Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland's senior writer for how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com, and today's episode is part two of
Speaker 1: the ID Software story. Remember this was a request from
Speaker 1: Dave who wrote to me and asked for an episode
Speaker 1: about ID Software. But as it turns out, there's too
Speaker 1: much to talk about for one episode. So in our
Speaker 1: last episode, Early talked about the people responsible for forming
Speaker 1: ID Software and how they found early success with titles
Speaker 1: like Commander Keene and Wolfenstein three D. Today we pick
Speaker 1: up where I left off with the development of the
Speaker 1: blockbuster title Doom. Now, the company was still just a
Speaker 1: small team of developers and they had a problem. There
Speaker 1: weren't enough people to work on a follow up to Wolfenstein,
Speaker 1: and simuled peneously work on the new Doom project. What's more,
Speaker 1: the people at in Software all wanted to work on Doom.
Speaker 1: They wanted to work on something new rather than create
Speaker 1: a sequel to an already existing game, but there was
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure from Apage to create a sequel.
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein had been the most successful title to debut on
Speaker 1: apog in its history, so they decided to do the
Speaker 1: reasonable thing. They outsourced Wolfenstein too. They licensed out the
Speaker 1: work to APOG, which got started on the project, but
Speaker 1: after some time in development in software didn't really see
Speaker 1: it progressing very well. They didn't think it was making
Speaker 1: any progress, so they pulled the plug on the project.
Speaker 1: Appog ended up taking these lemons and making Lemonade later on,
Speaker 1: converting the work they had already produced into a brand
Speaker 1: new title called Rise of the Triad. Talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about that in a second. They also hired
Speaker 1: a couple of folks in nineteen One of them ended
Speaker 1: up making a big name for himself a little bit
Speaker 1: later on in the video game world. That would be
Speaker 1: American McGhee. He's perhaps most famous for his Dark Alice
Speaker 1: in Wonderland inspired games, which he made with e A
Speaker 1: after his tenure with ID Software ended in nine. McGhee
Speaker 1: started at ID as a tech support worker and eventually
Speaker 1: worked his way up to designer, but there was a
Speaker 1: point where the company decided that McGee's work and the
Speaker 1: company's direction were no longer a good fit, and so
Speaker 1: he was let go. One thing that did make Doom
Speaker 1: possible was the evolution of computer hardware. The team had
Speaker 1: been bumping up against the upper limits of the previous
Speaker 1: generation of PCs, but over time, the really expensive Intel
Speaker 1: three eight six microprocessor cost had started to come down,
Speaker 1: and now it was finding its way into consumer level PCs.
Speaker 1: More people were able to afford a three eight six PC,
Speaker 1: which was better equipped to handle the demands of a
Speaker 1: beefy game engine, or at least beefy at the time.
Speaker 1: Three six have been around for a while. It first
Speaker 1: launched in this Intel microprocessor. It took about a year
Speaker 1: for manufacturing to ramp up to prod the levels that
Speaker 1: Intel wanted, but even when they did reach those levels,
Speaker 1: they were still really expensive, so very few people were
Speaker 1: actually able to afford them. By today's standards, a three
Speaker 1: six microprocessor would probably seem pretty crude and clunky. It
Speaker 1: had only two seventy five thousand transistors on it A
Speaker 1: little microprocessor now, I say only because today's microprocessors have
Speaker 1: more than a billion transistors on them, so two five
Speaker 1: thousand is nothing compared to today's uh microprocessors. The clock rate,
Speaker 1: as in how fast the three D six microprocessor could work,
Speaker 1: was between twelve mega hurts up to forty mega hurts
Speaker 1: if you're overclocking it on the extreme end. And again,
Speaker 1: your basic smartphone today can outperform those specs. But at
Speaker 1: the time it was a state of the art machine
Speaker 1: and it was just what it needed to take the
Speaker 1: next step in game development. John Carmack, at the ripe
Speaker 1: old age of twenty one years old, began to experiment
Speaker 1: with stuff that older game engines just couldn't handle. That
Speaker 1: included creating irregular shapes in the environment like uh, irregular
Speaker 1: walls or floors that sloped around. He also wanted dynamic
Speaker 1: lighting and the option to move in or outdoors. These
Speaker 1: were all elements that would have been really challenging back
Speaker 1: in the older Wolfenstein days, that that game engine just
Speaker 1: couldn't handle this kind of level of complexity. And then
Speaker 1: he also had another goal. He wanted gameplay to be
Speaker 1: immersive and fast. Fast was really importan and it had
Speaker 1: to be a fast paced game and really get the
Speaker 1: players blood pumping. So he wanted these abilities, this ability
Speaker 1: to make more complex environments, but not at the expense
Speaker 1: of the speed of the game. As Carmack worked on
Speaker 1: the engine, uh Romero started programming the levels and designed
Speaker 1: much of the look and sound of the game. For inspiration,
Speaker 1: the team looked at the art of hr Geiger, and
Speaker 1: that was Geiger's work that inspired the Alien film franchise,
Speaker 1: so the team used that art to guide decisions in
Speaker 1: level and monster design. The walls in Doom sometimes have
Speaker 1: hideous faces incorporated into them, and many of the demons
Speaker 1: look pretty monstrous as well. Romero points out that by
Speaker 1: today's standards, uh they might seem a bit cartoony, but
Speaker 1: at the time it was considered a really etchy approach
Speaker 1: to game design. Tom Hall, who had put up some
Speaker 1: resistance during the development of Wolfenstein three D, campaigned for
Speaker 1: are a rich story for Doom. He had in mind
Speaker 1: an opening scene that would set the rest of the
Speaker 1: game in motion, and in that scene, the player would
Speaker 1: be taking on the role of a soldier in the
Speaker 1: middle of a card game with the rest of his squad,
Speaker 1: and in the middle of the game, a demon would
Speaker 1: burst in, killing everyone but the player, and then the
Speaker 1: game would start, and his ideas helped shape design decisions,
Speaker 1: but as he tells it all later on, the focus
Speaker 1: was really more on the technical side of making the
Speaker 1: game work and less on the narrative or story side.
