December 10, 2024 • 50 mins
What if a game from the '90s could still captivate tech wizards and gamers alike today? Join us as we traverse the rich legacy of Doom, an iconic first-person shooter that changed the gaming landscape. I kick things off with a musical tribute, channeling the game's unforgettable soundtrack, while Ron and Don share their personal connections—ranging from childhood memories of peeking over an uncle's shoulder to college days where Doom was the ultimate spectator sport. We recount how this game wasn't just about defeating demons but also how it shaped our appreciation for media and transformed first-person shooter mechanics forever.
Ever hear of Doom running on a microwave or a pregnancy test? We dive into the programming wizardry that has kept Doom alive and kicking on the most unconventional platforms imaginable. This game’s simplicity and John Carmack's decision to release the source code in 1997 opened a Pandora's box of creativity, inspiring modders to take the game to new heights. We delve into fascinating mods like "My House," a project blending gaming with avant-garde literature to create immersive, multidimensional experiences. Doom’s ongoing legacy as a modding paradise is a testament to its engaging and accessible game design, making it a perfect canvas for creative expression.
We wrap up with a celebration of Doom’s artistic and technical marvels, from its groundbreaking 2.5D graphics to the adrenaline-pumping thrill of wielding the legendary BFG 9000. As we reminisce about how metal music and Dungeons and Dragons influenced Doom’s creation, we express our gratitude to John Carmack and id Software for giving us a piece of art that transcends generations. This episode captures the essence of 90s gaming nostalgia, underscoring how the classics continue to engage and inspire both seasoned gamers and new enthusiasts with their timeless appeal.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Doug (00:29):
Welcome back to the Uncannery or for any first-time
listeners out there, welcome tothe Uncannery.
I'm Doug, I'm Ron, I'm Don, andwould you, gentlemen, mind if I
sang you a little somethingreal quick.
Ron (00:42):
Yeah, that'd be awesome.
Doug (00:43):
You are historically a good singer and I like music and
Don any objections.
I've never heard you sing, so Idon't know anything about this
history.
Okay, here we go.
(01:03):
Anything, any, any.
Feelings arise as I begin tohit those Volkswagen commercial.
Don (01:11):
It's for the Jetta.
Doug (01:14):
No, don, it's not for the Jetta.
I thought you would hear thepulse pounding.
Ron (01:20):
No, I'm pretty pumped.
Yeah, I want to do something.
I want to do some hill in theworld right now Whoa.
Yeah, I wasn't going to take itthat far.
That'm pretty pumped.
Yeah, I want to do something.
I want to do some hill in theworld right now Whoa.
Doug (01:25):
Yeah, yeah, I wasn't going to take it that far.
Ron (01:27):
That's pretty wild, I think that's a primal bar that you've
dropped here.
Cool, this is Doom.
You are singing to me, doomWhoa.
Doug (01:38):
You actually got it.
You actually got it.
You got it For the listeners athome.
Um, I was just, uh, pretendingthat I was doing the MIDI sound
of the guitars from E1 M1 hangerlevel of the original 1994
classic.
Monstrous accomplishment of agame that is doom by id software
(02:03):
.
Um, gentlemen, how, howfamiliar are you with the game?
If not, is it the best game ofall time?
We all know it is.
Anyway, go ahead, tell us whatyou know.
Ron (02:13):
My introduction to doom was what you said.
94 came out 94, so I don't knowif it's doom 1 or doom 2, but
my uncle had.
My uncle was like the first pcgamer I knew.
Yeah, he had like a pc with asound card and stuff right, and
uh, he would show me doom and Iwas terrified of it as a child,
of course, like he's runningthrough the dark halls and then
(02:35):
a big minotaur, whatever popsout, and I was like I thought it
was a scary game and I thoughthe was like it was an element of
his personality that I had noidea.
I was like, wow, I thought hewas just a sch and I thought he
was like it was an element ofhis personality that I had no
idea.
I was like, wow, I thought hewas just a schmuck, but actually
he could play these veryterrifying games, absolutely.
And now, looking back, thinkingthat anything about Doom is
scary is silly to me.
(02:57):
But I've actually never playedthe original Doom, but I did
play the.
Was it 2016 remaster?
Yeah.
Doug (03:08):
That kind of took the world by swarm, uh uh, storm.
Well, swarm is appropriate ifwe're talking about doom.
It is a swarm of demons comingin.
Ron (03:12):
So, yeah, that's it, and I did finish 2016 and I started
eternal and I never finishedeternal completely different
game, so like it's eternal isalmost like a sport yes,
compared to 2016, which I wasenjoying, but, um, I didn't have
the time to devote to the sport.
I think the same time around.
Doug (03:27):
Did you play the original?
You just watched it.
Ron (03:30):
Yeah, I only watched it.
I've never gone back and playedit, really Okay.
Doug (03:33):
Very cool.
Don (03:34):
Don tell us about your experience.
I played it.
I played it in college.
Not very much.
You were brave.
I didn't think it was.
Yeah, it wasn't that scary forme, um, when it came out, yeah,
so, yeah, um, and it just wasn'tsomething I wasted a lot of
time on, spent a lot of time on,I guess I know exactly where
this podcast is going.
I'll just say that right now, um, yeah, but uh, um, but I had
(04:00):
friends that were playing itmore than I was, so okay, okay,
so I got to see a lot of it, butuh yeah, it was fun.
Doug (04:07):
I mean immediately.
The reason I asked what's yourexperience with doom and didn't
ask you the question what do youknow about doom is because I
think that generally it'sregarded uh enough that anybody
who has a basic knowledge ofvideo games is going to know
about Doom to a certain degree.
Ron (04:26):
I bet everyone has heard the word Doom and they know
that's a video game, but I'm notsure if everyone knows what it
is, or what sets it apart from?
Other video games.
Doug (04:34):
It does a lot.
It is not the firstfirst-person shooter ever made
and, as a matter of fact, whenDoom came out, the word
first-person shooter wasn't evenbeing thrown around at that
time, and that might besomething that's unfamiliar to
our audience, but it was one ofthe first games that became
widely accessible.
(04:55):
That kind of put you in theperspective of the character
that you were playing and youwere looking through the eyes of
that character as you proceeded.
And this is far afterBattlezone or some of these
arcade games that did have this.
Ron (05:08):
Is that the tank one?
Yes, yeah absolutely.
Don (05:11):
Which I love, that one too, yeah me too, Absolutely.
Doug (05:13):
Remember that animation when you get hit like it cracks
the screen.
Ron (05:16):
Yeah, so cool.
I love that game too, soimmersive.
Doug (05:20):
Yeah.
Don (05:22):
Yes, it was.
Doug (05:24):
Yeah, for me doom was a quintessential experience.
I, the more that I've thoughtabout this, I realized it's
informed a lot of just thingsthat I love about media.
I think in general because itcame at a time for me that that
was the big step up.
Um.
According to my dad, I thinkthe first game that I ever
(05:45):
played was out of this world.
I think that that was the titleof the game is a PC game.
I think it had a sequel calledflashback or something like that
.
Apparently, I have some vaguerecollections.
We used to play Dune Dune uh,not to be confused with doom.
Uh, doing the sci-fi epic.
There was dune um on computerum, and there was a few others,
(06:08):
definitely super mario's inthere.
But the biggest memories I haveum were when I was I was
allowed to play doom.
That was a big deal um at thetime because, yeah, it was scary
and there's monsters and demonsand all these scary things um,
but but it it blew my mind.
I could not believe thatsomething would be in in the
(06:29):
first person perspective, sothat already um had kind of
taken it there and there was somuch buzz around the idea of you
could um, it was under a modelthat the way that you could get
it was.
It was called shareware, which,uh, I guess we kind of have to
go back to talk about softwarein general, because so many
things are just downloaded now,but people are passing around
(06:49):
disks that you could getbasically the first third of the
game for free.
You could play through I thinkit was between 8 and 10 levels
that were designed in thebeginning and that was free.
You could play through that.
But in order to get the lasttwo volumes of the game, of the
game, or um episodes of the game, you had to uh buy it.
(07:09):
And what is also wild about thisis thinking about um.
You know, when you go to buy avideo game in the store, it's
always in a pre-packaged kind ofbox.
If not download it, like the,the people that are still
holding onto hardware um, youhave to go in and uh, basically
they would sell places like compUSA or like these stores uh,
(07:31):
the rights to sell the discs outof a box and they would give
them to.
You know, like, sell them thatand say, like, just slap a price
on it, you can make the boxlook however you want.
So people who have copies ofdoom from the uh mid nineties.
They all all the boxes aredifferent depending on what you
got, because it was such adifferent way to distribute this
(07:52):
piece of software.
Essentially, the the reason Iwanted to talk about it today is
not just because of theinfluence it had on me.
This isn't an autobiographicalepisode, but there is a.
There's an interesting wave ofprogramming that has kind of
caught my eye in that this gamefrom 1994, it is very historic
(08:17):
and so of course people aregoing to continue to talk about
it.
And if it has all of thesemarks of modern gaming for why
first-person shooters are sopopular, that's going to be
something to talk about.
But it's actually also aprogramming.
I don't know how would I phrasethis.
It's a programming challenge.
Yeah, it's like a programmingchallenge that recently there's
(08:40):
been a wave of people probablyover the past 10 years, but I've
really seen it pick up in thepast three years of people using
the original source code ofdoom to program it into very
strange places that are not justcomputers, uh, that can run
this software.
So, um, obviously you've gotphones like that somewhere that
(09:02):
you can imagine.
I do have a phone obviouslyyou've got phones like that
somewhere that you can imaginethese things.
I do have a phone, absolutely,and we hope that you do too at
home um, go buy a phone.
Ron (09:09):
If you don't have one, you gotta go get one before you can
listen to this episode pro phonepodcast yeah, talk to your
parents.
Doug (09:15):
Tell them it's time I deserve a phone thank you, um,
but what uh looking at that,with some of the things that uh
could be interesting like?
