“Dude, it’s beyond cool. It’s ‘we’re out of here cool’ is what it is.”

July 17, 2023 10:31 AM

The birth of id Software by John Romero [The Verge] In 1990, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall were working at Louisiana software maker Softdisk. There, they had an idea that would change PC games forever.
posted by Fizz (45 comments total)

This was really fun and good, but then it just kind of stopped and I wondered if they just forgot to post the rest of it?

But hey you take your John Romero guest post at The Verge whenever you can get it.
posted by General Malaise at 10:43 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's an excerpt from his autobiography, which apparently comes out tomorrow.
posted by The Bellman at 10:50 AM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's funny that id revolutionized PC games twice, and we almost never talk about the first time (I guess because they didn't invent a new genre, only new tech).

I was a hair too young for the shareware era -- I played most of the games, but as pirated copies from BBSes since I was a kid without a checkbook -- and Commander Keen never really struck me as revolutionary because it was just like all the stuff on consoles, only ... sorta worse.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:50 AM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I was unable to log in to leave a comment asking Mr. Romero if he'd forgotten his promise, but apparently he's already addressed the matter.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:51 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I loved me some Doom back in the day, but it certainly put us on the dude bro fake macho path.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:02 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you haven't seen the actual Super Mario 3 demo mentioned in the excerpt, it's pretty impressive for it's age.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:11 AM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Super Mario Bros 3 proof-of-concept

1990. ugh. A platformer of the quality of what I had running on my Mac II (cx) that year. My inner critic is my biggest enemy, I really hate that guy.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:19 AM on July 17, 2023

Romero seems like he grew out of the dudebro stuff pretty well.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:22 AM on July 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

This was really fun and good, but then it just kind of stopped and I wondered if they just forgot to post the rest of it?

To order DOOM GUY, call toll-free 1-800-ROMERO. If you'd like to purchase DOOM GUY with a check or money order, or if you live outside of the USA, please refer to the order information text file (order.frm) in your DOOM GUY directory.

This promo article can be freely distributed. Book vendors should refer to the vendor information text file (vendor.doc) in your DOOM GUY directory.

posted by zamboni at 11:41 AM on July 17, 2023 [27 favorites]

It's a teaser, this post needs tags "shareware" and "e1m1.bsp".
posted by k3ninho at 11:59 AM on July 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

Secret treasure here is Softdisk PC's "magazettes" which are available thanks to, where else, archive.org. Brb. Going to pitch an article to my editor about this...
posted by gee_the_riot at 1:04 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still remember the future shock of playing Doom for the first time. I had played other first person games, Wolfenstein most obviously, but nothing prepared me for the bigness of Doom’s spaces. It really felt like the future at the time.
posted by Kattullus at 1:15 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I still remember the future shock of playing Doom for the first time.

And then playing with a friend over a LAN for the first time? Mind blown! Of course one of us had to schlep a machine & monitor to the other's house, but well worth the effort.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:21 PM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I was wondering how long it would be until someone brought up Daikatana (and its awful ad campaign), and it's comment 4! I wonder if it's in the book, or glossed over. It's an uphill battle for this book, since the good parts of Romero’s career are already in the 2003 book Masters of Doom which is great.

Romero has had a tough time since leaving id - checking over his wikipedia page, I recognize only two games he's been part of. Compared to his id cofounder Carmack, who is heralded as some sort of programming god.
posted by meowzilla at 1:45 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Romero has had a tough time since leaving id - checking over his wikipedia page, I recognize only two games he's been part of.

Romero, as founder of Ion Storm, was indirectly responsible for the original Deus Ex, which enjoys a huge cachet among immersive sim fans. So he has that going for him.

(and as a nerdy longhair, dude's kind of always been my game dev hero. I'm glad he grew out of the macho stuff.)
posted by neckro23 at 2:11 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Carmack has had a weird career too. He went from staying at iD (who managed to dig themselves out of their FPS doldrums right around the time he left), to working on VR with the reprehensible Palmer Luckey at pre-Facebook Oculus, to leaving Meta to start his own AI company.
posted by thecjm at 2:13 PM on July 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it was a little bit of a cheap shot, but at least Romero seems to have come around. I think that that was about the time that gaming started to seem to become more bro-ish, which was too bad as it was also around the time that I started getting interested in gaming beyond just playing the shareware samplers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:16 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Some technical details on the EGA smooth scrolling and tile refresh system.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:18 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I watched a video where he played through MYHOUSE.WAD. It's kinda fun when he chuckles and says "that's cool" because you know it must be pretty cool.
posted by credulous at 2:27 PM on July 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't think there is any technical significance to the smooth scrolling, despite Romero's breathless tone. It's a cute hack but I don't think it's particularly difficult or innovative.

