September 29, 2023 • 44 mins
They made games like Doom and Quake, but where did id Software come from? In this episode, we explore the origins of a major name in computer games.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you.
It's a Friday. That means it's time for a tech
Stuff classic episode and we've got a two parter to
(00:27):
go through. So part one is this week. Part two
will be next Friday. And this is the ID Software story.
So ID Software very important video game company back in
the day. And yeah, I did a two parter back
in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So this episode.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Originally published on April fifth, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy. Hello,
really loved your flashback MP three episode. I'd start with
Vangeli's theme songs, but please do a podcast on the
creators of Doom ID Software. Well, David, this one goes
out to you. This is going to be all about
(01:05):
ID and because ID software story stretches back quite a
ways and a lot has happened with it, it's gonna
be a two parter. So here's part one of the
ID Software story. And you guys know me, if I'm
gonna tell you the history, I go back before the
story begins right. In this case, the story of ID
software really begins with another company called soft Disk. Soft
(01:29):
Disc started off in nineteen eighty one as a publisher
in Louisiana and it created magazines on disc and you
would get programs on disc. You would subscribe to a service.
Every month you'd get a new disc and that would
have various articles on it as well as programs that
you could run on your computer. It was actually related
(01:50):
originally to another company called soft Talk, and soft Talk
was a print magazine company, but soft Talk eventually went
out of business. Soft Disk continued. It managed to stay afloat.
So besides publishing a magazine on a disc, they created
this utility software that you would subscribe to, you know,
(02:13):
boring useful stuff. Now, those programs were sold through that
subscription on that monthly basis, so you didn't go to
a store and buy a box with soft Disk's name
on it. Instead, you would subscribe to this service and
they would send it to you. As the computer industry grew,
soft Disc did pretty well, but there was a major challenge.
(02:35):
As computers were becoming more sophisticated, that meant software also
got more complicated or bloated, and that meant that your
team of developers who had to create new software every
single month had an increasingly difficult challenge ahead of them.
Delivering a disc with programs on it on a monthly
basis was really hard to do as time went on.
(02:58):
So imagine that your job is to write a new
program every month, only the programs are getting more complicated,
which means there's also more potential for computer bugs.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
In the code. It was by the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
By nineteen ninety at least, it was getting to be
pretty rough now. They were also looking to expand around
that time, so in August of nineteen ninety, Soft Disc
launched a new bi monthly gaming disc magazine called Gamer's Edge.
By going bi monthly, you would have more time to
(03:31):
develop games. Programmers could take a little bit more time
to design and polish a game before shipping it. However,
two months is still incredibly short. I mean to tell
someone today like you've got two months to create a game,
you'd probably see them flip out because a lot of
modern games take months or even years to develop from
the concept to shipping it, So a two month window
(03:55):
is super tight.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The gamers among.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Your really probably hyper aware of that based upon shipping
dates slipping from now and again. Like whenever you hear
about a company having to miss a ship date, that's
usually because the game ended up being more complicated than
they had anticipated at some stage of the development process. Now,
the head of the Gamer's Edge project was a guy
(04:20):
named John Romero, who was originally from Colorado's Springs and
had moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to work with Soft Disc.
John Romero's a pretty famous name in gaming, so the
gamers among you, I'm guessing I've heard of him, but
everyone else might not know who he is. He's got
a really long history in the computer game business and
(04:43):
has been involved in some major successes and big names,
as well as some pretty popularized flops. Romero already had
a history in computer game design before he took on
a job over at Soft Disc and became the leader
at gamers Edge. His very first published game was for
the Apple two and it was called Scout Search. That's
(05:06):
from the early eighties. He's also the guy behind Cavern
Crusader if you remember that game. For a while he
worked at Origin Systems, which was the company behind such
games as The Wing Commander franchise and the Ultima series,
although he didn't work on those titles. He then went
on to co found a couple of companies between then
(05:27):
and working for Soft Disk, and he was still working
in games. But you know, being a self starter is
sometimes pretty hard, so eventually he decided to move to Shreveport,
Louisiana in nineteen eighty nine and worked for Soft Disc
because it was a steady gig. Now, Romero brought over
a guy named Adrian Carmack from Soft Disk's art department
(05:48):
over to Gamer's Edge, and Adrian Carmack was originally from Shreveport,
so he grew up there and he had taken on
a job at Soft Disk to make money while he
was searching for a way to a mat a living
in the fine arts. He was twenty one when Romero asked.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Him to join Gamer's Edge.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Then he also asked another Carmack, this time John Carmack,
no relation to Adrian Carmack.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
John Carmack was a programmer for Soft Disk who specialized
in the company's monthly Apple two GS publication. Those among
you who remember the Apple two Gs, make sure you
give me a shout out. I'm curious to hear from you.
I never owned an Apple two GS.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
I couldn't. I had an Apple two E and that
just had to suffice. Well.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
John Carmack came originally from Kansas City, and he had
a bit of a past, which he has talked about publicly.
So I'm not really spreading dirty laundry here. But John
Carmack said that when he was a kid, he was
really interested in how stuff works, which I can easily
relate to. But Carmack would push and prod around the
(06:53):
edges of what is consideredly legal. You know, maybe maybe
he wanted to see how stuff worked a little bit
beyond what is legally allowed. Sometimes he leapt right over
those limitations. He was really interested in things like computer
hacking and freaking phone freaking. That's where you're hacking the
telephone system. I did a whole episode of tech stuff
(07:16):
about phone freaking. You can find that in my archives.
He experimented with stuff like thermite and explosives. Now, while
a teenager, he took part in what was supposed to
be an Apple to heist, And I am not making
this up. John Carmack was part of an elite group
(07:36):
of teenagers who had determined that they wanted to take
possession of some apple to computers that were residing in
their local school. So his part was mixing up a
miasma of stuff that included thermite in order to melt
through the windows of the school without setting off the
(07:59):
alarm system. However, during their robbery attempt, they triggered the
alarms somehow anyway, and the police showed up and Carmack
was arrested and after a psychological evaluation, he was sentenced
to a year in a juvenile home. A lot of
kids were there for drugs. John Carmack was there for
(08:19):
the apple too. He described his younger self as being
an a moral little jerk, and that is a direct
quote by John Carmack himself. He attended a couple of
semesters of college once he got out of juvenile the
juvenile home. He finished high school went on to college
at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, but he
(08:42):
didn't complete his studies there. He dropped out when he
found the classes to be boring. He later said that
he probably would have found the classes to be helpful
if he had stuck around, but his attitude was what
made it challenging. So he fully admits that as an individual,
he had not yet matured enough to benefit from a
college education, that it wasn't necessarily the fault of the college. However,
(09:07):
he credits his employment at soft Disk for really opening
up his realization and helping him mature as a person,
because he was doing what he loved, which was programming,
and he was making enough money to do it to
afford a place to live and food to eat, and
that was all that was important to him. So once
he started doing that, he started to realize, you know,
(09:28):
kind of how his attitude had gotten in his own way,
and so he really matured quite a bit while working
at soft Disk, and that ended up benefiting him more
than a college education.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
In the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Now, along with those two Carmacs, Romero enlisted the help
of a guy named Lane Roath. Roath had been a
programmer throughout the nineteen eighties and he had joined soft
Disk in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
He had known.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Romero before they worked at soft Disc. Romero had co
founded a company called Capital Ideas, and both had founded
a company called Blue Mountain Micro. Eventually, they decided they
wanted to work together and they wanted to create a
new company and merge the names of their old organizations
together to create a company called Ideas from the Deep.
(10:14):
This would later serve as the inspiration for ID Software's
name ID because Ideas from.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
The Deep is just too long to say.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
But by the time ID software became an official thing,
Growth was no longer part of the equation. He did
not go on to join the others when they founded
ID Software.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
The last piece of the Gamer's Edge puzzle was a
guy named Tom Hall. Hall had a degree in computer
science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Hall
was another programmer and editor over at soft Disk. He
wasn't officially part of the gamers Edge project, so his
work was mainly done after hours because he had an
(10:56):
interest in games, but he wasn't officially on the projects
for gamers Edge, so any work he did had to
be off the books. Gamer's Edge gave the developers a
chance to try new things, and one of the things
that John Carmac was really interested in was designing game engines.