I don't know if the best way todo is go through a guessing
game here, but what are some ofthe strangest areas that you can
imagine this game beingprogrammed into?
Ron (09:35):
The hump of a camel.
Okay, Ron Got him.
It's not that strange, is it?
Doug (09:44):
We are going to get into the biological.
It is going to get very strangeonce we look at some of the
other stable points.
There is going to be one stopthat we take that is biological.
But no, I'm looking for moremechanical.
Ron (09:58):
Okay, so I do have some experience.
The strangest thing I've seensomeone program the video game
Doom onto was a calculator.
I couldn't tell you what kindof calculator.
I was never a calculator guy.
I can't tell my T-1000 from a TMath calculator.
Yeah, some sort of mathcalculator.
Don (10:15):
And.
Ron (10:15):
I had like a fifth grade student who was like, just
showed me, look, I got Doom onhere.
I'm like what.
And he was playing Doom on acalculator and it looked really
good, Like, and he said he didit himself and I was so
completely blown away andconfused and I was like, wow,
this must be the smartest kid inthe world.
This guy's the next IsaacNewton.
Doug (10:39):
Yes, um, yeah, that that is exactly like what you're
experiencing.
Live there.
Um is interesting.
Yes, ti 84 calculators havebecome a staple of this Um, and
so to think that, something from1994, that, um, my dad, I think
, had to buy extra Ram for atthe time to make sure, or like a
new chip that he had to put onhis motherboard, or new
(11:01):
motherboard, um, you're justsaying words now.
Don (11:04):
You don't.
You don't know what he did.
Motherboard and ram are realwords those are words, and
you're correct.
Doug (11:10):
I don't know which one between the two, but he did have
to increase the processingpower of his computer so we
could play doom at home theseare all words.
Ron (11:16):
I've seen labeling aisles in a fries electronics
absolutely rest in peace.
Fries electronics oh my god, myfavorite store ever.
Me too, I'd love to frieselectronics absolutely.
Doug (11:29):
Yeah, dad and I would take many a trip um to go look at
games and computer parts um whyis this building so tall?
Absolutely for selling dvds andcables because when you say I
found the game I wanted, itneeds to echo through a huge
warehouse.
That's it um.
(11:49):
So yeah, ti-84 calculators umkind of became a mainstay
because they could process umthe the game.
So that that's one um any otherguesses or okay, so weirder
than a calculator, yeah yeah, itdoes get weirder.
Tamagotchi, tamagotchi I didn'tfind anything on that and it is
possible, but no, I did not findany tamagotchis that had them
(12:12):
programmed.
Um, although there is a devicecalled the tilt, which is about
the size of three legos stackedon top of each other, that has a
screen about the size of yourpinky nail that responds to
movement, uh, left, right, upand down, uh, that somebody did
program doom into and all themovement controls were done
through tilting the object andpressing the lego button on the
(12:33):
top of it in order to shoot sothat is another item sick yeah,
absolutely microwave ovenmicrowave oven.
I have not not seen up to thispoint.
That's another one, and what'swild about this is maybe is the
answer, but a refrigerator twoyears ago has been taken care of
(12:55):
.
There was a refrigerator thathad an LG screen that was
attached to it and when youwould open up the door to get a
beverage and then go back toclose it, it would load up e1m1
that you could play through theentire time.
Um, and I think when you theyhad it programmed to when you
shot the first enemy, it couldstart dispensing ice, which I
thought was absolutely insane.
(13:16):
But that's something else.
That's there.
What's e1m1?
That is episode one, uh, mapone, the very first level of
Doom that I sang from at thebeginning of this episode here.
Don (13:29):
The Jetta commercial.
Doug (13:30):
Yes, the Jetta commercial, indeed Some other notable
options If you had the versionand I don't know if MacBooks are
still doing this, but there wasa digital display bar that was
at the top of macbooks that youcould use to turn volume up and
down the touch bar thank youobviously and no they don't make
them anymore, but they stillexist special edition.
(13:52):
Uh well, you could have gottenan even more special edition in
which somebody just programmedthe led in the top of that bar
to play doom, so not the actualcomputer that's running it, but
just the, the, the volumecontrols and brightness controls
.
That was reprogrammed so itwould play doom in the bar while
your computer was running acompletely separate operation
(14:13):
perfect like a secret secret I'min a meeting look I'm working
Ron (14:18):
yeah absolutely working awfully hard over there, don,
that's right that's right.
Doug (14:23):
Um so that was there.
Um we uh also have had um anatm.
There was an atm.
Ron (14:31):
Uh, that was programmed would it dispense all the money
when you beat the level?
Doug (14:35):
that you had to finish the entire game.
Don (14:37):
To get there, you had to get all the way through hell and
the line, the line behind thatexactly you go.
Doug (14:45):
You select the difficulty, and then it decided what
stratosphere of capitalism youwere strapped into forever.
Don (14:50):
That's the ATM I wish they had at the casinos in Vegas.
Yeah oh, I couldn't agree more.
Oh man, oh man, I can't get it.
That's right.
Doug (15:00):
Another option there old generation iPods, one of my
favorites.
A pregnancy test.
A pregnancy test, uh, a coupleof years ago.
Ron (15:10):
What are the mecha like?
Uh, uh, maybe I'm showing mylack of knowledge but how many
inputs are there on a, on apregnancy test?
I think this is the piece stick.
Don (15:21):
Yeah.
Doug (15:24):
Originally it was just one line, two lines or a dot.
Now, uh, featuring doom.
Um, I don't think it played the.
I imagine the, the chugging aguitar that I did in the
beginning, coming out of apregnancy test right.
But yeah, pregnancy test wasused to run Doom as well.
It looks incredibly archaic andyou can barely see what's
(15:44):
happening in the graphics, butthe entire game can run through
that, as poorly manifested asthat is.
That is the one that youreferred to earlier.
Ron, you're joking around abouta camel, but an.
MIT biotech researcher was ableto get at least at least like
(16:05):
frames to begin to pop up.
Ron (16:08):
In the eyes of a chimpanzee .
Doug (16:11):
No, actually off of gut bacteria.
So, MIT researcher LaurenRamlin didn't get the game going
on a digital simulation ofbacteria, but turned actual
bacteria into pixels to displaythe game.
The frames were running that itwould change a frame about
(16:32):
every 70 minutes, a frame aboutevery 70 minutes, and so
somebody had calculated that ittakes.
Uh, if somebody were to gothrough the entire game off of
gut bacteria, it would take 600years to finish the game.
But somebody actually used gutbacteria.
Ron (16:45):
So we're putting gut bacteria in like a dish or
something, and then we arecommanding them to move so that
they order themselves into theshapes of pixels that create a
picture.
Doug (16:55):
We're now getting just past my area of expertise, if
not far beyond it at this point,but from what I saw, there was
a digital input screen that kindof looked like a reverse
negative image and tons of wiresjust going into some guy's
abdomen.
Ron (17:18):
He's screaming.
It's so funny because I wasthinking hey, chill out, charlie
, we got two frames.
Doug (17:26):
Yeah, we're almost there.
I kept thinking about how funnyif it was an actual person.
I don't think it was.
No, I don't think it was in aperson, I think it was just gut
bacteria used as a sample, but Iwas thinking if somebody was
hooked in they would look kindof like the demons in Doom, yeah
, yeah.
That have kind of likecybernetic, you know,
attachments to them in some way.
Ron (17:45):
This sounds like a gross misappropriation of research
funds.
Yeah, 100%.
I don't know why you can't eatgluten, but but look at this
doom on my gut.
Doug (18:01):
You thought your stomach ache was bad.
Now, doom that's right.
Exactly.
So, yeah, this, this is somewild stuff, obviously, and it
got me thinking about it alittle bit because this game
from my childhood.
So so to go back for just asecond, this game for my
childhood I I loved.
I can't even tell you.
(18:22):
I think there was at least twosummers that that was what I was
doing during the summer.
It was like, yes, I would playwith friends, but when mom and
dad went off to work, I rememberbooting up MS-DOS, which, if
we're not familiar with,obviously now operating systems
have a graphical interface.
You just have to type in everysingle command and executable
(18:42):
that you would put into yourcomputer.
And I remember having friendsover and like just going to the
hard drive and typing in DIR,which is just directory, and it
would just tell you what filesyou had on your computer.
And so my friends would comeover and be like you want to see
something really crazy.
I just opened the directory andit would just list you what
files you had on your computer.
And so my friends would comeover and be like you want to see
something really crazy.
I just opened the directory andit would just list all the
files on my computer and I'dlook at them.
I'm like I can hack.
There's nothing absolutelyinteresting about it.
(19:06):
Like such a basic, this looks alot like that scene in Jurassic
Park right guys, no, no no.
Don (19:12):
You don't have the magic password.
Doug (19:15):
So, yeah, I've been going through, but I, I, I had it
memorized essentially like howto get to doom and go through
the process, and I, I rememberjust loving you know, going
through the different levels thelevel design is so good and
like finding the different keycards, going to different places
and trying to run through theexits of these levels.
But what world I don'tunderstand is why now and we're
(19:37):
currently in the year 2024, whywe're looking at this game that
is now 30 years old and we'restill trying to program that one
specifically onto so manydifferent devices and objects.
Like, why has this become sucha challenge?
And so I throw that to you guysfor just a second of why this
(20:01):
game?
Why this game, in particular,with the very limited knowledge
that we have?
What would you think?
Don (20:09):
Why not?
Because it's there.
Ron (20:11):
Because it's there, okay, but I mean, we're not recreating
Pokemon.
Not, we're not.
We're not recreating pokemon,we're not recreating, uh, the
first mario game.
Uh, there must be.
Uh, is there like a sort of agross simplicity in its, in its
programming, or something?
Is it just like?
Doug (20:31):
you know like a fifth grader with a calculator can
program this kid who just blewyour mind is the next great
programmer of his time.
Well, um, from from what I'vebeen able to take in, I do think
that that is a part of it is.
It does come from an era that,um, this was programmed in
assembly language.