If you read between the lines you can see the significance is contextual. It was exciting because they were at the cutting edge of a market, not of technology in general. It was exciting because there's a giant pile of money involved.

Carmack and Romero have significant real glory already. There's no need to gild the lily by pretending Commander Keen was a big deal IMHO.
posted by fleacircus at 3:12 PM on July 17, 2023

This was really fun and good, but then it just kind of stopped and I wondered if they just forgot to post the rest of it?

It's on the next 7 floppy disks.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 3:27 PM on July 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah, even Ultima had dirty-tile refresh, and lots of C-64 games no doubt did similar scrolling tricks. But it did demonstrate Carmack's ability to combine several Weird Tech Tricks that seemed a couple years in the future, and also his ability to separate engine design from game design.

But I think Wolf3D was the real birth of id, after they adopted their gib-soaked aesthetic and jettisoned all of Tom Hall's ideas (and it would be a way different company/industry if they didn't!)
posted by credulous at 3:37 PM on July 17, 2023

Not Even Doom Memoirs
posted by cortex at 3:52 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Bellman: It's an excerpt from his autobiography, which apparently comes out tomorrow.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to check this out. It’ll go well on my bookshelf next to the Sid Meier bio I’m almost done with.
posted by dr_dank at 3:53 PM on July 17, 2023

and Commander Keen never really struck me as revolutionary because it was just like all the stuff on consoles, only ... sorta worse.

I didn't have any opinion at all at the time, since, yeah, i was just playing actual Nintendo games for the most part. I have come to appreciate in the last few years of reading off and on about 80 PC hardware and software that what they did with Commander Keen was, while not amazing in terms of what was technically possible in general, pretty genuinely impressive in terms of working with the awful PC bus, video I/O, and the fucking mess that was the PC market with its various x86 cpus and weird bazaar of hardware. Getting smooth platformer scrolling out of an NES is easy, because it was built for it. Getting it out of a Tandy clone of an office productivity machine with the world's worst video bus is actually pretty slick!

since the good parts of Romero’s career are already in the 2003 book Masters of Doom which is great.

I liked some of what I read of Masters of Doom but eventually I just put it down, maybe halfway through, because I had been hoping it would be both (a) more technical and (b) way less credulously dude-tastically excited about some guys who for all their smarts and enthusiasm sure seemed like not-great dudes who did not have their shit together very much. Like, it's okay to have a book that chronicles in part how much of a mess Carmack and Romero et al were while doing their gonzo game development lifestyle, but Masters of Doom frequently seems to, like, not even really notice that they're being messy pieces of a shit a lot of the time? It just really landed poorly for me, in a way that—and this is part of why it bothered me so much—I might not really have picked up on when I was in my early 20s myself and still sort of daydreaming of being a game programmer when I grew up.
posted by cortex at 4:03 PM on July 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Everyone's heard about Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement before, but the stuff about Scott Miller sending all those letters was a fun new thing to me. id Software always felt like this weird sideshow behind the Apogee-Epic war, and sure, if they were just tech guys that make sense. The Commander Keen games were never very good as games (though respect to the undying fan community) but they sure did pave the way for a lot of PC platformers.
posted by one for the books at 5:24 PM on July 17, 2023

And then playing with a friend over a LAN for the first time? Mind blown! Of course one of us had to schlep a machine & monitor to the other's house, but well worth the effort.

I've only had a few peak gaming moments, and one of them was having regular after-work access to a 100mhz 486 with a then-whopping 16 megs of RAM that was a significant fraction of the cost of the whole Dell PC, a VESA Local Bus graphics card with 2MB of ram of its own and a pro/network grade Racal Vadic modem that could push certain modem chipsets to connect at 19.2k even though they were listed as 9600s, back when 9600s were still fast and 14.4ks for consumers weren't really widely available or affordable.

Pair that with a BBS that had multiplayer connection software available - shoot, was it battlenet? I can't remember - and the know how and ability to load the Doom server/client files entirely into RAM disk, that was just about as fast as it got for playing Doom.

Everyone wanted to play when I was hosting multiplayer games, even though I always had a home court advantage since I was local to the server and effectively had zero ping times limited only by the bus speeds of the PC itself and my frame rates were absolutely ridiculous for the era.
posted by loquacious at 6:02 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

and Commander Keen never really struck me as revolutionary because it was just like all the stuff on consoles, only ... sorta worse.

Yeah, Commander Keen got the mechanics right.

What they didn't get right was the totally insane level of game design that other platform-side-scrolling games like Super Mario Bros and other notable examples of the genre.

