Carmack told Romero it was a pity he did not join him at QuakeCon this year. Romero replied he will definitely go to QuakeCon sometimes in the future because he loves QuakeCon and the community.
To me it sounded as if Carmack was talking about their relationship and Romero evading this topic. If that is the case, I really hope they will find a way to reestablish what might have been a friendship once.
The 2023 Doom Cacowards were also just published. It's a community collection and celebration of the best Doom maps and mods released this year! I personally recommend MyHouse.wad.
https://www.doomworld.com/cacowards/2023/
What a time to be a kid. Computers and games were absolute magic.
Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer gaming.
Again, it was magic.
Edit: without wanting to sound too “get off my lawn”. I was loading up some games on a tablet for a flight with the kids today and they just don’t care that much. They could get a new game at any moment. For us a new game was a rarity. If one of us got a new game from somewhere we’d bmx over to our mates so they could copy it. I recall a friend getting the quake demo and zipping it on to 8 disks for me, the 6th of which was corrupt. It took a week of back and forth before I finally got to play it.
I fondly remember playing Doom with my brother. Our dad had made a serial cable for us. One of us was playing on the PC and the other one on a laptop with a grey scale display and terrible ghosting. We had so much fun and it felt like magic indeed :)
My dad had a similar laptop. Playing video games on it was pretty trippy with all the ghosting.
Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same without online resources.
Hah, while I had a 386, it was an SX, as in without a math co-processor. I managed to find a TSR program on a local BBS that would emulate a math co-processor though, allowing me to play Doom.
It was not a playable experience. Even at the smallest screen size, it still ran at about 1 FPS.
Doom used fixed point math, not floating point math. It didn't run well on a 386 SX simply because 386 SXs were slow, but it would run without FPU emulation, and at better than 1 FPS.
The dx didn't have an FPU either - the difference was the size of the data bus (sx had a 16 bit data bus, dx was 32). It was the 486 where the sx/dx notation indicated floating point support.
Another part is the reach for hardware was harder/impossible. At a far far later time I recall waiting for 1 year to upgrade my pc to 4mbs of ram so I could play Mortal Combat 1. I kept the MKI floppies more precious than Gollum's. If I am not mistaken it was a 386dx or 486.
When Doom was released I had a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66v tower. It had a 486DX2-66, ATI Ultra Pro VLB video card and a VLB connected IDE controller. Doom was nice and smooth on it without having to reduce the screen. My brother had an IBM PS/2 Model 90 with a 486DX2 at home which belonged to his employer. We would play via modem.
Thirty years ago, computers were magic. Forty, too. Haven't you noticed, though? They're still magic.
I do not miss the nonsense with unreliable media, however. Loading Elite from tape took five minutes and if humidity or temperature were unusual or the moon occluded Santraginus or whatever it'd be spewing endless CRC check errors. Some hardships are valuable learning experiences, but this one is just trauma.
The magic now is so beyond that it doesn't feel special anymore. Maybe it's because I read about new games more than I play them. Seeing what Ureal can do makes me think anything is now possible so loses some shock factor, though I'm sure first hand in-game would still be Wow! I'm still waiting for the killer immersive VR game.
If you’ll allow the unsolicited suggestion: one excellent way to rediscover the joy of computers is to write a game. Even something simple for yourself, like a Tetris clone or a cattery simulator. Back in the day, that meant hand-rolled hardware gymnastics on an 6502. These days, there are many excellent engines and tools available, but you’re still never far from cutting real code.
I agree they’re still magic. Ever since I had my first Amstrad coming up to 40 years ago, I’ve been enamoured with them.
My point sort of drifted off into nostalgia a little, but I think there was something in the scarcity of it back then - probably helped somewhat by growing up in rural NZ.