He really wanted to create something that would allow PCs
(11:17):
to create a smooth scrolling method similar to what you
would find in video game console games. Now, this was
huge because video game consoles are dedicated machines.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
That means every.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Element inside of video game console, everything that you put
in there, is meant to make the games work. At
least in the earlier video game consoles. You could argue
that today they're more media centers than they were before,
but at that time, video game consoles that's all they did.
They just made games work. That's what all the horsepower in.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
The machine was focused on.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Whereas PC's are general purpose devices and they have to
be able to do lots of stuff, not just play games.
That means they're not nearly as good at performing video
game console functions the way a console could back in
these days. Anyway, today it's a different story. PCs are
so powerful and video game consoles are essentially proprietary PCs
(12:18):
that the differences are much less apparent than they were
back in the day. At that time, video game consoles
had the edge over PCs, and so what CARMAC wanted
to do was find a way to let PCs play
games that were similar in in scale and in play
(12:40):
to video game console games.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
So how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
How do you make a game engine that can allow
this to happen. You see, the real problem was that
a side scrolling game, or really any game where the
image is the backgrounds scrolling across, whether it's up and
down or left and right or whatever, that means the
computer has to constantly redraw the screen as you move around,
(13:06):
so elements that are changing have to be redrawn. You
can't just have a static image there. Older computer games
usually did have those static environments. You could move a
character around within an environment, and the character might be
animated a little bit, but the environment itself would stay
pretty much exactly the way it is. Think of like
(13:27):
an old school game like pac Man, where you've got
the full maze on the screen at one time. The
characters move around, but the screen remains static throughout that level.
It might change from level to level, but during a
level it stays the same. So what could Karmac do
to simplify this Well, he realized that if he developed
(13:47):
a game engine where only the parts of the screen
that change are animated are redrawn, he could cut down
on the amount of processing power required for a side scroller.
So if you have a side scroller type game like
Double Dragon that's a classic, and your characters are walking
across a background that isn't changing, Like there's a blue
(14:09):
sky in the background, you don't have to redraw the
blue sky every time the character moves. You just have
to redraw the stuff that actually does change. So maybe
it's buildings or trees or bushes or something like that.
That saves processing time and made side scrolling on PCs possible.
This sounds incredibly basic, and by today's standards, it is,
(14:31):
but at the time it was a monumental innovation. It
really got the wheels turning, and he showed it to
his coworker Tom Hall, and Hall was really excited by this.
He says, this is incredible, and he began immediately to
start working on a game that could show off this
(14:53):
side scrolling capability on the PC, and they together decided
that what they would do is build a replica the
first level for Super Mario Brothers three, and they used
assets from an existing game that John Romero had created
before he joined Soft Disc. It was a game called
Dangerous Dave. So their original rough version of this was
(15:16):
the first level of Super Mario Brothers three, but using
the Dangerous Dave character, and it was all done without
the authorization of Soft Disc. Or even John Romero. He
didn't know about it either, and so it took them
one night to recreate that first level. They then saved
it to a disc and they titled it Dangerous Dave
(15:38):
in copyright infringement, very tongue in cheek, and they put
the disc on John Romero's desk.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So John Romero gets to work.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
He has this disc sitting there and he puts it
in this computer and he sees this title screen of
Dangerous Dave and copyright infringement. He's thinking, what the heck
because he made Dangerous Dave. And he starts the program
and he suddenly sees the side scrolling game on PC
and he goes bonkers. He loves it because it's something
(16:10):
that had not been achievable in PC games up to
this point. He unofficially authorizes work on a full replica
of Super Mario Brothers III. They recreate the game, They
do every level exactly the way it is in the
Super Nintendo system, but on PC they had to do
(16:30):
all of this work off hours. They couldn't officially do
it as Gamer's Edge employees or soft Disk in the
case of Tom Hall. They did, however, use soft disk computers.
At the end of the week, they would take their
computers home. I'm talking desktops here. These aren't like laptops
(16:51):
or anything. They would pack them up, they would take
them home and over the weekend they would work on
this game, and then on Monday morning they would bring
the computer back, hook it back and hope nobody noticed.
After a few weeks, they had built a full PC
version of the game, and the three of them brought
this replica of the game to Nintendo and they wanted
(17:13):
to tell Nintendo, Hey, you can reach a much larger
audience by releasing your game for PC, and we can
do it. See, we know the secret to making a
side scrolling game on the personal computer. If you partner
with us, we can be the solution and we can
end up opening up your game to an entirely new audience.
(17:36):
And Nintendo said no, thanks, not a big surprise. If
you know how Nintendo works, everyone would imagine that they
would turn down such an offer. For one thing, Nintendo
relies on titles like Mario to sell Nintendo consoles. If
they were to offer those games on other platforms, there'd
(17:56):
be very little incentive to buy a Nintendo entertainment system.
And they'd be undercutting themselves, so they decided they did
not want to go in that direction. But other people
began to take notice of Romero's work and have some
interest in perhaps talking with them, And one of those
people was a guy named Scott Miller, who had founded
(18:17):
a software developer and publishing company called Apagee Software. I'll
talk more about what Scott Miller got up to with
John Romero in just a second, but first let's take
a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
All Right, I mentioned.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Apagee just before the break. They got their start in
Texas back in nineteen eighty seven. Now, the company relied
on a pretty interesting business model. They would publish the
beginning of a game for free that allowed players to
download the game and try it out, and if they
wanted to continue the game, they'd have to purchase the
subsequent episodes over the phone, and then the company would
(19:04):
ship the rest of the game a physical copy of
the game to the player. This model became known as shareware.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
You could share the first part.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Of the game freely with anyone you liked.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
After that you had to pay.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Now, keep in mind, this is before the World Wide
Web was a thing that really got started back in
nineteen ninety two. This was nineteen eighty seven, so in
those days, you had to call up a server using
a dial up modem. It might be a bulletin board
system or something along those lines. It might be something
more like a an online service provider, but that's how
(19:40):
you would first get connected to the internet, and then
you could download a file like the shareware version of
the game, and then you would have to call up
the company, give them your information, order it, and then
they would ship you the rest of the game via
snail mail. It was pretty primitive back in the those days.
(20:01):
I don't miss it. Apage was pretty successful with this
approach it. The reason was that they were able to
take advantage of not having a marketing department or a
real sales department or having to worry about securing shelf
(20:22):
space at brick and mortar stores. It cut down a
lot of costs, so it ended up bringing the overhead
down and they were able to take advantage of that.
They also originally intended to create sub brands for each
of the genres of games that the company produced, so
they would have maybe one for adventure games, one for
(20:43):
you know, fighting games, one for flight simulators, that kind
of thing. That was the idea. It never really worked
out that way. Only one sub brand really stood out,
but it was a doozy because that one was three
D Realms. Now, three D Realms created games like the
Max Pain franchise and Pray, and probably most famously was
(21:03):
Duke Newcomb three D. I did a whole episode about
Duke nukeomb or at least I talked about a lot
in our episode on vaporware, so I won't really go
into it here. Plus it doesn't really tie into ID
software deeply enough to warrant it. But that's a heck
of a story anyway. Scott Miller over at Apagee had
noticed Romero's work on a game called Pyramids of Egypt,
(21:27):
and Miller thought Pyramids of Egypt was the perfect style
of game to sell in this shareware business. He thought,
this is a way to really get a game that
is a fun and an interesting If Romero can make
more games like that, I can sell them this way,
was what he was thinking. But he was also sneaky.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Scott Miller was.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
He knew that if he sent correspondence directly to John
Romero over at soft Disk, they might intercept the message.
Because software companies had to fight tooth and nail for
their talent, it was always possible that some other company
would offer employees more money and more benefits to jump ship.
So in order to get his message to Romero without
(22:13):
being detected, he sent Romero a series of fan letters,
each with a different name attached, but all of them
having the same contact information the same address enclosed.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
In the letter.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Romero didn't catch on right away. It wasn't until he
was reading an article about Scott Miller's company that he
noticed the address in the article was really familiar. And
then he looked at his fan mail and saw that
the same address was on three different letters from three
supposedly different people. And then Romero got angry. He was
angry because he thought that the letters were genuine fan mail,
(22:47):
so he felt betrayed that this fan mail wasn't really
fan mail, it was someone who wanted something from him.
