224: Heavy Metal Twenty-Something Swagger

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I found myself on Usenet the other day.

00:02SPEAKER- That's a great place to be.

00:03SPEAKER- Well, I found myself on old Usenet on Google Groups.

00:06SPEAKER- That's an even better place to be.

00:07SPEAKERI mean, I've certainly got my issues

00:09SPEAKERabout how Google Groups has evolved over time, but.

00:12SPEAKER- It's kind of what I wanted to talk about

00:13SPEAKERbecause I've noticed that the search

00:16SPEAKERon Google Groups has gotten worse.

00:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, that's a year's long problem.

00:21SPEAKERLike you can find like ours articles and stuff about it

00:23SPEAKERof people have complaints

00:25SPEAKERabout like they are just letting Google Groups,

00:27SPEAKERto back up for a second,

00:28SPEAKERGoogle bought the Dejan News Usenet archive

00:31SPEAKERyears and years ago.

00:32SPEAKER- Like 20 years ago, yeah.

00:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it's been ages, but basically Google's in possession

00:36SPEAKERof a massive archive of Usenet from the,

00:38SPEAKERI don't know if it goes back to the '70s,

00:40SPEAKERprobably the '80s, sometime in the '80s.

00:41SPEAKER- I mean, it's definitely, like the place,

00:43SPEAKERthe area I'm interested is when it started getting popular

00:45SPEAKERin the '90s when people were using it as a message board.

00:47SPEAKER- Yes, but yeah, so like they integrated that entire archive

00:50SPEAKERinto Google Groups and then over time,

00:53SPEAKERthe search functionality has continued to decay

00:55SPEAKERto the point that you can barely search,

00:57SPEAKERlike you can't even really search

00:59SPEAKERin individual groups easily anymore.

01:01SPEAKERThey, there's a big banner on there now,

01:02SPEAKERthey are disabling the ability to post to Usenet

01:05SPEAKERthrough Google Groups very soon.

01:07SPEAKER- I'm kind of okay with that, I think.

01:08SPEAKER- That's fine, yes, I don't need to,

01:10SPEAKERI don't need to post to you.

01:11SPEAKERAlthough, what if I did, you know.

01:13SPEAKER- You should get a Usenet account.

01:14SPEAKERYeah, download your Usenet reader of choice.

01:17SPEAKER- A, I should post to Usenet.

01:19SPEAKERB, if I was going to post to Usenet,

01:21SPEAKERI would do it through a command line.

01:22SPEAKER- Would you be, where would you post?

01:24SPEAKERLike alt.content.

01:27SPEAKER- I can, I can tell you what's my,

01:29SPEAKERwe've talked about this before.

01:30SPEAKERMy frequent groups were alt.games.finalfantasy,

01:33SPEAKERrec.games.video.Nintendo, and .Sony,

01:37SPEAKERor was it .PlayStation, I don't quite remember.

01:40SPEAKERAnd then some of the computing ones

01:41SPEAKERthat I don't quite remember.

01:43SPEAKER- See, I was more of an IRC guy.

01:44SPEAKERI always liked the ephemeral chat.

01:46SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:47SPEAKER- To the everlasting nature of Usenet.

01:50SPEAKER- Oh, I was on, I was on IRC for years

01:52SPEAKERas we have well-documented.

01:55SPEAKERAlt.comp.periffs.mainboard.abit.

01:58SPEAKER- Oh, people are going to go find you now.

02:00SPEAKER- Oh, I mean, we've read these posts out loud

02:02SPEAKERon this podcast. - Some of them.

02:03SPEAKERJust some of them. (laughs)

02:05SPEAKER- Well, the search is broken, so don't bother.

02:07SPEAKER- You said you had a better alternative, though, now.

02:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I am a little concerned about the future

02:11SPEAKERof Google's Usenet archive.

02:13SPEAKERBut I can't remember, a user on one of my,

02:17SPEAKERone of our Discords turned me onto this.

02:19SPEAKERI apologize, I can't remember your name.

02:21SPEAKERUsenetarchives.com.

02:23SPEAKERQuite easy to find.

02:25SPEAKERI don't know where they're getting their data from.

02:27SPEAKERI'm not sure.

02:28SPEAKERThis launched, I think, like four or five years ago.

02:30SPEAKERI found a Reddit post of the person who runs this

02:32SPEAKERannouncing it.

02:33SPEAKERIt's very slow, very slow.

02:36SPEAKER- I mean, that makes sense.

02:37SPEAKERLike, it's like archive.org is slow, too.

02:38SPEAKERIt's put in a lot of data,

02:40SPEAKERand it's probably not super well-funded.

02:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so they have a Patreon up, actually,

02:45SPEAKERso you can support this.

02:45SPEAKERI think this person said in their announcement post,

02:48SPEAKERlike, hey, I'm throttling database hits

02:49SPEAKERbecause this is a huge database, like, et cetera, et cetera.

02:52SPEAKERAnyway, there is an alternative now.

02:54SPEAKERLike, knowing there is another Usenet archive out there

02:56SPEAKERmakes me feel just a little bit better.

02:59SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:22SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:27SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

03:29SPEAKERI'm Will.

03:30SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

03:31SPEAKERYou're sounding guttural this week.

03:33SPEAKER- I'm a little deeper than normal, Brad.

03:35SPEAKERI'm just bringing it in low, low, low,

03:37SPEAKER'cause I've had a cough, cough, cough.

03:39SPEAKER- Oh, I thought you brought your bedroom voice or something.

03:43SPEAKER- No, if this was my bedroom voice,

03:44SPEAKERI don't even know what I'd do with that.

03:46SPEAKERThat's too much power for me.

03:48SPEAKERFor this extremely sexy episode about Apple 2,

03:52SPEAKER6502 assembly and making first person shooters.

03:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I learned a surprising amount

03:59SPEAKERabout old CPU assembly reading this book.

04:03SPEAKERSo for folks that don't know, this week,

04:05SPEAKERwe are talking about the John Romero biography,

04:09SPEAKERautobiography, I guess.

04:11SPEAKER- I kept calling it a memoir when I talked about it before,

04:13SPEAKER'cause I think memoir sounds classy.

04:15SPEAKER- It's a little memoirish.

04:17SPEAKERJohn Romero's book, "Doom Guy, Life in First Person."

04:19SPEAKERIt's a memoir about his time, so far at least.

04:24SPEAKER- On Earth.

04:25SPEAKER- Making video games and also on Earth.

04:27SPEAKERYeah, I mean, it's kind of,

04:28SPEAKERthe whole thing's intertwined, it seems like.

04:30SPEAKER- Yes, John Romero, famously of id Software,

04:33SPEAKERco-creator of Doom and Wolfenstein and Quake

04:35SPEAKERand all that stuff.

04:36SPEAKERWe've talked about all these things,

04:38SPEAKERad infinitum around here.

04:40SPEAKER- Went on to launch Ion Storm,

04:43SPEAKERhas made a bunch of mobile games and other stuff since then.

04:46SPEAKERIt's working on a new title now in Ireland.

04:48SPEAKERBut famously was the guy, was the Doom and Wolfenstein,

04:53SPEAKERand to a lesser extent, Wolfenstein.

04:56SPEAKERBut he was kind of the public face of id Software

05:01SPEAKERduring their prime.

05:03SPEAKERI think we can look back now and say that that was the prime.

05:04SPEAKERI mean, I think actually, I would say that id Software

05:07SPEAKERis kind of in the middle of another prime right now.

05:09SPEAKERBut the thing that started the first person shooter

05:12SPEAKERas a genre and took over gaming for 10, 20 years

05:16SPEAKERstarted in the 90s.

05:17SPEAKERAnd that was a handful of people were involved in that.

05:20SPEAKER- Yeah, something actually,

05:21SPEAKERI will just make a disclaimer right up front here

05:23SPEAKERthat we'll go for this entire episode,

05:26SPEAKERwhich is that I kind of consider there to be

05:27SPEAKERtwo id Softwares.

05:29SPEAKERLike there's the scrappy, four guys crammed

05:33SPEAKERin a rental house version,

05:35SPEAKERwhich I know it became a much bigger company

05:38SPEAKERup through when John Carmack left.

05:40SPEAKERBut that's kind of like when he left

05:43SPEAKERis sort of when it became a different company, right?

05:45SPEAKERAnd it is a very different studio now run by mostly,

05:48SPEAKERI mean, there's still some veterans there,

05:50SPEAKERbut the output is different.

05:53SPEAKERI feel like there's a difference in clearly reading

05:55SPEAKERthis book, there's a difference in professionalism cases

05:58SPEAKERand it's much more of a real modern video game studio now.

06:01SPEAKERAnd I've been on record, Doom 2016 is one of the best games

06:05SPEAKERof the last decade.

06:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it's fabulous.

06:07SPEAKER- So they're doing great work over there.

06:09SPEAKERBut when I talk about id Software,

06:12SPEAKERand when I talk about like,

06:13SPEAKER'cause I'm probably gonna say things like,

06:14SPEAKERoh, you know, I think I feel like that's when it ended

06:16SPEAKERor that's when like X stopped being the case or whatever.

06:19SPEAKERLike it's like, I'm talking basically

06:21SPEAKERabout two different companies here.

06:22SPEAKERI'm talking about like the original incarnation

06:25SPEAKERof that studio.

06:26SPEAKER- And it's worth mentioning even like,

06:28SPEAKERyou know, when I went and played Doom 3, right?

06:31SPEAKERAnd Rage, even in that time period post,

06:35SPEAKERyou know, when it was a very different company

06:37SPEAKERthan it was when they were making the original Doom

06:39SPEAKERand Quake, it was still small for that scale developer.

06:43SPEAKERFor a developer that made games

06:44SPEAKERthat that many people played, they were always small.

06:47SPEAKERI think now it's a little different 'cause you know,

06:49SPEAKERthe art constraints of a modern game engine are different.

06:52SPEAKER- But also they've successfully become a part

06:55SPEAKERof bigger and bigger companies, right?

06:57SPEAKERThey got bought by FESDA in like '09 or something like that.

07:00SPEAKER- They then got bought by Microsoft

07:02SPEAKERand presumably at some point they're gonna be bought

07:04SPEAKERby Whelan Yutani or something, I don't know, we'll see.

07:07SPEAKER- Yeah, so I got maybe a better way to look at it

07:08SPEAKERis the dividing line between when they were still

07:10SPEAKERan independent studio and then became part

07:12SPEAKERof a bigger company.

07:13SPEAKER'Cause I, you know, I'm not gonna say

07:14SPEAKERthat like Carmack was the only person

07:16SPEAKERkeeping things going there, like by all accounts,

07:19SPEAKERit seems like he maybe was kind of not super involved

07:21SPEAKERfor the last few years he was even there, so.

07:24SPEAKER- But we're not, that's not the stuff

07:25SPEAKERwe're talking about today.

07:27SPEAKERThe reason this time period is interesting to me

07:29SPEAKERand I think to you as well,

07:30SPEAKERand to just technologists in general,

07:33SPEAKERis that in the late '90s, the work that was being done

07:37SPEAKERon games like First Person Shooters specifically,

07:39SPEAKERwhich were incredibly hardware dependent and demanding,

07:43SPEAKERdrove an incredible amount of advancement forward

07:46SPEAKERin the PC space.

07:47SPEAKERIt also changed the tenor of the internet.

07:50SPEAKERLike this is, the early internet was about like porn

07:54SPEAKERand Quake and Doom for lack of like--

07:58SPEAKER- Okay, sure.

07:59SPEAKER- There were two things you could find

08:01SPEAKERon the early internet in ripe abundance.

08:03SPEAKERSpeculation about upcoming video games from id Software

08:06SPEAKERand other adjacent companies and pornography.

08:10SPEAKER- Smut.

08:11SPEAKER- Yeah, there wasn't a whole lot out,

08:12SPEAKERlike it wasn't like there were blogs,

08:14SPEAKERthere weren't, the first time I saw a recipe on the internet,

08:16SPEAKERI was like, wow, that's really weird,

08:18SPEAKERI've never thought about doing that before.

08:19SPEAKER- Sure, okay, yes, sure.

08:21SPEAKER- But I also had seven different blogs

08:23SPEAKERdedicated to reading plan files

08:27SPEAKERfrom game developers in Texas saved on my bookmarks.

08:32SPEAKER- It occurs to me that that might be,

08:34SPEAKERthe availability of the material might be a reflection

08:36SPEAKERof the demographic that had early internet access.

08:39SPEAKER- You are not wrong, my friend.

08:40SPEAKER- But anyway, anyway, all that said,

08:44SPEAKERthis book is really about his kind of whole life, honestly.

08:47SPEAKERLike, you know, I came to it wanting to know

08:52SPEAKERabout the ins and outs of that period of id Software

08:54SPEAKER'cause Doom and Quake were life-changing for me

08:56SPEAKERand I wanted to know what happened behind the scenes there,

08:58SPEAKERbut he really starts from the beginning.

08:59SPEAKERLike he actually, you spend, I don't know,

09:03SPEAKERa fifth of the book maybe on his childhood and teen years.

09:06SPEAKERLike he definitely does not skimp over his upbringing,

09:09SPEAKERhis early exposure to computers,

09:11SPEAKERhow he got into coding, how much of a coder he is,

09:14SPEAKERlike that was a huge revelation for me reading this book,

09:18SPEAKERwhich we'll get into is that like he is

09:20SPEAKERand was a hardcore programmer and solo game designer.

09:24SPEAKER- Well, and it's interesting because he starts

09:26SPEAKERfrom a period in time when like solo game design,

09:29SPEAKERthere were two types of game designers

09:31SPEAKERin that like late '80s, early '90s time period.

09:34SPEAKERThere were people at like the big, I'm air quoting big

09:37SPEAKERbecause they weren't really that big by today's standards,

09:40SPEAKERbut like the Williamses making King's Quest

09:43SPEAKERand then those games were big.

09:46SPEAKERThey were industry titans, right?

09:48SPEAKER- Richard Garriott is, I mean, I don't know

09:50SPEAKERif we'll go through this kind of chronologically,

09:51SPEAKERso we'll get there, but like his first real job in games

09:54SPEAKERwas at Origin Systems of all places

09:56SPEAKERand he and a lot of people idolized Richard Garriott

09:59SPEAKERat the time, who I think actually this book says

10:01SPEAKERlike Garriott also was a serious coder, right?

10:04SPEAKERLike he, before Origin became big,

10:06SPEAKERlike I think he was writing the games, right?

10:08SPEAKER- Because I was gonna say the other way you made games

10:10SPEAKERat that point was if you could kind of do everything

10:12SPEAKERand you were a one-stop shop.