Speaker 1: He'd say it would be a few years before you
Speaker 1: would see a first person shooter incorporate deep story elements,
Speaker 1: and the game he sites is really nailing. It was
Speaker 1: Half Life, which was a from a totally different company.
Speaker 1: It's from Valve, That would be the first real example
Speaker 1: of that sort of thing. But he wanted it to
Speaker 1: be Doom, and he started to feel really discouraged that
Speaker 1: a lot of his ideas were being rejected. He wanted
Speaker 1: rooms to have a purpose in Doom, so that when
Speaker 1: you walked into a room in the game, you understood
Speaker 1: why the room was there. It had a reason for existing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just one in a series of rooms that
Speaker 1: make up a level, or just a weird, interchangeable environment
Speaker 1: with undefined spaces. In his Doom, you wouldn't wonder why
Speaker 1: two rooms connected together, or what purpose a weird path
Speaker 1: might serve. It would have a reason and you would
Speaker 1: understand what it was. To him, level design needed to
Speaker 1: make sense and serve the story, but the development of
Speaker 1: the game didn't really allow for his designs, and so
Speaker 1: the levels were less detailed, less logical. Hall himself designed
Speaker 1: about seven levels, according to his own estimation. He said
Speaker 1: Romero was responsible for some of the more iconic levels
Speaker 1: in Doom, particularly the ones that used multiple vertical planes,
Speaker 1: you know, multiple levels within a game level. So I'm
Speaker 1: using level in two different ways here, game levels meaning
Speaker 1: at a stage in a game, and love was within
Speaker 1: the game or within that stage rather meaning different vertical platforms.
Speaker 1: Hall's account of those days sound like they were pretty rough.
Speaker 1: He said that the team was working every day, seven
Speaker 1: days a week, for up to sixteen hours a day,
Speaker 1: and he said he was feeling increasingly isolated at that time.
Speaker 1: The rest of the team sensed this as well, and
Speaker 1: eventually in Romero invited Hall over for dinner and then
Speaker 1: told him they were letting him go. He was essentially fired,
Speaker 1: but they had also secured another job for him over
Speaker 1: at Apog, so he already had a place to go.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like he was just cut loose, and in
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen, Hall said that ultimately this came
Speaker 1: as a huge relief. After the Shock War off, he
Speaker 1: was the first of the four main founders of IT
Speaker 1: to leave it's software. He would move on to Apog
Speaker 1: and work on Rise of the Triad, which I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: It was the game that Wolfenstein, too, would turn into
Speaker 1: He'd work on other games too, before moving on to
Speaker 1: co found another studio. The other studio he co founded
Speaker 1: was one called ion Storm, rather infamous in video game circles,
Speaker 1: and a fellow co founder was John Romero. But we'll
Speaker 1: get to that part of the story a little later.
Speaker 1: And ion Storm could be its own episode all by itself.
Speaker 1: It was a heck of a story. I remember when
Speaker 1: all of that was was unfolding. Meanwhile, in Adrian Carmack
Speaker 1: relished the subject matter of Doom. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like the opposite of Tom Hall's reaction. He thought it
Speaker 1: was fantastic. He took great delight in designing and drawing
Speaker 1: numerous demonic critters and nightmarish environments. He was happy to
Speaker 1: move away from the more family friendly art style that
Speaker 1: Tom Hall held dear. He and Kevin Cloud, his assistant,
Speaker 1: designed tons of monsters and then they commissioned a sculptor
Speaker 1: to come in and create three dimensional mob as of
Speaker 1: the monsters out of clay. Then they would paint the
Speaker 1: models and scan them in to create virtual models for
Speaker 1: the game itself. And it gave Doom a really unique look.
Speaker 1: And I realized that really unique is redundant. Someone who
Speaker 1: joined in Software during the development of Doom was Sandy Peterson.
Speaker 1: He was a programmer who had worked for Micropros before
Speaker 1: joining ID Software. Micropros was another huge game that name
Speaker 1: in the computer gaming industry in the nineteen eighties. In particular,
Speaker 1: one of its founders is a real legend in games,
Speaker 1: Sid Meyer. Peterson would end up designing nineteen levels for Doom,
Speaker 1: even though he joined the project after it had already started.
Speaker 1: As the game neared completion, they had a big decision
Speaker 1: they had to make. They felt they had outgrown apages
Speaker 1: business model, which involved that shareware approach to get gamers interested,
Speaker 1: followed by sending a physical copy of the full game
Speaker 1: once an order came in. Appage only had a couple
Speaker 1: of employees handling incoming calls, and the folks over at
Speaker 1: it we're getting frustrated because orders were coming in faster
Speaker 1: than apag could respond to them. And they asked Scott
Speaker 1: Miller if he would invest in that department and grow it,
Speaker 1: and he seemed reluctant to do that. So it Software
Speaker 1: decided they could do this for themselves and just do
Speaker 1: what Appage had been doing for them, using the Internet
Speaker 1: for distribution and keeping overhead costs low so that they
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about producing physical copies and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So they moved out to strike
Speaker 1: out on their own. Now I got more to say
Speaker 1: about this next phase and its software's evolution, but first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. During
Speaker 1: alpha testing of the Doom game, ID Software sent unfinished
Speaker 1: copies to a few play testers to look for bugs
Speaker 1: and get feedback on how the gameplay was coming together.