So he sent an angry letter to Scott Miller. But
he did leave a callback number in that letter, and
Scott Miller called Romero and immediately apologized for the whole
misunderstanding in his mind, and then made Romero an offer.
(23:10):
He couldn't refuse, so Miller sent a letter that was
dated on August twenty third, nineteen ninety, which was not
long after Gamer's Edge had launched, and said, I really
did like Pyramids of Egypt. That wasn't a lie. I
enjoyed that game very much. He also described his company.
He described the shareware model, and he pointed out that
(23:31):
his most popular title could pull in anywhere between fifteen
hundred and two thousand dollars in sales every week. So
he proposed to Romero, why don't you make games. We'll
publish the games, and in return, you'll get a substantial percentage.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Of the profits.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And because we don't have these overhead costs, we can
maximize those profits. It's not like you're taking a tiny
percentage of the net. I mean, gross is pretty much
the same as net in our business. And Romero thought
this sounded like a really good idea, and he had
an ace in the hole as well, that new side
scrolling technique would give apagee a crazy advantage over other
(24:13):
publishers in the PC gaming space. No one else had
developed a game engine that could do this, so apage
ended up commissioning a game essentially and the group ended
up developing it, and they called it Commander Keene, a
very cute side scrolling game, a little cartoonish, very lighthearted,
(24:36):
and the shareware portion of the game launched in December
nineteen ninety and it caught on like Gangbusters. Scott Miller
had been making about seven thousand dollars a month with
his old library of games. Within ten days of it launching,
Commander Keene had already earned thirty thousand dollars, so I
was leaving everything else behind. In February nine, nineteen ninety one,
(25:01):
John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and John Carmack all resigned from
Soft Disc in order for them to go off and
form their own company. Tom Hall stayed on at Soft
Disk for a couple more months in order to finish
up some projects, but then he followed suit, and together
they created id Software. In order to keep good relations
(25:21):
with their old employer and not get sued, they agreed
to make a new game for Soft Disc every two
months for all of nineteen ninety one at five thousand
dollars a pop. And again they did that because they
had developed that side scrolling graphics engine while working at
Soft Disk, and they had developed the games that got
(25:43):
them the gig on soft disc equipment, so rather than
court a lawsuit, they decided to be a little proactive
and smooth things out. One of the games ID Software
created for soft disk was called Hover Tank, soeten ninety
Origin Systems released Wing Commander, and that was a really
(26:03):
impressive title at the time. The gameplay of Wing Commander
has the player take on the role of a spaceship
pilot fighting off aliens in various star battles. It's a
three D perspective, but it required a pretty powerful computer,
and even then it ran a little slow and janky,
and a lot of the field of view is cut
(26:24):
off by the cockpit of your spacecraft, so you have
a little window that you can see the actual view
of the other spacecraft in it. That ended up limiting
the amount of stuff the computer had to redraw. Well.
It definitely got John Carmack's attention, and he got to
work and created a new three D engine for computer
(26:47):
games and incorporated it into this title called Hovertank, which
wasn't nearly as graphically breathtaking as Wing Commander was at
the time, but the game mechanics were much more smooth
than what was in Wing Commander and was a full
field of view for you didn't have a cockpit obstructing
(27:07):
your view. Carmac would incorporate this same approach again in
a title called Catacomb three D, which was a dungeon
crawling game in which you play a powerful wizard blasting
enemies with fireballs and other stuff, and when you used
a spell, a hand would appear as if it was
being held out by the player. Otherwise, you just saw
(27:28):
whatever was in front of you, but there was no
component of the player character in your view until you
cast a spell. Then a hand would pop up and
a fireball would shoot out. This gave the player a
first person perspective within a game, not inside a vehicle
of any type, but rather just the player's representation alone.
(27:51):
This sounds incredibly basic today, but at the time was
an innovative approach. No one had done it before, so
this was brand new. And this was again for soft Disk,
which in some ways the company viewed as being a
bit of a waste because the most they would get
for it is five thousand dollars. It didn't matter if
the game caught on or didn't catch on. That's what
(28:13):
the deal was. For it also meant that a very
narrow audience would get hold of the game, because it
was only the people who were subscribing to Soft Discs
Gamer's Edge service. However, it gave them the experience they
needed to develop their own games. By the way, in
case you're wondering, Gamer's Edge survived for a while without
(28:33):
the ID Software team there once the team left in
nineteen ninety one and agreed to supply a game every
two months for the rest of that year. The folks
still with Soft Disc took their time learning how John
Carmack's engine worked, and they started developing their own games.
The agreement with ID meant that the team had some
leeway to learn the ropes because they could use that
(28:56):
time where the games coming from ID Software could be
put out under the Gamer's Edge brand, and ideally it
would mean that the team could go on to build
up a collection of titles of their own and always
stay ahead of the publication schedule. Mike Maynard and Jim
Rowe led the department until they too decided to leave
Soft Disc in late nineteen ninety two. They went on
(29:19):
to form their own game company called Jam Productions, and
I'll mention Jam Productions a little bit later. Gamer's Edge
at that time just faded into obscurity.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
All right, now, let's.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Get back to ID Software. The guys at ID decided
to move away from Shreveport. Tom Hall was originally from Wisconsin,
and he convinced his new coworkers that they should move there,
so they did in September. For a while, they worked
out of their apartments building games for Soft Disc while
trying to decide on what to make for their own titles,
apart from more Commander Keen games, which had proven as
(29:53):
a success. So Tom Hall was very fond of Commander Keen.
In fact, it was mostly his ideas in that game,
so he was really advocating for more Commander Keen titles.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
But some of the rest of the.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Team, actually all the rest of the team were hoping
to do something new. John Romero suggested that they make
a game similar to an old PC title called Castle Wolfenstein. Now,
this was a game that came out for the Apple
two in nineteen eighty one, and it is not like
the famous Castle Wolfenstein that most of my listeners are
(30:27):
familiar with.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
If you are familiar with it at all.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
The nineteen eighty one game was a stealth based game,
and it was a top down perspective, meaning you were
looking down on the field of play and your character
was just represented by a little kind of almost like
a stick figure. But you were playing as a prisoner
of war attempting to escape a Nazi prison camp during
World War Two. So very different in many ways from
(30:54):
the game that ID Software would later produce. The guy
who programmed the original Castle Wolfenstein as a fellow by
the name of Silas Warner Romero, thought that the concept
of escaping a prison while fighting bad guys was the
perfect concept to put this new three D engine to use,
and it didn't hurt that the publishing company that put
(31:14):
out Castle Wolfenstein Muse had ceased to be several years earlier.
The company had gone out of business, it didn't exist
at all, and no one had scooped up its intellectual property,
so the copyright had entered the public domain, and Castle
Wolfenstein's intellectual property was fair game, so that the team
decided to make a new version of the game, putting
(31:36):
the player in the role of the hero and calling
it Wolfenstein three D. Not everyone was so happy about
this direction. Tom Hall felt that Commander Keene which was
much more playful and lighthearted, was a better direction for
the company. He was not so happy about the idea
of doing a gritty, grim, bloody, violent game.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Like Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Now, if you look at footage of the original Wolfenstein
three D game today, you'd say it's very cartoony. But
at the time, again, that bloody display you see whenever
you shoot a bad guy, that was new at the time.