If you were to find it today, it'd probably have to be an indie game. It's a bit of a jump, but if you like exploring alone you could try Scanner Sombre.
well, With Quake not really :)
It’s hard to explain why. I’ve seen nothing as satisfactory as shotgun in Doom. ;) More realistic - yes. Better rendered - yes, but nothing of the same level of satisfaction :)
I think I know the answer but like with any art it’s difficult to put into words. Easier to make something with the similar energy. Perhaps one day …
>… Scanner Sombre
Thank you for the advice. I’ll take a look. I recall Elite was also nice once . I’ve made computer that was able to run it with my own hands which involved soldering and debugging it with oscilloscope for the first time in my life. So it was a double pleasure once it worked :) Or double magic :)
I didn't really get Quake either. I don't think it really belonged anywhere; it was too strange, whereas Doom mixed the foreign and the familiar very well. I think Scanner Sombre does that too. Most games are too familiar these days considering that the story is told to you, but I think the best stories are the ones you live through.
Making dedicated hardware seems amazing. I wish I had the time for it.
Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?
You could pretty much say the same thing about Carmack. He just kept making the same doom and quake game over and over with better and better tech. Carmack's space company venture didn't work out, then he went to work at Oculus where he couldn't get anyone to listen to him and got frustrated and left. Now he's at some AI startup.
In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code) without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up and left.
Carmack was key for many aspects of modern VR and I'm currently still enjoying the fruits of his labours. Even a partial success is pretty good for someone like him.
Right, saying he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him is super reductionist. No one cared about hobbyist VR until Carmack started working with Luckey and got the software to run a lot faster. It was him taking it seriously that helped get the ball rolling for the VR boom.
This is a common pattern in a lot of creative industries; some people have early, groundbreaking success, but once they're successful have a tough time replicating that. Some combination of now that they're rich, no longer really the pressure to succeed as they already have, they were in the right place at the right time and no longer are, they have less pressure from other people telling them "no", they no longer have the passion of youth in their favor, they were better at the "inventing a new genre" than competing in a more mature marketplace with everyone else who has already learned from their previous success, etc.
I don't know enough about the specifics of Romero to say which it is, possibly more than one, but it doesn't seem to be unique to him, I see this kind of pattern in pop culture all the time.
This phenomena is sometimes called the "sophomore slump" [1] in some creative industries and "second-system effect" [2] in software development. To add to your excellent list of reasons why this happens, I'd also add that early success may be the result of spending much more time on the first creative effort than subsequent ones. Some musicians spend years making their first album but then have only a year or two to try to repeat the success for a second album, especially if a label wants them to release another album while they are riding high and before their fame fades (supposedly). Second-system effect refers more specifically to feature creep in second projects in a series, but you can imagine the same thinking applying to creative industries too.
Not inconsistent with this, what seems warped to me is having these huge expectations for individuals after their first success in the first place. (Writing this thinking about someone like Romero working on something like a game; lot of what follows doesn't carry over to, say, music or writing.)
They needed talent to pull it off, but also lots of stars aligned for a bold experiment to work out, and true experiments don't always work out. Conversely, for each success there were many talented folks who tried good ideas and didn't see them work out. The more surprising the first success was, the more foolish you'd be to expect a repeat, it seems like.
If that's the basic problem, you can't "fix" it in the sense that you can't make someone keep churning out revolutionary new things. But you might get better outcomes and fewer embarrassing failures the more you think of individual talent as one factor. Folks still have to iterate, get feedback, work with good people, sometimes put a lot of work into an idea then see it they have to rework it, or even release some quick experiments that don't do that well. You don't maximize your odds of great results by sending someone off to work in isolation as long as they want.
One thing I see hints of here and there, but don't really have a great picture of, is the inner workings of organizations that produce new/weird but successful things more than just once. It interacts with business, luck, and changes in the world outside of course, but internally--how do they balance single vision vs. input from many folks? Do they build a lot they throw away? Do they go outside the team a lot for feedback (in Romero's world "playtesting")? Of course there's no one Right Way to do things, especially across domains, but it could be fascinating to see a bit more how various places work.
He is a good game designer who invented some of the common tropes of FPS. After Quake and Doom he tried things that were sometimes too ambitious or just didn't work out.
First of all, most game designers don't have as much success as he had after Id. Second, how are you going to follow up games as successful as Doom.
Also don't forget Wolfenstein, Hexen..
(Full disclosure: I met him once and he was nice.)
Romero recently released a book, _Doom Guy: Life in First Person_, if you'd like a long-form answer to that question.
Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the questions you're asking.
