoles. If
Speaker 1: they were to offer those games on other platforms, there'd
Speaker 1: be very little incentive to buy a Nintendo entertainment system.
Speaker 1: And they'd be undercutting themselves, so they decided they did
Speaker 1: not want to go in that direction. But other people
Speaker 1: began to take notice of Romero's work and have some
Speaker 1: interest in perhaps talking with them, And one of those
Speaker 1: people was a guy named Scott Miller, who had founded
Speaker 1: a software developer and publishing company called Apagee Software. I'll
Speaker 1: talk more about what Scott Miller got up to with
Speaker 1: John Romero in just a second, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 2: All Right, I mentioned.
Speaker 1: Apagee just before the break. They got their start in
Speaker 1: Texas back in nineteen eighty seven. Now, the company relied
Speaker 1: on a pretty interesting business model. They would publish the
Speaker 1: beginning of a game for free that allowed players to
Speaker 1: download the game and try it out, and if they
Speaker 1: wanted to continue the game, they'd have to purchase the
Speaker 1: subsequent episodes over the phone, and then the company would
Speaker 1: ship the rest of the game a physical copy of
Speaker 1: the game to the player. This model became known as shareware.
Speaker 2: You could share the first part.
Speaker 1: Of the game freely with anyone you liked.
Speaker 2: After that you had to pay.
Speaker 1: Now, keep in mind, this is before the World Wide
Speaker 1: Web was a thing that really got started back in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two. This was nineteen eighty seven, so in
Speaker 1: those days, you had to call up a server using
Speaker 1: a dial up modem. It might be a bulletin board
Speaker 1: system or something along those lines. It might be something
Speaker 1: more like a an online service provider, but that's how
Speaker 1: you would first get connected to the internet, and then
Speaker 1: you could download a file like the shareware version of
Speaker 1: the game, and then you would have to call up
Speaker 1: the company, give them your information, order it, and then
Speaker 1: they would ship you the rest of the game via
Speaker 1: snail mail. It was pretty primitive back in the those days.
Speaker 1: I don't miss it. Apage was pretty successful with this
Speaker 1: approach it. The reason was that they were able to
Speaker 1: take advantage of not having a marketing department or a
Speaker 1: real sales department or having to worry about securing shelf
Speaker 1: space at brick and mortar stores. It cut down a
Speaker 1: lot of costs, so it ended up bringing the overhead
Speaker 1: down and they were able to take advantage of that.
Speaker 1: They also originally intended to create sub brands for each
Speaker 1: of the genres of games that the company produced, so
Speaker 1: they would have maybe one for adventure games, one for
Speaker 1: you know, fighting games, one for flight simulators, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. That was the idea. It never really worked
Speaker 1: out that way. Only one sub brand really stood out,
Speaker 1: but it was a doozy because that one was three
Speaker 1: D Realms. Now, three D Realms created games like the
Speaker 1: Max Pain franchise and Pray, and probably most famously was
Speaker 1: Duke Newcomb three D. I did a whole episode about
Speaker 1: Duke nukeomb or at least I talked about a lot
Speaker 1: in our episode on vaporware, so I won't really go
Speaker 1: into it here. Plus it doesn't really tie into ID
Speaker 1: software deeply enough to warrant it. But that's a heck
Speaker 1: of a story anyway. Scott Miller over at Apagee had
Speaker 1: noticed Romero's work on a game called Pyramids of Egypt,
Speaker 1: and Miller thought Pyramids of Egypt was the perfect style
Speaker 1: of game to sell in this shareware business. He thought,
Speaker 1: this is a way to really get a game that
Speaker 1: is a fun and an interesting If Romero can make
Speaker 1: more games like that, I can sell them this way,
Speaker 1: was what he was thinking. But he was also sneaky.
Speaker 2: Scott Miller was.
Speaker 1: He knew that if he sent correspondence directly to John
Speaker 1: Romero over at soft Disk, they might intercept the message.
Speaker 1: Because software companies had to fight tooth and nail for
Speaker 1: their talent, it was always possible that some other company
Speaker 1: would offer employees more money and more benefits to jump ship.
Speaker 1: So in order to get his message to Romero without
Speaker 1: being detected, he sent Romero a series of fan letters,
Speaker 1: each with a different name attached, but all of them
Speaker 1: having the same contact information the same address enclosed.
Speaker 2: In the letter.