Speaker 1: An early build of the game. That alpha build ended
Speaker 1: up leaking onto the Internet, which got a ton of attention,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that it wasn't a complete game and
Speaker 1: ID Software was genuinely worried that it could end up
Speaker 1: tanking the game. If people played something that wasn't finished,
Speaker 1: they might have a a an incorrect assumption of how
Speaker 1: the game's going to turn out. But actually it helped
Speaker 1: drive excitement for the title. People were really eager to
Speaker 1: get hold of the finished copy. The retail price for
Speaker 1: the game, at least at one point was was suggested
Speaker 1: at nine dollars. That's insane, right. The game launched on
Speaker 1: a server on December tenth at the University of Wisconsin
Speaker 1: and almost immediately the server crashed because so many people
Speaker 1: were ailing in to try and get a copy of
Speaker 1: this game, and since it was about midnight when the
Speaker 1: game went live, it meant there was several hours before
Speaker 1: someone could get everything back online, but that really only
Speaker 1: helped drive the demand for the game further and soon
Speaker 1: it became a best seller. Wolfenstein three D gave birth
Speaker 1: to the first person shooter genre, but Doom defined it,
Speaker 1: and it's software built in a feature that would become
Speaker 1: standard in nearly every FPS to follow Doom, and that
Speaker 1: was the death match. That was Romero's term for a
Speaker 1: competitive match between two or more players using the game engine.
Speaker 1: With Doom, up to four people could play against each
Speaker 1: other on physically networked computers, a local area network or land,
Speaker 1: or you could play against a single person over the internet.
Speaker 1: It was the birth of competitive multiplayer for first person shooters,
Speaker 1: and it's another reason why people site Dom as the
Speaker 1: real father of the FPS genre. So while Wolfenstein three
Speaker 1: D did it first, Doom really got the form factor down,
Speaker 1: and before Doom, Wolfenstein was the biggest hit from it
Speaker 1: software with more than two hundred thousand copies sold, but
Speaker 1: within a couple of years of launched, Doom sales blew
Speaker 1: that number on the water by. It was estimated that
Speaker 1: ten million computers had a copy of Doom on them.
Speaker 1: Whether or not all those copies were full paid copies
Speaker 1: is another matter, because again the first few levels were
Speaker 1: offered as a shareware download. The game received positive reviews.
Speaker 1: Fans loved it. The multiplayer was huge, an enormous innovation
Speaker 1: and in software was the darling of the computer games industry.
Speaker 1: And it also had another big innovation built in with Doom.
Speaker 1: And this was a choice that John Carmack had made.
Speaker 1: It was incredibly accessible to the mob community. Now. A
Speaker 1: mody is someone who modifies games. They tweak code to
Speaker 1: create new types of enemies or environments, new levels, new items,
Speaker 1: new weapons. A modern friendly game is one that can
Speaker 1: transform in all sorts of ways with a minimum minimum
Speaker 1: a fuss upon the part of the matters. They don't
Speaker 1: have to end up breaking code in order to make
Speaker 1: it happen. Now, there are a lot of titles out
Speaker 1: there today that have a reputation for supporting creative mods,
Speaker 1: such as sky Rim or A Grand Theft Auto five.
Speaker 1: Doom was an early example of this. John Karmack designed
Speaker 1: the code so that it wouldn't be too difficult for
Speaker 1: the moderate community to tweak it, and in fact, this
Speaker 1: would remain one of his principles throughout his career. The
Speaker 1: result was that Doom was viewed as a must have
Speaker 1: game because even if you grew tired of the original gameplay,
Speaker 1: the moderate community was always adding new stuff, which meant
Speaker 1: that you had a continuously refreshed ame you could just
Speaker 1: download the mods and incorporated into your own copy. It
Speaker 1: was so big that during the presentation for Windows, Bill
Speaker 1: Gates had a segment in which he was keyed into
Speaker 1: the frame of a Doom game. And yes, it's just
Speaker 1: as embarrassing and awkward as you are imagining right now.
Speaker 1: Bill Gates standing there wearing a kind of a costume,
Speaker 1: holding a rifle in the middle of the rifle, his
Speaker 1: hand nowhere near the stock or the trigger, talking about
Speaker 1: how he's going to enter the next Doom tournament, and
Speaker 1: then a Doom sprite appears to his left. He turns,
Speaker 1: holds the rifle out still by the middle, by the
Speaker 1: way finger nowhere near the trigger, and blasts the bad guy.
Speaker 1: It's awful and you should watch it anyway. The fact
Speaker 1: that even Microsoft was acknowledging this showed what a big
Speaker 1: deal it was, and the fact that this was a
Speaker 1: game that was going mainstream. Like the Wolfenstein engine before it,
Speaker 1: A lot of other computer game companies wanted to license
Speaker 1: the technology powering Doom. It was light years ahead of
Speaker 1: anyone else, so In Software was happy to oblige for
Speaker 1: a fee. Companies could use the underlying engine for their
Speaker 1: own games, and that brought in another steady stream of
Speaker 1: revenue into the company, boosting the already impressive cash flow
Speaker 1: from game sales. The ID crew found themselves flush with moolah,
Speaker 1: and not everyone handled success the same way, So here's
Speaker 1: a way to contrast. People. Both John Carmack and Romero
Speaker 1: bought expensive sports cars like Ferraris, but John Carmack limited
Speaker 1: his lavish spending and much of his life didn't really
Speaker 1: change that significantly compared to what it was before. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: John Romero jumped a little further into the deep end
Speaker 1: of luxury. He bought a big house, he bought more
Speaker 1: luxury cars, He started growing big elaborate parties, and people
Speaker 1: began to get a little worried that perhaps he was
Speaker 1: getting caught up in the lifestyle. After Doom went gold,
Speaker 1: John Carmack went back to the drawing board to create
Speaker 1: guess what, yep, the next generation game engine. Essentially, every
Speaker 1: time they release a game, Carmack wanted to build a
Speaker 1: better game engine for the next game. He never wanted
Speaker 1: to just rest on what he had built and then
Speaker 1: churn out sequels. He didn't find that satisfying. He wanted
Speaker 1: to make something better than what he made before, and
Speaker 1: he really wanted to crack the nut that was true
Speaker 1: three dimensional figures within a game, not three D that
Speaker 1: projects out, but figures within the game that have three
Speaker 1: dimensions within that virtual environment. Doom was a big jump
Speaker 1: from Wolfenstein. But you couldn't look up or down in Doom.