10:14SPEAKERSo like Romero started out and a lot of these folks

10:17SPEAKERstarted out earlier making, just writing code

10:21SPEAKERand turning that into games and then putting those games

10:23SPEAKERin Ziploc bags and selling them at computer shows

10:25SPEAKERand screwdriver shops.

10:27SPEAKER- Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of this book

10:29SPEAKER'cause I mean, we're skipping ahead a little bit.

10:31SPEAKERWe should talk about his upbringing a bit

10:33SPEAKER'cause it does come into play later.

10:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, okay, so let's-

10:35SPEAKER- But the I'm 15, 16 and selling games to magazines part

10:41SPEAKERwas one of the most exciting parts of this to me.

10:44SPEAKERIt sounds like so much fun.

10:46SPEAKER- Yeah, it's kind of the bridge

10:47SPEAKERfrom like the old homebrew computer club

10:50SPEAKERand like the guys in Silicon Valley

10:51SPEAKERthat were soldering chips onto boards

10:53SPEAKERand figuring it all out.

10:54SPEAKERAnd this is the bridge from that to hey, computers

10:57SPEAKERcan be a business and there's a reason

10:59SPEAKERfor a computer to be in every home.

11:01SPEAKERAnd that's to me the most interesting thing

11:03SPEAKERabout this like 10, eight, 10 year period,

11:07SPEAKERlooking back on it now especially.

11:08SPEAKERSo, okay, so Romero's childhood was rough.

11:12SPEAKERI'm gonna say if you're gonna read the book,

11:13SPEAKERthere's a lot of content warnings.

11:14SPEAKERThere's stuff that is abusive and terrible and bad.

11:18SPEAKERHe's like, he treats it really matter of factly

11:22SPEAKERand kind of unapologetically and is like,

11:25SPEAKERhey, I love my family, they have problems.

11:29SPEAKERAnd the childhood that I had is what shaped me

11:31SPEAKERinto the person I am now, so I don't regret that.

11:34SPEAKERBut some people are gonna read this and be like, holy shit.

11:37SPEAKER- Yeah, there's some fairly rough stuff in there.

11:39SPEAKERAnd he also treats it with kind of a shocking amount

11:42SPEAKERof grace, I feel like, for some of the stuff he went through

11:46SPEAKERand how sort of forgiving he is of a lot of those things.

11:50SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's the whole gamut of Gen X childhoods, right?

11:56SPEAKERIt's like the substance abuse parent, the bad stepdad,

12:01SPEAKERthe maybe the ambiguously bad stepdad.

12:05SPEAKERI don't know, the stepdad bought him his first Apple II

12:07SPEAKERand opened the door to a lot of stuff.

12:09SPEAKER- Stepdad is certainly an interesting figure

12:11SPEAKERin all of this.

12:12SPEAKER- Like, I think the remarkable thing about this book

12:15SPEAKERis that going through it and like the amount of drama

12:17SPEAKERthat happened in this time period, kind of,

12:22SPEAKERthere's not really a villain.

12:23SPEAKERI mean, there are people who definitely do bad things,

12:25SPEAKERbut there's not anybody that he comes out as inimical to.

12:29SPEAKER- Yeah, in his case, that's what I meant about the grace,

12:31SPEAKERyou know, because there are some like very abusive figures

12:35SPEAKERhere or one in particular.

12:39SPEAKERBut long story short, I found that section of the book

12:43SPEAKERincredibly engaging.

12:44SPEAKERLike that's what I was kind of getting at earlier

12:45SPEAKERwhen I came to this wanting to know about his time

12:48SPEAKERat ID Software primarily, but like, you know,

12:50SPEAKERit's a good several chapters of just his childhood

12:53SPEAKERand how he got into computers as a teenager.

12:54SPEAKERAnd I was like gripped by the whole thing.

12:57SPEAKERIt's told really vividly.

13:00SPEAKERThere's also a lot of positivity in there, you know,

13:01SPEAKERlike his, just his like appreciation of his heritage,

13:06SPEAKERyou know, his Mexican and indigenous lineage and culture.

13:10SPEAKERAnd like, you get a lot of positivity from him

13:14SPEAKERabout his family life in the midst of all of the bad stuff.

13:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like, it feels like he's like,

13:24SPEAKERI mean, he says it later in the book,

13:25SPEAKERbut he said writing the book was a reflection

13:26SPEAKERon everything that he's done and everything that he is,

13:28SPEAKERand it's made him understand himself better, which I get.

13:31SPEAKERLike I take that, I took that away from this whole thing.

13:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like that part of the book.

13:36SPEAKERI have not read a lot of autobiography

13:38SPEAKERor memoir type stuff, and this might actually be

13:40SPEAKERthe first one that I've read in that vein.

13:42SPEAKERAnd like, I was, you know, again,

13:45SPEAKERagain, you want to read somebody's autobiography

13:47SPEAKERbecause they're famous and did something

13:48SPEAKERyou want to know about.

13:49SPEAKERBut then like, I was, I guess what I'm trying to say is

13:51SPEAKERI was just shocked how much I appreciated

13:54SPEAKERreading about his background,

13:55SPEAKERwhich was something I didn't think

13:57SPEAKERI was coming to the book for.

13:58SPEAKER- Well, they're, and they're, in my experience,

14:00SPEAKERthey're like a couple of different kinds of these books.

14:02SPEAKEROne is that I want to burn everything down.

14:04SPEAKERFuck everybody, let's, let's, let's,

14:06SPEAKERlet's, airing of grievances.

14:08SPEAKER- The 20 year tell all.

14:09SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the other one.

14:11SPEAKERThis is the, hey, I think, I think I did okay.

14:13SPEAKERAnd I feel pretty good about where I ended up,

14:15SPEAKERbut let's, let's, let's share the story, right?

14:18SPEAKERIt's because it's a good story.

14:19SPEAKERIt's like the kid who came from nothing

14:21SPEAKERended up being one of the first video game millionaires,

14:25SPEAKERyou know, wildly successful rock star of the games industry.

14:28SPEAKERLike that's the kind of thing you can't,

14:30SPEAKERyou can't write a soap opera about that

14:32SPEAKERbecause people would be like, oh, that's not,

14:33SPEAKERthere's no way that kid is gonna,

14:35SPEAKERfrom the barrier is going to be able to do this.

14:37SPEAKERRight? - Right, right.

14:38SPEAKERAlthough, although ironically they did write a TV show

14:41SPEAKERabout this, but I can't, I can't,

14:44SPEAKERdid that ever get produced?

14:45SPEAKER- I don't, I don't think so.

14:47SPEAKERI would have watched the shit out of that, I'm sure.

14:49SPEAKER- I know, I know that it was it,

14:50SPEAKERwas it Masters of Doom that they, it was technically,

14:52SPEAKERI think they optioned. - Somebody optioned

14:52SPEAKERMasters of Doom. - That's what it was.

14:54SPEAKERAnd I know they cast those roles,

14:58SPEAKERbut I don't know if they ever actually got around

15:00SPEAKERto shooting it or not.

15:02SPEAKERAnyway. - So, so the other part

15:03SPEAKERabout this that's interesting is having read Masters of Doom.

15:05SPEAKERIt has been a minute since I read Masters of Doom,

15:07SPEAKERbut the, this has that Hells Angels

15:11SPEAKERelectric Kool-Aid acid test vibe,

15:13SPEAKERwhere two people are writing simultaneous books

15:16SPEAKERabout things that are happening in real life, in real time,

15:19SPEAKERand then they happen to cross paths.

15:20SPEAKERAnd you get in the middle,

15:21SPEAKERHells Angels written by Hunter Thompson.

15:23SPEAKERHe went and lived with the Hells Angels for a few years.

15:26SPEAKERElectric Kool-Aid acid test is written by Ken Kesey.

15:32SPEAKER- Tom Wolfe. - Tom Wolfe.

15:34SPEAKERIt's about Ken Kesey, sorry.

15:35SPEAKERAnd they happen to end up at a,

15:39SPEAKERlike spending a summer together at a series of parties.

15:42SPEAKERSo you can read these chapters

15:43SPEAKERin the middle of electric Kool-Aid acid test

15:44SPEAKERand these chapters in the middle of Hells Angels.

15:46SPEAKERAnd they're about the same place in the same period of time,

15:48SPEAKERbut from completely different perspectives.

15:50SPEAKER- Oh, that's fascinating. - Yeah, so.

15:52SPEAKER- I mean, he does mention Masters of Doom in this book,

15:54SPEAKERand I think he pretty much says, like,

15:57SPEAKERhe doesn't really disagree with anything in that book,

15:59SPEAKERI think. - Yeah, I think he said

16:00SPEAKERsome of it's a little bit overdramatized.

16:01SPEAKER- Or, yeah, yeah. - Yeah,

16:02SPEAKERit was the implication. - But the basic events.

16:05SPEAKER- Pretty much, pretty much there.

16:06SPEAKER- The events of this whole time are not,

16:08SPEAKERseemingly, in con, like, there's no,

16:11SPEAKERthere's not really a whole lot of disagreement

16:13SPEAKERabout what happened.

16:14SPEAKER- No, well, yeah, I mean, the big one is,

16:17SPEAKERand we'll get to this, I mean, the big one for me was

16:19SPEAKERwhen he left id, and we'll get there.

16:21SPEAKERBut in that particular case, as you will see,

16:24SPEAKERlike, the perspectives of the main figures involved there

16:28SPEAKERare very different, the stories that have been told

16:30SPEAKERabout what happened are quite different.

16:32SPEAKER- So the interesting thing about me from the apple,

16:34SPEAKERlike, there's a moment early on

16:36SPEAKERafter he's gotten his apple two,

16:37SPEAKERhe's a friend who lives near him

16:38SPEAKERthat has an apple two as well.

16:40SPEAKERAnd he's like, hey, do you wanna see the code?

16:42SPEAKERThe friend's sitting there, they're playing a game,

16:44SPEAKERI think it's Gorgon, which was a apple two,

16:47SPEAKERkind of intensive apple two game back in the day.

16:50SPEAKERAnd also, I'm gonna say, reading this book

16:54SPEAKERmade me wanna go download a bunch of old apple two games

16:56SPEAKERand load 'em up on the mister and get the,

17:00SPEAKERyou know, try these out, 'cause I missed all of this.

17:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I still want to do that.

17:05SPEAKERBoth some of his old solo games,

17:07SPEAKERand also especially a lot of those games

17:09SPEAKERthey churned out at soft disk, which we'll talk about.

17:11SPEAKER- We should find a Saturday sometime and just have some fun.

17:14SPEAKERAnyway, he said, hey, do you wanna see the code?

17:18SPEAKERAnd he opens up the console

17:20SPEAKERand types in the assembler command

17:23SPEAKERto just dump the hexadecimal assembly language for the CPU.

17:28SPEAKERAnd everyone's like, what is this?

17:29SPEAKERAnd he's like, it's the first time

17:30SPEAKERI've ever seen hexadecimal,

17:31SPEAKERit's the first time I've ever seen the language

17:33SPEAKERthat the machine speaks.

17:34SPEAKERAnd it's like, it's a moment that I didn't have.

17:38SPEAKERI didn't have a friend who knew how to do that.

17:40SPEAKERI didn't know anybody who knew.

17:42SPEAKERI wasn't aware that,

17:43SPEAKERI assumed that everything on your computer

17:45SPEAKERwas written in BASIC at that point in my life probably.

17:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so he goes through this whole arc in there.

17:49SPEAKERI mean, if you're interested in early

17:50SPEAKERand low level programming,

17:51SPEAKERlike there's a ton of fun detail in there about this,

17:54SPEAKERwhere yes, you know, he started out with BASIC.

17:56SPEAKERHe wrote some games in BASIC.

17:58SPEAKERYou can absolutely do that on apple two,

18:00SPEAKERbut he hits that moment where he realizes

18:04SPEAKERhe needs more speed.

18:05SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:06SPEAKER- And the only way to get that is to learn the machine code,

18:08SPEAKERthe 6502 assembly.

18:09SPEAKERAnd so like, there's like, it's very approachable.

18:12SPEAKERI'm not gonna say it's like too technical,

18:14SPEAKERbut there's like a, they're very,

18:16SPEAKERthere's an amount of technical detail

18:17SPEAKERthat I appreciate in there that even if you're a lay person,

18:21SPEAKERI think gives you a good sense of like,

18:23SPEAKERhere's what BASIC can do,

18:24SPEAKERbut here's how much harder it is, but also much faster.

18:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it passes the Goldilocks test there.

18:29SPEAKERIt's just the right amount of nerd shit to not turn me off.

18:32SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's fun to read about.

18:34SPEAKERHe, I'm trying to remember exactly,

18:36SPEAKERwhat was it he committed to memory?

18:37SPEAKERLike he memorized all the hexadecimal for like the-

18:40SPEAKER- All the addresses for the different commands, yeah.

18:43SPEAKER- Also, I think also for the entire alphabet

18:46SPEAKERand base 10 numbers, right?

18:49SPEAKERLike didn't he, just so he wouldn't have to look up the,

18:51SPEAKERlike, you know, what's hexadecimal for F or whatever.

18:53SPEAKERI think he just kind of memorized all that stuff.

18:55SPEAKER- Well, so the fun thing about this was

18:58SPEAKERit seemed like the typical nerd thing

19:00SPEAKERwhere you would go and hang out with other people

19:01SPEAKERand you'd compare notes about what you remembered

19:03SPEAKERand what you knew, and this was it.

19:06SPEAKERLike committing the entire thing to memory

19:08SPEAKERso you didn't have to reference anything.

19:09SPEAKERYou just worked straight out of your brain was seemed like,

19:12SPEAKERyou know, this was, it's the early nineties equivalent of,

19:17SPEAKERor late eighties equivalent of a nerd,

19:21SPEAKERnerds doing keg stands.

19:22SPEAKER- Yes, yes, yes.

19:23SPEAKERAlso, you know, there's another thing we'll get to,

19:26SPEAKERbut the contrast between who he actually is and was,

19:31SPEAKERor at least how he described himself versus the late nineties,

19:35SPEAKERlike make you his bitch, long haired rockstar persona

19:39SPEAKERis profound here because like he didn't party,

19:42SPEAKERhe didn't party through his teen years or anything.

19:45SPEAKERLike, I mean, his long hair-

19:47SPEAKER- All of these guys are straight edge guys.

19:48SPEAKER- Right, that's the thing.

19:49SPEAKERHe's like super straight edge, like you, you know,

19:52SPEAKERlike he talks more about his long hair as like,

19:54SPEAKERA, he didn't want to get a haircut and then B, later,

19:56SPEAKERhe culturally kind of came to appreciate the long hair

19:59SPEAKERin regard to his heritage.