So we're looking at down to themicrochip and sending the.
(20:54):
Uh, this is where the memory isgoing to go and this is what I
want the memory of the computerto be used for.
Um, this was something that wasprogrammed in a lower level
language that people couldaccess immediately.
Um, I, I, my, my hypothesis is,um, one of the the things that
interests me the most stillabout the original doom and doom
(21:16):
to like that that system is in1997.
Um, john Carmack, who is the oneof the lead programmers in
software, released the sourcecode to the internet and said
run wild with it.
Essentially, you can even lookin, and this was something I was
looking at.
In the read me file there's asection in which he is talking
(21:37):
about.
I strongly suggest that, ifyou're interested in modifying
this game and we hope that youare that you continue to
interact as a community.
Think about the weapons thatyou can add.
Maybe you add flying.
You can change the format ofthis game in some way, and I
think that there's a lot thatcan be said for the fact that he
decided to release the code tothe public that they could use
it.
They'd already moved on totheir next game, quake, which
(21:59):
that's a whole separate podcastabout e-sports and everything
else.
Cause arguably that started thatUm, but he released it into the
community that everybody couldkind of begin to build off of
that and um, and they did, andthey still are to this day, um,
one um one.
One very interesting uhdirection that this has uh gone
(22:19):
in is a mod was released in the,I believe the past five years
called my house um, which is adoom mod.
Are either of you familiar withum, the book house of leaves?
Yeah house of leaves.
What do you know about house ofleaves?
Ron (22:34):
I've read houseaves.
It's a sort of what are therelike three narratives or
something.
It's a sort of like a bookabout a guy finding a book,
about a person writing a book.
Am I right?
Doug (22:49):
It's been a while, but yeah, yeah, okay.
Ron (22:51):
So the person in a house, yeah, anyways, it involves this
sort of like multidimensionalhouse, right, that when people
enter it, the the interiorvolume of the house does not
match as sort of outwardappearance, right, and so they
eventually have to send uh.
My favorite part was, like the,the essentially start sending
like polar explorers into thishouse to like map it out or find
the very center of it.
(23:12):
Um, and it's, it's kind of a uh, avant-garde, uh-esque novel,
right, or uh, where there arethere's uh.
The author plays with theformatting of pages so that
there's missing text, orsometimes the text is tilted so
that you actually have tophysically rotate the book in
order to read it, and it becomesa kind of fun puzzle, right
(23:32):
I've always described it topeople as a book that's almost
haunted by itself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah in a way it islike a haunted house story,
right, but in a yeah, a Very funnovel new way.
Doug (23:43):
Yeah, a programmer a few years ago made a modification to
the game called my House, inwhich, when you boot it up, you
are put in front of what lookslike a suburban house inside of
a squared off fence.
You go into the house.
There's some demons from thegame Doom, that you're attacking
as you're going in and as youcontinue to traverse the
(24:03):
corridors, exactly as you justdescribed.
Because of the programming ofthe game and how simple it is to
build off of itself, he wasable to create that each time
that you go into a new area, thedimensions of the house change.
So the way that it's programmed.
It's interesting, because ofhow the format is presented to
itself, that when it goesthrough doors, there's places
(24:25):
that clearly, based on themechanics of how it's designed,
when somebody goes in through adoor, it opens up into a new
corridor and it's impossiblethat it could be there because
of the way that it's designed,essentially like there's no way
that physically, there could betwo doors in a segment where
there was one hallway that'sleading to the place that it is,
but because of the nature ofhow you can program doom, the
(24:48):
designer of that file, whocontinues to remain anonymous,
is most likely from what peoplecan speculate online, use the
doom programming code becauseyou could build on top of it,
within the source frame of thecode, in order for it to do the
same thing that this book did,of kind of putting you into like
an alternate dimension in whichthe dimensions of the house can
continue to manipulatethemselves.
(25:10):
And, um, the game I think it has, like you know, five different
endings and depending on how yougo through it and what you do
with the files within the game,it changes your experience.
But even still, then I'm lookingat it's a 30 year old game and
you want to to put thismasterwork that's a commentary
on a piece of literature, butthen putting it as a video game.
And you're still going to useDoom to do it.
(25:31):
And it continues to mystify mebecause again, it's this very,
you know, archaic.
It's a piece of history, butagain people are still using it
as this modification.
So, going back to this idea, Ithink that John Carmack, because
he decided to say this shouldbe the thing that people are
free to use and design their owngames with, I think that that
(25:51):
lends to this entire community,that now we get today people who
are using gut bacteria to toprogram this game because of the
free association with thispiece of art that he made and
said go out and make amazingstuff with it.
We see that that's stillhappening today.
Ron (26:07):
I do think that's one of the like interesting things
about video games as a medium isthat they do cultivate these
oftentimes not all video gamesright.
Some video games are still likeproducts and they're the people
that make them are veryprotective of the code and
giving players and creatorsaccess to that code to play with
that right.
But, like, the idea of moddinga video game is fairly common
(26:29):
for certain kinds of games.
Right, the idea that the playerinteracts with the art, the
creation, in more ways than justplaying through it, the way it
was intended, that you canactually create on top of that
right.
Are there other mediums we canthink of that where, like, uh,
the, the audience is um kind ofinvited to create with the like
(26:53):
on, build on top of the strataof the medium, in the same way
that, like, video gamesfrequently are, because it
sounds like that's part of whatyou're excited about here.
Right, like this game existedbut then it was released to
people and then they could umcontinue to utilize it in the
ways they saw fit or exciting.
Right In like fan fiction.
Don (27:12):
Yeah, it kind of works like that right, the universe has
been established for you andthen fans come along and tell
stories that layer on top ofthat universe and usually change
details and things like that.
But that's the only thing I canreally.
I mean, there's some like, somelike participatory theatrical.
Ron (27:27):
You know one-off things you can go to it yeah, some weird,
some show or something, some guyyou knew in college who tricked
someone into giving him a playspace for night.
Don (27:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's right but I think you're right, the,
the, um, the one of the thingsthat draws people to that, the
medium of the of the games, isthat it, it, it does allow the,
the players, some some freedomof creativity and application on
top of it, and that's actuallyone of the things that that in
the story of doom because I'mnot like, I don't play doom,
(28:01):
still, I don't like it.
I don't remember.
I remember shooting themeatballs with teeth, that's all
I remember yeah, caco demonsI'm familiar, um, but uh, that
it was one of the first networkgames, so it was a.
It was one of the first gameswhere you were not just playing
against the machine, you wereplaying against other people.
(28:22):
And it started off in, in, youknow, college computer science
labs, right with with cablestrung.
But then it was the first right, it was the first online they
were the first.
Doug (28:35):
Um, they were the first.
It was like there were onlinegames, but it was kind of like
more games which, like you takea turn, then I take a turn,
you're sending it back and forthand waiting for the yes, yeah,
chess strategy games.
Don (28:44):
Golf like I take my swings, you take a turn.
Doug (28:45):
then I take a turn.
You're sending it back andforth and waiting for the yes,
chess strategy games, golf, likeI take my swings, you take my
swings.
They wanted live real time,like send the bod from your
modem, and we're gonna do thisin real time.
Don (28:56):
yes, so I think that, actually that because it's the
first game that has thatcommunity aspect I think that is
part of the answer to thequestion you're asking us about
why it has this staying power inand because the focus from the
from the get go, was on buildinga community of players that are
all in the same universe, sameenvironment and interacting with
(29:17):
the same features.
So um, so yeah, when it'sreleased and then the community
feels a responsibility not onlyto um to continue the work that
Carmack started, but then toenjoy doing it and and being
creative with it.
Doug (29:30):
Yeah, and it's.
It's one of the things thatI've had to look at is I've I
was just, you know, listening toso many different podcasts.
I watched um, a high scoreepisode on doom.
Uh, I was listening to JohnRomero, who was one of the other
programmers, talk about theprocess of what they were doing
and what they were pulling fromcreatively, and it's so
(29:51):
interesting because it's a lotof things I think that we've
touched on, like a lot of theideas for what the demons look
like, like the meatball withteeth that you're talking about
was pulled from beholders intheir dungeons and dragons
section of the session of, like,how do we turn that into
something that's more demonic?
And then at one point, they hadlicensed um, they had licensed
to do a video game based on themovie aliens which had come out,
(30:14):
and then they decided to doaway with that.
But then what stuck was the ideaof these like space military
bases that they were goingthrough and different ships and
things like that.
And you see, or even the musicthat I was alluding to and
singing earlier, is becausethey're playing like Slayer and
Metallica, as they're continuingto program all of these things.
And you see, like, where a lotof the things that were
(30:36):
influencing them end up showingup in the game.
And I think that it's probablyjust a testament to id Software
and the fact that they were soinspired by these things and saw
that inspiration was a big partof what they did.
And they, you know, I wouldassume that they would also be
putting that out because they'reseeing what the community is
already starting to do andthey're like, well then, have at
(30:56):
it.
And like, let's see what we cancontinue to make.
And it's yeah, it's justincredible that it's lasted for
such a long time.
Ron (31:04):
Yeah, I think that you make a good point, don about like it
had a community from thebeginning.
Right.
I think in some ways this issort of like the backgammon
question.
Right, you were asking us a fewweeks ago which was, like you
know why this game right, and soat least it has to have an
audience to begin with, right,like are there people creating
for some old?
(31:24):
Like what were?
Doug (31:29):
they muds multi-user dungeons.
Have you ever heard of these?
Ron (31:30):
these are like yeah, they're like proto multiplayer
games, right yeah I'm sure thereare people still programming
like weird mud games, right,yeah, but um, they're not trying
to run them on a refrigerator,right?
Doug (31:40):
probably because they didn't have that level of
popular penetration Right.
Yeah.
Ron (31:44):
And so yeah, so it has to have like a basis or a history
of communal involvement.
Like you said, the source codemust be like pretty wieldable,
right, Like pretty versatile.
You can do a lot with it or fitit onto a lot of things, and
then I feel like there must belike another ingredient here,
though Right.