Speaker 1: You always look straight ahead no matter where you were facing,
Speaker 1: and the critters you ran into were represented by two
Speaker 1: domandational sprites. They weren't three dimensional virtual figures. They were
Speaker 1: kind of like flat cardboard cutout characters. Uh what version
Speaker 1: of him you saw was dependent upon how you were
Speaker 1: facing them, but it was always flat. Carmak wanted something
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than that, and when he wanted something, essentially
Speaker 1: would go out and build it. Meanwhile, its software received
Speaker 1: a request from a game publisher to create a version
Speaker 1: of Doom for store shelves, which became Doomed two. So
Speaker 1: Doom two was the one that you could find in
Speaker 1: a box in computer game stores in the mid nineties.
Speaker 1: It was actually really similar to the first game, just
Speaker 1: with some new levels and a couple of new designs,
Speaker 1: but mainly it was Doom, just with slightly different layouts.
Speaker 1: But it was another big commercial success because it was
Speaker 1: more of what people loved. Now on the company side,
Speaker 1: It's software had grown to the point that it could
Speaker 1: hire a few new people, and Romero cut back his
Speaker 1: workout wars. He had been working fourteen or sixteen hour days,
Speaker 1: and so now he moved to a more normal eight
Speaker 1: hour day, much of it spent playing Doom against in
Speaker 1: Software fans. Uh. He also spent a lot more time
Speaker 1: in engagement with fans in general, and again people at
Speaker 1: in Software began to worry that perhaps Romero wasn't as
Speaker 1: involved as he needed to be. When it came time
Speaker 1: to look at what came next, the group agreed upon
Speaker 1: another idea, inspired by their Dungeons and Dragon sessions. So
Speaker 1: in their games they had a mighty warrior named Quake,
Speaker 1: and he was a fierce melee fighter. He used melee
Speaker 1: weapons like hammers to whack bad guys, and Carmack and
Speaker 1: Romero both thought this would be really interesting to create
Speaker 1: a three D game first person shooter, but instead of
Speaker 1: being a shooter, it's a first person melee game. You
Speaker 1: have to use a hand to hand weapon and attack enemies.
Speaker 1: It would require a new approach to game design, new
Speaker 1: enemy to design in order to make it fair but challenging.
Speaker 1: It was something the team was really eager to take
Speaker 1: on because it was different enough from what they had
Speaker 1: done before to really be engaging. So they set out
Speaker 1: to make a fantasy based hand to hand first person
Speaker 1: combat game. There's only one little problem. They did not
Speaker 1: have a game engine yet. They had nothing to build
Speaker 1: upon because John Carmack was falling behind on delivery dates
Speaker 1: for a working game engine as he encountered unanticipated problems
Speaker 1: while building a three D engine. Meanwhile, other teams were
Speaker 1: creating concept art and level designs, but they couldn't do
Speaker 1: anything with them because there was no engine to build upon.
Speaker 1: So they company had already announced that was working on
Speaker 1: a game called Quake, and it was already starting to
Speaker 1: miss some promised release dates and Without a working game engine,
Speaker 1: it didn't make any sense to put anything out, and
Speaker 1: they couldn't really predict when something would be done because
Speaker 1: it could take ages after the game engine is done
Speaker 1: to build a brand new type of game. Remember, they'd
Speaker 1: have to design a first person melee game and then
Speaker 1: test it to make sure it was working, and then
Speaker 1: fix anything that wasn't working. This process could take another
Speaker 1: year or longer, and that's in addition to however long
Speaker 1: it was going to take Carmack to finish the three
Speaker 1: D engine. This is where things first came to a
Speaker 1: head in IT Software. Romero and Kevin Cloud both felt
Speaker 1: that it was really important to be innovative and push
Speaker 1: for new features with every new franchise, so they really
Speaker 1: wanted to incorporate this melee approach in this new game.
Speaker 1: It would mean that Romero's designs would be part of
Speaker 1: the game. It would mean that they would have something
Speaker 1: totally new to talk about. They didn't want to just
Speaker 1: keep making games and older franchises, but the rest of
Speaker 1: the team, including John Carmack himself, said that it was
Speaker 1: more important that they release another game in a timely fashion,
Speaker 1: using the Doom and chise or using the Doom engine,
Speaker 1: even because it would get the game out much more quickly.
Speaker 1: So it came down to Romero and Kevin Cloud versus
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody else, and everybody else won that argument. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: they decided to drop the melee combat aspect for Quake. Instead,
Speaker 1: it would become another first person shooter, similar to Doom
Speaker 1: and Wolfenstein. However, they were going to wait for Carmack's
Speaker 1: new game engine to be finished. The big advantage here
Speaker 1: was that they had already built first person shooters. They
Speaker 1: knew how to build first person shooters, so they didn't
Speaker 1: have as much uncertainty about game mechanics. That part was easier.