Speaker 1: Romero didn't catch on right away. It wasn't until he
Speaker 1: was reading an article about Scott Miller's company that he
Speaker 1: noticed the address in the article was really familiar. And
Speaker 1: then he looked at his fan mail and saw that
Speaker 1: the same address was on three different letters from three
Speaker 1: supposedly different people. And then Romero got angry. He was
Speaker 1: angry because he thought that the letters were genuine fan mail,
Speaker 1: so he felt betrayed that this fan mail wasn't really
Speaker 1: fan mail, it was someone who wanted something from him.
Speaker 1: So he sent an angry letter to Scott Miller. But
Speaker 1: he did leave a callback number in that letter, and
Speaker 1: Scott Miller called Romero and immediately apologized for the whole
Speaker 1: misunderstanding in his mind, and then made Romero an offer.
Speaker 1: He couldn't refuse, so Miller sent a letter that was
Speaker 1: dated on August twenty third, nineteen ninety, which was not
Speaker 1: long after Gamer's Edge had launched, and said, I really
Speaker 1: did like Pyramids of Egypt. That wasn't a lie. I
Speaker 1: enjoyed that game very much. He also described his company.
Speaker 1: He described the shareware model, and he pointed out that
Speaker 1: his most popular title could pull in anywhere between fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred and two thousand dollars in sales every week. So
Speaker 1: he proposed to Romero, why don't you make games. We'll
Speaker 1: publish the games, and in return, you'll get a substantial percentage.
Speaker 2: Of the profits.
Speaker 1: And because we don't have these overhead costs, we can
Speaker 1: maximize those profits. It's not like you're taking a tiny
Speaker 1: percentage of the net. I mean, gross is pretty much
Speaker 1: the same as net in our business. And Romero thought
Speaker 1: this sounded like a really good idea, and he had
Speaker 1: an ace in the hole as well, that new side
Speaker 1: scrolling technique would give apagee a crazy advantage over other
Speaker 1: publishers in the PC gaming space. No one else had
Speaker 1: developed a game engine that could do this, so apage
Speaker 1: ended up commissioning a game essentially and the group ended
Speaker 1: up developing it, and they called it Commander Keene, a
Speaker 1: very cute side scrolling game, a little cartoonish, very lighthearted,
Speaker 1: and the shareware portion of the game launched in December
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety and it caught on like Gangbusters. Scott Miller
Speaker 1: had been making about seven thousand dollars a month with
Speaker 1: his old library of games. Within ten days of it launching,
Speaker 1: Commander Keene had already earned thirty thousand dollars, so I
Speaker 1: was leaving everything else behind. In February nine, nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and John Carmack all resigned from
Speaker 1: Soft Disc in order for them to go off and
Speaker 1: form their own company. Tom Hall stayed on at Soft
Speaker 1: Disk for a couple more months in order to finish
Speaker 1: up some projects, but then he followed suit, and together
Speaker 1: they created id Software. In order to keep good relations
Speaker 1: with their old employer and not get sued, they agreed
Speaker 1: to make a new game for Soft Disc every two
Speaker 1: months for all of nineteen ninety one at five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a pop. And again they did that because they
Speaker 1: had developed that side scrolling graphics engine while working at
Speaker 1: Soft Disk, and they had developed the games that got
Speaker 1: them the gig on soft disc equipment, so rather than
Speaker 1: court a lawsuit, they decided to be a little proactive
Speaker 1: and smooth things out. One of the games ID Software
Speaker 1: created for soft disk was called Hover Tank, soeten ninety
Speaker 1: Origin Systems released Wing Commander, and that was a really
Speaker 1: impressive title at the time. The gameplay of Wing Commander
Speaker 1: has the player take on the role of a spaceship
Speaker 1: pilot fighting off aliens in various star battles. It's a
Speaker 1: three D perspective, but it required a pretty powerful computer,
Speaker 1: and even then it ran a little slow and janky,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the field of view is cut
Speaker 1: off by the cockpit of your spacecraft, so you have
Speaker 1: a little window that you can see the actual view
Speaker 1: of the other spacecraft in it. That ended up limiting
Speaker 1: the amount of stuff the computer had to redraw. Well.