Doug (32:04):
Like well, one thing.
There's another aspect that Ihaven't even touched on, um,
which is they.
They were sitting a lot oftimes when they'd be programming
.
They had a Nintendoentertainment set like the
original NES was sitting next tothem, and one of the things
that really inspired them wasplaying super Mario brothers
three.
And this is something I takefor granted because, like I just
(32:24):
, I grew up with super mariobrothers three and I was just
always seeing it.
But there was, um a desire forcomputer games to get the same
smooth feeling of mario mariobeing able to go across the
screen, and it wasn't refreshingthe screen to where it'd have
to reset the screen completely.
It just he could just verysmoothly go across the screen
(32:46):
and there was no um, there wasno reset where the image had to
change.
In a way, it's like it felt likethe world was just continuous,
the more that he would run backforth, up and down.
Everything was there, and thatwas a big thing that, um, the
programming team at id had puttogether was.
They found a way to do that onthe computer through vertical
programming, of putting thingsinto columns, so you weren't
(33:07):
having to refresh the screenover and over again.
It was like the sides of thescreen were the only things that
had to be reset.
So that perspective, that doomis giving you from this Ray it's
called Ray casting of lookingout from the perspective of the
first person, was able to justprogram within these columns the
the places that were refreshedso it could run at a very fast
(33:28):
speed.
So also, I mean I would thinkthat this was a big deal because
people were like, oh, theyfinally fixed the problem that
we've been having with computergaming.
It's finally at the speed wewant.
It looks like it's a console,so now we can start to play with
code.
That's actually really good andwe don't have to solve this
gigantic problem of how do weput this at the same refresh
rate as, like some of the thingsthat had mystified them for so
(33:51):
many years before so you'resaying it's like an engineering
feat also right it seems to bethere's
Don (33:56):
several yeah, no, karmic has several engineering feats
that he accomplished here.
So the one that you'redescribing is called um, binary
space partitioning, um, which,uh, which does exactly what you
say.
So it takes the perspectivefrom one individual spot and it
allows the computer to renderonly the surfaces that are
visible from that location andnot anything that's behind, like
(34:17):
blocked by a wall.
So traditionally in, like the,the consoles, what would be
happening in a 3d environment,is it?
It's called picture framerendering, so it renders the
background and then it rendersthe mountains on top of the
background and then the tree infront of them.
So that way, when it's donewith all that layering, the view
that you get is the correct 3dview.
But that requires a lot ofprocessing because it has to
(34:38):
process every single one ofthose, those planes.
But what, uh?
What Carmack came up with withbinary space partitioning is is
um, they would draw the map andthen um the map prior to the
gameplay.
So this is when the map iscreated, it, it divides itself,
it partitions itself intoindividual sectors and then
(34:59):
subsectors, so that the gamealready knows, in any given
location, which frames it has toor which not frames, which
columns it has to render and itdoesn't render anything else.
So it's actually a super lightrendering engine.
So it doesn't take up, which iswhy it will run on a computer
where it from 1993, where othergames wouldn't run on a computer
from 1993.
Doug (35:19):
It's interesting you say that because I saw somebody who
was looking at it through aprogramming base that it could
graphically render what it lookslike from a top down view.
And what I found fascinatingabout that, and speaks to your
point, is the character in thegame is actually not moving, and
what I mean by that is the mapis moving around the character
Right.
(35:40):
So it's like, when you see it,you're just seeing the static
thing and a map flying all overthe place around this dot, which
is the character.
And that also is interestingbecause, of course, when you're
playing the game, you'rethinking about you because it's
from your first personperspective, running around in
this environment and blowingstuff up and doing what you do.
But really and I think thatspeaks to his innovation and
(36:01):
genius is he's looking at itfrom the perspective.
How are we going to render this?
Well, now, the map is the thingthat is moving around this and
we can render it that way.
So little things like that oflike, how do you solve these
problems?
And it seems like earlyprogramming, because, from what
I, when I talk to people, itseems like you're kind of always
looking within the realmsdesigning games nowadays, that
you have a base Like, you'relike.
(36:22):
Well, I'm using unity, I'musing this engine, I'm using,
I'm using the doom engine, youknow like, or the quake engine,
whatever it is.
There's an engine that'salready kind of setting up the
parameters for what you're doing.
But he's looking at it from theperspective of like, going back
down to maybe not binary ofones and zeros, but pretty close
to that of, like I need tocommand this to do this, so I
can actually set up the enginefor what I'm trying to
(36:44):
accomplish, which makes it thatthat programming code yeah.
Don (36:49):
It's akin to um, it's when you go to the theater, right?
So the the way I think aboutbinary space and this is rough
analogy, but just for ournon-computer science listeners
um, if you go to the theater andyou see a backdrop painted on
the set and there's a big couchin front of it, they didn't have
to build the set behind thecouch because nobody in the
(37:11):
audience right, right so that'swhat the computer is doing.
It's, it's deciding oh, nobodycan see what's behind that wall,
so I'm not rendering any ofthat right.
Um, but the.
But the other thing thatcarmack does is he also develops
this thing called hardwareabstraction, where each
component is modular.
So there's a component in hiscode that is just dealing with
(37:32):
the graphics and a componentthat is just dealing with the
sound and a different componentthat's dealing with the input,
and all of that runs throughkind of like a decoder ring
called the hardware abstractionlayer.
And so one of the reasons youcan port this to so many other
devices is all you have tochange is that hardware
abstraction, the decoder ring,and then the rest of the of the
code, works fine.
So two things right.
(37:54):
We've got the, the binary spacepartitioning that lowers the
computation requirement of thehardware, and then you've got
this decoder ring that you justhave to change this one element
and then it'll work on apregnancy test or it'll work on
a refrigerator or whatever.
So those are the two like thetechnical things that I found
that allow this to be ported somany different places.
(38:15):
But I don't think we've touchedon the question of why you can
do it but like why would you putpoor doom, why would you port
doom to a pregnancy test or togut bacteria or to a microwave
or to whatever?
Why?
Ron (38:31):
I think there's a missing element, yeah, that we're
talking about, which is um also,it just needs to be fun, like
it needs to be a good game,right, like it needs to not be
light and easy to uh manipulateand uh run on all these devices,
but it has to be like reallycool, right like, like you know,
(38:52):
pong pong didn't have much,yeah, yeah, people aren't
putting pong right, like youknow, but pong was like a was
like a artistic or like ahistorical artifact.
My parents would like I feellike they bought these atari,
stick it to like vga, plug itinto your tv like they bought
like five of these when we werekids, and you'd play it like on
christmas day and be like, ohwow, cool, we're gonna play some
(39:13):
older.
And then you're like, oh god,we're gonna play pong I still
love pong.
Don (39:19):
My grandparents bought the original pong.
Ron (39:20):
It was the coolest thing when it was the only thing that
existed.
Don (39:24):
Absolutely yeah, but uh you know, atari was cool too, and
it was the only thing thatexisted when star wars, shadows
of the empire exists.
Ron (39:31):
You don't want to play pong .
I mean that's.
Doug (39:34):
That's very fair, I think yeah, some people are even
pushing doom aside when you getto that level of going whoa,
yeah, it's true um but I meandoom.
Ron (39:43):
So you're saying the doom is fun.
Yeah, it's a fun game.
Don (39:45):
Right, it's a, it's a because who doesn't want to
shoot a meatball?
Ron (39:48):
yeah, like I think there are lots of elements of doom
that lend it like uh, you knowthere are lots of shooter games
and, like you said, this is notthe first shooter game, um, but
like uh the.
The game design is pretty geniusalso, right.
Right, you have these multipletypes of enemies.
They all have, like, differentbehaviors.
They provide differentchallenges.
You can kind of remix thecombat areas by just by choosing
(40:11):
which of these enemies show upand how many of them.
So now there's two flying guysand three guys who run at you
super fast.
So then it's like very quickdecision making who do I target
first, who do I hit?
Don (40:22):
And then there's like room to execute with actual skill
right and I I might be inventingthis, so I'm asking for help.
Are there sections where thereit's like a puzzle kind of like
you can?
See the enemy, but you don'tknow how to get to the enemy, to
to a bit like that.
Doug (40:37):
Um, the biggest thing and this was actually the part I of
course like love the shooting,because it's like ooh, explodey,
explodey, boom, boom.
Like of course you're going tolove that when you're younger.
But I think the staying powerwas the maps of having to get
certain key cards to accesscertain areas.
Or you would see like an areaof like I can't get up to there,
how is that possible?
(40:57):
But there'd be like a secretdoor in the corner or switch
that you'd flip or you'd go to acertain area and something
would happen, or a trap doorwould kind of spring, which is
also very Dungeons and Dragons,like all of these maps that are
kind of outlined, with all ofthese tricks that are designed
for you to go through, and sothat's a part of it too is as
much as it's a shooter, it'salso, I agree, like it's very
much a puzzle as well, as you'regoing through Scratches that
(41:21):
like a human exploration itchright, Like it is not just a
combat game, it is also yeah,you can kind of like pick the
parts of it you want to do.
Ron (41:31):
Really well, I actually I never had patience for the
exploration parts.
I was like I don't care that,I'll watch someone on.
Youtube, get up there.
I just want to go do moreshooting Stick with your 2016,.
Man, a hundred percent, no, butto go do more shooting stick
with your 2016 man yeah 100percent?
Doug (41:44):
um no, but to go back to your question, don't yeah like
what?
Why this?
one I would answer.
It's a bit more abstract, but Ithink that it's a great example
of artistic expression withvideo game, and what I mean by
that is you're looking at a gamethat's coming out that has yes,
it's innovative for its time,but right before that, the
(42:07):
Wolfenstein 3d was also amassive success, which was
taking a world war two stealthygame and then putting it into
first person perspective.
That did a very similar thing.
Before that they had a gamecalled catacomb 3d, which my, my
dad and I had, which was theirfirst experience, or like kind
of one of their first delvesinto first person perspective,
although you kind of have like amage hand that you're like
(42:29):
fighting enemies in a dungeonwith Um.