Speaker 1: It meant that there was going to be less on
Speaker 1: the development time once the game engine was finished. If
Speaker 1: they had gone with that melee approach, they have a
Speaker 1: lot more testing on their hands. So they went with
Speaker 1: the first person shooter model, and they cut out a
Speaker 1: lot of uncertainty, even though that meant refining something they
Speaker 1: had already done earlier. They had also, by that time
Speaker 1: gained a pretty substantial fan club, including some famous fans.
Speaker 1: One of those fans was Trent Resiner from nine Inch Nails.
Speaker 1: He was a big fan of Doom, and so once
Speaker 1: they found out about this, they reached out to him
Speaker 1: and asked if he might be interested to become the
Speaker 1: music and audio director for Quake, and he said yes.
Speaker 1: So he ended up doing the sound design and music
Speaker 1: for a Quake and turning it into an immersive audio
Speaker 1: experience on top of its visual impact. So if you
Speaker 1: ever played Quake and thought, while the sound design for
Speaker 1: this is pretty pretty special, it's because of Trent resin
Speaker 1: Now When it was finished, Quake allowed players to look
Speaker 1: in all directions. You could look up and down, which
Speaker 1: meant you had to worry about aiming up or down
Speaker 1: for the first time. Because in Doom, if an enemy
Speaker 1: was in front of you and you shot at it,
Speaker 1: you were aiming at it. It didn't matter if it
Speaker 1: was on top of some airs or at the bottom
Speaker 1: of some stairs. Your character was magically aiming up or
Speaker 1: down based upon you facing the enemy. You didn't really
Speaker 1: have to worry about aiming so much because you couldn't
Speaker 1: look up or down, and Quake it was totally different.
Speaker 1: You could look up and down, which meant that you
Speaker 1: suddenly had to worry about that aiming. And so a
Speaker 1: lot of the environments included things like balconies stairs raised platforms,
Speaker 1: requiring you to be to look up or down or
Speaker 1: else you would get blasted into oblivion. And Quake also
Speaker 1: built on the success of Doom's multiplayer format. With Quake,
Speaker 1: up to sixteen players could compete online simultaneously, a pretty
Speaker 1: big jump from the four local area network players of Doom.
Speaker 1: Deathmatches became much more chaotic and fast paced and pretty.
Speaker 1: It was such a popular mode that some fans in
Speaker 1: Texas decided that they wanted to hold a big event
Speaker 1: and invite people to come in and bring their computers
Speaker 1: with them. So if you wanted to attend, you brought
Speaker 1: your Peter rig. You set it up inside this big
Speaker 1: conference hall, and it would become an enormous local area
Speaker 1: network where Quake could be played with huge groups, and
Speaker 1: they called it Quake Con. It was such a big
Speaker 1: deal that even the software team came out to it,
Speaker 1: and it would become so popular that they would hold
Speaker 1: it every year and its software would take advantage of
Speaker 1: it to use it as an event to announce upcoming
Speaker 1: titles and projects. So it became a kind of a
Speaker 1: marketing thing for in software, even though it was organized
Speaker 1: by fans. Very useful for for a company to have
Speaker 1: the fans to allow to work for you. Quake was
Speaker 1: incredibly successful, though it had a little bit of a
Speaker 1: hiccup in its growth because of a decision that its
Speaker 1: software made when it came to distributing the game. They
Speaker 1: decided to offer part of the game for ten dollars.
Speaker 1: So you pay ten bucks and you get access to
Speaker 1: the early part of the game. Technically, you would get
Speaker 1: the full game, but only the first few levels would
Speaker 1: be accessible. Once you completed that section, you would get
Speaker 1: informed at to unlock the rest of the game, you
Speaker 1: would have to pony up the money that made up
Speaker 1: the difference in the full price tag, which was another
Speaker 1: fifty dollars. But hackers began to examine the code for
Speaker 1: Quake because they knew if you had that first part
Speaker 1: of it, you had the whole game, and eventually they
Speaker 1: figured out how to bypass the system and get access
Speaker 1: to the full game without paying that fifty dollars, and
Speaker 1: the hack spread across the internet very quickly, but it
Speaker 1: still was a success for in software, and it also
Speaker 1: inspired a new art form. A group of Quake players
Speaker 1: created a little comedy sketch using the game Quake. They
Speaker 1: had a group of game characters that were trying to
Speaker 1: seek out and stop someone who was cheating in the game,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that the person cheating is actually
Speaker 1: John Romero. They used the Quake game engine to tell
Speaker 1: a story, something that was pretty new at the time,
Speaker 1: and eventually people started calling this art form mashinima for
Speaker 1: machine animation. If you want to hear more about this process,
Speaker 1: you should check out the episode tech Stuff Talks to
Speaker 1: Rooster Teeth, which we published originally back in February two
Speaker 1: tho twelve. In it, I talked to Bernie Burns, founder
Speaker 1: of Rooster Teeth, and one of the big shows they
Speaker 1: did that got them started was a series called Red
Speaker 1: Versus Blue that used the Halo game engine to animate stories.
Speaker 1: These days, Rooster Teeth does all sorts of stuff, including
Speaker 1: feature length films. So maybe sometime I can do a
Speaker 1: follow up story with somebody from there. Fascinating company and
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of their work. Back to its software,
Speaker 1: just like Doom and Wolfenstein, that Quake engine became a
Speaker 1: sought after asset. Valve Software licensed it for their first
Speaker 1: person shooter Half Life, which Tom Hall once cited as
Speaker 1: the next real landmark in first person shooters. For its
Speaker 1: incorporated storyline. The Quake Engine would dominate in the computer
Speaker 1: industry until it was eventually conquered by the Unreal Engine.