Speaker 1: It definitely got John Carmack's attention, and he got to
Speaker 1: work and created a new three D engine for computer
Speaker 1: games and incorporated it into this title called Hovertank, which
Speaker 1: wasn't nearly as graphically breathtaking as Wing Commander was at
Speaker 1: the time, but the game mechanics were much more smooth
Speaker 1: than what was in Wing Commander and was a full
Speaker 1: field of view for you didn't have a cockpit obstructing
Speaker 1: your view. Carmac would incorporate this same approach again in
Speaker 1: a title called Catacomb three D, which was a dungeon
Speaker 1: crawling game in which you play a powerful wizard blasting
Speaker 1: enemies with fireballs and other stuff, and when you used
Speaker 1: a spell, a hand would appear as if it was
Speaker 1: being held out by the player. Otherwise, you just saw
Speaker 1: whatever was in front of you, but there was no
Speaker 1: component of the player character in your view until you
Speaker 1: cast a spell. Then a hand would pop up and
Speaker 1: a fireball would shoot out. This gave the player a
Speaker 1: first person perspective within a game, not inside a vehicle
Speaker 1: of any type, but rather just the player's representation alone.
Speaker 1: This sounds incredibly basic today, but at the time was
Speaker 1: an innovative approach. No one had done it before, so
Speaker 1: this was brand new. And this was again for soft Disk,
Speaker 1: which in some ways the company viewed as being a
Speaker 1: bit of a waste because the most they would get
Speaker 1: for it is five thousand dollars. It didn't matter if
Speaker 1: the game caught on or didn't catch on. That's what
Speaker 1: the deal was. For it also meant that a very
Speaker 1: narrow audience would get hold of the game, because it
Speaker 1: was only the people who were subscribing to Soft Discs
Speaker 1: Gamer's Edge service. However, it gave them the experience they
Speaker 1: needed to develop their own games. By the way, in
Speaker 1: case you're wondering, Gamer's Edge survived for a while without
Speaker 1: the ID Software team there once the team left in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one and agreed to supply a game every
Speaker 1: two months for the rest of that year. The folks
Speaker 1: still with Soft Disc took their time learning how John
Speaker 1: Carmack's engine worked, and they started developing their own games.
Speaker 1: The agreement with ID meant that the team had some
Speaker 1: leeway to learn the ropes because they could use that
Speaker 1: time where the games coming from ID Software could be
Speaker 1: put out under the Gamer's Edge brand, and ideally it
Speaker 1: would mean that the team could go on to build
Speaker 1: up a collection of titles of their own and always
Speaker 1: stay ahead of the publication schedule. Mike Maynard and Jim
Speaker 1: Rowe led the department until they too decided to leave
Speaker 1: Soft Disc in late nineteen ninety two. They went on
Speaker 1: to form their own game company called Jam Productions, and
Speaker 1: I'll mention Jam Productions a little bit later. Gamer's Edge
Speaker 1: at that time just faded into obscurity.
Speaker 2: All right, now, let's.
Speaker 1: Get back to ID Software. The guys at ID decided
Speaker 1: to move away from Shreveport. Tom Hall was originally from Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: and he convinced his new coworkers that they should move there,
Speaker 1: so they did in September. For a while, they worked
Speaker 1: out of their apartments building games for Soft Disc while
Speaker 1: trying to decide on what to make for their own titles,
Speaker 1: apart from more Commander Keen games, which had proven as
Speaker 1: a success. So Tom Hall was very fond of Commander Keen.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was mostly his ideas in that game,
Speaker 1: so he was really advocating for more Commander Keen titles.
Speaker 2: But some of the rest of the.
Speaker 1: Team, actually all the rest of the team were hoping
Speaker 1: to do something new. John Romero suggested that they make
Speaker 1: a game similar to an old PC title called Castle Wolfenstein. Now,
Speaker 1: this was a game that came out for the Apple
Speaker 1: two in nineteen eighty one, and it is not like
Speaker 1: the famous Castle Wolfenstein that most of my listeners are
Speaker 1: familiar with.
Speaker 2: If you are familiar with it at all.