But doom seemed like it had acertain amount of artistic flair
in that.
Uh, people have described it as2.5 D, like where it's just
it's giving you vertical height,it's giving you it's not just
corridors, but you're alsoseeing it that it seems like
it's more expansive levels.
(42:49):
There's lighting design, that ithas just enough dynamics, that
I think it was the first onethat really seemed like it
brought things into 3d, eventhough it wasn't full.
3d, like quake, is actuallytheir next game.
Quake is actually the real bigone.
That um kind of set that up,that that we have polygons and
textures that are mapped there.
And I wonder if that designchallenges because that was such
(43:11):
a big leap in terms of theartistic expression of video
games, in terms of like theseare these things that we've
designed from our minds, fromthe metal that we're listening
to as're designing this thing,from our Dungeons and Dragons
campaigns that we're pulling artand design.
They even had something calledthe Doom Bible which they were
going through and saying likethese are the rules and
environments of doom.
It is in this kind of sci-fiatmosphere but scientists have
(43:33):
messed too much with thistechnology and they've brought
in the realms of hell to thisMars base that everybody's
fighting through.
And though the story isn't everreally implicitly, it's not a
very like the forefront elementof the game.
As you can progress through thegame and things get more and
more, I guess, hellish as you'regoing, like deeper into the
(43:54):
realms.
The level design kind of speaksto that and I wonder if, like
those small pieces that I saw asa kid and going, this is
something completely different,if that staying power, the
simple code, so like the art,the code and the fact that it's
something that is kind of thisMarvel, is why it sticks around
like that.
Cause I don't know if I meanmaybe super Mark, but I would
(44:15):
put the I mean it's up therewith the biggest games of all
time, like maybe super Mariowould be there and, and all time
, like maybe super Mario wouldbe there, um, and, and a lot of
these like the biggest namesever.
Don (44:25):
But I think that that might be a part of it as well.
I think you're right, and the,the, that artistic expression,
right, the, the.
I think computer programmersare not often given a whole lot
of artistic credit because itseems so technical, um, but uh,
but that artistic expression,like it, can be used for, um,
(44:46):
for other purposes too.
So, um, porting doom onto somedevices has even been a type of
activism, um, so there's a, the,there's a tractor, a John Deere
tractor, right and uh, and itwas uh, the, so the, the image
of doom running on thetouchscreen on the tractor, um,
(45:07):
it was a statement that you know, John Deere locks down its
computer code and and it won'tlet you mod the tractor and it
won't let you repair the tractorand and so the the proof of
concept that you could run doomon the tractor was um the idea
that that users are able tomanipulate their own hardware
and their own computer devices.
(45:27):
So why?
Why don't their manufacturerslet that happen?
It's a it was a right to repairum activism campaign.
Um, so that right, it linksthat, that idea of artistic
expression to a cause in thiscase.
But but I think you're right.
Um other thing that I I waswondering about too is um have
(45:48):
you guys heard of the omelettest?
Ron (45:50):
Hmm, can it cook an omelet yeah?
Don (45:52):
And uh, and do you know what it's supposed to show?
Ron (45:56):
That, uh, some surfaces are very hot.
Don (45:58):
Exactly, we're on the right track, perfect, hot, exactly.
Yeah, on the right track,perfect, it's so.
The the omelet test is a.
It's a test of a of of cookingright.
It's supposed to demonstrateyour ability to cook, because
it's a relatively simple taskbut it's really complex in in
other aspects, and so it's a,it's a complete sort of event
that will demonstrate youroverall cooking ability and and
(46:21):
I'm wondering if, if portingdoom is like that because it's a
it's, the code is clean, thecode is simple.
You've just got to, you know,change that hardware abstraction
layer, but it does two thingsit proves your ability as a
coder to manipulate those things, but it also proves the
hardware's ability to run thatwhen you're done with it, right.
So it's a.
(46:41):
It's like, uh like I thinkthere's a law, right, if you go
to um like Sam Ash or a guitarcenter.
Doug (46:47):
I was just going to say this right.
Don (46:49):
When you're testing a guitar, you have to play a
stairway to heaven Right and, ofcourse, they always have a
signs up.
Doug (46:54):
Don't play stairway to heaven.
Don (46:55):
No, stairway is always what they have.
But yes, but there's alwaysright, and, and I imagine out of
the musical instruments there'sprobably a, a, a thing you're
supposed to play when you pickup a violin to see if it, if it
works.
I think that this is kind oflike how do you test the
capability of a computer?
Well, will it run doom?
And and then you prove that it,that it can, and it's.
It's the omelet test of yourhacking, it's the omelet test of
(47:18):
um, of the computer's abilityto to run it and um.
So I wonder if that's going ontoo.
Ron (47:24):
So what's kind of like a I was going to say like in the
world of literature.
Doug (47:27):
It's kind of like you have to write a book about someone
undergoing a divorce, right Likewhat stairway to heaven is to
rock music is what doom is toyeah is to the classics.
Well, I don't know about youguys, but I'm ready to go play
Deathmatch right now.
Shall we boot it up?
Yeah, please, I want the rocketlauncher Absolutely.
Do you want to play it on gutbacteria, or would you rather do
(47:49):
it on the ATM?
It only takes 600 years,absolutely.
Ron (47:52):
I'm hoping we can get it on some hair follicles or
something.
Don (47:58):
You know it's funny.
You should mention that becauseI found.
So it's not reporting doom, butI did find a story about some
scientists in Australia that areactually they've I don't know
how they've connected rat braincells onto a computer chip and
they're actually training theserandom brain cells how to play
(48:20):
doom.
Ron (48:22):
Oh, so that's the next level.
Don (48:23):
Yeah, so it's going to.
So it's, can you run it?
Can you play?
Doom Skynet is real, absolutelyWait, is it?
Ron (48:30):
working?
Are they are?
They are the?
Are the rats playing Doom?
Don (48:33):
As far as, so, as far as they have gotten so far, they've
gotten the brain cells to growon the on the chip and they on
the on the chip, and they are,they are learning.
I don't think they've actuallyplayed the whole game yet, but
it's has to do with with aimingand and and sending happy
electric signals and anduncomfortable electric signals
to the brain chip, to to tell usyeah, they are, but it's not a
(48:57):
real, it's not a real brain yet,and it's just themselves.
Doug (48:59):
So well, hopefully.
A real brain yet and it's justsome cells.
Ron (49:04):
So well, hopefully they get to at least e1 m2 by the time,
that uh incredible breakthroughsin the fields of uh
neurobiology, absolutely.
Thank you, john karmack.
Doug (49:11):
Absolutely yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I.
I am eternally grateful to idsoftware for some of the best
memories of my childhood, and soI am really.
But it is amazing to me to seethe ways that it continues to
play out, because I do thinkthat it's art and I think that
this conversation is anexpression of that.
Ron (49:30):
And it is cool to see something from your childhood
like persist right and beadopted by subsequent
generations who find somethingcool about it and make it their
own in some way.
Doug (49:39):
Right, Big, time, absolutely, gentlemen.
Thank you for indulging me andtaking me back.
I'll go boot up the computersright now.
Ron (49:47):
Thank you, Dougie doom.
Don (49:48):
And we're never going to get another episode done.
You guys are going to beplaying forever.
Doug (49:52):
What can I say?
I love that BFG 9,000 childrenof the nineties.
You.
Welcome back to the Uncannery or for any first-time
listeners out there, welcome tothe Uncannery.
I'm Doug, I'm Ron, I'm Don, andwould you, gentlemen, mind if I
sang you a little somethingreal quick.
Ron (00:42):
Yeah, that'd be awesome.
Doug (00:43):
You are historically a good singer and I like music and
Don any objections.
I've never heard you sing, so Idon't know anything about this
history.
Okay, here we go.
(01:03):
Anything, any, any.
Feelings arise as I begin tohit those Volkswagen commercial.
Don (01:11):
It's for the Jetta.
Doug (01:14):
No, don, it's not for the Jetta.
I thought you would hear thepulse pounding.
Ron (01:20):
No, I'm pretty pumped.
Yeah, I want to do something.
I want to do some hill in theworld right now Whoa.
Yeah, I wasn't going to take itthat far.
That'm pretty pumped.
Yeah, I want to do something.
I want to do some hill in theworld right now Whoa.
Doug (01:25):
Yeah, yeah, I wasn't going to take it that far.
Ron (01:27):
That's pretty wild, I think that's a primal bar that you've
dropped here.
Cool, this is Doom.
You are singing to me, doomWhoa.
Doug (01:38):
You actually got it.
You actually got it.
You got it For the listeners athome.
Um, I was just, uh, pretendingthat I was doing the MIDI sound
of the guitars from E1 M1 hangerlevel of the original 1994
classic.
Monstrous accomplishment of agame that is doom by id software
(02:03):
.
Um, gentlemen, how, howfamiliar are you with the game?
If not, is it the best game ofall time?
We all know it is.
Anyway, go ahead, tell us whatyou know.
Ron (02:13):
My introduction to doom was what you said.
94 came out 94, so I don't knowif it's doom 1 or doom 2, but
my uncle had.
My uncle was like the first pcgamer I knew.
Yeah, he had like a pc with asound card and stuff right, and
uh, he would show me doom and Iwas terrified of it as a child,
of course, like he's runningthrough the dark halls and then
(02:35):
a big minotaur, whatever popsout, and I was like I thought it
was a scary game and I thoughthe was like it was an element of
his personality that I had noidea.
I was like, wow, I thought hewas just a sch and I thought he
was like it was an element ofhis personality that I had no
idea.
I was like, wow, I thought hewas just a schmuck, but actually
he could play these veryterrifying games, absolutely.
And now, looking back, thinkingthat anything about Doom is
scary is silly to me.
(02:57):
But I've actually never playedthe original Doom, but I did
play the.
Was it 2016 remaster?
Yeah.
Doug (03:08):
That kind of took the world by swarm, uh uh, storm.