20:00SPEAKERBut like, it was never, he was like, I mean,

20:03SPEAKERhe loved heavy metal, but he was not like out partying,

20:05SPEAKERdoing Coke and like drinking all the time.

20:07SPEAKERLike he's super straight edge.

20:09SPEAKER- Yeah, they were the other kind of heavy metal nerds,

20:10SPEAKERthe nerds that just liked heavy metal and didn't like any of

20:13SPEAKERthe stuff that the heavy metal implied.

20:14SPEAKER- Right, like they just listened to a lot of Iron Maiden

20:17SPEAKERand stuff and-

20:17SPEAKER- Just about Satan in music, not the drugs, it turns out.

20:20SPEAKER- Yeah, like he just, he describes himself

20:22SPEAKERas incredibly driven and single-minded about just wanting

20:24SPEAKERto program and make games and do nothing else.

20:26SPEAKERAnd he wouldn't do anything to get in the way of that.

20:29SPEAKER- And like, and like that comes up over and over again.

20:31SPEAKERAt one point, you know, when they moved, they,

20:34SPEAKERat one point they all moved to Madison, Wisconsin together

20:36SPEAKERand they just got apartments in the same apartment complex

20:39SPEAKERand had an extra one where they put all the computers

20:41SPEAKERso that nobody had to drive to get to work, right?

20:44SPEAKERLike you could just walk down the,

20:45SPEAKERwalk down the hallway to go to work

20:47SPEAKERbecause that's all they wanted to do.

20:49SPEAKERWhen he's talking about being married in the id software days

20:53SPEAKERhe's like, I'm coming home, I'm working all day,

20:55SPEAKERI'm coming home and I'm working on other stuff

20:56SPEAKERto figure out what we can do later on

20:58SPEAKERand just always experimenting.

21:02SPEAKERThere's an anecdote about when they did the same thing

21:05SPEAKERin Texas, they moved to Texas, got a bunch of apartments

21:06SPEAKERin this apartment complex and the one,

21:10SPEAKERthe one where they work also has Carmack's bedroom upstairs.

21:14SPEAKERBecause I assume because, I'm guessing it's because

21:16SPEAKERthe next workstation was in Carmack's house

21:18SPEAKERand they didn't want to buy two of them

21:19SPEAKERso he'd have one at home so he could just work, work.

21:22SPEAKERSo anyway, he went and looked at Carmack's room one day

21:25SPEAKERand he's like, there's no bed.

21:26SPEAKERHe's just sleeping on the floor.

21:28SPEAKERSo he went out and bought a mattress for Carmack

21:30SPEAKERat that point, at that day and tucked a mattress

21:32SPEAKERon the floor so he could sleep on, get some good sleep.

21:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that might've been in Madison,

21:38SPEAKERin Wisconsin when they were doing Wolfenstein

21:39SPEAKERor pre-Wolfenstein but yeah, the way he describes

21:41SPEAKERthe bedroom, he had no bed, oh sorry.

21:44SPEAKERThere was a pillow, a lamp and a stack of computer books

21:46SPEAKERon the floor next to a blanket.

21:48SPEAKERHe had no bed, I felt sorry for him.

21:50SPEAKERHow could you sleep on the floor and still work long hours

21:53SPEAKERand not be fatigued?

21:55SPEAKERYeah, anyway.

21:57SPEAKERSo like long story short, I mean we can kind of skip over

21:59SPEAKERsome of the events but you know, he spends his teen years

22:03SPEAKERmaking games by himself, selling them to magazines.

22:06SPEAKER- And that also, that transaction's really fascinating

22:08SPEAKER'cause I think it worked out because they would literally,

22:11SPEAKERhe'd buy a computer magazine and be like,

22:12SPEAKERoh I like the games in this magazine.

22:14SPEAKERHe'd call the phone number or send a letter

22:16SPEAKERto the masthead address and say hey, I have some games,

22:19SPEAKERdo you wanna buy them?

22:20SPEAKERAnd then they'd send him a few hundred dollars

22:22SPEAKERfor the games.

22:23SPEAKER- Right, yeah, there's a real self-starting quality

22:25SPEAKERto a lot of this stuff that I appreciate, you know,

22:27SPEAKERof just like maybe some kind of stuff that I maybe wish

22:29SPEAKERI had done a little more of when I was younger

22:31SPEAKERof like, he didn't feel intimidated or--

22:35SPEAKER- A massive amount of confidence for somebody

22:36SPEAKERthat's 16 or 17 years old is what I would say.

22:39SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what it is.

22:39SPEAKERIt's like you said, he just looked at the masthead,

22:43SPEAKERsaw there was a phone number and just called it, you know.

22:44SPEAKERHe didn't feel intimidated by doing that or, you know,

22:47SPEAKERit didn't not occur to him to do that.

22:48SPEAKERHe just kind of reached out and got himself into it.

22:52SPEAKER- Well, it's also interesting 'cause there was kind of

22:54SPEAKERan in-between place too for people

22:55SPEAKERwho were fledgling game designers, right?

22:58SPEAKERYou know, there wasn't, like you weren't gonna sell

23:00SPEAKERa boxed copy at that point and this was before games

23:03SPEAKERwere at Walmart or, you know, probably stuff like,

23:07SPEAKERI guess EB and Babbage's and game stores like that existed,

23:11SPEAKERbut they were pretty rare and not definitely

23:12SPEAKERin every town at that point.

23:14SPEAKERSo mostly people got software through word of mouth

23:18SPEAKERor a computer show would come through your town

23:20SPEAKERonce or twice a year and you'd go and there'd be just

23:23SPEAKERlike bins filled with tall Ziploc bags with a manual

23:27SPEAKERand a couple of floppy disks in 'em, one or two.

23:31SPEAKERAnd that was how you got games, like or you had a friend

23:33SPEAKERwho went to those things and then copied the floppies,

23:35SPEAKERwhich we weren't supposed to copy the floppies,

23:37SPEAKERbut you know, here we are.

23:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, also a lot of those games had like

23:40SPEAKERvery generic, alliterative titles like Crazy Climber

23:43SPEAKERand Dangerous Dave and, you know what I mean?

23:45SPEAKER- Yeah. - Like Terrible Towers.

23:47SPEAKER- Or they were just straight knockoffs

23:48SPEAKERof like arcade games or whatever, so.

23:51SPEAKER- That's one of my favorite moments in this entire book

23:53SPEAKERis when he was first learning to,

23:55SPEAKERhe talked about how obsessed he was with playing,

23:57SPEAKERI think it's Asteroids, right?

23:58SPEAKERWas the arcade game that he absolutely loved

24:00SPEAKERand was like constantly trying to scrounge hoarders

24:02SPEAKERto go play Asteroids.

24:04SPEAKERLike part of the reason he got so excited about programming,

24:06SPEAKERmaking his own games is he realized he could just

24:08SPEAKERwrite his own Asteroids clone and then play it forever

24:11SPEAKERfor free.

24:13SPEAKER- Yeah, and like that whole, but that whole,

24:17SPEAKERlike having a place where you could sell your work

24:20SPEAKERthat wasn't a commercial product but would still get you

24:23SPEAKERa little bit of money was a really powerful thing

24:26SPEAKER'cause it let him build a library of software

24:28SPEAKERthat he had made and could pull ideas from and move,

24:31SPEAKERyou know, port forward and a bunch of other things in time

24:35SPEAKERthat he was still making a little bit of money

24:36SPEAKERon every month.

24:37SPEAKERNow, were those magazines absolutely underpaying the kids

24:41SPEAKERthat were sending in, you know, homebrew games?

24:44SPEAKERAlmost certainly.

24:46SPEAKERBut, you know, it's a place that kind of didn't exist

24:51SPEAKERin the modern context for a long time

24:52SPEAKERand now we're starting to see it come back

24:54SPEAKERwith like itch and some of the indie kind of hey,

24:59SPEAKERhere's a place where you can put your game up for free

25:01SPEAKERor for 10, 10, 20, a buck or two or whatever.

25:04SPEAKER- Yeah, it's cool.

25:05SPEAKERThe last thing I'll say about this era is

25:08SPEAKERwhen this book came out last year,

25:10SPEAKERJordan Meckner, the creator of "Prince of Persia"

25:13SPEAKERwho I guess Romero idolized.

25:16SPEAKERMeckner on his Twitter account went and posted

25:18SPEAKERand there's a scan of a letter

25:19SPEAKERthat a very young John Romero sent him right after.

25:21SPEAKER- Oh my God.

25:22SPEAKER- Did you not see this?

25:23SPEAKER- No, I missed this.

25:24SPEAKER- You have to go look this up.

25:25SPEAKERIt is incredible.

25:27SPEAKERIt's like two pages.

25:28SPEAKERI'll try to find it and link it in the show notes.

25:30SPEAKERBut I think Romero's like 17 or something

25:33SPEAKERand it's basically fan mail to Meckner

25:35SPEAKERabout how much he likes, I think it's "Prince of Persia"

25:38SPEAKERor maybe it was "Karateka".

25:39SPEAKERI think it might've been "Karateka"

25:41SPEAKERis what he wrote in about.

25:42SPEAKER- It was probably "Karateka", yeah.

25:43SPEAKER- But it's a lot of fawning praise for Meckner's work.

25:46SPEAKERIt's a lot of geeky shit.

25:48SPEAKERYou know, it's like, oh, you must be using page flipping

25:49SPEAKERto do animation like that, right?

25:51SPEAKERLike it gets into the weeds of the programming stuff.

25:52SPEAKERAnd then he also promotes his own work

25:55SPEAKERin a way that is absolutely hilarious.

25:57SPEAKER- Oh, I love this.

25:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

26:00SPEAKER- It's a real,

26:01SPEAKERit's clearly printed on a dot matrix printer too.

26:05SPEAKER- Yes.

26:06SPEAKER- With robot logos.

26:06SPEAKERIt looks like it's made in Print Shop Pro.

26:08SPEAKERThis is incredible.

26:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I'll put the links in

26:11SPEAKERso you can check it in and show notes.

26:12SPEAKER- It's got an amazing letterhead on it.

26:14SPEAKERLike dot matrix looking letterhead.

26:16SPEAKERGreetings earthling with little printed out robots

26:19SPEAKERat the top.

26:21SPEAKERAnyway, my favorite part of the,

26:25SPEAKERwhen he's talking about his own work,

26:26SPEAKERthe game is called "The Pyramids of Egypt".

26:28SPEAKERMany people feel that it is better than "Load Runner"

26:30SPEAKERand almost everybody yells out "Tutankhamen"

26:32SPEAKERwhen they first see it.

26:34SPEAKER(laughing)

26:37SPEAKERAnyway.

26:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

26:40SPEAKER- Yeah, it's good stuff.

26:40SPEAKERBut anyway, like, you know,

26:42SPEAKERit goes from like his kind of teen years

26:44SPEAKERdoing homebrew single person game development

26:46SPEAKERwith an outlet in magazines and stuff.

26:49SPEAKERLike he ends up at Origin Systems

26:51SPEAKERworking for Richard Garriott for a while.

26:54SPEAKERAnd then long story short,

26:55SPEAKERhe ultimately goes down to SoftDisk in Louisiana.

27:00SPEAKER- Shreveport, Louisiana.

27:01SPEAKER- Shreveport, Louisiana,

27:02SPEAKERwhich is where he meets most of the people

27:04SPEAKERwho would then go on to found his software.

27:07SPEAKERSoftDisk, like, that is just a business model

27:10SPEAKERthat is so time and place,

27:11SPEAKERlike the way they were operating.

27:13SPEAKERLike they were basically selling subscription software

27:15SPEAKERto computer enthusiasts.

27:17SPEAKER- But not, they weren't selling like software

27:18SPEAKERyou pay monthly for.

27:19SPEAKERThey were paying, like every month you pay the money

27:21SPEAKERand they'd send you a disc full of software.

27:23SPEAKER- Right, and you didn't necessarily know what you were,

27:25SPEAKERI mean, it was kind of like an early blind box, right?

27:27SPEAKEROr an early, like one of these services of like,

27:29SPEAKERhey, pay us money and we will send you some stuff

27:32SPEAKERbecause you didn't know exactly what you were,

27:33SPEAKERI'm sure they promoted some of what was upcoming,

27:36SPEAKERbut they just had a bunch of in-house developers

27:38SPEAKERmaking games, making productivity applets,

27:40SPEAKERlittle, little programs,

27:42SPEAKERand you just kind of got stuff on a disc.

27:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's probably,

27:46SPEAKERthat seems like it, right?

27:48SPEAKERYou'd get the, like one month it would be

27:53SPEAKERa couple of games and a spreadsheet,

27:56SPEAKERone month it would be something else.

27:57SPEAKERLike it was just, if you think about it,

28:00SPEAKERthis business model ended up moving to magazines eventually

28:05SPEAKER'cause this is what Chris Anderson did with Future in the UK

28:08SPEAKERwhere they would bundle a magazine with a CD

28:12SPEAKERthat was full, a floppy disc that was full of software,

28:15SPEAKERand it was the same thing, just they had a magazine

28:17SPEAKERso they had a place to put it in grocery stores

28:19SPEAKERand newsstands.

28:21SPEAKERThe interesting thing about this was this,

28:23SPEAKERthe person who owned this, who owned SoftDisc,

28:26SPEAKERcomes across as a very favorable character

28:28SPEAKERand somebody who kind of took them under their wing

28:30SPEAKERand set them up as a skunkworks to build cool games.

28:35SPEAKERAnd like, it seems like it worked for a while, right?

28:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, Al Vikovius is the founder

28:41SPEAKERthat you're talking about here.

28:42SPEAKERHe absolutely comes off as a very magnanimous figure

28:46SPEAKERbecause, so this is the point where,

28:49SPEAKERokay, they were there to make games, of course.

28:50SPEAKERLike that's where they, this company,

28:52SPEAKERultimately they found John Carmack

28:54SPEAKERand convinced him to come down from like Kansas or whatever

28:57SPEAKERand work there, and like Tom Hall,

28:58SPEAKERlike the whole gang in Carmack.

29:01SPEAKER- They recruit Carmack to come in there.

29:02SPEAKER- Yes, like the whole gang of early ed software

29:04SPEAKERis basically at SoftDisc at this point,

29:06SPEAKERand they're tasked with making games, of course,

29:08SPEAKERand specifically the cadence they're tasked with

29:12SPEAKERis churning out a game every month.

29:14SPEAKERThey literally are making like 12 games a year,

29:16SPEAKERwhich is completely crazy.