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty one game was a stealth based game,
Speaker 1: and it was a top down perspective, meaning you were
Speaker 1: looking down on the field of play and your character
Speaker 1: was just represented by a little kind of almost like
Speaker 1: a stick figure. But you were playing as a prisoner
Speaker 1: of war attempting to escape a Nazi prison camp during
Speaker 1: World War Two. So very different in many ways from
Speaker 1: the game that ID Software would later produce. The guy
Speaker 1: who programmed the original Castle Wolfenstein as a fellow by
Speaker 1: the name of Silas Warner Romero, thought that the concept
Speaker 1: of escaping a prison while fighting bad guys was the
Speaker 1: perfect concept to put this new three D engine to use,
Speaker 1: and it didn't hurt that the publishing company that put
Speaker 1: out Castle Wolfenstein Muse had ceased to be several years earlier.
Speaker 1: The company had gone out of business, it didn't exist
Speaker 1: at all, and no one had scooped up its intellectual property,
Speaker 1: so the copyright had entered the public domain, and Castle
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein's intellectual property was fair game, so that the team
Speaker 1: decided to make a new version of the game, putting
Speaker 1: the player in the role of the hero and calling
Speaker 1: it Wolfenstein three D. Not everyone was so happy about
Speaker 1: this direction. Tom Hall felt that Commander Keene which was
Speaker 1: much more playful and lighthearted, was a better direction for
Speaker 1: the company. He was not so happy about the idea
Speaker 1: of doing a gritty, grim, bloody, violent game.
Speaker 2: Like Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 1: Now, if you look at footage of the original Wolfenstein
Speaker 1: three D game today, you'd say it's very cartoony. But
Speaker 1: at the time, again, that bloody display you see whenever
Speaker 1: you shoot a bad guy, that was new at the time.
Speaker 1: It was not something you typically saw in video games
Speaker 1: at that time, so it was causing a bit.
Speaker 2: Of a stir.
Speaker 1: Now, Romero was more about taking on this game designer
Speaker 1: role within the company, but that meant that it was
Speaker 1: sort of pushing Tom Hall a bit to the side,
Speaker 1: because Tom Hall was supposed to be the lead game designer,
Speaker 1: And this was sort of the beginning of Tom Hall's
Speaker 1: realization that perhaps this company wasn't the right place for him,
Speaker 1: but he'd still stick around for a bit longer. The
Speaker 1: team started work on Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2: They had it ready to go.
Speaker 1: To release in the spring of nineteen nine. They used
Speaker 1: the shareware model under apagee. They released the first set
Speaker 1: of levels for free. If you completed those levels, you've
Speaker 1: got a message saying that if you wanted the rest
Speaker 1: of the game, you had to purchase it, and it
Speaker 1: would give you essentially two more sets of levels and
Speaker 1: some bonus material, including the final battle with Hitler or
Speaker 1: essentially Mecha Hitler. I remember this game fondly. This was
Speaker 1: the game that introduced me to ID Software. I actually
Speaker 1: played Wolfenstein three D before I ever played any of
Speaker 1: the Commander Keen games, although I eventually played those two
Speaker 1: and Wolfenstein three D was a game I played in
Speaker 1: high school. Both during that time and literally in high school,
Speaker 1: I had a word processing class that I finished all
Speaker 1: the class work for the year in the first month,
Speaker 1: and so then I spent the rest of the year
Speaker 1: playing Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2: True story, Dylan, absolutely true.
Speaker 1: The second year I was there, I taught the IBM class,
Speaker 1: and once I gave them an assignment, I played more
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein three D. I played a lot of Wolfenstein three
Speaker 1: D is what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2: I thought it was great.
Speaker 1: It was unlike other games I had played on PCs,
Speaker 1: which at that time were mostly computer role playing games,
Speaker 1: and even earlier ones which were text adventure style games, so.
Speaker 2: This was a new thing for me.
Speaker 1: Around the same time, ID Software hired a person named
Speaker 1: Kevin Cloud as an assistant to Adrian Carmack, and Kevin
Speaker 1: would end up being an important part of id's Software's team.
Speaker 1: Whenever the question came up whether to focus on a
Speaker 1: new intellectual property or create a sequel or remake, Kevin's
Speaker 1: inclination was to go with the new, and sometimes that
Speaker 1: meant going against the prevailing opinion. More on that, especially
Speaker 1: in the second part. I've got more to say in
Speaker 1: this first part about ID Software, but before I continue,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right,
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein was an enormous success. Game sales reached two hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a month and stayed that way for more
Speaker 1: than a year. This made even Commander Keene's success look
Speaker 1: tiny by comparison, and Keen had been a huge hit
Speaker 1: for Apagee.
Speaker 2: It was such a big hit that.
