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 time for another tech Stuff Classic episode. This is
Speaker 1: actually the conclusion of a two parter. So if you
Speaker 1: didn't listen to last week's classic, which was The ID
Speaker 1: Software Story Part one, I recommend you go do that
Speaker 1: first because this is The ID Software Story Part two
Speaker 1: and you don't want to walk into a movie right
Speaker 1: in the middle right, you want to see it from
Speaker 1: the beginning. Anyway. This episode originally published way back on
Speaker 1: April seventh, twenty seventeen. Hope you enjoy. So in our
Speaker 1: last episode, I really talked about the people responsible for
Speaker 1: forming ID Software and how they found early success with
Speaker 1: titles like Commander Keene and Wolfenstein three. Today we'd 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
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein and simultaneously work on the new Doom project. What's more,
Speaker 1: the people at ID 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: Apagee 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 apage, which got started on the project, but
Speaker 1: after some time in development, ID Software didn't really see
Speaker 1: it progressing very well. They didn't think it was a
Speaker 1: making it a progress, so they pulled the plug on
Speaker 1: the project. Apagee ended up taking these lemons and making
Speaker 1: Lemonade later on, converting the work they had already produced
Speaker 1: into a brand new title called Rise of the Triad.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit more about that in a second.
Speaker 1: They also hired a couple of folks in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: One of them ended up making a big name for
Speaker 1: himself a little bit later on in the video game world.
Speaker 1: That would be American McGee. He's perhaps most famous for
Speaker 1: his Dark Alice in Wonderland inspired games, which he made
Speaker 1: with EA. After his tenure with ID Software ended in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, McGhee started at ID as a tech
Speaker 1: support worker and eventually worked his way up to designer,
Speaker 1: but there was a point where the company decided that
Speaker 1: McGee's work and the company's direction were no longer a
Speaker 1: good fit, and so he was let go. One thing
Speaker 1: that did make Doom possible was the evolution of computer hardware.
Speaker 1: The team had been bumping up against the upper limits
Speaker 1: of the previous generation of PCs, but over time, the
Speaker 1: really expensive Intel three eighty six microprocessor cost had started
Speaker 1: to come down, and now it was finding its way
Speaker 1: into consumer level PCs. More people were able to afford
Speaker 1: a three eighty six PC, which was better equipped to
Speaker 1: handle the demands of a BFY game engine, or at
Speaker 1: least BF at the time. Now three eighty six had
Speaker 1: been around for a while. It first launched in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five. This Intel microprocessor, it took about a year
Speaker 1: for manufacturing to ramp up to the levels that Intel wanted,
Speaker 1: but even when they did reach those levels, they were
Speaker 1: still really expensive, so very few people were actually able
Speaker 1: to afford them. By today's standards, a three eighty six
Speaker 1: microprocessor would probably seem pretty crude and clunky. It had
Speaker 1: only two hundred and seventy five 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 hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five thousand is nothing compared to today's microprocessors.
Speaker 1: The clock rate, as in how fast the three eighty
Speaker 1: six microprocessor could work, was between twelve megahertz up to
Speaker 1: forty megahurts if you're overclocking it on the extreme end.
Speaker 1: And again, your basic smartphone today can outperform those specs.
Speaker 1: But at the time it was a state of the
Speaker 1: art machine and it was just what it needed to
Speaker 1: take the next step in game development. John Karmack, at
Speaker 1: the ripe old age of twenty one years old, began
Speaker 1: to experiment with stuff that older game engines just couldn't handle.
Speaker 1: That included creating irregular shapes in the environment, like irregular
Speaker 1: walls or floors that sloped around. He also wanted dynamic
Speaker 1: lighting and the option to move in or out doors.
Speaker 1: These were all elements that would have been really challenging
Speaker 1: back in the older Wolfenstein days 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 important. It had to
Speaker 1: be a fast paced game and really get the player's
Speaker 1: blood pumping, so he wanted these abilities, this ability to
Speaker 1: make more complex environments, but not at the expense of
Speaker 1: the speed of the game. As Carmak worked on the engine,
Speaker 1: Romero started programming the levels and designed much of the
Speaker 1: look and sound of the game. For inspiration, the team
Speaker 1: looked at the art of hr Geiger, and that was
Speaker 1: Geiger's work that inspired the Alien film franchise, so the
Speaker 1: team used that art to guide decisions in level and
Speaker 1: monster design. The walls in Doom sometimes have hideous faces
Speaker 1: incorporated in to them, and many of the demons look
Speaker 1: pretty monstrous as well. Romero points out that by today's
Speaker 1: standards they might seem a bit cartoony, but at the
Speaker 1: time it was considered a really etchy approach to game design.