Well, swarm is appropriate ifwe're talking about doom.
It is a swarm of demons comingin.
Ron (03:12):
So, yeah, that's it, and I did finish 2016 and I started
eternal and I never finishedeternal completely different
game, so like it's eternal isalmost like a sport yes,
compared to 2016, which I wasenjoying, but, um, I didn't have
the time to devote to the sport.
I think the same time around.
Doug (03:27):
Did you play the original?
You just watched it.
Ron (03:30):
Yeah, I only watched it.
I've never gone back and playedit, really Okay.
Doug (03:33):
Very cool.
Don (03:34):
Don tell us about your experience.
I played it.
I played it in college.
Not very much.
You were brave.
I didn't think it was.
Yeah, it wasn't that scary forme, um, when it came out, yeah,
so, yeah, um, and it just wasn'tsomething I wasted a lot of
time on, spent a lot of time on,I guess I know exactly where
this podcast is going.
I'll just say that right now, um, yeah, but uh, um, but I had
(04:00):
friends that were playing itmore than I was, so okay, okay,
so I got to see a lot of it, butuh yeah, it was fun.
Doug (04:07):
I mean immediately.
The reason I asked what's yourexperience with doom and didn't
ask you the question what do youknow about doom is because I
think that generally it'sregarded uh enough that anybody
who has a basic knowledge ofvideo games is going to know
about Doom to a certain degree.
Ron (04:26):
I bet everyone has heard the word Doom and they know
that's a video game, but I'm notsure if everyone knows what it
is, or what sets it apart from?
Other video games.
Doug (04:34):
It does a lot.
It is not the firstfirst-person shooter ever made
and, as a matter of fact, whenDoom came out, the word
first-person shooter wasn't evenbeing thrown around at that
time, and that might besomething that's unfamiliar to
our audience, but it was one ofthe first games that became
widely accessible.
(04:55):
That kind of put you in theperspective of the character
that you were playing and youwere looking through the eyes of
that character as you proceeded.
And this is far afterBattlezone or some of these
arcade games that did have this.
Ron (05:08):
Is that the tank one?
Yes, yeah absolutely.
Don (05:11):
Which I love, that one too, yeah me too, Absolutely.
Doug (05:13):
Remember that animation when you get hit like it cracks
the screen.
Ron (05:16):
Yeah, so cool.
I love that game too, soimmersive.
Doug (05:20):
Yeah.
Don (05:22):
Yes, it was.
Doug (05:24):
Yeah, for me doom was a quintessential experience.
I, the more that I've thoughtabout this, I realized it's
informed a lot of just thingsthat I love about media.
I think in general because itcame at a time for me that that
was the big step up.
Um.
According to my dad, I thinkthe first game that I ever
(05:45):
played was out of this world.
I think that that was the titleof the game is a PC game.
I think it had a sequel calledflashback or something like that
.
Apparently, I have some vaguerecollections.
We used to play Dune Dune uh,not to be confused with doom.
Uh, doing the sci-fi epic.
There was dune um on computerum, and there was a few others,
(06:08):
definitely super mario's inthere.
But the biggest memories I haveum were when I was I was
allowed to play doom.
That was a big deal um at thetime because, yeah, it was scary
and there's monsters and demonsand all these scary things um,
but but it it blew my mind.
I could not believe thatsomething would be in in the
(06:29):
first person perspective, sothat already um had kind of
taken it there and there was somuch buzz around the idea of you
could um, it was under a modelthat the way that you could get
it was.
It was called shareware, which,uh, I guess we kind of have to
go back to talk about softwarein general, because so many
things are just downloaded now,but people are passing around
(06:49):
disks that you could getbasically the first third of the
game for free.
You could play through I thinkit was between 8 and 10 levels
that were designed in thebeginning and that was free.
You could play through that.
But in order to get the lasttwo volumes of the game, of the
game, or um episodes of the game, you had to uh buy it.
(07:09):
And what is also wild about thisis thinking about um.
You know, when you go to buy avideo game in the store, it's
always in a pre-packaged kind ofbox.
If not download it, like the,the people that are still
holding onto hardware um, youhave to go in and uh, basically
they would sell places like compUSA or like these stores uh,
(07:31):
the rights to sell the discs outof a box and they would give
them to.
You know, like, sell them thatand say, like, just slap a price
on it, you can make the boxlook however you want.
So people who have copies ofdoom from the uh mid nineties.
They all all the boxes aredifferent depending on what you
got, because it was such adifferent way to distribute this
(07:52):
piece of software.
Essentially, the the reason Iwanted to talk about it today is
not just because of theinfluence it had on me.
This isn't an autobiographicalepisode, but there is a.
There's an interesting wave ofprogramming that has kind of
caught my eye in that this gamefrom 1994, it is very historic
(08:17):
and so of course people aregoing to continue to talk about
it.
And if it has all of thesemarks of modern gaming for why
first-person shooters are sopopular, that's going to be
something to talk about.
But it's actually also aprogramming.
I don't know how would I phrasethis.
It's a programming challenge.
Yeah, it's like a programmingchallenge that recently there's
(08:40):
been a wave of people probablyover the past 10 years, but I've
really seen it pick up in thepast three years of people using
the original source code ofdoom to program it into very
strange places that are not justcomputers, uh, that can run
this software.
So, um, obviously you've gotphones like that somewhere that
(09:02):
you can imagine.
I do have a phone obviouslyyou've got phones like that
somewhere that you can imaginethese things.
I do have a phone, absolutely,and we hope that you do too at
home um, go buy a phone.
Ron (09:09):
If you don't have one, you gotta go get one before you can
listen to this episode pro phonepodcast yeah, talk to your
parents.
Doug (09:15):
Tell them it's time I deserve a phone thank you, um,
but what uh looking at that,with some of the things that uh
could be interesting like?
I don't know if the best way todo is go through a guessing
game here, but what are some ofthe strangest areas that you can
imagine this game beingprogrammed into?
Ron (09:35):
The hump of a camel.
Okay, Ron Got him.
It's not that strange, is it?
Doug (09:44):
We are going to get into the biological.
It is going to get very strangeonce we look at some of the
other stable points.
There is going to be one stopthat we take that is biological.
But no, I'm looking for moremechanical.
Ron (09:58):
Okay, so I do have some experience.
The strangest thing I've seensomeone program the video game
Doom onto was a calculator.
I couldn't tell you what kindof calculator.
I was never a calculator guy.
I can't tell my T-1000 from a TMath calculator.
Yeah, some sort of mathcalculator.
Don (10:15):
And.
Ron (10:15):
I had like a fifth grade student who was like, just
showed me, look, I got Doom onhere.
I'm like what.
And he was playing Doom on acalculator and it looked really
good, Like, and he said he didit himself and I was so
completely blown away andconfused and I was like, wow,
this must be the smartest kid inthe world.
This guy's the next IsaacNewton.
Doug (10:39):
Yes, um, yeah, that that is exactly like what you're
experiencing.
Live there.
Um is interesting.
Yes, ti 84 calculators havebecome a staple of this Um, and
so to think that, something from1994, that, um, my dad, I think
, had to buy extra Ram for atthe time to make sure, or like a
new chip that he had to put onhis motherboard, or new
(11:01):
motherboard, um, you're justsaying words now.
Don (11:04):
You don't.
You don't know what he did.
Motherboard and ram are realwords those are words, and
you're correct.
Doug (11:10):
I don't know which one between the two, but he did have
to increase the processingpower of his computer so we
could play doom at home theseare all words.
Ron (11:16):
I've seen labeling aisles in a fries electronics
absolutely rest in peace.
Fries electronics oh my god, myfavorite store ever.
Me too, I'd love to frieselectronics absolutely.
Doug (11:29):
Yeah, dad and I would take many a trip um to go look at
games and computer parts um whyis this building so tall?
Absolutely for selling dvds andcables because when you say I
found the game I wanted, itneeds to echo through a huge
warehouse.
That's it um.
(11:49):
So yeah, ti-84 calculators umkind of became a mainstay
because they could process umthe the game.
So that that's one um any otherguesses or okay, so weirder
than a calculator, yeah yeah, itdoes get weirder.
Tamagotchi, tamagotchi I didn'tfind anything on that and it is
possible, but no, I did not findany tamagotchis that had them
(12:12):
programmed.
Um, although there is a devicecalled the tilt, which is about
the size of three legos stackedon top of each other, that has a
screen about the size of yourpinky nail that responds to
movement, uh, left, right, upand down, uh, that somebody did
program doom into and all themovement controls were done
through tilting the object andpressing the lego button on the
(12:33):
top of it in order to shoot sothat is another item sick yeah,
absolutely microwave ovenmicrowave oven.
I have not not seen up to thispoint.
That's another one, and what'swild about this is maybe is the
answer, but a refrigerator twoyears ago has been taken care of
(12:55):
.
There was a refrigerator thathad an LG screen that was
attached to it and when youwould open up the door to get a
beverage and then go back toclose it, it would load up e1m1
that you could play through theentire time.
Um, and I think when you theyhad it programmed to when you
shot the first enemy, it couldstart dispensing ice, which I
thought was absolutely insane.
(13:16):
But that's something else.
That's there.
What's e1m1?
That is episode one, uh, mapone, the very first level of
Doom that I sang from at thebeginning of this episode here.
Don (13:29):
The Jetta commercial.
Doug (13:30):
Yes, the Jetta commercial, indeed Some other notable
options If you had the versionand I don't know if MacBooks are
still doing this, but there wasa digital display bar that was
at the top of macbooks that youcould use to turn volume up and
down the touch bar thank youobviously and no they don't make
them anymore, but they stillexist special edition.
(13:52):
Uh well, you could have gottenan even more special edition in
which somebody just programmedthe led in the top of that bar
to play doom, so not the actualcomputer that's running it, but
just the, the, the volumecontrols and brightness controls
.
That was reprogrammed so itwould play doom in the bar while
your computer was running acompletely separate operation
(14:13):
perfect like a secret secret I'min a meeting look I'm working
Ron (14:18):
yeah absolutely working awfully hard over there, don,
that's right that's right.