29:18SPEAKER- But this is, again, this is where that homebrew scene

29:21SPEAKERcomes in, A, it's a simpler time.

29:23SPEAKERThe art of hands on a game in 1991,

29:26SPEAKERpretty thin by today's standards.

29:27SPEAKER- Of course.

29:28SPEAKER- But also they were taking their old,

29:30SPEAKERlike Apple II games and pointing them over to PC and Amiga.

29:33SPEAKERI think they originally were doing Amiga stuff, right,

29:35SPEAKERat SoftDisc?

29:37SPEAKER- Maybe, I'm not sure.

29:38SPEAKER- Maybe, no, no, it was other people

29:40SPEAKERwho were doing Amiga stuff.

29:40SPEAKER- Okay.

29:42SPEAKER- But yeah, so they were putting their old games

29:44SPEAKERup to new platforms.

29:46SPEAKERThey were making sequels to games that they already had.

29:49SPEAKERBut also that cadence forced them

29:52SPEAKERto think about things differently.

29:55SPEAKERSo like they were building tooling to make levels

29:57SPEAKERthat then would work in future games that they made

30:00SPEAKERso that they wouldn't have to make the tools

30:01SPEAKERto make the games over and over again.

30:03SPEAKEROr somebody who wasn't writing an assembly

30:06SPEAKERcould make the game, make the art and the content

30:10SPEAKERfor the game while somebody else was,

30:14SPEAKERI don't wanna say game engine,

30:14SPEAKER'cause they weren't exactly there yet.

30:16SPEAKERBut it was the foundational work that became,

30:19SPEAKERhey, if we separate the thing that makes the game run

30:21SPEAKERand the content that's in the game,

30:23SPEAKERthen it becomes a technological advantage

30:25SPEAKERthat we have that lets us work faster and better

30:27SPEAKERand all that.

30:28SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

30:29SPEAKERAnd this is around the period,

30:30SPEAKERfrom what I remember reading the book.

30:32SPEAKERThis is around when you start seeing

30:33SPEAKERsome of the first exciting, big innovations

30:36SPEAKERin PC game tech happening.

30:39SPEAKERI think this is where Carmack figures out

30:41SPEAKERthe smooth scrolling without video hardware stuff

30:43SPEAKERfor 2D games, which is, I think before Commander Keen,

30:46SPEAKERthey made a game or two for soft disk

30:48SPEAKERthat utilized that technology,

30:50SPEAKERwhere it was a vertical scrolling shooter.

30:52SPEAKERI don't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

30:54SPEAKER- So before soft, well, so they made,

30:56SPEAKERbut the horizontal scrolling was the big jump.

31:00SPEAKER- Right, well, you can scroll in either direction,

31:02SPEAKERlike it was the smoothness of it was the thing,

31:04SPEAKER'cause stuff like the NES had specialized hardware

31:07SPEAKERto be able to be clear, to scroll graphics,

31:11SPEAKERtiles, sprites, whatever smoothly across the screen.

31:14SPEAKERI think tiles in particular.

31:16SPEAKERStuff like the NES had special hardware to do that.

31:18SPEAKERYou can't just do that easily in software.

31:20SPEAKERAnd I think there's descriptions in there

31:22SPEAKERof like, you're using stuff about the video output hardware

31:26SPEAKERof the computer to, like, you're taking advantage-

31:29SPEAKER- They're using overscan or something, was the trick.

31:31SPEAKER- I forget how it works exactly,

31:32SPEAKERbut you're literally taking advantage

31:34SPEAKERof how electrically the video signal goes out to the screen

31:37SPEAKERand stuff like that, like some really interesting stuff.

31:39SPEAKERBut the soft disk where they were just turning these games

31:42SPEAKERout is where they started figuring some of that stuff out.

31:46SPEAKER- The thing with that especially is that,

31:48SPEAKERaccording to Romero's book at least,

31:51SPEAKERCarmack had done this thing,

31:53SPEAKERand he brought it in and was like,

31:54SPEAKER"Hey, look at, is this cool?"

31:55SPEAKERAnd showed them the demo,

31:57SPEAKERand everybody came and was like, "Oh, that's really cool."

32:00SPEAKERAnd Romero was like, "Oh my God,

32:02SPEAKERwe've got to make a game with this right now."

32:03SPEAKER- Right, like the rest of the company looked at it

32:05SPEAKERand was just like, "Okay, cool, good job."

32:06SPEAKERLike pat on the back and just walked off, right?

32:08SPEAKERLike nobody, like most of the people there

32:10SPEAKERdidn't seem to grasp how momentous this was.

32:12SPEAKER- Well, that it was a competitive advantage.

32:14SPEAKERThe other thing that's worth mentioning here

32:15SPEAKERis that the demo that they made

32:17SPEAKERwas Super Mario Brothers 3,

32:20SPEAKERand they coded it up over a weekend or something

32:23SPEAKERand sent it to Nintendo with a note that was like,

32:25SPEAKER"Hey, we'd love to make a PC port of Super Mario Brothers.

32:27SPEAKERWill you let us do that?"

32:28SPEAKERAnd so the Nintendo was like, "No, we're cool, thanks."

32:30SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, which of course famously

32:32SPEAKERis what led to Commander Keen and the rest was history,

32:35SPEAKERbut eventually they get out of soft disk.

32:38SPEAKERThey all realize like, "Hey, we can do this for ourselves.

32:40SPEAKERLike we should give this a shot."

32:43SPEAKERBut the thing I was gonna say before we move on

32:45SPEAKERabout Vicovius, the founder, like their boss,

32:48SPEAKERthere's some really hilarious,

32:50SPEAKERlike slapdash sort of business practices

32:53SPEAKERor behavior going on here.

32:54SPEAKERLike primarily he describes quite vividly

32:58SPEAKERhow they would wait for everybody to leave the office

33:01SPEAKERon Friday evening, and then they would roll their cars up

33:04SPEAKERand take all of their work computers home for the weekend

33:07SPEAKERand make their own games on their work machines

33:09SPEAKERat home all weekend,

33:11SPEAKERand then take them back late Sunday night.

33:13SPEAKERAnd I don't know if the management of soft disk

33:16SPEAKERknew about that stuff or not,

33:18SPEAKERbut like a lot of companies absolutely

33:20SPEAKERwould not let you get away with that.

33:21SPEAKER- Well, it seems like, yeah, I mean, look,

33:24SPEAKERone of the first things they tell you

33:25SPEAKERwhen you start out in a tech company

33:26SPEAKERis don't use your work computer for personal projects

33:29SPEAKER'cause you're gonna get sued.

33:30SPEAKERLike given what we know now,

33:33SPEAKERhad Al Vicovius decided to go after them in court,

33:37SPEAKERespecially in Louisiana,

33:39SPEAKERhe probably could have claimed a fair amount

33:41SPEAKERof Wolfenstein and Commander Keen as his property.

33:45SPEAKERBut also, like that whole vibe in that company was like,

33:49SPEAKERhey, here's the old staid spreadsheet guys,

33:52SPEAKERand then they brought in the young weirdos to make video,

33:54SPEAKERthe metal guys to make video games,

33:56SPEAKERand he was very aware that they were driving his business

34:02SPEAKERin a specific direction that was helping him.

34:05SPEAKERI don't know what happened to soft disk.

34:06SPEAKERI did a little bit of looking,

34:08SPEAKERand it just kind of disappeared after a while.

34:11SPEAKERIt's one of the things I was looking for on Usenet.

34:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems like looking at their Wikipedia,

34:15SPEAKERthey just kind of like faded out of existence.

34:18SPEAKER- Ran out of gas.

34:19SPEAKER- Even the Wikipedia is pretty vague about like as of 2006,

34:22SPEAKERtheir website directed to that of Bayou Internet.

34:25SPEAKERSo it's a little unclear what exactly happened there.

34:29SPEAKER- I mean, there were a lot of late, mid 90s,

34:32SPEAKERinternet businesses that were like an ISP

34:35SPEAKERwith a BBS attached to it with a couple of other things.

34:39SPEAKERAnd it may be that he just kind of ended up

34:40SPEAKERin this weird business

34:42SPEAKERbecause it seemed like a good idea at the time, right?

34:45SPEAKER- Yeah, the big blue disc.

34:47SPEAKERThis reminds me of the thing, their monthly product

34:50SPEAKERthat the id guys were making games for

34:52SPEAKERwas called the big blue disc.

34:54SPEAKER- So 1.4 megabyte double-sided floppy, right?

34:57SPEAKER- Probably, probably.

34:59SPEAKERBut anyway, like the management,

35:01SPEAKERlike Vicovia specifically,

35:02SPEAKERlike basically let them go with a smile,

35:05SPEAKERkind of like wish them well, right?

35:08SPEAKERLike they didn't try anything

35:09SPEAKERto like stop them from going independent

35:12SPEAKERor try to retain them

35:13SPEAKERor specifically to like go after them legally

35:15SPEAKERin any fashion.

35:16SPEAKERThey basically just were like, you know,

35:18SPEAKERgo like, I wish you well.

35:19SPEAKER- They committed to making a few more games for them.

35:21SPEAKER- Yes, that's what it was.

35:22SPEAKER- That was the deal, yeah.

35:23SPEAKER- Right, yeah.

35:24SPEAKERSo they did fulfill a contract,

35:27SPEAKERbut then they were free and clear.

35:30SPEAKER- So they moved to Madison as a group.

35:35SPEAKERI think because Raven Software was there

35:37SPEAKERis the vibe that I got from the book,

35:38SPEAKERbut I don't think he explicitly says that.

35:39SPEAKERWere they there?

35:41SPEAKER- Yeah, they were there then.

35:42SPEAKER- Were they?

35:43SPEAKEROkay, I think it was also just a cheap college town.

35:45SPEAKERI think like they just needed a place to be

35:47SPEAKERthat was-

35:48SPEAKER- Inexpensive.

35:50SPEAKER- Cheap and had like good tech access to stuff and yeah.

35:54SPEAKER- Wisconsin, not where I would go probably.

35:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.

35:57SPEAKER- I mean, I guess if you never leave your apartment,

35:59SPEAKERWisconsin's great.

36:00SPEAKER- Yes, although, you know,

36:01SPEAKERthere is a description in there

36:02SPEAKERof when they got their first next machine,

36:05SPEAKERCarmack like walking through the snow to the bank.

36:08SPEAKER- To get a cashier's check or something?

36:09SPEAKER- Take out the loan or the cash or whatever

36:11SPEAKERto buy the $11,000 next workstation

36:14SPEAKERthat they then used to make Wolfenstein.

36:16SPEAKER- Oh, the other thing I wanted to say

36:18SPEAKERfrom that first period is that when he started at Origin,

36:22SPEAKERthe manager or someone at Origin was like,

36:25SPEAKERyou're never gonna make more than $40,000 a year

36:27SPEAKERmaking video games, just to be clear.

36:29SPEAKERThis is like, I think they paid him $22,000 a year to do that

36:33SPEAKERand he was thrilled, of course.

36:36SPEAKER- As soon as Commander Keen checks started coming in,

36:38SPEAKERso while they were at Soft Disk,

36:40SPEAKERthey met Scott Miller from Apogee.

36:44SPEAKER- Yes.

36:45SPEAKER- And Apogee was foundational in the shareware model,

36:49SPEAKERwhich is, we'll give away part of the game,

36:51SPEAKERusually about a third for free,

36:53SPEAKERand then if you wanna play the rest of it,

36:54SPEAKERyou pay, you send us a check or a money order,

36:57SPEAKERyou call us to give us your credit card number

36:58SPEAKERand we'll send you the other two disks.

37:01SPEAKERAnd that's how they shipped Commander Keen.

37:05SPEAKERCommander Keen was sold as a shareware model,

37:07SPEAKERWolfenstein later and Doom, Quake,

37:09SPEAKERall of these were sold shareware model,

37:10SPEAKERdifferent publishers for, I guess, Doom.

37:15SPEAKER- Doom was Soft Disk, it was still Apogee, right?

37:18SPEAKERI think they moved it in-house by then.

37:20SPEAKER- I believe as of Doom,

37:21SPEAKERthey were doing their own shareware fulfillment

37:23SPEAKER'cause later they start becoming pretty dissatisfied

37:26SPEAKERwith the efficiency of Apogee's operation,

37:30SPEAKERlet's say, in terms of taking orders

37:32SPEAKERand fulfilling them efficiently.

37:36SPEAKERYeah, I believe Doom,

37:37SPEAKERDoom was their first in-house shareware game

37:40SPEAKERand then Doom II was published by GT Interactive

37:42SPEAKER'cause that was a retail deal,

37:43SPEAKERwhich I believe GT Interactive,

37:44SPEAKERI found out through this book,

37:46SPEAKERwas affiliated with Walmart in some way,

37:48SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken.

37:49SPEAKER- They had a Walmart deal.

37:50SPEAKERSo they had a Walmart distribution deal

37:52SPEAKERand that immediately gave them access

37:54SPEAKERto millions of units sold.

37:56SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

37:57SPEAKERAnyway, we're skipping ahead a little bit there,

37:58SPEAKERbut yeah, that's the gist of it,

38:00SPEAKERis that they kind of started developing

38:02SPEAKERthe smooth scrolling 2D tech while at soft disk.

38:05SPEAKERThey went on and used that to make all the Commander Keens,

38:07SPEAKERwhich made quite a bit of money.

38:10SPEAKERThey got hooked up with Apogee,

38:11SPEAKERwhich allowed them to adopt the shareware model for Keen.

38:16SPEAKERI think, when does the 3D stuff start coming in?

38:20SPEAKER'Cause there's also talk about,

38:22SPEAKERthey made a 3D game before Wolfenstein,

38:25SPEAKERwas it like hover tank?

38:26SPEAKER- It was like a battle zone type thing, right?

38:28SPEAKER- Yeah, it was some sort of hover tank.

38:30SPEAKERThe name is escaping me right now,

38:31SPEAKERbut like-- - So they made

38:33SPEAKERa couple of 3D things and basically,

38:36SPEAKERthey were starting on the,

38:38SPEAKERliterally sitting down to start work

38:39SPEAKERon the third trilogy of Keen.

38:42SPEAKERCarmack had figured out how to do bit flipping

38:43SPEAKERso they could have parallaxed foregrounds and backgrounds

38:46SPEAKERon the 2D platformer.

38:48SPEAKERAnd I think he says Adrian Carmack looks over

38:52SPEAKERand is like, "I'm not super excited about this."

38:55SPEAKERAnd everybody around the room was like,

38:58SPEAKER"Yeah, I'm not stoked about making

39:00SPEAKER"another three episodes of Keen."

39:02SPEAKERSo they talk about it, "What do we wanna do?"