Speaker 1: Tom Hall, who had put up some resistance during the
Speaker 1: development of Wolfenstein three D, campaigned for a rich story
Speaker 1: for Doom. He had in mind an opening scene that
Speaker 1: would set the rest of the game in motion, and
Speaker 1: in that scene, the player would be taking on the
Speaker 1: role of a soldier in the middle of a card
Speaker 1: game with the rest of his squad, and in the
Speaker 1: middle of the game a demon would burst in, killing
Speaker 1: everyone but the player, and then the game would start,
Speaker 1: and his ideas helped shape design decisions, but as he
Speaker 1: tells it all later on, the focus was really more
Speaker 1: on the technical side of making the game work and
Speaker 1: less on the narrative or story side. He'd say it
Speaker 1: would be a few years before you would see a
Speaker 1: first person shooter incorporate deep story elements, and the game
Speaker 1: he cites is really nailing it. Half Life, which was
Speaker 1: a from a totally different company. It's from Valve, that
Speaker 1: would be the first real example of that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But he wanted it to be Doom, and he started
Speaker 1: to feel really discouraged that a lot of his ideas
Speaker 1: were being rejected. He wanted rooms to have a purpose
Speaker 1: in Doom, so that when you walked into a room
Speaker 1: in the game, you understood why the room was there.
Speaker 1: It had a reason for existing. It wasn't just one
Speaker 1: in a series of rooms that make up a level,
Speaker 1: or just a weird interchangeable environment with undefined spaces. In
Speaker 1: his Doom, you wouldn't wonder why two rooms connected together,
Speaker 1: or what purpose a weird path might serve, it would
Speaker 1: have a reason and you would understand what it was.
Speaker 1: To him, level design needed to make sense and serve
Speaker 1: the story, but the development of the game didn't really
Speaker 1: allow for his designs, and so the levels were less detailed,
Speaker 1: less logical. Hall himself designed about seven levels, according to
Speaker 1: his own estimation. He said Romero was responsible for some
Speaker 1: of the more iconic levels in Doom, particularly the ones
Speaker 1: that used multiple vertical planes. You know, multiple levels within
Speaker 1: a game level. So I'm using level in two different
Speaker 1: ways here, game levels meaning at a stage in a game,
Speaker 1: and levels within the game or within that stage rather
Speaker 1: meaning different vertical platforms. Hall's account of those days sound
Speaker 1: like they were pretty rough. He said that the team
Speaker 1: was working every day, seven days a week, for up
Speaker 1: to sixteen hours a day, and he said he was
Speaker 1: feeling increasingly isolated at that time. The rest of the
Speaker 1: team sensed this as well, and eventually, in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: Romero invited Hall over for dinner and then told him
Speaker 1: they were letting him go. He was essentially fired, but
Speaker 1: they had also secured another job for him over at Apogee,
Speaker 1: so he already had a place to go. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like he was just cut loose, and in twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: said that ultimately this came as a huge relief after
Speaker 1: the Shock War off. He was the first of the
Speaker 1: four main founders of ID to leave ID Software. He
Speaker 1: would move on to Apagee and work on Rise of
Speaker 1: the Triad, which I mentioned earlier. It was the game
Speaker 1: that Wolfenstein Io would turn into. He'd work on other
Speaker 1: games too, before moving on to co found another studio.
Speaker 1: The other studio he co founded was one called ion Storm,
Speaker 1: rather infamous in video game circles, and his fellow co
Speaker 1: founder was John Romero. But we'll get to that part
Speaker 1: of the story a little later, and ion Storm could
Speaker 1: be its own episode all by itself. It was a
Speaker 1: heck of a story. I remember when all of that
Speaker 1: was unfolding. Meanwhile, in nineteen ninety three, Adrian Carmak relished
Speaker 1: the subject matter of Doom. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: the opposite of Tom Hall's reaction. He thought it was fantastic.
Speaker 1: He took great delight in designing and drawing numerous demonic
Speaker 1: critters and nightmarish environments. He was happy to move away
Speaker 1: from the more family friendly art style that Tom Hall
Speaker 1: held dear. He and Kevin Cloud, his assistant, designed tons
Speaker 1: of monsters, and then they commissioned a sculptor to come
Speaker 1: in and create three dimensional models of the monsters out
Speaker 1: of clay. Then they would paint the models and scan
Speaker 1: them in to create virtual models for the game itself.
Speaker 1: And it gave Doom a really unique look. And I
Speaker 1: realized that really unique is redundant. Someone who joined ID
Speaker 1: Software during the development of Doom was Sandy Peterson. He
Speaker 1: was a programmer who had worked for Micropros before joining
Speaker 1: ID Software. Micropros was another huge name in the computer
Speaker 1: gaming industry in the nineteen eighties. In particular, one of
Speaker 1: its founders is a real legend in games, Sid Meyer.