Romero seems like a guy who has a ton of fantastical designs that needs a more conservative designer to help trim them down and bring them into reality. For id Software, that was Tom Hall.
Have you seen Rise of the triad? Tom Hall also needs someone to trim him down.
One thing that kept both grounded was the brutal timing of their releases. Doom had 6 months or so, and if it failed they knew they had to go back to boring jobs.
Apart from that, Masters of doom paints doom-id culture like the 1970's rock n roll band stories. A group comes together, works as well oiled team for a while and produces genius results. But the success and differences in personal growth trajectories inevitably pull the group apart. There is typically a painfull divorse phase between the main egos. The reality was that this kind of synergy never lasts more than a few years in any case.
Sounds like you are paraphrasing Carmacks perspective. I am pretty sure all Ids 3D games would have been duds had Carmack been in charge of game and level designs.
Reminds me of Notch. He took his incredible Minecraft success and pitched this new game where you’d have a space ship and a CPU with limited resources. I downloaded some tech demo and… it was just another janky Java-based FPS engine. He had that adequate but short-lived card game but that’s about it.
I’m not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know that being a success doesn’t imply generalizable skill, whether it’s a one-hit-wonder song, game, app, or business.
0x10c had serious promise. In many ways it was one of the 300 attempts at creating a successful SS13 clone (but with Mojang on it it _might_ have worked?).
Who knows.. Even Minecraft was catching lightning in a bottle. It was there just at the right moment at the right time. The odd choice of Java was just the right thing needed to make it take off. First since you could play it in the browser(remember applets?), later when easy decompilation and modding arrived.
The impression I got just watching as a casual player throughout the duke nukem/keen->wolf3d->doom->quake days and the subsequent breakup of id and interviews Carmack has given, is that Romero let the early fame and success get to him and lacked the self discipline to keep pulling his weight while Carmack was substantially carrying the company along from his perspective.
They had equal shares and were all very young, the only option for them at the time appeared to be parting ways. Carmack has voiced in multiple more recent interviews that in hindsight there were probably better options to make things work out, but they didn't have the maturity and experience at the time to pursue them.
Given this context I don't think it's surprising that Romero would crash and burn on his own after being pushed out of id. The self-discipline and maturity side was only more critical to success without the id team's support, not less.
I always perceived the opposite. Carmack is the real genius, Romero is just a lucky level designer who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Many other level designers rapidly surpassed Romero.
Carmack was doing a great job until he started building rockets.
I think with creative work, there’s a huge amount of luck involved in what achieves popular success. And in a collaborative medium like video games, the success of the enterprise also depends on the team working well together. I think in many cases we see a great success and assume the artist behind it is a unique genius; it’s possible that we’re just seeing survivorship bias, and that there are many others who are equally talented, and could achieve the same level if they had the opportunity, the right collaborators, the right motivation, etc.
There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should cost, which seems entirely cultural and not based on an accounting of the resources that went into it. Remember when the standard price of a AAA game was raised by $10, and there was a bit of outrage (from some camps), despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are today?
Clearly, many gamers don't consider the amount of work and resources that go into a game being the decisive factor in its price!
With that framing, Romero's pricing makes perfect sense. It doesn't much matter if he's designing levels for a game rather than developing a game, because the resources that go into the game's production are irrelevant to the cost.
What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product. Unlike AAA games, who are targeting the marginal player—that is, the person who isn't necessarily going to buy the game anyway—Romero is selling to true believers (in him, in Doom, in their nostalgia for their childhoods, whatever). The cost is extra irrelevant to that group.
>There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should cost, which seems entirely cultural and not based on an accounting of the resources that went into it.
The price of a video game is not a function of how much it cost to make it. The price is set by maximizing unit price * expected sales where expected sales is a function of cost. The demand curves are cultural and that is how it works for any industry.
>despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are today?
Conversely, gaming is a mass market that appeals to a larger amount of people than it did in the past. The masses may be less willing to spend as much as an enthusiast.
>What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product.
He chose to make it a niche product. It would not have been that much extra work to make it into a full game and release it on Steam. He could have even outsourced that work. There are freely licensed doom clones that could be used so it would not need much development time.