It was not something you typically saw in video games
at that time, so it was causing a bit.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Of a stir.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Now, Romero was more about taking on this game designer
role within the company, but that meant that it was
sort of pushing Tom Hall a bit to the side,
because Tom Hall was supposed to be the lead game designer,
And this was sort of the beginning of Tom Hall's
realization that perhaps this company wasn't the right place for him,
(32:47):
but he'd still stick around for a bit longer. The
team started work on Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
They had it ready to go.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
To release in the spring of nineteen nine. They used
the shareware model under apagee. They released the first set
of levels for free. If you completed those levels, you've
got a message saying that if you wanted the rest
of the game, you had to purchase it, and it
would give you essentially two more sets of levels and
some bonus material, including the final battle with Hitler or
(33:18):
essentially Mecha Hitler. I remember this game fondly. This was
the game that introduced me to ID Software. I actually
played Wolfenstein three D before I ever played any of
the Commander Keen games, although I eventually played those two
and Wolfenstein three D was a game I played in
high school. Both during that time and literally in high school,
(33:40):
I had a word processing class that I finished all
the class work for the year in the first month,
and so then I spent the rest of the year
playing Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
True story, Dylan, absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
The second year I was there, I taught the IBM class,
and once I gave them an assignment, I played more
Wolfenstein three D. I played a lot of Wolfenstein three
D is what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
I thought it was great.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
It was unlike other games I had played on PCs,
which at that time were mostly computer role playing games,
and even earlier ones which were text adventure style games, so.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
This was a new thing for me.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Around the same time, ID Software hired a person named
Kevin Cloud as an assistant to Adrian Carmack, and Kevin
would end up being an important part of id's Software's team.
Whenever the question came up whether to focus on a
new intellectual property or create a sequel or remake, Kevin's
inclination was to go with the new, and sometimes that
(34:40):
meant going against the prevailing opinion. More on that, especially
in the second part. I've got more to say in
this first part about ID Software, but before I continue,
let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right,
(35:03):
Wolfenstein was an enormous success. Game sales reached two hundred
thousand dollars a month and stayed that way for more
than a year. This made even Commander Keene's success look
tiny by comparison, and Keen had been a huge hit
for Apagee.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
It was such a big hit that.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Another company called form Gen asked the asked ID Software
to make a copy of the game that could be
sold in brick and mortar stores. In other words, make
a game with box art and all of that stuff
that we can put on store shelves, because it's it's
too good to just have it in this shareware format.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So id Software did. They created a new.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Version of Wolfenstein called Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny, and that
launched in December in nineteen ninety two. Nintendo even called
them up and said, hey, we would like a version
of this for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It's kind
of funny because, of course, the company originally started as
trying to convince Nintendo to allow them to port games
(36:06):
to the PC, and now their Nintendo was saying, hey,
can you port this PC game to the Nintendo. The
Nintendo version's a bit different from the original PC version.
All the blood has been removed from the game, so
when you shoot Nazis, they still die, but they don't
bleed everywhere. And while in the PC version you would
(36:27):
run into guard dogs and have to kill them, that's
not cricket on the SNES, so instead you run into
enormous rats. Maybe they're rous's give me a shout if
you get that reference.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The one place in software was seeing some trouble was Germany.
Wolfenstein three D is all about escaping a Nazi prison,
which meant there were plenty of depictions of Nazis in
the game, including images bearing the swastika symbol, but it's
illegal in Germany to have that image in entertainment, particularly
in games, so the German government banned the sale of
(37:03):
Wolfenstein in Germany.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Only this game wasn't.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Distributed the way your traditional games were on store shelves,
which meant players could go online and download the game anyway,
because the Internet doesn't obey the traditional national boundaries, at
least not without some hardware restricting communications like the Great
Firewall of China. So Wolfenstein three D played a part
in those early days of the Internet and making some
(37:26):
people very nervous about the information super Highway and what
it might be able to do. It actually prompted quite
a few serious discussions across country borders and how can
we manage the Internet in such a way that obeys
the law within certain jurisdictions while remaining an international communication protocol.
(37:47):
It's a question we still ask ourselves today. It's tough.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Well.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
John Carmac's engine for Wolfenstein was getting a lot of
attention in the computer game world, and other publishers wanted
to be able to make first par and shooter style
games as well. But reinventing something that someone else has
already made is a lot of work, so it's easier,
although sometimes expensive, to just license software that powers another game,
(38:14):
and that's how ID Software got into the game engine
licensing business. They began to sell licenses to the underlying
engine powering Wolfenstein three D, and other publishers began to
make games using that engine, and those games ran the
gamut of genres. The one of them was blake Stone,
which was a science fiction game that had a cover
(38:35):
art that looked a lot like Buck Rogers, and blake
Stone came from Jam Productions, that company I mentioned earlier.
They made the game, an Apagee published the title. There
was also a game from Capstone Software called Corridor seven
Alien Invasion, which added a bit of horror to the
science fiction mix. I think it owed a lot to
(38:57):
Alien honestly. That game was by Intracore and game Tech.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
It didn't do so well because by the time it came.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Out, it was already a little dated and the engine
of Wolfenstein was not quite as robust as some of
the newer engines, and a planned sequel of Corridor eight
never came to pass. Then there was an Snees game
that used the Wolfenstein engine, and I mean it makes
perfect sense that game.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Was super three D.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Noah's Arc YEP, a game about Noah using sleep darts
to pacify goats, use the Wolfenstein game engine.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
It's all true Dylan.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Goats and ostriches. By the way, goats couldn't open doors.
Ostriches could totally open a door and come after you. Yeah,
it's a real thing that really existed, and it used
the Wolfenstein three D engine. Although the game wasn't really violent,
it involved knocking animals out with sleep darts, which is
perfectly fun. Don't do it for real, zies though, that's
(40:03):
just mean. On April first, nineteen ninety two, in Software
relocated again.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
So moving to Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Might not have been the best idea. A lot of
the team wasn't really happy with how winters turn out
in Wisconsin, particularly the people who had grown up in Louisiana.
They did not imagine it getting that cold and that snowy,
and I imagine Tom Hall didn't really talk up the
whole winter wonderland of Wisconsin either when he convinced everyone
to move their base of operations up there, So instead
(40:34):
they moved to Texas. Scott Miller was in Dallas, so
they moved to Mesquite, which is a region on the
east side of Dallas. It's just a short six and
a half hour drive away from Shreveport, Louisiana, so if
they really felt like it, they could do a long
road trip back to where they started. John Carmack was
(40:56):
hard at work designing a new game engine. This will
become a familiar thread for the rest of these two episodes.
He was wanting to improve upon the one he had
already built for Wolfenstein three D, and he even had
a name for the next game, but he didn't have
any idea of what the game would be about. He
just knew the name he wanted the games titled to
(41:18):
be Doom.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
He thought it sounded.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Cool, but what would it actually be about.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
He had no idea.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
The name, by the way, didn't just occur to Carmak.
He didn't just say, oh, we should call it Doom.
Apparently it was actually taken as an inspiration from a quote.
A quote from the nineteen eighty seven film The Color
of Money, which is a sequel to a nineteen sixty
one movie called The Hustler. So in The Color of Money,
(41:46):
a character named Vincent Lauria played by Tom Cruise, is
carrying a case and the case holds his poolque but
another character asks him what's in the case, and he
just kind of smiles as he opens it up, and
he says Doom. And thus the name of the next
huge game was born. And they had the name, but
(42:09):
they didn't have a game, and they were talking pretty
big at the time. In January nineteen ninety three, the
company announced in a press release that their next title
would become the biggest Times Suck in all of history,
and that productivity would plummet as a result. The idea
for the game itself emerged, as all great ideas do,
in a totally different game. Yes, just like every idea
(42:34):
of massive consequence in human history, the idea for Doom
came out of a rousing Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game. Yes, indeed,
D and D is the reason Doom exists. John Carmack
had taken on the role of dungeon Master, and John
Romero says that his own character was trying to get
(42:55):
hold of a magic sword and through a series of
somewhat hasty decisions acts identally unleashed a legion of demons
which quickly overran the world. And then they realized what
Doom should be about In Doom, you would play a
hero in a science fiction setting facing off against monstrous enemies.
Only these enemies wouldn't be aliens, they would be demons.
(43:18):
The science facility where it all takes place would have
accidentally opened up a portal to Hell. That's when development
of Doom really got underway. That is it for the
ID Software story, Part one, which originally published on April fifth,
twenty seventeen. Like I said, next week, we will conclude
(43:39):
that with part two. So if you're waiting on the
edge of your seat, you got seven days to wait,
unless you're binging this in the future, in which case
you can just skip right ahead to that one if
you like, and then go back and listen to the
other ones as many times as you like. That's my motto.