Speaker 1: After Quake went gold, the company held internal conversations about
Speaker 1: its direction, and things really came to add Romero felt
Speaker 1: that they were relying too heavily on formats that they
Speaker 1: had already perfected, and he said, we should really be
Speaker 1: doing something new and innovative. We shouldn't just keep doing
Speaker 1: what we do well. John Carmack and most of the
Speaker 1: rest of its software felt that Romero wasn't really dedicating
Speaker 1: himself to the work anymore, and that he'd become too
Speaker 1: wrapped up in his own fame and lifestyle, and so
Speaker 1: the company said, hey, Romero, can you make tracks. They
Speaker 1: told him to resign, and he did. He then went
Speaker 1: on to reconnect with Tom Hall and together they formed
Speaker 1: the company ion Storm. More on that at the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, It's got kind of a sad ending.
Speaker 1: The ID Software team, meanwhile, went back to work creating
Speaker 1: a sequel to Quake because of the hacking that they
Speaker 1: experienced when they launched the first Quake. They I did
Speaker 1: that the best way to move forward would be to
Speaker 1: partner with an established publisher that They had been doing
Speaker 1: this on their own for a while, and when they
Speaker 1: were smaller it was easier to handle, but as they
Speaker 1: grew they realized that they needed someone with a more
Speaker 1: established approach to publishing. But they definitely didn't want to
Speaker 1: deal with having their IP stolen anymore, so they formed
Speaker 1: a long term relationship with Activision. The first game they
Speaker 1: put out was Quake two in and then they immediately
Speaker 1: got to work on Quake three. We're in the home
Speaker 1: stretch here, but before I conclude the story of the
Speaker 1: software company, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that much longer after Romero's departure that it
Speaker 1: seemed like his accusations were really accurate ones, and John
Speaker 1: Carmack's leadership style complicated matters. He decided that Quake three
Speaker 1: would be a multiplayer only style game, online only, multiplayer only,
Speaker 1: no single player component, no monster designed because it would
Speaker 1: only be player characters fighting each other, and the rest
Speaker 1: of the team wasn't really happy because they felt it
Speaker 1: was limited and it really meant that a lot of
Speaker 1: them didn't have much to do. But Carmack insisted that
Speaker 1: that was the approach they take. It was also said
Speaker 1: that Romero, for whatever faults he may have had, was
Speaker 1: much better at managing people than Carmack was. People felt
Speaker 1: ignored or dismissed, and morale started to dip. Quake three
Speaker 1: Arena launched in ninet. It of course had a brand
Speaker 1: new game engine powering it. The first Call of Duty
Speaker 1: game actually uses that Quake engine as its foundation, but
Speaker 1: that didn't help people at ID Software feel that the
Speaker 1: come but he wasn't just doing the same thing repeatedly.
Speaker 1: And also, the Unreal engine ended up debuting and was
Speaker 1: comparatively easy to use. If you looked at the Quake
Speaker 1: engine and the Unreal engine side by side, and you
Speaker 1: looked at the actual interfaces for the two, Unreal engine
Speaker 1: was very attractive, and it ended up becoming stiff competition
Speaker 1: for that Quake engine. On the game development side, things
Speaker 1: slowed down at in Software Now that wasn't on purpose.
Speaker 1: John Carmack felt that the next game on the company,
Speaker 1: uh Dime, would have to have an even better game engine.
Speaker 1: Big surprise there. Every time the game came out, Carmack said,
Speaker 1: the next engine has to be even better. We can't
Speaker 1: just make a game on this engine. That's where he
Speaker 1: found his satisfaction in designing the latest, greatest gaming engine
Speaker 1: with new features and new capabilities, something that could really
Speaker 1: take advantage of the latest generation of hardware. But he
Speaker 1: also wanted to keep his development team at its soft
Speaker 1: where small. He felt that that made communication better, ad
Speaker 1: meant that you were more nimble, you could react faster.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to see id Software balloon into a
Speaker 1: large corporation. So there's the problem, right, That's there's a
Speaker 1: consequence to to these two decisions, and that is it
Speaker 1: takes longer to make games because games were getting more complex.
Speaker 1: You were no longer in an era where one or
Speaker 1: two people could launch a triple A title game. You
Speaker 1: had to have a group of people working on it.
Speaker 1: The games were so much more complex that it was
Speaker 1: taking groups of experienced programmers longer to make games, especially
Speaker 1: by restricting the size of the development team. So if
Speaker 1: you keep the development team the same while the games
Speaker 1: get more and more complex, guess what it means everything
Speaker 1: takes longer to produce. When It's Software announced in two
Speaker 1: thousand that their next game was going to be Doomed three,
Speaker 1: they didn't have an idea at the time, nor did
Speaker 1: the fans that it would take more than three years
Speaker 1: for that game to come out, which meant that when
Speaker 1: it finally did launch in two thousand four, there had
Speaker 1: been five years between games from its software Quake three
Speaker 1: Arena in Doom three in two thousand four, yikes. While
Speaker 1: working on the game, it Software did something that they
Speaker 1: had not done before. They began to license out their
Speaker 1: actual game intellectual property to other game studios. Not Apage,
Speaker 1: you know, that's who they used to work with, but
Speaker 1: to other game studios in general. So they allowed other
Speaker 1: developers to create games and franchises that they had themselves designed.
Speaker 1: So the first of those was Returned to Castle Wolfenstein,
Speaker 1: which was developed by gray Matter Interactive and Nerve Software.