39:05SPEAKERBlah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

39:06SPEAKERAnd they come up with Doom, or sorry, Wolfenstein,

39:09SPEAKERbasically on the spot. - Yep, yep.

39:12SPEAKER- The design, they wanted to,

39:14SPEAKERthere was a game called Castle Wolfenstein

39:16SPEAKERthat was an Apple II game that was like an early stealth

39:19SPEAKERkind of combat game and they wanted to do that whole thing.

39:23SPEAKERThey went through the whole,

39:24SPEAKERhe talks through the design era and iteration on that

39:27SPEAKERand it eventually became clear that like,

39:29SPEAKERrunning through mazes and shooting Nazis is always fun.

39:34SPEAKERThe stealth stuff was less necessary

39:36SPEAKERin the first person context.

39:38SPEAKERCarmack realized that they could do,

39:39SPEAKERas long as they didn't do ceilings and floors,

39:41SPEAKERhe could have fully rendered, textured,

39:46SPEAKERtexturing was new then also.

39:48SPEAKER- There's a great interlude in there about,

39:50SPEAKERwho is it that they talk to on the phone?

39:51SPEAKERAnother well-known game developer, I forgot,

39:53SPEAKERwas it, gosh, it's not Warren Spector.

39:56SPEAKERIt was somebody of that caliber though.

39:58SPEAKER- It was before Warren Spector.

40:00SPEAKER- But there's like an excited telephone conversation

40:03SPEAKERdescribed in here about this amazing new technique

40:05SPEAKERcalled texture mapping.

40:07SPEAKER- So, hover tank one and catacomb 3D,

40:10SPEAKERthose were the first ones that they had made.

40:13SPEAKER- Yes, the 3D games,

40:14SPEAKERwhich I think one of those might've been for soft disc,

40:17SPEAKERbut anyway, they had been doing rudimentary 3D technology

40:20SPEAKERat that point.

40:22SPEAKERAnd that's some of the stuff I found the most intriguing,

40:25SPEAKERof course I did, and this book was the description

40:28SPEAKERof the evolving technology behind the games they were doing

40:31SPEAKERand how they came to those innovations.

40:33SPEAKER- So Paul Neurath was the one who talked to him

40:35SPEAKERabout texture maps first.

40:37SPEAKER- That's right.

40:37SPEAKER- And I believe that that is what ended up being

40:40SPEAKERUltima Underground, Ulta Underworld.

40:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe that he actually says Ultima Underworld

40:46SPEAKERshipped first with textures before they did.

40:49SPEAKER- Yeah, but it was slow.

40:50SPEAKER- They were not the only ones out there doing 3D games

40:52SPEAKERat this point, of course, but it was the manic gunplay aspect

40:59SPEAKERof their 3D games, obviously,

41:01SPEAKERthat is what really defined them.

41:03SPEAKER- And I was in college by this point, I guess,

41:07SPEAKERor at least there was a moment in my freshman year

41:10SPEAKERof college when everybody on the floor

41:12SPEAKERdiscovered Wolfenstein, and it went from computers

41:16SPEAKERwere mostly being used to write papers and do school stuff

41:21SPEAKERand occasionally play, I don't know,

41:24SPEAKERprobably like X-Com or something like that to,

41:30SPEAKERoh my God, everybody's playing Wolfenstein

41:32SPEAKERif they have a computer that can run Wolfenstein.

41:34SPEAKER- Right, yeah, there's talk of that in here, of course,

41:36SPEAKERand that got even worse with Doom,

41:38SPEAKERbut there's talk of down the halls at Microsoft,

41:41SPEAKERafter Wolfenstein came out, literally everyone at Microsoft

41:44SPEAKERwas just playing Wolfenstein constantly.

41:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:48SPEAKER- So yeah, they made Wolfenstein

41:51SPEAKERand they made it on the sharer model with Apogee.

41:54SPEAKERImmediately, they were making more money

41:55SPEAKERthan they had ever imagined that they could make.

41:58SPEAKER- Right, I think that was the inflection point.

41:59SPEAKERI mean, they talk about like Keen was quite successful.

42:01SPEAKERLike they certainly made good money from Keen

42:03SPEAKERand he goes into the finances of the company quite a bit

42:05SPEAKERin terms of how much they were paying themselves,

42:07SPEAKERhow much they were socking away to keep the company going.

42:11SPEAKERBut yeah, Keen was very good money.

42:14SPEAKERWolfenstein was like, oh, we're rich now.

42:17SPEAKER- Well, and the interesting thing,

42:18SPEAKERthe other interesting thing about Keen that I forgot

42:20SPEAKERis that they didn't have exclusivity with anyone

42:23SPEAKERfor any of these games at this point.

42:25SPEAKERSo there's a couple of retail Keen games

42:29SPEAKERthat aren't on the sharer model that just got released

42:31SPEAKERand went out to stores and boxed copies and stuff like that.

42:35SPEAKERThere's, Wolfenstein is when they established the,

42:38SPEAKERhey, the first version, the first game on a new tech

42:42SPEAKERwill be shareware, and then the second,

42:45SPEAKERthe follow-up while they're working on the next engine

42:48SPEAKERwill be a boxed copy that we sell on retail shelves.

42:52SPEAKERThat's how Spirit of Destiny came around.

42:53SPEAKER- Right, and I think Spirit of Destiny,

42:55SPEAKERwhile they were around the time they were doing

42:57SPEAKERSpirit of Destiny is when they moved to Texas,

42:58SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken.

43:00SPEAKER- I think that's correct, yeah.

43:02SPEAKERThey talk a little bit about the Xbox port of,

43:05SPEAKERI think, Wolfenstein.

43:06SPEAKERI mean, they talk about the Xbox SNES port of Wolfenstein.

43:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think I alluded to that on a recent episode.

43:10SPEAKERThat was one of the most profound moments of this book to me.

43:13SPEAKER- Which was?

43:15SPEAKER- If you followed the development of Quake back in the day

43:17SPEAKERand you were familiar with the idea of a BSP tree,

43:20SPEAKERbinary space partition, that was something

43:23SPEAKERthat was talked about a lot as Quake was coming out

43:26SPEAKERin terms of how can this game have such complex

43:30SPEAKER3D environments and yet run so fast?

43:32SPEAKERNo game looks like this and does this, what the hell?

43:35SPEAKERSo the gist of what happened was they signed a deal with,

43:39SPEAKERI forget which Japanese publisher,

43:40SPEAKERbut they signed a deal with somebody to port Wolfenstein

43:44SPEAKERto the Super Nintendo, Super Famicom.

43:46SPEAKER- Like a cash upfront deal.

43:47SPEAKER- Yes, a ChemCo, I can't remember who the company was.

43:50SPEAKERAnyway, they farmed the port out,

43:52SPEAKER'cause this is like kind of late Wolfenstein, pre-Doom era,

43:56SPEAKERor they're kind of getting going on Doom.

43:58SPEAKERI think Carmack maybe was architecting

44:00SPEAKERthe next technology or whatever.

44:01SPEAKERAnd they farmed the port out to a programmer they knew,

44:05SPEAKERleft him alone to work on it for X number of months

44:08SPEAKERor a year or more, close to the time that the port

44:11SPEAKERwas due to the publisher, they checked in

44:14SPEAKERand this person was basically like nowhere to be seen

44:16SPEAKERwith like no real work to speak of.

44:19SPEAKER- To the point that he doesn't name this person

44:20SPEAKERin the book, I don't think.

44:21SPEAKER- Yes, and so they basically had to get a port

44:24SPEAKERto Super Nintendo of Wolfenstein together

44:26SPEAKERin like two weeks, I believe.

44:28SPEAKER- Yeah, so they basically did all hands, dropped everything

44:31SPEAKERand immediately started working on it.

44:33SPEAKER- But you know, the Super Nintendo,

44:34SPEAKERnot a super capable piece of hardware by that time,

44:36SPEAKERespecially for a game like Wolfenstein.

44:38SPEAKERAnd so long story short,

44:41SPEAKERCarmack discovered essentially binary space partitioning

44:43SPEAKERas a way to get Wolfenstein to run on the Super Nintendo.

44:46SPEAKERIt was purely out of like frantic necessity of,

44:49SPEAKERoh my God, we have to fulfill this contract.

44:52SPEAKERHow are we gonna get this game to run acceptably

44:54SPEAKERon this limited game console?

44:56SPEAKERAnd he basically came to a sort of,

45:00SPEAKERI don't know, data structure technique,

45:01SPEAKERI guess you would call it,

45:03SPEAKERthat then became like the core of Doom

45:06SPEAKERand then Quake.

45:07SPEAKERLike that was a huge part of allowing those games

45:10SPEAKERto run as fast, as smoothly as they did on the hardware

45:13SPEAKERthat they ran on at the time.

45:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

45:15SPEAKER- Like it's entirely possible

45:17SPEAKERthat had that Wolfenstein dust up not happened,

45:21SPEAKERthe tech for Doom and Quake

45:22SPEAKERwould not have evolved as rapidly as it did.

45:24SPEAKERLike, it's just a great example of like, you know,

45:26SPEAKERnecessity breeding invention, that kind of thing.

45:29SPEAKER- Yeah, so, and like, it's funny

45:33SPEAKER'cause that's the kind of story of the whole way through,

45:34SPEAKERright, is that they figured something out

45:37SPEAKERand then something else was hard.

45:38SPEAKERAnd while they were figuring that out,

45:39SPEAKERthey did something else and they bounced around a lot.

45:44SPEAKERSo, while after Wolfenstein was done,

45:46SPEAKERCarmack was working on Doom.

45:47SPEAKERAfter the SNES port of Wolfenstein came out

45:50SPEAKERor was sent off, they, oh, the other thing

45:54SPEAKERthat was interesting about the SNES port

45:55SPEAKERis that they did it on a,

45:56SPEAKERthey didn't use official Nintendo dev kits for it.

45:58SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yes.

46:00SPEAKER- They had some bootleg, hold on, I can't remember.

46:02SPEAKER- I've got it, I've had the tab open on my phone

46:04SPEAKERsince I read this book.

46:05SPEAKERLet me try to find, I think it was,

46:06SPEAKERwas it called the Sluggo 3, I believe.

46:10SPEAKERI may have closed, yep, there it is.

46:12SPEAKERThe Sluggo 3, Roman numeral three.

46:14SPEAKERIt was a like homebrew Super Nintendo development box,

46:18SPEAKERwhich I believe, did it go to court?

46:21SPEAKERI can't remember if Nintendo like sued over this, but I did.

46:23SPEAKER- I don't remember, I don't know about that.

46:25SPEAKER- For some reason, I believe it was deemed to be legal.

46:27SPEAKERIt was literally just like somebody reverse engineered

46:30SPEAKERthe Super Nintendo development process

46:31SPEAKERand put together their own dev kit, debugger kind of thing.

46:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so dev kits and debuggers are what you use

46:37SPEAKERto kind of step through code and they make it possible

46:40SPEAKERto write code on one device and pump it

46:42SPEAKERinto the other machine in a way that you can work on it

46:46SPEAKERand find out what's wrong with it as things are going bad.

46:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so that was an amazing fact,

46:51SPEAKERa way to come across that there was this whole homebrew scene

46:54SPEAKERof bootleg Super Nintendo development kits out there

46:57SPEAKERand that's what they use to make that port.

46:59SPEAKER- The other thing interesting about the Wolfenstein time

47:00SPEAKERis it's when they started trying to shop around the engine.

47:02SPEAKERSo they had some developers that they liked.

47:04SPEAKERThey liked Raven up in Wisconsin.

47:06SPEAKERThey liked a couple of other people and they were like,

47:08SPEAKERhey, the Wolfenstein engine's available if you wanna use it

47:11SPEAKERand kind of didn't get a whole lot of bites.

47:13SPEAKERLike people weren't super into it.

47:16SPEAKER- A little bit clearer, I mean,

47:17SPEAKERlike the idea of licensing an engine

47:18SPEAKERdid not exist at that time.

47:19SPEAKERI think even when they did sign deals,

47:22SPEAKERit was basically just like here are some disks

47:24SPEAKERwith our source code on it, have fun.

47:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and there's a point later in the book

47:30SPEAKERwhere they're like, hey, we have to figure out

47:34SPEAKERhow we keep people from just using the source code

47:36SPEAKERfor more games than just the one,

47:39SPEAKERwhich I thought was pretty funny.

47:41SPEAKERBut when Doom came out,

47:43SPEAKERDoom was such a transformative revolutionary.

47:47SPEAKERSo first off, they released a press release

47:49SPEAKERafter Wolfenstein when they were working on Doom

47:52SPEAKERwhile Spear of Destiny was in development

47:54SPEAKERthat basically goes through and describes

47:58SPEAKERkind of their high level feature list.

48:02SPEAKER- Like what Doom's going to be?

48:03SPEAKER- Yeah, what is Doom?

48:06SPEAKER- I don't have it in front of me,

48:07SPEAKERbut I feel like I remember it having a fair amount

48:09SPEAKERof like the heavy metal 20 something swagger to it, right?

48:13SPEAKERLike...

48:16SPEAKER- It reads like a press release written,

48:18SPEAKERI'm gonna read it actually.

48:20SPEAKER- Okay.

48:21SPEAKER- So it says id software to unleash Doom

48:23SPEAKERon the PC revolutionary programming

48:25SPEAKERand advanced design make for great gameplay.

48:28SPEAKERHeralding another technical revolution in PC programming,

48:30SPEAKERid software is Doom promises to push back the boundaries

48:33SPEAKERof what was thought possible on a 386 SX or better computer.

48:36SPEAKERWell, that was a lie, it didn't run on an SX.

48:39SPEAKERThe company plans to release Doom

48:40SPEAKERin the third quarter of 1993 with versions for PC

48:43SPEAKERin DOS, Windows, Windows NT and a version for the next.

48:46SPEAKERIn Doom, you play one of four off duty soldiers

48:48SPEAKERsuddenly thrown in the middle of an interdimensional war

48:50SPEAKERstationed at a scientific research facility, blah, blah,

48:52SPEAKERblah, blah, the demons first episode will be with shareware.

48:58SPEAKERWhen you register, you receive the next two episodes

48:59SPEAKERto feature a journey into another dimension

49:01SPEAKERfilled to its hellish horizon with fire and flesh.

49:06SPEAKERThey talk about the technical stuff though.

49:09SPEAKERSo the game may take takes up to four players

49:11SPEAKERthrough a futuristic world where they may cooperate

49:13SPEAKERor compete to beat the invading creatures.

49:15SPEAKERIt boasts a much more active environment

49:17SPEAKERthan its previous effort Wolfenstein 3D

49:20SPEAKERwhile retaining the pulse pounding action and excitement.