Speaker 1: Another company called form Gen asked the asked ID Software
Speaker 1: to make a copy of the game that could be
Speaker 1: sold in brick and mortar stores. In other words, make
Speaker 1: a game with box art and all of that stuff
Speaker 1: that we can put on store shelves, because it's it's
Speaker 1: too good to just have it in this shareware format.
Speaker 2: So id Software did. They created a new.
Speaker 1: Version of Wolfenstein called Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny, and that
Speaker 1: launched in December in nineteen ninety two. Nintendo even called
Speaker 1: them up and said, hey, we would like a version
Speaker 1: of this for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It's kind
Speaker 1: of funny because, of course, the company originally started as
Speaker 1: trying to convince Nintendo to allow them to port games
Speaker 1: to the PC, and now their Nintendo was saying, hey,
Speaker 1: can you port this PC game to the Nintendo. The
Speaker 1: Nintendo version's a bit different from the original PC version.
Speaker 1: All the blood has been removed from the game, so
Speaker 1: when you shoot Nazis, they still die, but they don't
Speaker 1: bleed everywhere. And while in the PC version you would
Speaker 1: run into guard dogs and have to kill them, that's
Speaker 1: not cricket on the SNES, so instead you run into
Speaker 1: enormous rats. Maybe they're rous's give me a shout if
Speaker 1: you get that reference.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The one place in software was seeing some trouble was Germany.
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein three D is all about escaping a Nazi prison,
Speaker 1: which meant there were plenty of depictions of Nazis in
Speaker 1: the game, including images bearing the swastika symbol, but it's
Speaker 1: illegal in Germany to have that image in entertainment, particularly
Speaker 1: in games, so the German government banned the sale of
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein in Germany.
Speaker 2: Only this game wasn't.
Speaker 1: Distributed the way your traditional games were on store shelves,
Speaker 1: which meant players could go online and download the game anyway,
Speaker 1: because the Internet doesn't obey the traditional national boundaries, at
Speaker 1: least not without some hardware restricting communications like the Great
Speaker 1: Firewall of China. So Wolfenstein three D played a part
Speaker 1: in those early days of the Internet and making some
Speaker 1: people very nervous about the information super Highway and what
Speaker 1: it might be able to do. It actually prompted quite
Speaker 1: a few serious discussions across country borders and how can
Speaker 1: we manage the Internet in such a way that obeys
Speaker 1: the law within certain jurisdictions while remaining an international communication protocol.
Speaker 1: It's a question we still ask ourselves today. It's tough.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: John Carmac's engine for Wolfenstein was getting a lot of
Speaker 1: attention in the computer game world, and other publishers wanted
Speaker 1: to be able to make first par and shooter style
Speaker 1: games as well. But reinventing something that someone else has
Speaker 1: already made is a lot of work, so it's easier,
Speaker 1: although sometimes expensive, to just license software that powers another game,
Speaker 1: and that's how ID Software got into the game engine
Speaker 1: licensing business. They began to sell licenses to the underlying
Speaker 1: engine powering Wolfenstein three D, and other publishers began to
Speaker 1: make games using that engine, and those games ran the
Speaker 1: gamut of genres. The one of them was blake Stone,
Speaker 1: which was a science fiction game that had a cover
Speaker 1: art that looked a lot like Buck Rogers, and blake
Speaker 1: Stone came from Jam Productions, that company I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: They made the game, an Apagee published the title. There
Speaker 1: was also a game from Capstone Software called Corridor seven
Speaker 1: Alien Invasion, which added a bit of horror to the
Speaker 1: science fiction mix. I think it owed a lot to
Speaker 1: Alien honestly. That game was by Intracore and game Tech.
Speaker 2: It didn't do so well because by the time it came.
Speaker 1: Out, it was already a little dated and the engine
Speaker 1: of Wolfenstein was not quite as robust as some of
Speaker 1: the newer engines, and a planned sequel of Corridor eight
Speaker 1: never came to pass. Then there was an Snees game
Speaker 1: that used the Wolfenstein engine, and I mean it makes
Speaker 1: perfect sense that game.
Speaker 2: Was super three D.
Speaker 1: Noah's Arc YEP, a game about Noah using sleep darts
Speaker 1: to pacify goats, use the Wolfenstein game engine.
Speaker 2: It's all true Dylan.