Speaker 1: Peterson would end up designing nineteen levels for Doom, even
Speaker 1: 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 Apagee's
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. Abajee only had a couple
Speaker 1: of employees handling incoming calls, and the folks over at
Speaker 1: it were getting frustrated because orders were coming in faster
Speaker 1: than apagee 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 ID Software
Speaker 1: decided they could do this for themselves and just do
Speaker 1: what apage 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 in ID 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 playtesters to look for bugs and
Speaker 1: get feedback on how the gameplay was coming together. An
Speaker 1: early build of the game that alpha build ended up
Speaker 1: 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 an incorrect assumption of how the game's
Speaker 1: going to turn out, but actually it helped drive excitement
Speaker 1: for the title. People were really eager to get hold
Speaker 1: of the finished copy. The retail price for the game,
Speaker 1: at least at one point was a was suggested at
Speaker 1: nine dollars. That's insane, right. The game launched on a
Speaker 1: server on December tenth, nineteen ninety three, at the University
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin, and almost immediately the server crashed because so
Speaker 1: many people were dialing in to try and get a
Speaker 1: copy of this game, and since it was about midnight
Speaker 1: when the game went live, it meant there was several
Speaker 1: hours before someone could get everything back online, but that
Speaker 1: really only helped drive the demand for the game further,
Speaker 1: and soon it became a best seller. Wolfenstein three D
Speaker 1: gave birth to the first person shooter genre, but Doom
Speaker 1: defined it, and id Software built in a feature that
Speaker 1: would become standard in nearly every FPS to follow Doom,
Speaker 1: and that was the death match. That was Romero's term
Speaker 1: for a competitive match between two or more players. Using
Speaker 1: the game engine Doom, up to four people could play
Speaker 1: against each other on physically networked computers, a local area network,
Speaker 1: or a land or you could play against a single
Speaker 1: person over the internet. It was the birth of competitive
Speaker 1: multiplayer for first person shooters, and it's another reason why
Speaker 1: people cite Doom as the real father of the FPS genre.
Speaker 1: So while Wolfenstein three D did it first, Doom really
Speaker 1: got the form factor down. And before Doom, Wolfenstein was
Speaker 1: the biggest hit from ID Software with more than two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand copies sold, but within a couple of years
Speaker 1: of launch, Doom sales blew that number out of the water.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety five, it was estimated that ten million
Speaker 1: computers had a copy of Doom on them. Whether or
Speaker 1: not all those copies were full paid copies is another matter,
Speaker 1: because again the first few levels were offered as a
Speaker 1: shareware download. The game received positive fans loved it. The
Speaker 1: multiplayer was huge, an enormous innovation, and ID Software was
Speaker 1: the darling of the computer games industry. And it also
Speaker 1: had another big innovation built in with Doom. And this
Speaker 1: was a choice that John Carmack had made. It was
Speaker 1: incredibly accessible to the modern community. Now, a mot is
Speaker 1: someone who modifies games. They tweak code to create new
Speaker 1: types of enemies or environments, new levels, new items, new weapons.
Speaker 1: A modern friendly game is one that can transform in
Speaker 1: all sorts of ways with a minimum of fuss upon
Speaker 1: the part of the motters. They don't have to end
Speaker 1: up breaking code in order to make it happen. Now,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of titles out there today that
Speaker 1: have a reputation for supporting creative mods, such as Skyrim
Speaker 1: or a Grand Theft Auto five. Doom was an early
Speaker 1: example of this. John Carmack designed the code so that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be too difficult for the modern community to
Speaker 1: tweak it, and in fact, this would remain one of
Speaker 1: his principles throughout his career. The result was that Doom
Speaker 1: was viewed as a must have game because even if
Speaker 1: you grew tired of the original gameplay, the modern community
Speaker 1: was always adding new stuff, which meant that you had
Speaker 1: a continuously refreshed game. You could just download the mods
Speaker 1: and incorporate it into your own copy. It was so
Speaker 1: big that during the presentation for Windows ninety five, 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 spread 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 ID Software was happy to oblige for fee.
Speaker 1: Companies could use the underlying engine for their own games,
Speaker 1: and that brought in another steady stream of revenue into
Speaker 1: the company, boosting the already impressive cash flow from game sales.