Doug (14:23):
Um so that was there.
Um we uh also have had um anatm.
There was an atm.
Ron (14:31):
Uh, that was programmed would it dispense all the money
when you beat the level?
Doug (14:35):
that you had to finish the entire game.
Don (14:37):
To get there, you had to get all the way through hell and
the line, the line behind thatexactly you go.
Doug (14:45):
You select the difficulty, and then it decided what
stratosphere of capitalism youwere strapped into forever.
Don (14:50):
That's the ATM I wish they had at the casinos in Vegas.
Yeah oh, I couldn't agree more.
Oh man, oh man, I can't get it.
That's right.
Doug (15:00):
Another option there old generation iPods, one of my
favorites.
A pregnancy test.
A pregnancy test, uh, a coupleof years ago.
Ron (15:10):
What are the mecha like?
Uh, uh, maybe I'm showing mylack of knowledge but how many
inputs are there on a, on apregnancy test?
I think this is the piece stick.
Don (15:21):
Yeah.
Doug (15:24):
Originally it was just one line, two lines or a dot.
Now, uh, featuring doom.
Um, I don't think it played the.
I imagine the, the chugging aguitar that I did in the
beginning, coming out of apregnancy test right.
But yeah, pregnancy test wasused to run Doom as well.
It looks incredibly archaic andyou can barely see what's
(15:44):
happening in the graphics, butthe entire game can run through
that, as poorly manifested asthat is.
That is the one that youreferred to earlier.
Ron, you're joking around abouta camel, but an.
MIT biotech researcher was ableto get at least at least like
(16:05):
frames to begin to pop up.
Ron (16:08):
In the eyes of a chimpanzee .
Doug (16:11):
No, actually off of gut bacteria.
So, MIT researcher LaurenRamlin didn't get the game going
on a digital simulation ofbacteria, but turned actual
bacteria into pixels to displaythe game.
The frames were running that itwould change a frame about
(16:32):
every 70 minutes, a frame aboutevery 70 minutes, and so
somebody had calculated that ittakes.
Uh, if somebody were to gothrough the entire game off of
gut bacteria, it would take 600years to finish the game.
But somebody actually used gutbacteria.
Ron (16:45):
So we're putting gut bacteria in like a dish or
something, and then we arecommanding them to move so that
they order themselves into theshapes of pixels that create a
picture.
Doug (16:55):
We're now getting just past my area of expertise, if
not far beyond it at this point,but from what I saw, there was
a digital input screen that kindof looked like a reverse
negative image and tons of wiresjust going into some guy's
abdomen.
Ron (17:18):
He's screaming.
It's so funny because I wasthinking hey, chill out, charlie
, we got two frames.
Doug (17:26):
Yeah, we're almost there.
I kept thinking about how funnyif it was an actual person.
I don't think it was.
No, I don't think it was in aperson, I think it was just gut
bacteria used as a sample, but Iwas thinking if somebody was
hooked in they would look kindof like the demons in Doom, yeah
, yeah.
That have kind of likecybernetic, you know,
attachments to them in some way.
Ron (17:45):
This sounds like a gross misappropriation of research
funds.
Yeah, 100%.
I don't know why you can't eatgluten, but but look at this
doom on my gut.
Doug (18:01):
You thought your stomach ache was bad.
Now, doom that's right.
Exactly.
So, yeah, this, this is somewild stuff, obviously, and it
got me thinking about it alittle bit because this game
from my childhood.
So so to go back for just asecond, this game for my
childhood I I loved.
I can't even tell you.
(18:22):
I think there was at least twosummers that that was what I was
doing during the summer.
It was like, yes, I would playwith friends, but when mom and
dad went off to work, I rememberbooting up MS-DOS, which, if
we're not familiar with,obviously now operating systems
have a graphical interface.
You just have to type in everysingle command and executable
(18:42):
that you would put into yourcomputer.
And I remember having friendsover and like just going to the
hard drive and typing in DIR,which is just directory, and it
would just tell you what filesyou had on your computer.
And so my friends would comeover and be like you want to see
something really crazy.
I just opened the directory andit would just list you what
files you had on your computer.
And so my friends would comeover and be like you want to see
something really crazy.
I just opened the directory andit would just list all the
files on my computer and I'dlook at them.
I'm like I can hack.
There's nothing absolutelyinteresting about it.
(19:06):
Like such a basic, this looks alot like that scene in Jurassic
Park right guys, no, no no.
Don (19:12):
You don't have the magic password.
Doug (19:15):
So, yeah, I've been going through, but I, I, I had it
memorized essentially like howto get to doom and go through
the process, and I, I rememberjust loving you know, going
through the different levels thelevel design is so good and
like finding the different keycards, going to different places
and trying to run through theexits of these levels.
But what world I don'tunderstand is why now and we're
(19:37):
currently in the year 2024, whywe're looking at this game that
is now 30 years old and we'restill trying to program that one
specifically onto so manydifferent devices and objects.
Like, why has this become sucha challenge?
And so I throw that to you guysfor just a second of why this
(20:01):
game?
Why this game, in particular,with the very limited knowledge
that we have?
What would you think?
Don (20:09):
Why not?
Because it's there.
Ron (20:11):
Because it's there, okay, but I mean, we're not recreating
Pokemon.
Not, we're not.
We're not recreating pokemon,we're not recreating, uh, the
first mario game.
Uh, there must be.
Uh, is there like a sort of agross simplicity in its, in its
programming, or something?
Is it just like?
Doug (20:31):
you know like a fifth grader with a calculator can
program this kid who just blewyour mind is the next great
programmer of his time.
Well, um, from from what I'vebeen able to take in, I do think
that that is a part of it is.
It does come from an era that,um, this was programmed in
assembly language.
So we're looking at down to themicrochip and sending the.
(20:54):
Uh, this is where the memory isgoing to go and this is what I
want the memory of the computerto be used for.
Um, this was something that wasprogrammed in a lower level
language that people couldaccess immediately.
Um, I, I, my, my hypothesis is,um, one of the the things that
interests me the most stillabout the original doom and doom
(21:16):
to like that that system is in1997.
Um, john Carmack, who is the oneof the lead programmers in
software, released the sourcecode to the internet and said
run wild with it.
Essentially, you can even lookin, and this was something I was
looking at.
In the read me file there's asection in which he is talking
(21:37):
about.
I strongly suggest that, ifyou're interested in modifying
this game and we hope that youare that you continue to
interact as a community.
Think about the weapons thatyou can add.
Maybe you add flying.
You can change the format ofthis game in some way, and I
think that there's a lot thatcan be said for the fact that he
decided to release the code tothe public that they could use
it.
They'd already moved on totheir next game, quake, which
(21:59):
that's a whole separate podcastabout e-sports and everything
else.
Cause arguably that started thatUm, but he released it into the
community that everybody couldkind of begin to build off of
that and um, and they did, andthey still are to this day, um,
one um one.
One very interesting uhdirection that this has uh gone
(22:19):
in is a mod was released in the,I believe the past five years
called my house um, which is adoom mod.
Are either of you familiar withum, the book house of leaves?
Yeah house of leaves.
What do you know about house ofleaves?
Ron (22:34):
I've read houseaves.
It's a sort of what are therelike three narratives or
something.
It's a sort of like a bookabout a guy finding a book,
about a person writing a book.
Am I right?
Doug (22:49):
It's been a while, but yeah, yeah, okay.
Ron (22:51):
So the person in a house, yeah, anyways, it involves this
sort of like multidimensionalhouse, right, that when people
enter it, the the interiorvolume of the house does not
match as sort of outwardappearance, right, and so they
eventually have to send uh.
My favorite part was, like the,the essentially start sending
like polar explorers into thishouse to like map it out or find
the very center of it.
(23:12):
Um, and it's, it's kind of a uh, avant-garde, uh-esque novel,
right, or uh, where there arethere's uh.
The author plays with theformatting of pages so that
there's missing text, orsometimes the text is tilted so
that you actually have tophysically rotate the book in
order to read it, and it becomesa kind of fun puzzle, right
(23:32):
I've always described it topeople as a book that's almost
haunted by itself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah in a way it islike a haunted house story,
right, but in a yeah, a Very funnovel new way.
Doug (23:43):
Yeah, a programmer a few years ago made a modification to
the game called my House, inwhich, when you boot it up, you
are put in front of what lookslike a suburban house inside of
a squared off fence.
You go into the house.
There's some demons from thegame Doom, that you're attacking
as you're going in and as youcontinue to traverse the
(24:03):
corridors, exactly as you justdescribed.
Because of the programming ofthe game and how simple it is to
build off of itself, he wasable to create that each time
that you go into a new area, thedimensions of the house change.
So the way that it's programmed.
It's interesting, because ofhow the format is presented to
itself, that when it goesthrough doors, there's places
(24:25):
that clearly, based on themechanics of how it's designed,
when somebody goes in through adoor, it opens up into a new
corridor and it's impossiblethat it could be there because
of the way that it's designed,essentially like there's no way
that physically, there could betwo doors in a segment where
there was one hallway that'sleading to the place that it is,
but because of the nature ofhow you can program doom, the
(24:48):
designer of that file, whocontinues to remain anonymous,
is most likely from what peoplecan speculate online, use the
doom programming code becauseyou could build on top of it,
within the source frame of thecode, in order for it to do the
same thing that this book did,of kind of putting you into like
an alternate dimension in whichthe dimensions of the house can
continue to manipulatethemselves.
(25:10):
And, um, the game I think it has, like you know, five different
endings and depending on how yougo through it and what you do
with the files within the game,it changes your experience.
But even still, then I'm lookingat it's a 30 year old game and
you want to to put thismasterwork that's a commentary
on a piece of literature, butthen putting it as a video game.
And you're still going to useDoom to do it.
(25:31):
And it continues to mystify mebecause again, it's this very,
you know, archaic.
It's a piece of history, butagain people are still using it
as this modification.