49:23SPEAKERDoom features a fantastic fully texture mapped environment,

49:26SPEAKERa host of technical tour de forces to surprise the eyes,

49:29SPEAKERmultiple player option and smooth gameplay

49:32SPEAKERon any 386 or better.

49:34SPEAKER- I wouldn't say all of that quite came to pass.

49:37SPEAKER- I mean, like a 386 DX could run it fine

49:39SPEAKER'cause I bought a 387 chip to make mine a DX.

49:45SPEAKERThere's a Carmack quote that says,

49:47SPEAKER"Wolfenstein is primitive compared to Doom.

49:49SPEAKERWe're doing Doom the right way this time.

49:50SPEAKERI've had some very good insights and optimizations

49:52SPEAKERthat will make Doom engine performed at great frame rate.

49:55SPEAKERThe game runs fine on a 386 SX and on a 486 33,

49:58SPEAKERwe're talking 35 frames per second.

50:00SPEAKERFully texture mapped at normal detail

50:02SPEAKERfor a large area of the screen.

50:04SPEAKERThat's the fastest texture mapping around, period."

50:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it was not wrong.

50:07SPEAKER- And then they defined texture mapping

50:09SPEAKERbecause nobody knew what texture mapping was at that point.

50:11SPEAKER- That's pretty great.

50:13SPEAKERThe thing generally I was gonna say about the,

50:14SPEAKERwhat the description of the Doom development process,

50:16SPEAKERlike it is absolutely, it sounds like the peak

50:18SPEAKERof their creative output that like-

50:21SPEAKER- I think so, yeah.

50:21SPEAKER- It's very much, it's everyone there firing

50:25SPEAKERon all cylinders and then making this,

50:27SPEAKERlike this legendary Seminole game,

50:29SPEAKERlike one of the best games ever made,

50:31SPEAKERcomes together in like a lesson a year,

50:32SPEAKERlike a matter of months.

50:33SPEAKERLike the technology is just there.

50:36SPEAKERThe art, the map design in particular,

50:38SPEAKERlike he spends a lot of time talking

50:39SPEAKERabout his map design process.

50:41SPEAKER- Like individual notes in the map

50:42SPEAKERto the point that when I was sitting at,

50:44SPEAKERlike I was sitting waiting to pick up my kid from a thing

50:47SPEAKERand I was sitting reading this on my phone,

50:49SPEAKERI was like, I wonder if I can get Doom on my iPhone.

50:52SPEAKERI downloaded Doom on my iPhone sitting in the parking lot

50:55SPEAKERand played through the levels as he,

50:56SPEAKERlike he'd talk about the level

50:58SPEAKERand then I'd open it up on the phone.

51:00SPEAKERAnd I was, and A, it was interesting hearing the notes

51:06SPEAKERfrom him about how he designed some of those levels

51:07SPEAKERand then playing them directly.

51:09SPEAKERBut B, it's crazy that here 30 years later,

51:14SPEAKERI have a thing in my pocket

51:16SPEAKERthat not only can I read his book on,

51:18SPEAKERbut also I can just open up the game from 30 years ago

51:21SPEAKERthat required a really expensive ass PC.

51:23SPEAKERAnd it just plays, the controls aren't great,

51:25SPEAKERbut you know, what are you gonna do?

51:26SPEAKER- Yeah, it's research.

51:28SPEAKERBut he talks a lot about his map design process in this.

51:31SPEAKERAnd like, I feel like that kind of thing

51:33SPEAKERcan very easily go up its own ass, you know,

51:35SPEAKERbut the way he talks about it is very down to earth,

51:38SPEAKERbut very descriptive about, you know,

51:41SPEAKERlike he wanted each of his Doom maps

51:43SPEAKERto tell an implicit story, you know,

51:45SPEAKERlike talking about like rising and falling tension

51:47SPEAKERand like misdirection and how to reveal secrets.

51:51SPEAKERAnd like, it's like a really,

51:52SPEAKERit's a really studied description of his approach

51:56SPEAKERto how to make a map that, and like, you know,

51:57SPEAKERhe's made some incredible maps across different contexts.

52:01SPEAKERSo like he clearly is onto something with that.

52:03SPEAKER- Yeah, using sound cues.

52:04SPEAKERIt's funny, this is the thing that I expected

52:06SPEAKER'cause like his, when back in the day,

52:09SPEAKERwhen Carmack would post something in his plan file,

52:12SPEAKERit was always about like the interaction of photons

52:16SPEAKERon a glass surface, having some sort of weird highlights.

52:20SPEAKERWhen Romero would post stuff,

52:21SPEAKERit was about game features and game design stuff.

52:23SPEAKERSo I had always assumed, I didn't really appreciate

52:25SPEAKERthat Romero was also like a low level, you know, coder

52:31SPEAKERand built all of the tools for the early id games, right?

52:34SPEAKERLike the game engine tools, the texture formatters,

52:37SPEAKERall that stuff was built with him.

52:42SPEAKERThe bits about the map design were really interesting

52:44SPEAKER'cause he did talk a lot about,

52:46SPEAKERlike this is later on some of the sigil,

52:48SPEAKERwhich is his like post everything else,

52:54SPEAKERpretty much revisit, going back to the old days

52:57SPEAKERand writing new Doom maps in the 20 teens, early 2020.

53:02SPEAKER- The unofficial, official fifth episode of Doom,

53:05SPEAKERI guess was the fifth or fourth.

53:07SPEAKER- Fifth, 'cause it comes after the fourth.

53:09SPEAKERAnd then he also did one for Doom 2

53:12SPEAKERthat is like the beginning,

53:15SPEAKERbasically he built a bridge between Doom 1 and Doom 2

53:18SPEAKERthat we only got in a cut scene previously.

53:21SPEAKERBut he talks about that and he talks about having levels

53:23SPEAKERwhere you come in and you can see the exit.

53:26SPEAKERLike you can see the exit and then it's up to you

53:28SPEAKERto figure out how to traverse that map

53:30SPEAKERand what sequence of events you have to go through

53:33SPEAKERand how making it a puzzle box makes those,

53:36SPEAKERtraversing those mazes a little bit more engaging and fun,

53:39SPEAKERwhich I love.

53:41SPEAKERHe talks about, so, okay, fast forward.

53:43SPEAKERThe game came out, they sold a bazillion copies.

53:46SPEAKER- Yes, like Wolfenstein made them rich,

53:48SPEAKERDoom made them like filthy rich,

53:49SPEAKERlike became an absolute cultural phenomenon.

53:52SPEAKERWe all know that story.

53:54SPEAKER- He tells the story of when he had to go to,

53:56SPEAKERwhen they decided to pay themselves bonuses

53:59SPEAKERand they each gave themselves $100,000,

54:02SPEAKERthey went to the Ferrari dealership and bought Ferraris.

54:04SPEAKER- Yeah, there's some amount of that kind of new money,

54:07SPEAKERwish fulfillment stuff in here of like a bunch of young guys

54:11SPEAKERwith suddenly with a bunch of money,

54:13SPEAKERhere's what they did with it.

54:14SPEAKERBuilt houses, the whole thing.

54:16SPEAKER- And then they roll straight into Doom 2, right?

54:18SPEAKERSo at this point, Carmack kind of branches off.

54:21SPEAKERHe starts working on the next engine for the next game

54:24SPEAKERand the art team and the game team go on

54:29SPEAKERand just make out, make more levels.

54:31SPEAKER'Cause by this point they had a GT Interactive deal

54:33SPEAKERthat would put their game in Walmart, basically.

54:36SPEAKER- Which is how Doom 2 launched, right?

54:38SPEAKER- Yeah, as a box product, you go went to the store to buy.

54:41SPEAKER- Yeah, and there's a lot of threads converging here

54:43SPEAKERas you read this book.

54:44SPEAKERIf you really lived through this time

54:46SPEAKERor and or care about this history a lot where like,

54:48SPEAKERI think, wasn't it Doom 2 was the first game

54:50SPEAKERwhere he went to a big lavish sort of launch party

54:53SPEAKERorganized by the publisher.

54:55SPEAKER- I think so, yeah.

54:56SPEAKER- It was like kind of blown away that a company

54:58SPEAKERwould spend this much money to throw a party like this

55:00SPEAKERabout a game they had made.

55:01SPEAKERBut it's also kind of leading up to the promotion heavy

55:05SPEAKERlate '90s with the Daikatana advertising and stuff.

55:08SPEAKERIt was like kind of the start of these types of games

55:11SPEAKERdriving huge profits and therefore like bigger companies

55:14SPEAKERand other influences coming in

55:15SPEAKERand taking them in different directions.

55:19SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say, yeah, at this point,

55:20SPEAKERthe rise of the 486 and all the 486 clones

55:24SPEAKERmeant that there were an incredible number of PCs

55:26SPEAKERthat could run.

55:27SPEAKERAnd also the decline of all of the competing architectures

55:30SPEAKERfor all intents and, you know, the Mac was still around.

55:33SPEAKERPeople were still using Amigas at this point.

55:35SPEAKERBut for the most part, if you had a PC,

55:36SPEAKERit was an Intel machine or an Intel compatible machine.

55:39SPEAKERAnd the fact that Doom ran on those

55:42SPEAKERdidn't require any weird hardware

55:43SPEAKERlike a 3D accelerator yet at this point

55:46SPEAKERmeant that there was a huge market for these games.

55:49SPEAKERAnd when people played them,

55:50SPEAKERthey immediately got hooked, right?

55:52SPEAKERLike it was unlike anything you'd ever played before.

55:58SPEAKER- Yes.

55:59SPEAKER- And this was just using a keyboard.

56:01SPEAKERBy this point, hardly anybody was playing with a mouse.

56:03SPEAKERLike this was you using the Alt keys to strafe

56:07SPEAKERand using your arrow keys to move

56:09SPEAKERand shooting with control or space, right?

56:12SPEAKERSo they're working on Doom 2.

56:18SPEAKERAt this point, the licensing stuff starts to take off

56:20SPEAKER'cause Raven was, they actually,

56:23SPEAKERthey published basically Heretic.

56:26SPEAKERThey entered into a publisher deal

56:27SPEAKERwhere they gave Raven an advance and said,

56:29SPEAKER"Hey, make this game.

56:30SPEAKERWe want a swords and sorcery game set in the Doom engine,

56:36SPEAKERand we'll teach you how to use the next."

56:38SPEAKER'Cause they built the level editor,

56:40SPEAKERall that stuff was running on NeXT hardware.

56:42SPEAKERSo they, "Here, you can set yourself up with NeXT hardware.

56:44SPEAKERWe'll teach you how to use it."

56:45SPEAKERAnd Romero was basically running that

56:47SPEAKERwhile they were doing the Doom 2 level design

56:49SPEAKERand box design.

56:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so those threads,

56:54SPEAKERand this is where his upbringing

56:55SPEAKERstarts to come back into things.

56:56SPEAKERLike he talks about having come from a poor family

56:59SPEAKERand like an abusive situation and stuff.

57:00SPEAKERLike, it kind of embedded certain behaviors in him

57:04SPEAKERin terms of like wanting to always make sure

57:06SPEAKERthere was enough, you know,

57:07SPEAKERlike he always wanted to make sure

57:08SPEAKERthere was enough revenue coming into the company

57:09SPEAKERto make sure that it kept running, et cetera, et cetera.

57:13SPEAKERYou know, like even when they were between games,

57:15SPEAKERlike that's where the Heretic, by his description,

57:17SPEAKERthat's where the Heretic deal came from.

57:19SPEAKERThe map packs, like he talked about,

57:21SPEAKERlike he's spearheaded or was fairly instrumental

57:25SPEAKERin the map packs that got put out in places like Walmart,

57:27SPEAKERyou know, the kind of episode bundles,

57:30SPEAKERthe Ultimate Doom, stuff like that, rereleases,

57:32SPEAKERlike he kind of-

57:33SPEAKER- Well, that was so there would be a retail version

57:34SPEAKERof Doom 1 in those stores.

57:35SPEAKER'Cause up until that point,

57:36SPEAKERthe only way to get Doom 1 was with shareware,

57:38SPEAKERwhich was by now was not a mainstream thing anymore.

57:42SPEAKERIt was the edge again.

57:43SPEAKER- Right, so it's like where what I'm building up to here

57:45SPEAKERis what eventually kind of broke this whole partnership

57:48SPEAKERwas, you know, by his description,

57:51SPEAKERhe wanted to make sure they had a lot of irons in the fire

57:53SPEAKERat all times, they needed to strike.

57:56SPEAKERAll the iron was hot to continue the metaphor,

57:58SPEAKERbut like, you know, he was out there doing all these deals.

58:01SPEAKERAnd then it turned out that Carmack very much thought

58:05SPEAKEReveryone should be single-minded

58:06SPEAKERand head down on the next game all the time constantly.

58:08SPEAKERAnd that's where we're headed

58:11SPEAKERas we come out of Doom into Quake.

58:12SPEAKERAnd that converged with a couple of other problems

58:15SPEAKERthat led to the extremely famous kind of sundering

58:19SPEAKERof the original id lineup.

58:21SPEAKERAlso, we should mention Tom Hall was let go during Doom.

58:25SPEAKERDoom was not a hundred percent a smooth harmonious process,

58:31SPEAKERlet's say, 'cause he had much bigger ambitions

58:33SPEAKERaround like story and narrative in the game,

58:36SPEAKERwhich is where I think a lot of that like play through

58:38SPEAKERwith up to three friends and cooperate or not

58:40SPEAKERtype stuff came from.

58:41SPEAKERAnd then, but by Romero's accounting,

58:46SPEAKERhe was not as down with the just balls out

58:48SPEAKERheavy metal action angle

58:50SPEAKERand was kind of not as into what they were doing.

58:52SPEAKERAnd so they kind of parted ways with him.

58:55SPEAKER- And then we get to Quake.

58:57SPEAKER- Yeah, so Quake, well, hold on, one last thing.

59:01SPEAKERDoom II is the first time they made the game

59:03SPEAKERknowing that there was gonna be multiplayer.

59:05SPEAKERLike it's the first time they built the maps for the game

59:08SPEAKERwith an eye toward both single player and multiplayer.

59:11SPEAKERSo there were some maps,

59:13SPEAKERI think he specifically lists Circle of Death,

59:16SPEAKERwhich is I think 15 in Doom II, 15, I can't remember.

59:23SPEAKERAs hey, we built this so that it would run,

59:26SPEAKERso that like it had a loop,

59:28SPEAKERso that players would run a circuit basically

59:31SPEAKERas they're chasing each other.