Commander Keen was technically cool and sort of scratched that console platformer itch in a way that PC had not yet seen, but it definitely did not have the replay value of even the first Super Mario Bros or especially flagship titles like Super Mario Bros 2/3 where it was fun to play whether you were a total noob or advanced player trying to speedrun the game.

It's much easier to see this in hindsight but Shigeru Miyamoto and others was doing some really forward-thinking work about level designs and layouts and how things like certain elements and placements are easy to read as random, haphazard or just plain silly but they were really there for replay value and increasingly challenging game play even though the levels are the same every time, and leaving mystery and discovery for the player in finding different routes and completion times through any given level.

This is why so many platform genre games fail to be fun or replayable even when they get all the technical parts totally right. It's not just about efficient blitter, sprite and tile use or techy details, it's about actual game design and playabillity.

This is one of the main reasons why Nintendo has thrived even though it's consistently had lesser hardware specs than competitors. They understand game play and fun.
posted by loquacious at 6:17 PM on July 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

My LAN party experiences weren't until Counter Strike but those were some of the best times of my life. I lived 18.floors up so it involved getting a cart, loading up my big CRT monitor and tower, taking the elevator down to the parking lot, loading everything into my car and driving over to my friend's house and unloading everything to take up into his parents' garage apartment we would use. Staying up all night. That's when I first tried alcohol and weed (apparently I was able to get a lot of headshots while high). Online gaming now just doesn't compare to all being in the same room laughing your asses off for hours and then going into your friend's parents' house at 5 in the morning to make Bagel Bites.
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:37 PM on July 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is going to sound even older than it is, but I think the first time I saw DOOM was in Sears in the York Galleria Mall. I had played through Wolfenstein at home (deeply embedding important lessons about Nazis), and heard about DOOM, but I remember the scene pretty clearly. It was just the coolest looking thing I'd ever seen - more impressive than even what was in the arcades.

I remember finally getting the four-floppy-disk shareware version and installing it on our 486 with its 4mb of RAM, and playing with the screen shrunk down to preserve a decent framerate. We did eventually upgrade the ram though.

One on one deathmatch battles with neighborhood friends, played via modem kept me up well into many a night. Eventually, a local BBS installed a module that allowed four dial-up users to play four player id software games. Before the industry focused almost entirely on deathmatch, it really was a blast playing games like DOOM and Heretic with three other people in co-op mode.

And of course, bringing Trent Reznor in to do the music and sound for Quake? Just incredible.

I remember finding a DOOM shirt at a Salvation Army in Los Angeles (probably swag for the movie that came out, which I still haven't watched) and being pretty stoked about it, because DOOM shirts were all but non-existent. I really enjoyed the Doom reboot from a few years ago, but gamer culture is completely alien to me, and I'd feel embarrassed to wear that DOOM shirt these days. Even while I still type DOOM in all caps. The 2013 Wolfenstein was way better than it deserved to be, too.

It was fun watching id software do its thing, and it's been really cool to have the people involved talk about how it all went. It's wild to learn about how *small* the company was, even while they were producing Quake and beyond, especially in light of the ridiculous gaming studio system that exists today.
posted by Leviathant at 7:44 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I loved Commander Keen - played it over and over.
posted by awfurby at 8:45 PM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I liked some of what I read of Masters of Doom but eventually I just put it down, maybe halfway through, because I had been hoping it would be both (a) more technical and (b) way less credulously dude-tastically excited about some guys who for all their smarts and enthusiasm sure seemed like not-great dudes who did not have their shit together very much.

Masters of Doom was legitimately a major influence on me - I must have read it a dozen times when I was a middle schooler learning programming. I guess eventually I got tired of it, though, because I haven’t read it since. My recollection is that it very much romanticizes the “six guys sleeping in the office making games” crunch lifestyle (and in fact has been cited as an influence by a number of startup guys) but that after the twelfth read, at least, one came away with a pretty good sense of the personal limitations of the two Johns.

(I remember Tom Hall specifically coming off pretty well - id was right to pursue the more straight-ahead Romero vision of DOOM at the time, but it basically sounded like Hall wanted to make Half-Life)
posted by atoxyl at 10:53 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Having a decent platformer on PC was huge. The Keen games were never great, but they were good enough and some of them were free.

Keen 4 got me out of the "we're not getting an SNES" doldrums. You can't compare it to the brilliance of Super Mario World, but I certainly tried my hardest until the prices of next generation consoles came down.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:48 AM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Keen games also drove sales of the Gravis PC Gamepad. I remember trying to play the original Keen using one of those ubiquitous PC flight-sim joysticks with the suction cups on the bottom. It sucked. Keen was a "good enough" platformer to justify bringing game pads to PC which made it possible for other developers to design games with them in mind.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:01 AM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Keen games also drove sales of the Gravis PC Gamepad.