Speaker 1: That game received some mixed reviews, especially for the single
Speaker 1: player campaign, but the multiplayer aspect was generally praised. Activision
Speaker 1: wanted an ex spansion pack for the game, and they
Speaker 1: ended up working with a company called Splash Damage to
Speaker 1: design that expansion pack. But boy were they not happy
Speaker 1: when they saw the single player component to Wolfenstein Enemy
Speaker 1: Territory that was the expansion pack. Activision said that the
Speaker 1: single player campaign was not good enough to publish OUCH,
Speaker 1: but the multiplayer was seen to be really, really fun
Speaker 1: and enjoyable, and it worked fine, so Activision released it
Speaker 1: for free. Here's the crazy thing. You could download the
Speaker 1: multiplayer expansion and play it even if you didn't own
Speaker 1: the original game, which means Activision gave away a free
Speaker 1: multiplayer game. Why oh, I couldn't find an answer to that.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe at the time, no one really thought
Speaker 1: it through. Doom three debuted in two thousand four two
Speaker 1: mixed reviews. It looked really pretty. The new game engine
Speaker 1: was phenomenal. It had amazing lighting effects, lots of dynamic
Speaker 1: lighting in that game, but many people felt that the
Speaker 1: actual design of the enemies and the gameplay was pretty derivative.
Speaker 1: Enemies tend to come straight at you once they spot you.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a whole lot of variety to it. There
Speaker 1: was a game mechanic that required you to switch between
Speaker 1: a flashlight and your guns, which irritated people so much
Speaker 1: that someone created a mod that allowed you to have
Speaker 1: a flashlight taped to your gun, because they said, if
Speaker 1: you're on Mars, you probably have tape. I think that's reasonable.
Speaker 1: I remember playing this game and I did it without
Speaker 1: the mod and I hated that fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: you had to switch between your flashlight and your gun.
Speaker 1: The whole idea was to make it more exciting and
Speaker 1: to ramp up the tension, but ultimately it just made
Speaker 1: me tecked off. Anyway, the game was a huge hit,
Speaker 1: ended up becoming the top selling title and in Software's history,
Speaker 1: partly because it was available on multiple platforms like consoles
Speaker 1: in the PC. In two thousand five, Adrian Carmack left
Speaker 1: the company, which meant that the only original founder remaining
Speaker 1: with the company was John Carmack. And remember Adrian Carmack
Speaker 1: and John Carmack not related. Adrian Carmack later sued in Software.
Speaker 1: He alleged that he was forced out of the company
Speaker 1: by the other co owners so that they could get
Speaker 1: shares of ownership of the company. So, according to Carmack,
Speaker 1: Adrian Carmack, that is, Activision had made an offer to
Speaker 1: purchase the Doom Quake and Wolfenstein intellectual properties for about
Speaker 1: fifteen million dollars, but he was rejected, or rather Activision
Speaker 1: was rejected by it, and then the other co owners
Speaker 1: of the company tried to pressure Adrian Carmack to sell
Speaker 1: his shares back to them for eleven million dollars. He said, well,
Speaker 1: that severely undervalues the shares that I own. I own
Speaker 1: of ID software. It's way too little money for so
Speaker 1: valuable a property. Then they gave him an offer of
Speaker 1: twenty million, according to Adrian Carmack, and then they terminated
Speaker 1: him once he did not agree to sell at that price. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: the lawsuit that he leveled against in Software never went anywhere,
Speaker 1: and that's most likely because Activision never actually purchased in Software,
Speaker 1: so it all remained hypothetical in the first place. Uh.
Speaker 1: In two thousand five, a major major event happened, not
Speaker 1: just for its software, but I would say the world.
Speaker 1: That's when the Rock Dwayne Johnson himself starred in the
Speaker 1: film version of Doom. I guess you could say it
Speaker 1: was inspired by the game, It wasn't really connected to
Speaker 1: Doom that much. There's a first person perspective section in
Speaker 1: the film that's meant to be a nod to the
Speaker 1: original source material. It's a really cheesy movie. I saw
Speaker 1: it for free at a pre screening and ask for
Speaker 1: my money back. It stands at nine on Rotten Tomatoes.
Speaker 1: Just a reminder though, that The percentage on Rotten Tomatoes
Speaker 1: tells you how many critics gave it a negative or
Speaker 1: a positive review. So a nine percent movie isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: worse than say, a thirty percent movie. It just means
Speaker 1: fewer critics gave it a positive review. If it's a
Speaker 1: movie that's right in the middle somewhere, then it could
Speaker 1: go either way, right like, if if it's a one
Speaker 1: out of ten scale and everyone gives it a four,
Speaker 1: the percentage could be really low, but you would still
Speaker 1: say it's a better movie than something that warrants a one.
Speaker 1: All that being said, Doom the movie is awful, don't
Speaker 1: watch It's terrible is being generous. So John Carmack had
Speaker 1: decided that he's going to work on another game, which
Speaker 1: means yep, you guessed. He wanted to make an all
Speaker 1: new aiming engine. Big surprise there, and so that meant
Speaker 1: there'd be more years between games. Meanwhile, there were rumors
Speaker 1: that other companies besides Activision were interested in ID software.