Speaker 1: The ID crew found themselves flush with moolah, and not
Speaker 1: everyone handled success the same way. So here's a way
Speaker 1: to contrast people. Both John Carmack and Romero bought expensive
Speaker 1: sports car like Ferraris, but John Carmack limited his lavish spending,
Speaker 1: and much of his life didn't really change that significantly
Speaker 1: compared to what it was before. Meanwhile, John Romero jumped
Speaker 1: a little further into the deep end of luxury. He
Speaker 1: bought a big house, he bought more luxury cars, He
Speaker 1: started throwing big, elaborate parties, and people began to get
Speaker 1: a little worried that perhaps he was getting caught up
Speaker 1: in the lifestyle. After Doom went gold, John Carmack went
Speaker 1: back to the drawing board to create guess what yep,
Speaker 1: the next generation game engine. Essentially every time they release
Speaker 1: a game, Carmack wanted to build a better game engine
Speaker 1: for the next game. He never wanted to just rest
Speaker 1: on what he had built and then churn out sequels.
Speaker 1: He didn't find that satisfying. He wanted to make something
Speaker 1: better than what he made before, and he really wanted
Speaker 1: to crack the nut that was true three dimensional figures
Speaker 1: within a game, not three D that projects out, but
Speaker 1: figures within the game that have three dimensions within that
Speaker 1: virtual environment. Doom was a big jump from Wolfenstein. But
Speaker 1: you couldn't look up or down in Doom. You always
Speaker 1: look straight ahead, no matter where you were facing, and
Speaker 1: the critters you ran into were represented by two dimensional sprites.
Speaker 1: They weren't three dimensional virtual figures. They were kind of
Speaker 1: like flat cardboard cutout characters. What version of them you
Speaker 1: saw was dependent upon how you were facing them, but
Speaker 1: it was always flat. Carmak wanted something more sophisticated than that,
Speaker 1: and when he wanted something, essentially, he would go out
Speaker 1: and build it. Meanwhile, ID Software received a request from
Speaker 1: a game publisher to create a version of Doom for
Speaker 1: store shelves, which became Doom two. So Doom Too was
Speaker 1: the one that you could find in a box in
Speaker 1: computer game stores in the mid nineties. It was actually
Speaker 1: really similar to the first game, just with some new
Speaker 1: levels and a couple of new designs, but mainly it
Speaker 1: was Doom, just with slightly different layouts. But it was
Speaker 1: another big commercial success because it was more of what
Speaker 1: people loved. Now on the company side, ID Software had
Speaker 1: grown to the point that it could hire a few
Speaker 1: new people, and Romero cut back his work hours. He
Speaker 1: had been working fourteen or sixteen hour days and so
Speaker 1: now he moved to a more normal eight hour day,
Speaker 1: much of it spent playing Doom against ID Software fans.
Speaker 1: He also spent a lot more time in engagement with
Speaker 1: fans in general, and again people at ID Software began
Speaker 1: to worry that perhaps Romero wasn't as involved as he
Speaker 1: needed to be. When it came time to look at
Speaker 1: what came next, the group agreed upon another idea inspired
Speaker 1: by their Dungeons and Dragon sessions. So in their games
Speaker 1: they had a mighty warrior named Quake, and he was
Speaker 1: a fierce melee fighter. He used melee weapons like hammers
Speaker 1: to whack bad guys, and Carmack and Romero both thought
Speaker 1: this would be really interesting to create a three D
Speaker 1: game first person shooter, but instead of being a shooter,
Speaker 1: it's a first person melee game. You have to use
Speaker 1: a hand to hand weapon and attack enemies. It would
Speaker 1: require a new approach to game design, new enemy design
Speaker 1: in order to make it fair but challenging. It was
Speaker 1: something the team was really eager to take on because
Speaker 1: it was different enough from what they had done before
Speaker 1: to really be engaging. So they set out to make
Speaker 1: a fantasy based hand to hand first person combat game.