Wait No, my motto is I hope you are all well,
(44:00):
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you.
It's a Friday. That means it's time for a tech
Stuff classic episode and we've got a two parter to
(00:27):
go through. So part one is this week. Part two
will be next Friday. And this is the ID Software story.
So ID Software very important video game company back in
the day. And yeah, I did a two parter back
in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So this episode.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Originally published on April fifth, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy. Hello,
really loved your flashback MP three episode. I'd start with
Vangeli's theme songs, but please do a podcast on the
creators of Doom ID Software. Well, David, this one goes
out to you. This is going to be all about
(01:05):
ID and because ID software story stretches back quite a
ways and a lot has happened with it, it's gonna
be a two parter. So here's part one of the
ID Software story. And you guys know me, if I'm
gonna tell you the history, I go back before the
story begins right. In this case, the story of ID
software really begins with another company called soft Disk. Soft
(01:29):
Disc started off in nineteen eighty one as a publisher
in Louisiana and it created magazines on disc and you
would get programs on disc. You would subscribe to a service.
Every month you'd get a new disc and that would
have various articles on it as well as programs that
you could run on your computer. It was actually related
(01:50):
originally to another company called soft Talk, and soft Talk
was a print magazine company, but soft Talk eventually went
out of business. Soft Disk continued. It managed to stay afloat.
So besides publishing a magazine on a disc, they created
this utility software that you would subscribe to, you know,
(02:13):
boring useful stuff. Now, those programs were sold through that
subscription on that monthly basis, so you didn't go to
a store and buy a box with soft Disk's name
on it. Instead, you would subscribe to this service and
they would send it to you. As the computer industry grew,
soft Disc did pretty well, but there was a major challenge.
(02:35):
As computers were becoming more sophisticated, that meant software also
got more complicated or bloated, and that meant that your
team of developers who had to create new software every
single month had an increasingly difficult challenge ahead of them.
Delivering a disc with programs on it on a monthly
basis was really hard to do as time went on.
(02:58):
So imagine that your job is to write a new
program every month, only the programs are getting more complicated,
which means there's also more potential for computer bugs.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
In the code. It was by the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
By nineteen ninety at least, it was getting to be
pretty rough now. They were also looking to expand around
that time, so in August of nineteen ninety, Soft Disc
launched a new bi monthly gaming disc magazine called Gamer's Edge.
By going bi monthly, you would have more time to
(03:31):
develop games. Programmers could take a little bit more time
to design and polish a game before shipping it. However,
two months is still incredibly short. I mean to tell
someone today like you've got two months to create a game,
you'd probably see them flip out because a lot of
modern games take months or even years to develop from
the concept to shipping it, So a two month window
(03:55):
is super tight.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The gamers among.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Your really probably hyper aware of that based upon shipping
dates slipping from now and again. Like whenever you hear
about a company having to miss a ship date, that's
usually because the game ended up being more complicated than
they had anticipated at some stage of the development process. Now,
the head of the Gamer's Edge project was a guy
(04:20):
named John Romero, who was originally from Colorado's Springs and
had moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to work with Soft Disc.
John Romero's a pretty famous name in gaming, so the
gamers among you, I'm guessing I've heard of him, but
everyone else might not know who he is. He's got
a really long history in the computer game business and
(04:43):
has been involved in some major successes and big names,
as well as some pretty popularized flops. Romero already had
a history in computer game design before he took on
a job over at Soft Disc and became the leader
at gamers Edge. His very first published game was for
the Apple two and it was called Scout Search. That's
(05:06):
from the early eighties. He's also the guy behind Cavern
Crusader if you remember that game. For a while he
worked at Origin Systems, which was the company behind such
games as The Wing Commander franchise and the Ultima series,
although he didn't work on those titles. He then went
on to co found a couple of companies between then
(05:27):
and working for Soft Disk, and he was still working
in games. But you know, being a self starter is
sometimes pretty hard, so eventually he decided to move to Shreveport,
Louisiana in nineteen eighty nine and worked for Soft Disc
because it was a steady gig. Now, Romero brought over
a guy named Adrian Carmack from Soft Disk's art department
(05:48):
over to Gamer's Edge, and Adrian Carmack was originally from Shreveport,
so he grew up there and he had taken on
a job at Soft Disk to make money while he
was searching for a way to a mat a living
in the fine arts. He was twenty one when Romero asked.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Him to join Gamer's Edge.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Then he also asked another Carmack, this time John Carmack,
no relation to Adrian Carmack.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
John Carmack was a programmer for Soft Disk who specialized
in the company's monthly Apple two GS publication. Those among
you who remember the Apple two Gs, make sure you
give me a shout out. I'm curious to hear from you.
I never owned an Apple two GS.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
I couldn't. I had an Apple two E and that
just had to suffice. Well.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
John Carmack came originally from Kansas City, and he had
a bit of a past, which he has talked about publicly.
So I'm not really spreading dirty laundry here. But John
Carmack said that when he was a kid, he was
really interested in how stuff works, which I can easily
relate to. But Carmack would push and prod around the
(06:53):
edges of what is consideredly legal. You know, maybe maybe
he wanted to see how stuff worked a little bit
beyond what is legally allowed. Sometimes he leapt right over
those limitations. He was really interested in things like computer
hacking and freaking phone freaking. That's where you're hacking the
telephone system. I did a whole episode of tech stuff
(07:16):
about phone freaking. You can find that in my archives.
He experimented with stuff like thermite and explosives. Now, while
a teenager, he took part in what was supposed to
be an Apple to heist, And I am not making
this up. John Carmack was part of an elite group
(07:36):
of teenagers who had determined that they wanted to take
possession of some apple to computers that were residing in
their local school. So his part was mixing up a
miasma of stuff that included thermite in order to melt
through the windows of the school without setting off the
(07:59):
alarm system. However, during their robbery attempt, they triggered the
alarms somehow anyway, and the police showed up and Carmack
was arrested and after a psychological evaluation, he was sentenced
to a year in a juvenile home. A lot of
kids were there for drugs. John Carmack was there for
(08:19):
the apple too. He described his younger self as being
an a moral little jerk, and that is a direct
quote by John Carmack himself. He attended a couple of
semesters of college once he got out of juvenile the
juvenile home. He finished high school went on to college
at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, but he
(08:42):
didn't complete his studies there. He dropped out when he
found the classes to be boring. He later said that
he probably would have found the classes to be helpful
if he had stuck around, but his attitude was what
made it challenging. So he fully admits that as an individual,
he had not yet matured enough to benefit from a
college education, that it wasn't necessarily the fault of the college. However,
(09:07):
he credits his employment at soft Disk for really opening
up his realization and helping him mature as a person,
because he was doing what he loved, which was programming,
and he was making enough money to do it to
afford a place to live and food to eat, and
that was all that was important to him. So once
he started doing that, he started to realize, you know,
(09:28):
kind of how his attitude had gotten in his own way,
and so he really matured quite a bit while working
at soft Disk, and that ended up benefiting him more
than a college education.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
In the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Now, along with those two Carmacs, Romero enlisted the help
of a guy named Lane Roath. Roath had been a
programmer throughout the nineteen eighties and he had joined soft
Disk in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
He had known.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Romero before they worked at soft Disc. Romero had co
founded a company called Capital Ideas, and both had founded
a company called Blue Mountain Micro. Eventually, they decided they
wanted to work together and they wanted to create a
new company and merge the names of their old organizations
together to create a company called Ideas from the Deep.
(10:14):
This would later serve as the inspiration for ID Software's
name ID because Ideas from.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
The Deep is just too long to say.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
But by the time ID software became an official thing,
Growth was no longer part of the equation. He did
not go on to join the others when they founded
ID Software.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
The last piece of the Gamer's Edge puzzle was a
guy named Tom Hall. Hall had a degree in computer
science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Hall
was another programmer and editor over at soft Disk. He
wasn't officially part of the gamers Edge project, so his
work was mainly done after hours because he had an
(10:56):
interest in games, but he wasn't officially on the projects
for gamers Edge, so any work he did had to
be off the books. Gamer's Edge gave the developers a
chance to try new things, and one of the things
that John Carmac was really interested in was designing game engines.