Speaker 1: They were still licensing out properties like Quake and Wolfenstein
Speaker 1: to other companies. Reviews mostly criticized the style of play,
Speaker 1: echoing the concerns Romero had expressed years earlier saying you
Speaker 1: guys are stuck in a rut. Carmack, in the meantime,
Speaker 1: started looking into mobile games and how he might make
Speaker 1: a big impact there. One of the projects from his
Speaker 1: initiative was called Orcs and Elves, which was the first
Speaker 1: new intellectual property involving ID Software UH in years, and
Speaker 1: it was for mobile platforms. In two thousand nine, a
Speaker 1: company called ZeniMax Media approached ID Software and an acquisition deal,
Speaker 1: which the company ultimately accepted. Xenomax Media also owned another
Speaker 1: big name in computer games, Bethesda. That's the company behind
Speaker 1: games like the most recent incarnation of the Fallout series
Speaker 1: and the Elder Scrolls franchise. Now, what set Zemax Media
Speaker 1: apart from other suitors was it had a reputation for
Speaker 1: letting subsidiary companies followed their own paths in a more
Speaker 1: or less handsoff approach. This gave ID Software the resources
Speaker 1: they would need to develop two games simultaneously, so they
Speaker 1: could actually work on two titles at the same time
Speaker 1: for the first time ever. Really. One of those two
Speaker 1: titles was Rage and the other was a new incarnation
Speaker 1: of Doom. Both games would end up using carmas next
Speaker 1: game engine called id Tech five Rage launched in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, totally new franchise. It's set in a post
Speaker 1: apocalyptic world and features players driving around, shooting its stuff
Speaker 1: and generally causing mayhem. The team at ID Software called
Speaker 1: it an open but directed world, meaning the player didn't
Speaker 1: have absolute freedom to do everything, but had a lot
Speaker 1: more options available with some guidance of what was to
Speaker 1: come next. The game received good reviews but failed to
Speaker 1: make a big impact on the market, possibly because by
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven the computer and video game industries were
Speaker 1: way more competitive than they had been a few years earlier.
Speaker 1: John Carmack also co founded a new company called Armadillo Aerospace.
Speaker 1: His gig over there is to design spacecraft, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty nifty side project for a computer game designer.
Speaker 1: On November twenty second, two thirteen, he resigned from ID Software.
Speaker 1: Carmac had expressed excitement and interest in the Oculus virtual
Speaker 1: reality platform he had joined the company earlier in and
Speaker 1: then realized that he was going to have to switch
Speaker 1: to full time over at Oculus and leave ID Software.
Speaker 1: His twenty two year tenure at ID Software came to
Speaker 1: an end, and for the first time time in its history,
Speaker 1: its Software no longer had a founding member on staff.
Speaker 1: Carmack had said, I wanted to remain a technical advisor
Speaker 1: for ID, but it just didn't work out, probably for
Speaker 1: the best, as the divided focus was challenging. It Software's
Speaker 1: new version of Doom took a little longer to come
Speaker 1: out than they anticipated. It launched just last year on May.
Speaker 1: It's the fourth game in the Doom franchise and technically
Speaker 1: is a second reboot of the series. The setting is
Speaker 1: a research facility on Mars where the portal to Hell
Speaker 1: has opened up, and the player takes on the role
Speaker 1: of the Doomslayer, and featured some old school shooter mechanics,
Speaker 1: such as the fact that your health does not regenerate
Speaker 1: over time, you have to find health packs and you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about reloading weapons, but you can
Speaker 1: run out of ammunition, and it also brings back deathmatch modes.
Speaker 1: Its software is The company continues to work on new
Speaker 1: games on various platforms. But let's talk about the old
Speaker 1: founders and some of their co workers. Where are they now.
Speaker 1: John Romero went on to found other studios like ion Storm,
Speaker 1: which he left in two thousand one after he left,
Speaker 1: the Dallas office closed, and then about four years later
Speaker 1: the Austin office for ion Storm closed. That's a whole
Speaker 1: story in itself. He also worked at Midway for a
Speaker 1: while and Gazillion before he founded a new social gaming
Speaker 1: company called lut Drop, and he and his wife Brenda
Speaker 1: Romero do a lot of advocacy work for education. John
Speaker 1: Carmack is with Oculus, which is part of Facebook. He
Speaker 1: continues to be a big advocate for virtual reality in
Speaker 1: general and is still quite outspoken in the world of tech.
Speaker 1: Tom Hall, who was the first of the founders to
Speaker 1: leave ID Software, co founded ion Storm with Romero. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that did not last. He also has worked at Midway
Speaker 1: Games along with Romero, and at lute Drop along with Romero.
Speaker 1: Adrian Carmack got out of the game business after his
Speaker 1: contentious departure, at least for a while. He returned fairly recently.
Speaker 1: In April sixteen, John Romero released a video teasing a
Speaker 1: new first person shooter and announced that Adrian Carmack was
Speaker 1: involved in the project. It was called black Room and
Speaker 1: it was all attached to a Kickstarter campaign, but the
Speaker 1: campaign was canceled in just four days before it could
Speaker 1: reach its seven hundred thousand dollar goal. It had hit
Speaker 1: a hundred thirty one thousand before Romero canceled the Kickstarter campaign.
Speaker 1: He said that he was canceling it until they could
Speaker 1: produce a working demo to show gamers what the finished
Speaker 1: product would be like, so that people weren't just backing
Speaker 1: an idea that may not ever materialize. Sandy Peterson had
Speaker 1: left in Software in nine seven. He joined a company
Speaker 1: called Ensemble Studios in and got involved in a little
Speaker 1: game called Age of Empire Airs, which met with some success.
Speaker 1: These days, he tends to work on cool board games.
Speaker 1: There's one called Cathulu Wars that I really want to
Speaker 1: try out. It also has a video game version and
Speaker 1: was a highly successful crowdfunded project. Kevin Cloud remained at
Speaker 1: ID Software and served as creative director for the company
Speaker 1: for a while. One of the notes trivia I've found
Speaker 1: out about Kevin Cloud is that when you look down
Speaker 1: and you see the hands and doom and Doom too,
Speaker 1: those are Kevin Cloud's hands. And that's all I've got.
Speaker 1: That's the story of it Software. It continues on to
Speaker 1: this day, and maybe sometime I'll have an update about
Speaker 1: them in the future. For now, it's time to sign off.
Speaker 1: If any of you have suggestions for future episodes or guests,
Speaker 1: right and let me know the addresses Text stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuffworks dot com or drop me a line on
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter. The handle at each of those is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: is it how stuff works dot com