Speaker 1: There's only one little problem. They did not have a
Speaker 1: game engine yet, they had nothing to build upon. Because
Speaker 1: John Carmack was falling behind on delivery dates for a
Speaker 1: working game engine as he encountered unanticipated problems while building
Speaker 1: a three D engine. Meanwhile, other teams were creating concept
Speaker 1: art and level designs, but they couldn't do anything with
Speaker 1: them because there was no engine to build upon. So
Speaker 1: the company had already announced that was working on a
Speaker 1: game called Quake, and it was already starting to miss
Speaker 1: 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 Karmac to finish the three
Speaker 1: D engine. This is where things first came to a
Speaker 1: head in ID 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 in 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 franchise or using the Doom engine, even
Speaker 1: 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 Carmak'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: meant that there was going to be less on the
Speaker 1: development time once the game engine was finished. If they
Speaker 1: had gone with that melee approach, they'd have a lot
Speaker 1: more testing on their hands, so they went with the
Speaker 1: first person shooter model, and they cut out a lot
Speaker 1: of uncertainty, even though that meant refining something they had
Speaker 1: already done earlier. They had also by that time, gained
Speaker 1: a pretty substantial fan club, including some famous fans. One
Speaker 1: of those fans was Trent Resner 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 Quake and turning it into an immersive audio experience
Speaker 1: on top of its visual impact. So if you ever
Speaker 1: played Quake and thought, while the sound design for this
Speaker 1: is pretty pretty special, it's because of Trent Resnor. Now,
Speaker 1: when it was finished, Quake allowed players to look in
Speaker 1: all directions. You could look up and down, which meant
Speaker 1: you had to worry about aiming up or down for
Speaker 1: the first time, because in Doom, if an enemy was
Speaker 1: in front of you and you shot at it, you
Speaker 1: were aiming at it. It didn't matter if it was
Speaker 1: on top of some stairs or at the bottom of
Speaker 1: some stairs. Your character was magically aiming up or down
Speaker 1: based upon you facing the enemy. You didn't really have
Speaker 1: to worry about aiming so much because you couldn't look
Speaker 1: up or down. And Quake it was totally different. You
Speaker 1: could look up and down, which meant that you suddenly
Speaker 1: had to worry about that aiming, and so a lot
Speaker 1: 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 or local area network players
Speaker 1: of Doom. Death matches became much more chaotic and fast
Speaker 1: paced and pretty It was such a popular mode that
Speaker 1: some fans in Texas decided that they wanted to hold
Speaker 1: a big event and invite people to come in and
Speaker 1: bring their computers with them. So if you wanted to attend,
Speaker 1: you brought your computer rig you set it up inside
Speaker 1: this big conference hall, and it would become an enormous
Speaker 1: local area network where Quake could be played with huge groups,
Speaker 1: and they called it Quake Con. It was such a
Speaker 1: big deal that even the ID Software team came out
Speaker 1: to it, and it would become so popular that they
Speaker 1: would hold it every year and ID Software would take
Speaker 1: advantage of it to use it as an event to
Speaker 1: announce upcoming titles and projects. So it became a kind
Speaker 1: of a marketing thing for ID Software, even though it
Speaker 1: was organized by fans. Very useful for a company to
Speaker 1: have the fans do allow to work for you. Quake
Speaker 1: was incredibly successful, though it had a little bit of
Speaker 1: a hiccup in its growth because of a decision that
Speaker 1: ID Software made when it came to distributing the game.
Speaker 1: They decided to offer part of the game for ten dollars,
Speaker 1: So you'd pay ten bucks and you would get access
Speaker 1: to the early part of the game. Technically, you would
Speaker 1: get the full game, but only the first few levels
Speaker 1: would be accessible. Once you completed that section, you would
Speaker 1: get informed that to unlock the rest of the game
Speaker 1: you would have to pony up the money that made
Speaker 1: up the difference in the full price tag, which was
Speaker 1: another fifty dollars. But hackers began to examine the code
Speaker 1: for Quake because they knew if you had that first
Speaker 1: part of it, you had the whole game, And eventually
Speaker 1: they figured out how to bypass the system and get
Speaker 1: access to the full game without paying that fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: and the hack spread across the internet very quickly, but
Speaker 1: it still was a success for ID Software, and it
Speaker 1: also inspired a new art form. A group of Quake
Speaker 1: players created a little comedy sketch using the game Quake.
Speaker 1: They had a group of game characters that were trying
Speaker 1: to seek out and stop someone who was cheating in
Speaker 1: the game, and it turns out that the person cheating
Speaker 1: is actually John Romero. They used the Quake game engine
Speaker 1: to tell a story, something that was pretty new at
Speaker 1: the time, and eventually people started calling this art form
Speaker 1: machinema for machine animation. If you want to hear more
Speaker 1: about this process, you should check out the episode tech
Speaker 1: Stuff Talks to Rooster Teeth, which we published originally back
Speaker 1: in February twenty twelve in and I talked to Bernie Burns,
Speaker 1: founder of Rooster Teeth, and one of the big shows
Speaker 1: they did that got them started was a series called
Speaker 1: Red Versus Blue that used the Halo game engine to
Speaker 1: animate stories. These days, Rooster Teeth does all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 1: including feature length films, So maybe sometime I can do
Speaker 1: a follow up story with somebody from there. Fascinating company,
Speaker 1: and I'm a huge fan of their work. Back to
Speaker 1: ID Software, just like Doom and Wolf and styf that
Speaker 1: Quake Engine became a sought after asset. Valve Software licensed
Speaker 1: it for their first person shooter Half Life, which Tom
Speaker 1: Hall once cited as the next real landmark in first
Speaker 1: person shooters. For its incorporated storyline. The Quake Engine would
Speaker 1: dominate in the computer industry until it was eventually conquered
Speaker 1: by the Unreal Engine. After Quake went gold, the company
Speaker 1: held internal conversations about its direction, and things really came
Speaker 1: to a head. Romero felt that they were relying too
Speaker 1: heavily on formats that they had already perfected, and he said,
Speaker 1: we should really be doing something new and innovative. We
Speaker 1: shouldn't just keep doing what we do well. John Carmack
Speaker 1: and most of the rest of BID Software felt that
Speaker 1: Romero wasn't really dedicating himself to the work anymore, and
Speaker 1: that he become too wrapped up in his own fame
Speaker 1: and lifestyle, and so the company said, hey, Romero, can
Speaker 1: you make tracks? They told him to resign, and he did.