He really wanted to create something that would allow PCs
(11:17):
to create a smooth scrolling method similar to what you
would find in video game console games. Now, this was
huge because video game consoles are dedicated machines.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
That means every.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Element inside of video game console, everything that you put
in there, is meant to make the games work. At
least in the earlier video game consoles. You could argue
that today they're more media centers than they were before,
but at that time, video game consoles that's all they did.
They just made games work. That's what all the horsepower in.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
The machine was focused on.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Whereas PC's are general purpose devices and they have to
be able to do lots of stuff, not just play games.
That means they're not nearly as good at performing video
game console functions the way a console could back in
these days. Anyway, today it's a different story. PCs are
so powerful and video game consoles are essentially proprietary PCs
(12:18):
that the differences are much less apparent than they were
back in the day. At that time, video game consoles
had the edge over PCs, and so what CARMAC wanted
to do was find a way to let PCs play
games that were similar in in scale and in play
(12:40):
to video game console games.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
So how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
How do you make a game engine that can allow
this to happen. You see, the real problem was that
a side scrolling game, or really any game where the
image is the backgrounds scrolling across, whether it's up and
down or left and right or whatever, that means the
computer has to constantly redraw the screen as you move around,
(13:06):
so elements that are changing have to be redrawn. You
can't just have a static image there. Older computer games
usually did have those static environments. You could move a
character around within an environment, and the character might be
animated a little bit, but the environment itself would stay
pretty much exactly the way it is. Think of like
(13:27):
an old school game like pac Man, where you've got
the full maze on the screen at one time. The
characters move around, but the screen remains static throughout that level.
It might change from level to level, but during a
level it stays the same. So what could Karmac do
to simplify this Well, he realized that if he developed
(13:47):
a game engine where only the parts of the screen
that change are animated are redrawn, he could cut down
on the amount of processing power required for a side scroller.
So if you have a side scroller type game like
Double Dragon that's a classic, and your characters are walking
across a background that isn't changing, Like there's a blue
(14:09):
sky in the background, you don't have to redraw the
blue sky every time the character moves. You just have
to redraw the stuff that actually does change. So maybe
it's buildings or trees or bushes or something like that.
That saves processing time and made side scrolling on PCs possible.
This sounds incredibly basic, and by today's standards, it is,
(14:31):
but at the time it was a monumental innovation. It
really got the wheels turning, and he showed it to
his coworker Tom Hall, and Hall was really excited by this.
He says, this is incredible, and he began immediately to
start working on a game that could show off this
(14:53):
side scrolling capability on the PC, and they together decided
that what they would do is build a replica the
first level for Super Mario Brothers three, and they used
assets from an existing game that John Romero had created
before he joined Soft Disc. It was a game called
Dangerous Dave. So their original rough version of this was
(15:16):
the first level of Super Mario Brothers three, but using
the Dangerous Dave character, and it was all done without
the authorization of Soft Disc. Or even John Romero. He
didn't know about it either, and so it took them
one night to recreate that first level. They then saved
it to a disc and they titled it Dangerous Dave
(15:38):
in copyright infringement, very tongue in cheek, and they put
the disc on John Romero's desk.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So John Romero gets to work.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
He has this disc sitting there and he puts it
in this computer and he sees this title screen of
Dangerous Dave and copyright infringement. He's thinking, what the heck
because he made Dangerous Dave. And he starts the program
and he suddenly sees the side scrolling game on PC
and he goes bonkers. He loves it because it's something
(16:10):
that had not been achievable in PC games up to
this point. He unofficially authorizes work on a full replica
of Super Mario Brothers III. They recreate the game, They
do every level exactly the way it is in the
Super Nintendo system, but on PC they had to do
(16:30):
all of this work off hours. They couldn't officially do
it as Gamer's Edge employees or soft Disk in the
case of Tom Hall. They did, however, use soft disk computers.
At the end of the week, they would take their
computers home. I'm talking desktops here. These aren't like laptops
(16:51):
or anything. They would pack them up, they would take
them home and over the weekend they would work on
this game, and then on Monday morning they would bring
the computer back, hook it back and hope nobody noticed.
After a few weeks, they had built a full PC
version of the game, and the three of them brought
this replica of the game to Nintendo and they wanted
(17:13):
to tell Nintendo, Hey, you can reach a much larger
audience by releasing your game for PC, and we can
do it. See, we know the secret to making a
side scrolling game on the personal computer. If you partner
with us, we can be the solution and we can
end up opening up your game to an entirely new audience.
(17:36):
And Nintendo said no, thanks, not a big surprise. If
you know how Nintendo works, everyone would imagine that they
would turn down such an offer. For one thing, Nintendo
relies on titles like Mario to sell Nintendo consoles. If
they were to offer those games on other platforms, there'd
(17:56):
be very little incentive to buy a Nintendo entertainment system.
And they'd be undercutting themselves, so they decided they did
not want to go in that direction. But other people
began to take notice of Romero's work and have some
interest in perhaps talking with them, And one of those
people was a guy named Scott Miller, who had founded
(18:17):
a software developer and publishing company called Apagee Software. I'll
talk more about what Scott Miller got up to with
John Romero in just a second, but first let's take
a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
All Right, I mentioned.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Apagee just before the break. They got their start in
Texas back in nineteen eighty seven. Now, the company relied
on a pretty interesting business model. They would publish the
beginning of a game for free that allowed players to
download the game and try it out, and if they
wanted to continue the game, they'd have to purchase the
subsequent episodes over the phone, and then the company would
(19:04):
ship the rest of the game a physical copy of
the game to the player. This model became known as shareware.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
You could share the first part.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Of the game freely with anyone you liked.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
After that you had to pay.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Now, keep in mind, this is before the World Wide
Web was a thing that really got started back in
nineteen ninety two. This was nineteen eighty seven, so in
those days, you had to call up a server using
a dial up modem. It might be a bulletin board
system or something along those lines. It might be something
more like a an online service provider, but that's how
(19:40):
you would first get connected to the internet, and then
you could download a file like the shareware version of
the game, and then you would have to call up
the company, give them your information, order it, and then
they would ship you the rest of the game via
snail mail. It was pretty primitive back in the those days.
(20:01):
I don't miss it. Apage was pretty successful with this
approach it. The reason was that they were able to
take advantage of not having a marketing department or a
real sales department or having to worry about securing shelf
(20:22):
space at brick and mortar stores. It cut down a
lot of costs, so it ended up bringing the overhead
down and they were able to take advantage of that.
They also originally intended to create sub brands for each
of the genres of games that the company produced, so
they would have maybe one for adventure games, one for
(20:43):
you know, fighting games, one for flight simulators, that kind
of thing. That was the idea. It never really worked
out that way. Only one sub brand really stood out,
but it was a doozy because that one was three
D Realms. Now, three D Realms created games like the
Max Pain franchise and Pray, and probably most famously was
(21:03):
Duke Newcomb three D. I did a whole episode about
Duke nukeomb or at least I talked about a lot
in our episode on vaporware, so I won't really go
into it here. Plus it doesn't really tie into ID
software deeply enough to warrant it. But that's a heck
of a story anyway. Scott Miller over at Apagee had
noticed Romero's work on a game called Pyramids of Egypt,
(21:27):
and Miller thought Pyramids of Egypt was the perfect style
of game to sell in this shareware business. He thought,
this is a way to really get a game that
is a fun and an interesting If Romero can make
more games like that, I can sell them this way,
was what he was thinking. But he was also sneaky.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Scott Miller was.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
He knew that if he sent correspondence directly to John
Romero over at soft Disk, they might intercept the message.
Because software companies had to fight tooth and nail for
their talent, it was always possible that some other company
would offer employees more money and more benefits to jump ship.
So in order to get his message to Romero without
(22:13):
being detected, he sent Romero a series of fan letters,
each with a different name attached, but all of them
having the same contact information the same address enclosed.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
In the letter.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Romero didn't catch on right away. It wasn't until he
was reading an article about Scott Miller's company that he
noticed the address in the article was really familiar. And
then he looked at his fan mail and saw that
the same address was on three different letters from three
supposedly different people. And then Romero got angry. He was
angry because he thought that the letters were genuine fan mail,
(22:47):
so he felt betrayed that this fan mail wasn't really
fan mail, it was someone who wanted something from him.