Speaker 1: Goats and ostriches. By the way, goats couldn't open doors.
Speaker 1: Ostriches could totally open a door and come after you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a real thing that really existed, and it used
Speaker 1: the Wolfenstein three D engine. Although the game wasn't really violent,
Speaker 1: it involved knocking animals out with sleep darts, which is
Speaker 1: perfectly fun. Don't do it for real, zies though, that's
Speaker 1: just mean. On April first, nineteen ninety two, in Software
Speaker 1: relocated again.
Speaker 2: So moving to Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Might not have been the best idea. A lot of
Speaker 1: the team wasn't really happy with how winters turn out
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, particularly the people who had grown up in Louisiana.
Speaker 1: They did not imagine it getting that cold and that snowy,
Speaker 1: and I imagine Tom Hall didn't really talk up the
Speaker 1: whole winter wonderland of Wisconsin either when he convinced everyone
Speaker 1: to move their base of operations up there, So instead
Speaker 1: they moved to Texas. Scott Miller was in Dallas, so
Speaker 1: they moved to Mesquite, which is a region on the
Speaker 1: east side of Dallas. It's just a short six and
Speaker 1: a half hour drive away from Shreveport, Louisiana, so if
Speaker 1: they really felt like it, they could do a long
Speaker 1: road trip back to where they started. John Carmack was
Speaker 1: hard at work designing a new game engine. This will
Speaker 1: become a familiar thread for the rest of these two episodes.
Speaker 1: He was wanting to improve upon the one he had
Speaker 1: already built for Wolfenstein three D, and he even had
Speaker 1: a name for the next game, but he didn't have
Speaker 1: any idea of what the game would be about. He
Speaker 1: just knew the name he wanted the games titled to
Speaker 1: be Doom.
Speaker 2: He thought it sounded.
Speaker 1: Cool, but what would it actually be about.
Speaker 2: He had no idea.
Speaker 1: The name, by the way, didn't just occur to Carmak.
Speaker 1: He didn't just say, oh, we should call it Doom.
Speaker 1: Apparently it was actually taken as an inspiration from a quote.
Speaker 1: A quote from the nineteen eighty seven film The Color
Speaker 1: of Money, which is a sequel to a nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: one movie called The Hustler. So in The Color of Money,
Speaker 1: a character named Vincent Lauria played by Tom Cruise, is
Speaker 1: carrying a case and the case holds his poolque but
Speaker 1: another character asks him what's in the case, and he
Speaker 1: just kind of smiles as he opens it up, and
Speaker 1: he says Doom. And thus the name of the next
Speaker 1: huge game was born. And they had the name, but
Speaker 1: they didn't have a game, and they were talking pretty
Speaker 1: big at the time. In January nineteen ninety three, the
Speaker 1: company announced in a press release that their next title
Speaker 1: would become the biggest Times Suck in all of history,
Speaker 1: and that productivity would plummet as a result. The idea
Speaker 1: for the game itself emerged, as all great ideas do,
Speaker 1: in a totally different game. Yes, just like every idea
Speaker 1: of massive consequence in human history, the idea for Doom
Speaker 1: came out of a rousing Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game. Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: D and D is the reason Doom exists. John Carmack
Speaker 1: had taken on the role of dungeon Master, and John
Speaker 1: Romero says that his own character was trying to get
Speaker 1: hold of a magic sword and through a series of
Speaker 1: somewhat hasty decisions acts identally unleashed a legion of demons
Speaker 1: which quickly overran the world. And then they realized what
Speaker 1: Doom should be about In Doom, you would play a
Speaker 1: hero in a science fiction setting facing off against monstrous enemies.
Speaker 1: Only these enemies wouldn't be aliens, they would be demons.
Speaker 1: The science facility where it all takes place would have
Speaker 1: accidentally opened up a portal to Hell. That's when development
Speaker 1: of Doom really got underway. That is it for the
Speaker 1: ID Software story, Part one, which originally published on April fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Like I said, next week, we will conclude
Speaker 1: that with part two. So if you're waiting on the
Speaker 1: edge of your seat, you got seven days to wait,
Speaker 1: unless you're binging this in the future, in which case
Speaker 1: you can just skip right ahead to that one if
Speaker 1: you like, and then go back and listen to the
Speaker 1: other ones as many times as you like. That's my motto.
Speaker 1: Wait No, my motto is I hope you are all well,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.