59:32SPEAKERAnd that was a new concept

59:34SPEAKER'cause most of the Doom I maps were linear

59:35SPEAKERand would go straight from one end to the other

59:37SPEAKERand there was no kind of cutback

59:38SPEAKERfrom the beginning to the end.

59:40SPEAKERSo they weren't, a lot of them weren't great

59:42SPEAKERfor more than one or two people in the game at a time,

59:45SPEAKERwhich was fine 'cause most people at that point

59:46SPEAKERwere playing on modems.

59:47SPEAKERBut they also talk about Duango,

59:50SPEAKERwhich I had almost completely forgotten about.

59:51SPEAKERDuango was like a, it was basically a dial in,

59:54SPEAKERit basically worked like a message board,

59:56SPEAKERbut instead of sharing texts,

59:58SPEAKERyou dialed in and you'd connect to four other people,

1:00:00SPEAKERthree other people who wanted to play Doom Deathmatch

1:00:02SPEAKERlocally with you, which was like revolutionary,

1:00:05SPEAKERbig deal at the time you paid 10 bucks a month for it,

1:00:07SPEAKERit was a huge, huge expensive thing.

1:00:09SPEAKER- Yes, and then of course,

1:00:10SPEAKERDuango's business model immediately was destroyed

1:00:13SPEAKERas games started adopting internet and multiplayer

1:00:15SPEAKERdirectly thereafter, but that was a fun detail.

1:00:18SPEAKERWe could sit here for three hours

1:00:19SPEAKERgoing through amazing details on this.

1:00:21SPEAKERThere's one more I want to bring up

1:00:22SPEAKERand then we should really move on,

1:00:23SPEAKERbut there's a really fun, breathless, vivid description

1:00:27SPEAKERof how Deathmatch came to be

1:00:28SPEAKERor how multiplayer and Doom came to be at all,

1:00:31SPEAKERwhich was like a month or less than two months

1:00:34SPEAKERbefore the game released.

1:00:35SPEAKERLike they hadn't even like implemented the network play.

1:00:38SPEAKERLike they kind of didn't even know

1:00:39SPEAKERwhat they were gonna do with it.

1:00:40SPEAKERAnd like Carmack basically just hacked the networking

1:00:44SPEAKERinto the game, you know, six weeks before ship

1:00:46SPEAKERor something like that.

1:00:48SPEAKERAnd kind of, they just applied the existing mechanics

1:00:50SPEAKERthey already had for the single player

1:00:52SPEAKERto what it would be like to shoot each other.

1:00:55SPEAKERBut the way he talks about the first time

1:00:57SPEAKERthey sat in different rooms in their office

1:00:59SPEAKERand shot rockets at each other.

1:01:01SPEAKER- Just seeing another player move on the screen.

1:01:03SPEAKERLike honestly, yeah.

1:01:04SPEAKER- It really took me back to the first time

1:01:06SPEAKERI ever played Doom over a modem against somebody.

1:01:08SPEAKERIt was just like the description,

1:01:09SPEAKERlike the idea that you could see another player

1:01:12SPEAKERmoving around who was not in the same room with you

1:01:14SPEAKERmoving around in the virtual space.

1:01:16SPEAKERLike the description of that is so much fun.

1:01:18SPEAKERI remember going to the computer lab and being like,

1:01:21SPEAKERhey, are you the orange one?

1:01:23SPEAKERI don't know what color I am.

1:01:24SPEAKERI'm moving to the right now

1:01:25SPEAKERand like having this whole conversation

1:01:26SPEAKERabout what you were seeing.

1:01:29SPEAKER'Cause you'd never seen that before.

1:01:30SPEAKERIt was a novel thing.

1:01:31SPEAKERAnyway, so, okay.

1:01:34SPEAKERSo then they went on to Quake and Quake was fraught.

1:01:37SPEAKER- Quake is one of my favorite games ever.

1:01:40SPEAKERIt's also seemingly where everything went bad.

1:01:43SPEAKER- I was gonna say, I had the same exact reaction.

1:01:45SPEAKERI was super bummed out reading this whole section

1:01:49SPEAKERjust 'cause I love Quake so much.

1:01:51SPEAKERAnd it seems like it destroyed a bunch of people.

1:01:53SPEAKER- Yeah, like the death march they ended up on

1:01:55SPEAKERto get that game out the door was really,

1:01:57SPEAKERI had no idea it was quite that rough.

1:01:59SPEAKERI knew something like that had happened, but...

1:02:02SPEAKER- Well, the main cause seems to be that the engine side

1:02:06SPEAKERtook way longer to develop than they expected.

1:02:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so they had massive ambitions for Quake.

1:02:12SPEAKERThey thought that they had to come out of Doom

1:02:14SPEAKERwith something that blew Doom out of the water,

1:02:16SPEAKERyou know, that needed to be utterly revolutionary.

1:02:18SPEAKERAnd so the technical task that Carmack set for himself

1:02:22SPEAKERseems to be, I mean, it was not insurmountable

1:02:24SPEAKERbecause he eventually got there.

1:02:25SPEAKERBut a bunch of things happened here.

1:02:30SPEAKERCarmack kind of specked out too many advanced features

1:02:34SPEAKERthat had never been done before in one game.

1:02:36SPEAKER- Specifically like the full 3D world

1:02:38SPEAKERand then also the client server architecture for multiplayer.

1:02:41SPEAKER- Yeah, at the same time, they decided to build a game

1:02:43SPEAKERaround their long running D&D campaign and world that,

1:02:46SPEAKERit's a fun little, he goes back to this repeatedly.

1:02:49SPEAKERThey had been playing D&D for years at this point

1:02:50SPEAKERand had had this whole world with this epic hero named Quake

1:02:54SPEAKERand all this other stuff.

1:02:55SPEAKERAnd they literally wanted to turn their long running

1:02:57SPEAKERD&D campaign into their next game.

1:03:00SPEAKERBut that meant a lot like a big break

1:03:02SPEAKERfrom the shooter gameplay they'd been doing.

1:03:03SPEAKERIt was a lot more like melee combat with a hammer

1:03:06SPEAKERand a bunch of like RPG features.

1:03:08SPEAKERAnd we talk about this.

1:03:09SPEAKER- Like a buddy that shoots, that can drain enemies

1:03:11SPEAKERand stuff like that behind you.

1:03:12SPEAKER- Yeah, when we did the Quake 25th anniversary episode

1:03:15SPEAKERa couple of years ago, we talked more about this stuff.

1:03:17SPEAKERAnd so like, we got the Carmax side

1:03:20SPEAKERof how all this went down publicly 25 years ago.

1:03:22SPEAKERAnd we talked about that in that episode,

1:03:24SPEAKERbut this is where, I don't know, I assume.

1:03:26SPEAKER- They also talked about in Masters of Doom

1:03:28SPEAKERa fair amount as well.

1:03:29SPEAKER- Yeah, but this is the first place I think

1:03:30SPEAKERthat Romero has given his full first person account of.

1:03:32SPEAKER- I think so, yeah. - His side of things.

1:03:34SPEAKERLong story short, the tech took forever to come together

1:03:37SPEAKERbecause they were doing true 3D spaces

1:03:39SPEAKERwith like runes on top of runes,

1:03:41SPEAKERwhich had never been done before.

1:03:42SPEAKERThey're doing a client server model,

1:03:44SPEAKERwhich had never been done before.

1:03:47SPEAKERThey were doing like radiosity and really advanced lighting.

1:03:49SPEAKERLike just the-

1:03:51SPEAKER- This is the first place I saw light maps ever.

1:03:53SPEAKER- Right, like the technical mountain

1:03:55SPEAKERthat Carmack had to climb to get all this stuff done

1:03:58SPEAKERturned out to be huge.

1:03:59SPEAKERAnd effectively the people tasked with making the enemies

1:04:03SPEAKERand the levels and textures and all that stuff

1:04:06SPEAKERwere not really able to get to work properly

1:04:08SPEAKERbecause the engine was not ready.

1:04:10SPEAKERAnd like they kept having to throw a workout.

1:04:12SPEAKERLike they didn't know exactly what they had to work with.

1:04:13SPEAKERLike it sounded like a lot of spinning wheels

1:04:16SPEAKERfor the better part of a year

1:04:17SPEAKERwhile the tech slowly came together.

1:04:19SPEAKER- And just to be clear, when you say they didn't know,

1:04:22SPEAKERlike it wasn't like you could go to the store

1:04:24SPEAKERand buy a copy of Maya at this point to make a 3D tool.

1:04:26SPEAKERYou had to buy an SGI workstation

1:04:28SPEAKERand get some really hyper specific programs.

1:04:31SPEAKERSo they were learning how to do the 3D part of this, right?

1:04:34SPEAKERBut, and they were working on building the tools

1:04:38SPEAKERand all of that stuff.

1:04:39SPEAKERBut really they couldn't build the level editor

1:04:41SPEAKERuntil the level spec was finished.

1:04:42SPEAKERAnd they couldn't have the level spec finished

1:04:44SPEAKERuntil the engine capabilities were finished.

1:04:45SPEAKERAnd like it was just a series of,

1:04:47SPEAKERin software you call it a blocker, right?

1:04:50SPEAKERSo anytime one person's work is blocking

1:04:53SPEAKERa bunch of other people's work, you're in a situation.

1:04:56SPEAKERSo Carmack and John Cash and Mike Abrash

1:04:59SPEAKERand a couple other people were working on this engine side

1:05:03SPEAKERthat was essentially blocking

1:05:04SPEAKERthe entire other half of the studio.

1:05:05SPEAKERSo at this point Romero was, by his own account,

1:05:09SPEAKERworking on stuff like Final Doom and Ultimate Doom,

1:05:11SPEAKERwhich were retail box copies of Doom 1

1:05:13SPEAKERthat could go out through the GT Interactive deal

1:05:15SPEAKERand ended up in Walmart.

1:05:16SPEAKERSo we could all buy them again.

1:05:18SPEAKERAnd then also doing, working with Raven,

1:05:21SPEAKERessentially producing heretic for Raven

1:05:25SPEAKERand working on other like merchandise and licensing stuff

1:05:29SPEAKERas well as like doing the tool thing.

1:05:32SPEAKERBut what Carmack apparently expected

1:05:34SPEAKERwas something a little bit different.

1:05:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:36SPEAKERThe story from, and this was in magazines

1:05:38SPEAKERlike Carmack gave some quotes in '96, '97

1:05:42SPEAKERwhen all this stuff had happened, basically kind of,

1:05:44SPEAKERhe alluded to Romero kind of not doing much.

1:05:47SPEAKERLike basically the narrative was

1:05:49SPEAKERthat he kind of bought into his fame,

1:05:51SPEAKERhis newfound fame and money and rockstar image

1:05:53SPEAKERand was kind of not contributing.

1:05:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:56SPEAKER- By Romero's account, he was doing plenty

1:05:58SPEAKERto advance the revenue interests of the company.

1:06:00SPEAKERIt just, not much of that was related

1:06:03SPEAKERto Quake, the next project.

1:06:04SPEAKERAnd so like, you can see how maybe in Carmack's

1:06:07SPEAKERvery focused mind, like if you're not working

1:06:09SPEAKERon the next big game, you're not doing anything

1:06:12SPEAKERkind of thing, you know what I mean?

1:06:13SPEAKERIt's like, but from Romero's perspective,

1:06:15SPEAKERlike, hey, if I'm making the company money,

1:06:17SPEAKERthen that's just as good.

1:06:18SPEAKERAnd it seems like that might be

1:06:19SPEAKERwhere the disconnect happened.

1:06:21SPEAKER- The thing that, the tragedy of this whole thing

1:06:23SPEAKERand it is, it does come across

1:06:26SPEAKERlike an actual like tragedy, right?

1:06:28SPEAKER- It really does.

1:06:29SPEAKER- If they had been ever, if there had been one person

1:06:31SPEAKERon this team who was able to have a conversation

1:06:34SPEAKERlike a grown-ass adult and say, hey, I think,

1:06:39SPEAKERinstead of saying, I think, for example,

1:06:42SPEAKERCarmack came to a shareholder meeting

1:06:44SPEAKERwith a report card for everybody

1:06:45SPEAKERand was like, everybody gets A's

1:06:46SPEAKERexcept for Romero who gets a D or something.

1:06:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it was an email actually.

1:06:50SPEAKERI think, what, did he send an email out?

1:06:51SPEAKERAnd people just came into the office one day

1:06:53SPEAKERand found a mass email where he had,

1:06:55SPEAKERCarmack had given everybody a letter grade

1:06:57SPEAKERon what he saw their performance to be.

1:06:59SPEAKER- And just to be clear, almost all equals

1:07:02SPEAKERin terms of company structure at this point, so.

1:07:05SPEAKER- In terms of ownership, yeah.

1:07:06SPEAKER- Yeah, ownership and structure.

1:07:08SPEAKERSo having like that kind of, hey, I'm the only one here

1:07:14SPEAKERworking on this at three o'clock in the morning

1:07:17SPEAKERand I'm pissed off about it vibe along with not valuing,

1:07:23SPEAKERlike at the end of this chapter, Romero says,

1:07:27SPEAKERthe thing I have regrets about is that I looked

1:07:29SPEAKERat what Nintendo did monetizing Mario and their brands

1:07:32SPEAKERand I looked at how poorly we monetize Doom

1:07:34SPEAKERand we should have made so much more money

1:07:37SPEAKER'cause we didn't even sell t-shirt,

1:07:38SPEAKERlike they weren't even selling t-shirts, right?

1:07:40SPEAKERThey did nothing with that brand that was every bit

1:07:43SPEAKERas important and as big as a Nintendo brand,

1:07:47SPEAKERbut made a fraction of the money.

1:07:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:50SPEAKER- And Carmack didn't care about the money.

1:07:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:53SPEAKER- Which is fair, like I get that.

1:07:55SPEAKER- Yeah, well, he cared about money,

1:07:56SPEAKERbut he just wanted to make games to get the money.

1:07:58SPEAKERHe didn't wanna have to, he didn't wanna sell t-shirts

1:08:00SPEAKERor worry about ports and Walmart bundles.

1:08:03SPEAKER- Well, and the thing that's saddest about it,

1:08:05SPEAKERthe whole thing of it to me is like,

1:08:07SPEAKERit sounded almost like the thing Carmack wanted

1:08:11SPEAKERwas the times that he had with Romero

1:08:13SPEAKERin those early dev days where they would sit down

1:08:15SPEAKERand bang it out together.

1:08:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:17SPEAKER- And that's the thing that he was upset about,

1:08:18SPEAKERbut he wasn't able to say that.