So he sent an angry letter to Scott Miller. But
he did leave a callback number in that letter, and
Scott Miller called Romero and immediately apologized for the whole
misunderstanding in his mind, and then made Romero an offer.
(23:10):
He couldn't refuse, so Miller sent a letter that was
dated on August twenty third, nineteen ninety, which was not
long after Gamer's Edge had launched, and said, I really
did like Pyramids of Egypt. That wasn't a lie. I
enjoyed that game very much. He also described his company.
He described the shareware model, and he pointed out that
(23:31):
his most popular title could pull in anywhere between fifteen
hundred and two thousand dollars in sales every week. So
he proposed to Romero, why don't you make games. We'll
publish the games, and in return, you'll get a substantial percentage.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Of the profits.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And because we don't have these overhead costs, we can
maximize those profits. It's not like you're taking a tiny
percentage of the net. I mean, gross is pretty much
the same as net in our business. And Romero thought
this sounded like a really good idea, and he had
an ace in the hole as well, that new side
scrolling technique would give apagee a crazy advantage over other
(24:13):
publishers in the PC gaming space. No one else had
developed a game engine that could do this, so apage
ended up commissioning a game essentially and the group ended
up developing it, and they called it Commander Keene, a
very cute side scrolling game, a little cartoonish, very lighthearted,
(24:36):
and the shareware portion of the game launched in December
nineteen ninety and it caught on like Gangbusters. Scott Miller
had been making about seven thousand dollars a month with
his old library of games. Within ten days of it launching,
Commander Keene had already earned thirty thousand dollars, so I
was leaving everything else behind. In February nine, nineteen ninety one,
(25:01):
John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and John Carmack all resigned from
Soft Disc in order for them to go off and
form their own company. Tom Hall stayed on at Soft
Disk for a couple more months in order to finish
up some projects, but then he followed suit, and together
they created id Software. In order to keep good relations
(25:21):
with their old employer and not get sued, they agreed
to make a new game for Soft Disc every two
months for all of nineteen ninety one at five thousand
dollars a pop. And again they did that because they
had developed that side scrolling graphics engine while working at
Soft Disk, and they had developed the games that got
(25:43):
them the gig on soft disc equipment, so rather than
court a lawsuit, they decided to be a little proactive
and smooth things out. One of the games ID Software
created for soft disk was called Hover Tank, soeten ninety
Origin Systems released Wing Commander, and that was a really
(26:03):
impressive title at the time. The gameplay of Wing Commander
has the player take on the role of a spaceship
pilot fighting off aliens in various star battles. It's a
three D perspective, but it required a pretty powerful computer,
and even then it ran a little slow and janky,
and a lot of the field of view is cut
(26:24):
off by the cockpit of your spacecraft, so you have
a little window that you can see the actual view
of the other spacecraft in it. That ended up limiting
the amount of stuff the computer had to redraw. Well.
It definitely got John Carmack's attention, and he got to
work and created a new three D engine for computer
(26:47):
games and incorporated it into this title called Hovertank, which
wasn't nearly as graphically breathtaking as Wing Commander was at
the time, but the game mechanics were much more smooth
than what was in Wing Commander and was a full
field of view for you didn't have a cockpit obstructing
(27:07):
your view. Carmac would incorporate this same approach again in
a title called Catacomb three D, which was a dungeon
crawling game in which you play a powerful wizard blasting
enemies with fireballs and other stuff, and when you used
a spell, a hand would appear as if it was
being held out by the player. Otherwise, you just saw
(27:28):
whatever was in front of you, but there was no
component of the player character in your view until you
cast a spell. Then a hand would pop up and
a fireball would shoot out. This gave the player a
first person perspective within a game, not inside a vehicle
of any type, but rather just the player's representation alone.
(27:51):
This sounds incredibly basic today, but at the time was
an innovative approach. No one had done it before, so
this was brand new. And this was again for soft Disk,
which in some ways the company viewed as being a
bit of a waste because the most they would get
for it is five thousand dollars. It didn't matter if
the game caught on or didn't catch on. That's what
(28:13):
the deal was. For it also meant that a very
narrow audience would get hold of the game, because it
was only the people who were subscribing to Soft Discs
Gamer's Edge service. However, it gave them the experience they
needed to develop their own games. By the way, in
case you're wondering, Gamer's Edge survived for a while without
(28:33):
the ID Software team there once the team left in
nineteen ninety one and agreed to supply a game every
two months for the rest of that year. The folks
still with Soft Disc took their time learning how John
Carmack's engine worked, and they started developing their own games.
The agreement with ID meant that the team had some
leeway to learn the ropes because they could use that
(28:56):
time where the games coming from ID Software could be
put out under the Gamer's Edge brand, and ideally it
would mean that the team could go on to build
up a collection of titles of their own and always
stay ahead of the publication schedule. Mike Maynard and Jim
Rowe led the department until they too decided to leave
Soft Disc in late nineteen ninety two. They went on
(29:19):
to form their own game company called Jam Productions, and
I'll mention Jam Productions a little bit later. Gamer's Edge
at that time just faded into obscurity.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
All right, now, let's.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Get back to ID Software. The guys at ID decided
to move away from Shreveport. Tom Hall was originally from Wisconsin,
and he convinced his new coworkers that they should move there,
so they did in September. For a while, they worked
out of their apartments building games for Soft Disc while
trying to decide on what to make for their own titles,
apart from more Commander Keen games, which had proven as
(29:53):
a success. So Tom Hall was very fond of Commander Keen.
In fact, it was mostly his ideas in that game,
so he was really advocating for more Commander Keen titles.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
But some of the rest of the.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Team, actually all the rest of the team were hoping
to do something new. John Romero suggested that they make
a game similar to an old PC title called Castle Wolfenstein. Now,
this was a game that came out for the Apple
two in nineteen eighty one, and it is not like
the famous Castle Wolfenstein that most of my listeners are
(30:27):
familiar with.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
If you are familiar with it at all.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
The nineteen eighty one game was a stealth based game,
and it was a top down perspective, meaning you were
looking down on the field of play and your character
was just represented by a little kind of almost like
a stick figure. But you were playing as a prisoner
of war attempting to escape a Nazi prison camp during
World War Two. So very different in many ways from
(30:54):
the game that ID Software would later produce. The guy
who programmed the original Castle Wolfenstein as a fellow by
the name of Silas Warner Romero, thought that the concept
of escaping a prison while fighting bad guys was the
perfect concept to put this new three D engine to use,
and it didn't hurt that the publishing company that put
(31:14):
out Castle Wolfenstein Muse had ceased to be several years earlier.
The company had gone out of business, it didn't exist
at all, and no one had scooped up its intellectual property,
so the copyright had entered the public domain, and Castle
Wolfenstein's intellectual property was fair game, so that the team
decided to make a new version of the game, putting
(31:36):
the player in the role of the hero and calling
it Wolfenstein three D. Not everyone was so happy about
this direction. Tom Hall felt that Commander Keene which was
much more playful and lighthearted, was a better direction for
the company. He was not so happy about the idea
of doing a gritty, grim, bloody, violent game.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Like Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Now, if you look at footage of the original Wolfenstein
three D game today, you'd say it's very cartoony. But
at the time, again, that bloody display you see whenever
you shoot a bad guy, that was new at the time.