I was going to mention this as well. That control pad was pretty sweet and it was basically an SNES controller for your PC, minus the shoulder buttons or triggers.

I wasn't really into Keen or platformers so I wasn't the target market at all, and thought it was derpy and kind of a step backwards when it came out but, yeah, playing Keen on an analog joystick wasn't good at all and the only other real option was a keyboard.

Those gamepads were also choice when NES emulation started happening and you could play NES ROMs on a PC.

Meanwhile the joystick/controller I really wanted and lusted after was a true 3D joystick suitable for Descent and Descent 2 or even Wing Commander or Tie Fighter/X-Wing games that had full 6/12 axis freedom of movement. (6 axis of rotation, 6 of translation.)

I think I had a Logitech Extreme 3D pro or something similar for a while, and I vaguely remember there being a 3D controller that was less of a flight stick and more like a T-handle or something where you could control all 6 axis of rotation plus 6 axis of translation with the same stick instead of using hat switches for sliding, and that was pretty cool.
posted by loquacious at 9:29 AM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

When Doom came out, I was working for an engineering company, and we'd play during lunch sometimes. Unfortunately, the game used broadcast packets for everything, and it'd light up the router like a Christmas tree. The CAD guys ran a second network segment because of this. When they got off work, they'd disconnect from the regular network, connect to their private network, and go to it.
My boss gave a group of investors a tour after hours, and they went through the CAD area while they were busily trying to kill each other. He continued his spiel, ignoring what they were really doing. One of the women in the group caught on that they were a) playing a game, and b) playing against each other.
Among my friends, we mostly played Unreal Tournament, because it ley you have up to 16 people in a game. Also, unlike later games in the series, you could deploy it just by copying the directory it was in. I still have the game on my computer, from that original install, ages ago. I think that I ran it last year, and it still runs just fine.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:47 AM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

My recollection is that it very much romanticizes the “six guys sleeping in the office making games” crunch lifestyle (and in fact has been cited as an influence by a number of startup guys) but that after the twelfth read, at least, one came away with a pretty good sense of the personal limitations of the two Johns.

See also: The Soul of a New Machine, although I think Tracey Kidder is a whole lot slyer at simultaneously portraying hey-that-sounds-amazing velocity and oof-that-sounds-awful crunch.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:50 AM on July 18, 2023

Meanwhile the joystick/controller I really wanted and lusted after was a true 3D joystick suitable for Descent and Descent 2 or even Wing Commander or Tie Fighter/X-Wing games that had full 6/12 axis freedom of movement. (6 axis of rotation, 6 of translation.)


I used to use an analog joystick in my left hand for moving and the mouse in my right hand to rotate/aim and shoot.
posted by mikelieman at 12:07 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd feel embarrassed to wear that DOOM shirt these days

I have almost no connection to “gaming culture” at this point but DOOM is definitely in the sphere of broader cultural icons and sort of eternally cool. Like I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to buy a DOOM shirt but I certainly wouldn’t be embarrassed to own one.
posted by atoxyl at 1:34 PM on July 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

It’s also still fun, more so than any of the preceding or succeeding id shooters IMO.
posted by atoxyl at 1:36 PM on July 18, 2023

the joystick/controller I really wanted and lusted after was a true 3D joystick suitable for Descent and Descent 2

Descent and Descent 2 were the first shooters I owned as a kid because shooting robots was a more acceptable sort of violence to my parents, so I have a soft spot for them, but the hard part wasn’t actually the shooting, it was hunting for the red keycard/doing switch puzzles in a fully 3D maze.
posted by atoxyl at 1:40 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

See also: The Soul of a New Machine, although I think Tracey Kidder is a whole lot slyer at simultaneously portraying hey-that-sounds-amazing velocity and oof-that-sounds-awful crunch.

Cough cough
posted by General Malaise at 3:52 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Secret treasure here is Softdisk PC's "magazettes" which are available thanks to, where else, archive.org.

search also Big Blue Disk, they changed the name at some point; teen me talked my parents into a subscription & was obsessed

one of them featured Zappa Roidz which is I think the only id game I've played? it's good, it was an Asteroids roguelite before anyone called anything a roguelite

I'd be better able to participate in these discussions if my high school boyfriend hadn't been a dick every time I went to his house after school & he decided to just sit there playing Doom & I was like "Can I have a turn?" & he was like "No"

fuck you Jeff
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:19 PM on July 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

fuckin' jeff
posted by cortex at 10:58 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

COMMANDER KEEN'S ADAPTIVE TILE REFRESH

I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series.

During my research I was surprised to learn that ATR only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something far better.

posted by zamboni at 9:36 AM on August 7, 2023 [2 favorites]