1:08:20SPEAKER- They kind of all but do say that in here

1:08:22SPEAKERthat he more or less when it came to a head

1:08:24SPEAKERand they fired Romero slash he kind of sounded

1:08:28SPEAKERlike he wanted out anyway at that point,

1:08:29SPEAKERbut like he all but said, basically,

1:08:31SPEAKERlike he wished Romero had kind of been there by his side,

1:08:33SPEAKERalso coding through this process

1:08:36SPEAKERand like kind of contributing more

1:08:37SPEAKERto the development of the technology.

1:08:39SPEAKERI mean, we glossed over a little bit,

1:08:40SPEAKERbut Carmack was the only programmer until Quake

1:08:43SPEAKERand they brought in Abrash who was like an absolute legend.

1:08:46SPEAKER- And Cash.

1:08:47SPEAKER- And Cash who was,

1:08:48SPEAKERCash was a very strong network programmer,

1:08:50SPEAKERbut like Abrash in particular,

1:08:51SPEAKERit was like a God of assembly language,

1:08:54SPEAKERx86 assembly that they brought in.

1:08:56SPEAKERPoint being like, it was more than he,

1:08:58SPEAKERmore than Carmack could deal with on his own.

1:09:00SPEAKERAnd it seems like he wished Romero had been more attentive

1:09:03SPEAKERto the core technical development

1:09:05SPEAKERof what Quake was going to be.

1:09:08SPEAKERAnd some of the other things he said

1:09:09SPEAKERafter Romero was out at the time

1:09:11SPEAKERwhere he didn't like that Romero had been out to the press

1:09:13SPEAKERtalking about the big RPG tinged ideas for Quake,

1:09:18SPEAKERbecause they ended up not delivering that.

1:09:20SPEAKERWhat they ended up doing when the tech was finally ready,

1:09:23SPEAKERthey were so burned out from like making

1:09:25SPEAKERand throwing out work and making more work and et cetera,

1:09:27SPEAKERas the tech was coming together.

1:09:28SPEAKERBy the time they got there,

1:09:29SPEAKERthey were just like so exhausted.

1:09:31SPEAKERThey said, let's just make another shooter.

1:09:33SPEAKERLike that's why Quake at the end of the day

1:09:35SPEAKERhas basically the same weapons as Doom

1:09:37SPEAKERand is basically the same kind of game with better tech

1:09:39SPEAKERis let's just make what we know.

1:09:42SPEAKERNobody's got the energy to actually make this big,

1:09:44SPEAKERtotally different game now, which Romero didn't love,

1:09:48SPEAKERbut Carmack seemed to kind of pin it on him

1:09:50SPEAKERthat he had promised this to the world

1:09:51SPEAKERand then they didn't deliver it.

1:09:53SPEAKER- Well, which is funny because like they clearly,

1:09:55SPEAKERwhen they made Doom,

1:09:56SPEAKERthey sent out a press release, it's the exact same thing.

1:09:58SPEAKERIt's like, here's all the,

1:09:59SPEAKERhere are the technical advancements.

1:10:01SPEAKERHere's the story, here's the stuff.

1:10:02SPEAKERAnyway. - Yeah.

1:10:04SPEAKER- But yeah, so like all of this culminates

1:10:07SPEAKERin the most affecting part of this book

1:10:10SPEAKERand not everybody would agree about this,

1:10:11SPEAKERbut for me, who was a huge fan of this stuff at the time

1:10:14SPEAKERand was like super bummed that this worked out

1:10:16SPEAKERthe way it did,

1:10:17SPEAKERit's nice to read this little post-mortem they did,

1:10:19SPEAKERbut it also, it's the most tragic thing in this book.

1:10:23SPEAKERHe basically ends this whole saga where he leaves Id

1:10:27SPEAKERby accounting some conversations he's had

1:10:30SPEAKERwith John Carmack recently, where they went back,

1:10:33SPEAKERthey finally, after all this time,

1:10:34SPEAKERwent back and talked about-

1:10:35SPEAKER- Hold on, before we could do this though.

1:10:36SPEAKER- Okay, yeah.

1:10:37SPEAKER- The saddest part for me was when he described the launch,

1:10:41SPEAKERwhen they uploaded the shareware for Quake to the BBS.

1:10:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:45SPEAKER- Or FTP, I guess, at that point, which is like,

1:10:49SPEAKERhe's on IRC or talking to admins at the channel and is like,

1:10:54SPEAKER"Hey, you guys have got to lay off the FTP server

1:10:57SPEAKER"so I can get a connection to log in

1:10:58SPEAKER"and upload the software, 'cause right now,

1:11:00SPEAKER"no one can get on because you guys are all hammering

1:11:03SPEAKER"this FTP 'cause you know it's coming."

1:11:06SPEAKERBut he's the only one in the office.

1:11:07SPEAKER- Right.

1:11:08SPEAKER- There's no, like, you launch a game,

1:11:10SPEAKERusually there's a celebration, right?

1:11:11SPEAKERIt's like, "Hey, thank God we're done.

1:11:13SPEAKER"This is a good time, we're all good."

1:11:14SPEAKEROn this one, he was the only one there.

1:11:16SPEAKERHe was uploading it by himself.

1:11:17SPEAKERHe did the packaging himself, all of that stuff,

1:11:21SPEAKERwhich is like, A, really sad, but also profoundly uncool

1:11:26SPEAKERthat somebody, that they would spend all this time

1:11:29SPEAKERworking on this game and then nobody's even there

1:11:31SPEAKERto help him spot check, like double check his work for him.

1:11:33SPEAKER- Right, yeah.

1:11:34SPEAKER- It's a, it's like, it's the sad,

1:11:38SPEAKERit's the lights fading down, the hard vignette on the scene.

1:11:42SPEAKER- Yes.

1:11:43SPEAKER- There's like, they describe the war room

1:11:46SPEAKERthat they're in as like, shitty folding tables

1:11:48SPEAKERwhere everybody's just in a big U around the room.

1:11:49SPEAKERI assume there's like, kind of janky blinds

1:11:52SPEAKERon the windows that are kind of fucked up all over.

1:11:54SPEAKER- Yes, you absolutely can picture it.

1:11:56SPEAKER- And it's just like, a slow pan back as the violins play.

1:11:59SPEAKER- Yes, you can picture that, absolutely.

1:12:01SPEAKERYeah, it's worth pointing out,

1:12:02SPEAKERafter they made that decision to just make a shooter,

1:12:05SPEAKERthe last six or eight months of that game,

1:12:07SPEAKERwere they forced themselves to all move their desks

1:12:09SPEAKERinto the same room, and it sounded like the atmosphere,

1:12:12SPEAKERthe work atmosphere at that point was not fun.

1:12:15SPEAKER- It sounded like the shittiest crunch I've ever heard of,

1:12:17SPEAKERjust to be, not to, not to minimize anybody else's crunch,

1:12:20SPEAKER'cause I know the crunch is always bad, but damn.

1:12:23SPEAKER- Okay, I've got to read this passage now,

1:12:25SPEAKERbecause I, when I, when I hit this part in this book,

1:12:27SPEAKERI went back and reread this like five times,

1:12:30SPEAKER'cause it bummed me out so much,

1:12:31SPEAKERhaving followed the development of the stuff at the time

1:12:33SPEAKERwhen it was happening, and especially directly thereafter,

1:12:38SPEAKERbut okay, so this is them, Carmack and Romero,

1:12:40SPEAKERtalking about what they could have done differently.

1:12:43SPEAKERRegarding Quake, Carmack recently suggested to me

1:12:46SPEAKERthat he thought we could have split

1:12:47SPEAKERQuake's technology advances into two games.

1:12:50SPEAKERThe first game would have used the Doom II engine

1:12:52SPEAKERand a new client server networking model,

1:12:54SPEAKERand a Doom C programming language, that's important.

1:12:57SPEAKERActually, I completely forgot about that.

1:12:59SPEAKERThat was another one of the Quake innovations was Quake C,

1:13:01SPEAKERwhich was a like low level scripting/programming language

1:13:04SPEAKERthat you use to make mods, because prior to that,

1:13:07SPEAKERlike Doom mods, like Doom total conversions

1:13:10SPEAKERhave just been in the form of like maps with new graphics,

1:13:12SPEAKERlike you could put new sprites and textures in,

1:13:14SPEAKERbut you couldn't mess with the underlying game logic

1:13:18SPEAKERand mechanics very much.

1:13:20SPEAKER- Yeah, you could reskin enemies,

1:13:21SPEAKERbut you couldn't like change their behaviors necessarily.

1:13:24SPEAKERAnd things like, this happened because in Wolfenstein,

1:13:29SPEAKERpeople would make people, they left the,

1:13:31SPEAKERthe people were able to create their own maps

1:13:35SPEAKERand dump them in and replace existing maps.

1:13:37SPEAKERWith Doom, they were a little bit more intentional

1:13:39SPEAKERand like set up a structure, and people built Doom editors

1:13:42SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:13:43SPEAKERWith Quake, they wanted to make that an explicit part

1:13:45SPEAKERof the game, where not only could you create new maps

1:13:48SPEAKERand new skins for enemies and characters and players,

1:13:52SPEAKERbut also write new game logic, which was like super novel,

1:13:56SPEAKERended up having a bunch of exploits over the years,

1:13:58SPEAKERbut like, it was, it's a cool thing, Quake C.

1:14:00SPEAKER- Yeah, like Quake C is what led to Capture the Flag,

1:14:03SPEAKERlike that Capture the Flag happened,

1:14:04SPEAKERthree wave CTF happened less than six months,

1:14:07SPEAKERI think, after the game came out, like later that year.

1:14:09SPEAKER- You couldn't have had a grapple hook without that.

1:14:10SPEAKER- The grappling hook and the flag mechanics,

1:14:12SPEAKERyou couldn't have put in there without Quake C.

1:14:14SPEAKERSo, okay, so the first game would have used

1:14:16SPEAKERthe Doom II engine with a new client server networking model

1:14:19SPEAKERand a Doom C programming language.

1:14:21SPEAKERThe second game would have been Quake

1:14:22SPEAKERwith the true 3D world and advanced lighting.

1:14:25SPEAKERThat idea makes a lot of sense to me

1:14:26SPEAKERand would have allowed us to progress more quickly

1:14:28SPEAKERin a similar vein.

1:14:30SPEAKERIt also seems that putting aside some new engine features

1:14:32SPEAKERand moving on to gameplay code at an earlier point

1:14:34SPEAKERwould have allowed us and the rest of the team,

1:14:37SPEAKERrest of the design team to progress the gameplay much faster.

1:14:39SPEAKERBoth of these methods would have kept everyone fully tasked

1:14:42SPEAKERand allow for new products to come out.

1:14:44SPEAKER- Like, this is why this is a tragedy.

1:14:46SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like reading that.

1:14:48SPEAKER- Like if they had not been pissed off at each other

1:14:51SPEAKERto the point that they stopped talking to each other

1:14:53SPEAKERaside from work stuff, like this is a natural,

1:14:57SPEAKERlike there's a natural progression here.

1:15:00SPEAKERI mean, part of it is probably Carmack's ego at the time

1:15:02SPEAKERsaying, "Oh, I can figure this out, it's no big deal.

1:15:04SPEAKER"I've done all these engines."

1:15:05SPEAKERLike I wrote the original, the 3D Mario render

1:15:08SPEAKERor the 2D Mario renderer in a weekend, you know.

1:15:12SPEAKERI don't think anyone, having lived through this time,

1:15:16SPEAKERnobody really appreciated how much harder the 3D stuff was

1:15:19SPEAKERthan the 2D stuff.

1:15:20SPEAKERI think including Carmack and the smart people of the time.

1:15:24SPEAKERBut yeah, this one, this was a bummer.

1:15:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it really is, it really is.

1:15:29SPEAKER- Now the other side of that though

1:15:31SPEAKERis if he had released the client server architecture first,

1:15:35SPEAKERthen that means he would have realized,

1:15:37SPEAKERthey would have realized that the initial

1:15:38SPEAKERno network prediction, no lag compensation model

1:15:42SPEAKERwouldn't work, and probably fixing that

1:15:45SPEAKERwould have stalled them out in a completely different way

1:15:47SPEAKERat a different time because he would have had to do

1:15:50SPEAKERthe Quake world work after Doom 3,

1:15:54SPEAKERthe speculative Doom 3, not after Quake

1:16:00SPEAKERwhen there was downtime, so I don't know.

1:16:03SPEAKER- Who knows, historical counterfactuals

1:16:05SPEAKERare always hard to figure out,

1:16:06SPEAKERbut yeah, it's a real bummer.

1:16:09SPEAKERNot just that this happened and the way it happened,

1:16:11SPEAKERbut especially seeing this very measured accounting

1:16:14SPEAKERof what they could have done to not make this happen

1:16:17SPEAKERand to give the world more games

1:16:18SPEAKERand to introduce this technology

1:16:20SPEAKERin a healthier and less destructive way.

1:16:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so-- - It's rough.

1:16:25SPEAKER- The last thing, can we talk about M look real quick?

1:16:27SPEAKER'Cause this is my favorite.

1:16:28SPEAKERAfter having done the first person shooter controller episode

1:16:32SPEAKERa few weeks ago, I was thinking about this.

1:16:34SPEAKER'Cause actually the Logitech deal that ends with Romero

1:16:37SPEAKERon those magazine ads that we called out

1:16:39SPEAKERis mentioned in the book.

1:16:42SPEAKERBut he says, hey, as part of fixing and polishing everything

1:16:45SPEAKERmouse control needed to be fixed.

1:16:46SPEAKERCarmack and I talked about allowing the mouse to control

1:16:49SPEAKERnot just left and right, but also up and down

1:16:50SPEAKERby moving the mouse in both axes fluidly.

1:16:54SPEAKERThe idea would be to move the mouse around

1:16:55SPEAKERlike you do on a desktop,

1:16:56SPEAKERbut instead of moving a mouse pointer,

1:16:58SPEAKERyou would be moving your eyes in the game,

1:16:59SPEAKERlooking in all directions.

1:17:01SPEAKERMoving the mouse left and right would look around

1:17:02SPEAKERlike Wolfenstein 3D in Doom,

1:17:04SPEAKERbut moving the mouse forward and backward

1:17:05SPEAKERwould let you look straight up at one extreme

1:17:07SPEAKERand straight down at your feet at the other.

1:17:09SPEAKERMoving the mouse along each of those axes

1:17:11SPEAKERwould feel like you're looking around in 360 degrees,

1:17:13SPEAKERjust like in real life.

1:17:14SPEAKERCarmack spent 10 minutes programming the new axes

1:17:15SPEAKERof control into the game.