It was not something you typically saw in video games
at that time, so it was causing a bit.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Of a stir.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Now, Romero was more about taking on this game designer
role within the company, but that meant that it was
sort of pushing Tom Hall a bit to the side,
because Tom Hall was supposed to be the lead game designer,
And this was sort of the beginning of Tom Hall's
realization that perhaps this company wasn't the right place for him,
(32:47):
but he'd still stick around for a bit longer. The
team started work on Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
They had it ready to go.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
To release in the spring of nineteen nine. They used
the shareware model under apagee. They released the first set
of levels for free. If you completed those levels, you've
got a message saying that if you wanted the rest
of the game, you had to purchase it, and it
would give you essentially two more sets of levels and
some bonus material, including the final battle with Hitler or
(33:18):
essentially Mecha Hitler. I remember this game fondly. This was
the game that introduced me to ID Software. I actually
played Wolfenstein three D before I ever played any of
the Commander Keen games, although I eventually played those two
and Wolfenstein three D was a game I played in
high school. Both during that time and literally in high school,
(33:40):
I had a word processing class that I finished all
the class work for the year in the first month,
and so then I spent the rest of the year
playing Wolfenstein three D.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
True story, Dylan, absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
The second year I was there, I taught the IBM class,
and once I gave them an assignment, I played more
Wolfenstein three D. I played a lot of Wolfenstein three
D is what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
I thought it was great.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
It was unlike other games I had played on PCs,
which at that time were mostly computer role playing games,
and even earlier ones which were text adventure style games, so.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
This was a new thing for me.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Around the same time, ID Software hired a person named
Kevin Cloud as an assistant to Adrian Carmack, and Kevin
would end up being an important part of id's Software's team.
Whenever the question came up whether to focus on a
new intellectual property or create a sequel or remake, Kevin's
inclination was to go with the new, and sometimes that
(34:40):
meant going against the prevailing opinion. More on that, especially
in the second part. I've got more to say in
this first part about ID Software, but before I continue,
let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right,
(35:03):
Wolfenstein was an enormous success. Game sales reached two hundred
thousand dollars a month and stayed that way for more
than a year. This made even Commander Keene's success look
tiny by comparison, and Keen had been a huge hit
for Apagee.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
It was such a big hit that.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Another company called form Gen asked the asked ID Software
to make a copy of the game that could be
sold in brick and mortar stores. In other words, make
a game with box art and all of that stuff
that we can put on store shelves, because it's it's
too good to just have it in this shareware format.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So id Software did. They created a new.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Version of Wolfenstein called Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny, and that
launched in December in nineteen ninety two. Nintendo even called
them up and said, hey, we would like a version
of this for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It's kind
of funny because, of course, the company originally started as
trying to convince Nintendo to allow them to port games
(36:06):
to the PC, and now their Nintendo was saying, hey,
can you port this PC game to the Nintendo. The
Nintendo version's a bit different from the original PC version.
All the blood has been removed from the game, so
when you shoot Nazis, they still die, but they don't
bleed everywhere. And while in the PC version you would
(36:27):
run into guard dogs and have to kill them, that's
not cricket on the SNES, so instead you run into
enormous rats. Maybe they're rous's give me a shout if
you get that reference.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The one place in software was seeing some trouble was Germany.
Wolfenstein three D is all about escaping a Nazi prison,
which meant there were plenty of depictions of Nazis in
the game, including images bearing the swastika symbol, but it's
illegal in Germany to have that image in entertainment, particularly
in games, so the German government banned the sale of
(37:03):
Wolfenstein in Germany.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Only this game wasn't.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Distributed the way your traditional games were on store shelves,
which meant players could go online and download the game anyway,
because the Internet doesn't obey the traditional national boundaries, at
least not without some hardware restricting communications like the Great
Firewall of China. So Wolfenstein three D played a part
in those early days of the Internet and making some
(37:26):
people very nervous about the information super Highway and what
it might be able to do. It actually prompted quite
a few serious discussions across country borders and how can
we manage the Internet in such a way that obeys
the law within certain jurisdictions while remaining an international communication protocol.
(37:47):
It's a question we still ask ourselves today. It's tough.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Well.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
John Carmac's engine for Wolfenstein was getting a lot of
attention in the computer game world, and other publishers wanted
to be able to make first par and shooter style
games as well. But reinventing something that someone else has
already made is a lot of work, so it's easier,
although sometimes expensive, to just license software that powers another game,
(38:14):
and that's how ID Software got into the game engine
licensing business. They began to sell licenses to the underlying
engine powering Wolfenstein three D, and other publishers began to
make games using that engine, and those games ran the
gamut of genres. The one of them was blake Stone,
which was a science fiction game that had a cover
(38:35):
art that looked a lot like Buck Rogers, and blake
Stone came from Jam Productions, that company I mentioned earlier.
They made the game, an Apagee published the title. There
was also a game from Capstone Software called Corridor seven
Alien Invasion, which added a bit of horror to the
science fiction mix. I think it owed a lot to
(38:57):
Alien honestly. That game was by Intracore and game Tech.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
It didn't do so well because by the time it came.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Out, it was already a little dated and the engine
of Wolfenstein was not quite as robust as some of
the newer engines, and a planned sequel of Corridor eight
never came to pass. Then there was an Snees game
that used the Wolfenstein engine, and I mean it makes
perfect sense that game.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Was super three D.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Noah's Arc YEP, a game about Noah using sleep darts
to pacify goats, use the Wolfenstein game engine.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
It's all true Dylan.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Goats and ostriches. By the way, goats couldn't open doors.
Ostriches could totally open a door and come after you. Yeah,
it's a real thing that really existed, and it used
the Wolfenstein three D engine. Although the game wasn't really violent,
it involved knocking animals out with sleep darts, which is
perfectly fun. Don't do it for real, zies though, that's
(40:03):
just mean. On April first, nineteen ninety two, in Software
relocated again.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
So moving to Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Might not have been the best idea. A lot of
the team wasn't really happy with how winters turn out
in Wisconsin, particularly the people who had grown up in Louisiana.
They did not imagine it getting that cold and that snowy,
and I imagine Tom Hall didn't really talk up the
whole winter wonderland of Wisconsin either when he convinced everyone
to move their base of operations up there, So instead
(40:34):
they moved to Texas. Scott Miller was in Dallas, so
they moved to Mesquite, which is a region on the
east side of Dallas. It's just a short six and
a half hour drive away from Shreveport, Louisiana, so if
they really felt like it, they could do a long
road trip back to where they started. John Carmack was
(40:56):
hard at work designing a new game engine. This will
become a familiar thread for the rest of these two episodes.
He was wanting to improve upon the one he had
already built for Wolfenstein three D, and he even had
a name for the next game, but he didn't have
any idea of what the game would be about. He
just knew the name he wanted the games titled to
(41:18):
be Doom.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
He thought it sounded.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Cool, but what would it actually be about.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
He had no idea.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
The name, by the way, didn't just occur to Carmak.
He didn't just say, oh, we should call it Doom.
Apparently it was actually taken as an inspiration from a quote.
A quote from the nineteen eighty seven film The Color
of Money, which is a sequel to a nineteen sixty
one movie called The Hustler. So in The Color of Money,
(41:46):
a character named Vincent Lauria played by Tom Cruise, is
carrying a case and the case holds his poolque but
another character asks him what's in the case, and he
just kind of smiles as he opens it up, and
he says Doom. And thus the name of the next
huge game was born. And they had the name, but
(42:09):
they didn't have a game, and they were talking pretty
big at the time. In January nineteen ninety three, the
company announced in a press release that their next title
would become the biggest Times Suck in all of history,
and that productivity would plummet as a result. The idea
for the game itself emerged, as all great ideas do,
in a totally different game. Yes, just like every idea
(42:34):
of massive consequence in human history, the idea for Doom
came out of a rousing Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game. Yes, indeed,
D and D is the reason Doom exists. John Carmack
had taken on the role of dungeon Master, and John
Romero says that his own character was trying to get
(42:55):
hold of a magic sword and through a series of
somewhat hasty decisions acts identally unleashed a legion of demons
which quickly overran the world. And then they realized what
Doom should be about In Doom, you would play a
hero in a science fiction setting facing off against monstrous enemies.
Only these enemies wouldn't be aliens, they would be demons.
(43:18):
The science facility where it all takes place would have
accidentally opened up a portal to Hell. That's when development
of Doom really got underway. That is it for the
ID Software story, Part one, which originally published on April fifth,
twenty seventeen. Like I said, next week, we will conclude
(43:39):
that with part two. So if you're waiting on the
edge of your seat, you got seven days to wait,
unless you're binging this in the future, in which case
you can just skip right ahead to that one if
you like, and then go back and listen to the
other ones as many times as you like. That's my motto.
Wait No, my motto is I hope you are all well,
(44:00):
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
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