Speaker 1: He then went on to reconnect with Tom and together
Speaker 1: they formed the company ion Storm. More on that at
Speaker 1: the end of the Episode'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 decided that
Speaker 1: the best way to move forward would be to partner
Speaker 1: with an established publisher. That They had been doing this
Speaker 1: on their own for a while, and when they were
Speaker 1: smaller it was easier to handle, but as they grew,
Speaker 1: they realized that they needed someone with a more established
Speaker 1: approach to publishing. But they definitely didn't want to deal
Speaker 1: with having their IP stolen anymore, so they formed a
Speaker 1: long term relationship with Activision. The first game they put
Speaker 1: out was Quake two in nineteen ninety seven, and then
Speaker 1: they immediately got to work on Quake three. We're in
Speaker 1: the home stretch here, but before I conclude the story
Speaker 1: of the ID Software Company, let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. It wasn't that much longer after
Speaker 1: Romero's departure that it seemed like his accusations were really
Speaker 1: accurate ones, and John Carmack's leadership style complicated matters. He
Speaker 1: decided that Quake three would be a multiplayer only style game,
Speaker 1: online only, multiplayer only, no single player component, no monster designed,
Speaker 1: because it would only be player characters fighting each other,
Speaker 1: and the rest of the team wasn't really happy because
Speaker 1: they felt it was limited and it really meant that
Speaker 1: a lot of them didn't have much to do, but
Speaker 1: Carmack insisted that that was the approach they take. It
Speaker 1: was also said that Romero, for whatever faults he may
Speaker 1: have had, was much better at managing people than Carmack was.
Speaker 1: People felt ignored or dismissed, and morale started to dip.
Speaker 1: Quake three Arena launched in nineteen ninety nine, It of
Speaker 1: course had a brand new game engine powering it. The
Speaker 1: first Call of Duty game actually uses that Quake engine
Speaker 1: as its foundation, but that didn't help people at ID
Speaker 1: Software feel that the company wasn't just doing the same
Speaker 1: thing repeatedly. And also, the Unreal engine ended up debuting
Speaker 1: and was comparatively easy to use. If you looked at
Speaker 1: the Quake engine and the Unreal engine side by side,
Speaker 1: and you looked at the actual interfaces for the two
Speaker 1: unreal engine was very attractive, and it ended up becoming
Speaker 1: stiff competition for that Quake engine. On the game development side,
Speaker 1: things slowed down at ID Software. Now. That wasn't on purpose.
Speaker 1: John Carmack felt that the next game on the company, Dime,
Speaker 1: would have to have an even better game engine. Big
Speaker 1: surprise there. Every time it game came out, Karmac 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 ID Software small.
Speaker 1: He felt that that made communication better. It meant that
Speaker 1: you were more nimble, you could react faster. He didn't
Speaker 1: want to see ID Software balloon into a large corporation.
Speaker 1: So there's the problem, right. There's a consequence to these
Speaker 1: two decisions, and that is it takes longer to make
Speaker 1: games because games were getting more complex. You were no
Speaker 1: longer in an era where one or two people could
Speaker 1: launch a triple A title game. You had to have
Speaker 1: a group of people working on it. The games were
Speaker 1: so much more complex that it was taking groups of
Speaker 1: experienced longer to make games, especially by restricting the size
Speaker 1: of the development team. So if you keep the development
Speaker 1: team the same while the games get more and more complex,
Speaker 1: guess what it means everything takes longer to produce. When
Speaker 1: ID Software announced in two thousand that their next game
Speaker 1: was going to be Doom three, they didn't have an
Speaker 1: idea at the time, nor did the fans, that it
Speaker 1: would take more than three years for that game to
Speaker 1: come out, which meant that when it finally did launch
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, there had been five years
Speaker 1: between games from ID software Quake three Arena in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine to Doom three in two thousand and four. Yikes.
Speaker 1: While working on the game, ID Software did something that
Speaker 1: they had not done before. They began to license out
Speaker 1: their 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 expansion pack for the game, and they ended
Speaker 1: up working with a company called Splash Damage to design
Speaker 1: that expansion pack. But boy were they not happy when
Speaker 1: they saw the single player component to Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
Speaker 1: that was the expansion pack. Activision said that the single
Speaker 1: player campaign was not good enough to publish ouch, but
Speaker 1: the multiplayer was seen to be really, really fun and
Speaker 1: enjoyable and it worked fine, so Activision released it for free.
