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