Speaker 1: Here's the crazy thing. You could download the multiplayer expansion
Speaker 1: and play it even if you didn't own the original game,
Speaker 1: which means Activision gave away a free multiplayer game. Why. Oh,
Speaker 1: I couldn't find an answer to that. I guess maybe
Speaker 1: at the time, no one really thought it through. Doom
Speaker 1: three debuted in two thousand and four to mixed reviews.
Speaker 1: It looked really pretty, The new game engine was phenomenal.
Speaker 1: It had amazing lighting effects, lots of dynamic lighting in
Speaker 1: that game, but many people felt that the actual design
Speaker 1: of the enemies and the gameplay was pretty derivative. Enemies
Speaker 1: 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 had
Speaker 1: to switch between your flashlight and your gun. The whole
Speaker 1: idea was to make it more exciting and to ramp
Speaker 1: up the tension, but ultimately it just made me ticked off. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the game was a huge hit, end up becoming the
Speaker 1: top selling title in ID Software's history, partly because it
Speaker 1: was available on multiple platforms like consoles in the PC.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, Adrian Carmack left the company,
Speaker 1: which meant that the only original founder remaining with the
Speaker 1: company was John Carmack. And remember Adrian Carmack and John
Speaker 1: Carmack not related. Adrian Carmack later sued ID Software. He
Speaker 1: alleged that he was forced out of the company by
Speaker 1: the other co owners so that they could get shares
Speaker 1: of ownership of the company. So, according to Carmack, Adriancarmak,
Speaker 1: that is, Activision had made an offer to purchase the
Speaker 1: Doom Quake and Wolfenstein intellectual properties for about fifteen million dollars,
Speaker 1: but he was rejected, or rather Activision was rejected by
Speaker 1: id and then the other co owners of the company
Speaker 1: tried to pressure Adrian Karmak to sell his shares back
Speaker 1: to them for eleven million dollars. He said, well, that
Speaker 1: severely undervalues the shares that I own. I own forty
Speaker 1: one percent of ID Software. It's way too little money
Speaker 1: for so valuable a property. Then they gave him an
Speaker 1: offer of twenty million, according to Adrian Karmak, and then
Speaker 1: they terminated him once he did not agree to sell
Speaker 1: at that price. Ultimately, the lawsuit that he leveled against
Speaker 1: ID Software never went anywhere, and that's most likely because
Speaker 1: Activision never actually purchased ID Software, so it all remained
Speaker 1: hypothetical in the first place. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: a major major event happened, not just for ID Software,
Speaker 1: but I would say the world. That's when the rock
Speaker 1: Dwayne Johnson himself starred in the film version of Doom.
Speaker 1: I guess you could say it was inspired by the game.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really connected to Doom that much. There's a
Speaker 1: first person perspective section in the film that's meant to
Speaker 1: be a nod to the original source material. It's a
Speaker 1: really cheesy movie. I saw it for free at a
Speaker 1: pre screening and asked for my money back. It stands
Speaker 1: at nineteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Just a reminder, though,
Speaker 1: that the percentage on Rotten Tomatoes tells you how many
Speaker 1: critics gave it a negative or a positive review. So
Speaker 1: a nineteen percent movie isn't necessarily worse than, say, a
Speaker 1: thirty percent movie. It just means fewer critics gave it
Speaker 1: a positive review. If it's a movie that's right in
Speaker 1: the middle somewhere, then it could go either way, right Like,
Speaker 1: if it's a one out of ten scale and everyone
Speaker 1: gives it a four, the percentage could be really low,
Speaker 1: but you I would still say it's a better movie than
Speaker 1: something that warrants a one. All that being said, Doom
Speaker 1: the movie is awful. Don't watch it. It's terrible. Nineteen
Speaker 1: percent is being generous. So John Carmack had decided that
Speaker 1: he's going to work on another game, which means, yep,
Speaker 1: you guessed it. He wanted to make an all new
Speaker 1: gaming engine. Big surprise there, and so that meant there'd
Speaker 1: be more years between games. Meanwhile, there were rumors that
Speaker 1: other companies besides Activision were interested in ID Software. They
Speaker 1: were still licensing out properties like Quake and Wolfenstein to
Speaker 1: other companies. Reviews mostly criticized the style of play, echoing
Speaker 1: the concerns Romero had expressed years earlier saying you guys
Speaker 1: are stuck in a rut. Carmak, in the meantime, started
Speaker 1: looking into mobile games and how he might make a
Speaker 1: big impact there. One of the projects from his initiative
Speaker 1: was called Orcs and Elves, which was the first new
Speaker 1: intellectual property involving ID Software in years, and it was
Speaker 1: for mobile platforms. In two thousand and nine, a company
Speaker 1: called Zenemax Media approached ID Software in an acquisition deal,
Speaker 1: which the company ultimately accepted. Zenemax 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 Zenomax Media
Speaker 1: apart from other suitors was it had a reputation for
Speaker 1: letting subsidiary companies follow their own paths in a more
Speaker 1: or less hands off approach. This gave ID Software the
Speaker 1: resources they would need to develop two games simultaneously, so
Speaker 1: they could actually work on two titles at the same
Speaker 1: time for the first time ever. Really. One of those
Speaker 1: two titles was Rage and the other was a new
Speaker 1: incarnation of Doom. Both games would end up using Carmac's
Speaker 1: next game engine, called id Tech five. Rage launched in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. Totally new franchise. It 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: twenty eleven the computer and video game industries were way
Speaker 1: 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, twenty thirteen, he resigned from ID Software.
Speaker 1: Carmack had expressed excitement an interest in the Oculus virtual
Speaker 1: reality platform. He had joined the company earlier in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: and then realized that he was going to have to
Speaker 1: switch 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 in its history,
Speaker 1: ID 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. ID 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
Speaker 1: May thirteenth, twenty sixteen. It's the fourth game in the
Speaker 1: Doom franchise and technically is a second reboot of the series.
Speaker 1: The setting is a research facility on Mars where a
Speaker 1: portal to Hell has opened up, and the player takes
Speaker 1: on the role of the Doom Slagh. It featured some
Speaker 1: old school shooter mechanics such as the fact that your
Speaker 1: health does not regenerate over time. You have to find
Speaker 1: health packs and you don't have to worry about reloading weapons,
Speaker 1: but you can run out of ammunition. And it also
Speaker 1: brings back deathmatch modes. ID Software as the company continues
Speaker 1: to work on new games on various platforms. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about the old founders and some of their coworkers.
Speaker 1: Where are they now? John Romero went on to found
Speaker 1: other studios like ion Storm, which he left in two
Speaker 1: thousand and one. After he left, the Dallas office closed,
Speaker 1: and then about four years later, the Austin office for
Speaker 1: ion Storm closed. That's a whole story in itself. He
Speaker 1: also worked at Midway for a while and Gazillion before
Speaker 1: he founded a new social gaming company called loot Drop,
Speaker 1: and he and his wife, Brenda Romero do a lot
Speaker 1: of advocacy work for education. John Carmack is with Oculus,
Speaker 1: which is part of Facebook. He continues to be big
Speaker 1: advocate for virtual reality in general and is still quite
Speaker 1: outspoken in the world of tech. Tom Hall, who was
Speaker 1: the first of the founders to leave ID Software, co
Speaker 1: founded ion Storm with Romero. Obviously that did not last.
Speaker 1: He also has worked at Midway Games along with Romero
Speaker 1: and at Loot Drop along with Romero. Adrian Karmak got
Speaker 1: out of the game business after all his contentious departure,
Speaker 1: at least for a while. He returned fairly recently. In
Speaker 1: April twenty 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 dollars goal. It had hit
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty one thousand before Romero canceled the
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaign. He said that he was canceling it until
Speaker 1: they could produce a working to show gamers what the
Speaker 1: finished product would be like, so that people weren't just
Speaker 1: backing an idea that may not ever materialize. Sandy Peterson
Speaker 1: had left ID Software in nineteen ninety seven. He joined
Speaker 1: a company called Ensemble Studios in nineteen ninety seven and
Speaker 1: got involved in a little game called Age of Empires,
Speaker 1: which met with some success. These days, he tends to
Speaker 1: work on cool board games. There's one called Cuthulhu Wars
Speaker 1: that I really want to try out. It also has
Speaker 1: a video game version and was a highly successful crowdfunded project.
Speaker 1: Kevin Cloud remained at ID Software and served as creative
Speaker 1: director for the company for a while. One of the
Speaker 1: notes trivia I've found out about Kevin Cloud is that
Speaker 1: when you look down and you see the hands and
Speaker 1: Doom and Doom too, those are Kevin Cloud's hands. And
Speaker 1: that concludes the discussion about the ID Software story a
Speaker 1: two parter. I could probably have gone into much more detail.
Speaker 1: There's so much to talk about, and that company was
Speaker 1: incredibly in luential, so maybe at some point I will
Speaker 1: take another stab at it. We'll see, but I feel
Speaker 1: like those are pretty good start for getting a handle
Speaker 1: on what ID Software was and how it was important.
Speaker 1: I hope all of you out there are doing well.
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.