So, going back to this idea, Ithink that John Carmack, because
he decided to say this shouldbe the thing that people are
free to use and design their owngames with, I think that that
(25:51):
lends to this entire community,that now we get today people who
are using gut bacteria to toprogram this game because of the
free association with thispiece of art that he made and
said go out and make amazingstuff with it.
We see that that's stillhappening today.
Ron (26:07):
I do think that's one of the like interesting things
about video games as a medium isthat they do cultivate these
oftentimes not all video gamesright.
Some video games are still likeproducts and they're the people
that make them are veryprotective of the code and
giving players and creatorsaccess to that code to play with
that right.
But, like, the idea of moddinga video game is fairly common
(26:29):
for certain kinds of games.
Right, the idea that the playerinteracts with the art, the
creation, in more ways than justplaying through it, the way it
was intended, that you canactually create on top of that
right.
Are there other mediums we canthink of that where, like, uh,
the, the audience is um kind ofinvited to create with the like
(26:53):
on, build on top of the strataof the medium, in the same way
that, like, video gamesfrequently are, because it
sounds like that's part of whatyou're excited about here.
Right, like this game existedbut then it was released to
people and then they could umcontinue to utilize it in the
ways they saw fit or exciting.
Right In like fan fiction.
Don (27:12):
Yeah, it kind of works like that right, the universe has
been established for you andthen fans come along and tell
stories that layer on top ofthat universe and usually change
details and things like that.
But that's the only thing I canreally.
I mean, there's some like, somelike participatory theatrical.
Ron (27:27):
You know one-off things you can go to it yeah, some weird,
some show or something, some guyyou knew in college who tricked
someone into giving him a playspace for night.
Don (27:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's right but I think you're right, the,
the, um, the one of the thingsthat draws people to that, the
medium of the of the games, isthat it, it, it does allow the,
the players, some some freedomof creativity and application on
top of it, and that's actuallyone of the things that that in
the story of doom because I'mnot like, I don't play doom,
(28:01):
still, I don't like it.
I don't remember.
I remember shooting themeatballs with teeth, that's all
I remember yeah, caco demonsI'm familiar, um, but uh, that
it was one of the first networkgames, so it was a.
It was one of the first gameswhere you were not just playing
against the machine, you wereplaying against other people.
(28:22):
And it started off in, in, youknow, college computer science
labs, right with with cablestrung.
But then it was the first right, it was the first online they
were the first.
Doug (28:35):
Um, they were the first.
It was like there were onlinegames, but it was kind of like
more games which, like you takea turn, then I take a turn,
you're sending it back and forthand waiting for the yes, yeah,
chess strategy games.
Don (28:44):
Golf like I take my swings, you take a turn.
Doug (28:45):
then I take a turn.
You're sending it back andforth and waiting for the yes,
chess strategy games, golf, likeI take my swings, you take my
swings.
They wanted live real time,like send the bod from your
modem, and we're gonna do thisin real time.
Don (28:56):
yes, so I think that, actually that because it's the
first game that has thatcommunity aspect I think that is
part of the answer to thequestion you're asking us about
why it has this staying power inand because the focus from the
from the get go, was on buildinga community of players that are
all in the same universe, sameenvironment and interacting with
(29:17):
the same features.
So um, so yeah, when it'sreleased and then the community
feels a responsibility not onlyto um to continue the work that
Carmack started, but then toenjoy doing it and and being
creative with it.
Doug (29:30):
Yeah, and it's.
It's one of the things thatI've had to look at is I've I
was just, you know, listening toso many different podcasts.
I watched um, a high scoreepisode on doom.
Uh, I was listening to JohnRomero, who was one of the other
programmers, talk about theprocess of what they were doing
and what they were pulling fromcreatively, and it's so
(29:51):
interesting because it's a lotof things I think that we've
touched on, like a lot of theideas for what the demons look
like, like the meatball withteeth that you're talking about
was pulled from beholders intheir dungeons and dragons
section of the session of, like,how do we turn that into
something that's more demonic?
And then at one point, they hadlicensed um, they had licensed
to do a video game based on themovie aliens which had come out,
(30:14):
and then they decided to doaway with that.
But then what stuck was the ideaof these like space military
bases that they were goingthrough and different ships and
things like that.
And you see, or even the musicthat I was alluding to and
singing earlier, is becausethey're playing like Slayer and
Metallica, as they're continuingto program all of these things.
And you see, like, where a lotof the things that were
(30:36):
influencing them end up showingup in the game.
And I think that it's probablyjust a testament to id Software
and the fact that they were soinspired by these things and saw
that inspiration was a big partof what they did.
And they, you know, I wouldassume that they would also be
putting that out because they'reseeing what the community is
already starting to do andthey're like, well then, have at
(30:56):
it.
And like, let's see what we cancontinue to make.
And it's yeah, it's justincredible that it's lasted for
such a long time.
Ron (31:04):
Yeah, I think that you make a good point, don about like it
had a community from thebeginning.
Right.
I think in some ways this issort of like the backgammon
question.
Right, you were asking us a fewweeks ago which was, like you
know why this game right, and soat least it has to have an
audience to begin with, right,like are there people creating
for some old?
(31:24):
Like what were?
Doug (31:29):
they muds multi-user dungeons.
Have you ever heard of these?
Ron (31:30):
these are like yeah, they're like proto multiplayer
games, right yeah I'm sure thereare people still programming
like weird mud games, right,yeah, but um, they're not trying
to run them on a refrigerator,right?
Doug (31:40):
probably because they didn't have that level of
popular penetration Right.
Yeah.
Ron (31:44):
And so yeah, so it has to have like a basis or a history
of communal involvement.
Like you said, the source codemust be like pretty wieldable,
right, Like pretty versatile.
You can do a lot with it or fitit onto a lot of things, and
then I feel like there must belike another ingredient here,
though Right.
Doug (32:04):
Like well, one thing.
There's another aspect that Ihaven't even touched on, um,
which is they.
They were sitting a lot oftimes when they'd be programming
.
They had a Nintendoentertainment set like the
original NES was sitting next tothem, and one of the things
that really inspired them wasplaying super Mario brothers
three.
And this is something I takefor granted because, like I just
(32:24):
, I grew up with super mariobrothers three and I was just
always seeing it.
But there was, um a desire forcomputer games to get the same
smooth feeling of mario mariobeing able to go across the
screen, and it wasn't refreshingthe screen to where it'd have
to reset the screen completely.
It just he could just verysmoothly go across the screen
(32:46):
and there was no um, there wasno reset where the image had to
change.
In a way, it's like it felt likethe world was just continuous,
the more that he would run backforth, up and down.
Everything was there, and thatwas a big thing that, um, the
programming team at id had puttogether was.
They found a way to do that onthe computer through vertical
programming, of putting thingsinto columns, so you weren't
(33:07):
having to refresh the screenover and over again.
It was like the sides of thescreen were the only things that
had to be reset.
So that perspective, that doomis giving you from this Ray it's
called Ray casting of lookingout from the perspective of the
first person, was able to justprogram within these columns the
the places that were refreshedso it could run at a very fast
(33:28):
speed.
So also, I mean I would thinkthat this was a big deal because
people were like, oh, theyfinally fixed the problem that
we've been having with computergaming.
It's finally at the speed wewant.
It looks like it's a console,so now we can start to play with
code.
That's actually really good andwe don't have to solve this
gigantic problem of how do weput this at the same refresh
rate as, like some of the thingsthat had mystified them for so
(33:51):
many years before so you'resaying it's like an engineering
feat also right it seems to bethere's
Don (33:56):
several yeah, no, karmic has several engineering feats
that he accomplished here.
So the one that you'redescribing is called um, binary
space partitioning, um, which,uh, which does exactly what you
say.
So it takes the perspectivefrom one individual spot and it
allows the computer to renderonly the surfaces that are
visible from that location andnot anything that's behind, like
(34:17):
blocked by a wall.
So traditionally in, like the,the consoles, what would be
happening in a 3d environment,is it?
It's called picture framerendering, so it renders the
background and then it rendersthe mountains on top of the
background and then the tree infront of them.
So that way, when it's donewith all that layering, the view
that you get is the correct 3dview.
But that requires a lot ofprocessing because it has to
(34:38):
process every single one ofthose, those planes.
But what, uh?
What Carmack came up with withbinary space partitioning is is
um, they would draw the map andthen um the map prior to the
gameplay.
So this is when the map iscreated, it, it divides itself,
it partitions itself intoindividual sectors and then
(34:59):
subsectors, so that the gamealready knows, in any given
location, which frames it has toor which not frames, which
columns it has to render and itdoesn't render anything else.
So it's actually a super lightrendering engine.
So it doesn't take up, which iswhy it will run on a computer
where it from 1993, where othergames wouldn't run on a computer
from 1993.
Doug (35:19):
It's interesting you say that because I saw somebody who
was looking at it through aprogramming base that it could
graphically render what it lookslike from a top down view.
And what I found fascinatingabout that, and speaks to your
point, is the character in thegame is actually not moving, and
what I mean by that is the mapis moving around the character
Right.
(35:40):
So it's like, when you see it,you're just seeing the static
thing and a map flying all overthe place around this dot, which
is the character.
And that also is interestingbecause, of course, when you're
playing the game, you'rethinking about you because it's
from your first personperspective, running around in
this environment and blowingstuff up and doing what you do.
But really and I think thatspeaks to his innovation and
(36:01):
genius is he's looking at itfrom the perspective.
How are we going to render this?
Well, now, the map is the thingthat is moving around this and
we can render it that way.
So little things like that oflike, how do you solve these
problems?
And it seems like earlyprogramming, because, from what
I, when I talk to people, itseems like you're kind of always
looking within the realmsdesigning games nowadays, that
you have a base Like, you'relike.
(36:22):
Well, I'm using unity, I'musing this engine, I'm using,
I'm using the doom engine, youknow like, or the quake engine,
whatever it is.
There's an engine that'salready kind of setting up the
parameters for what you're doing.
But he's looking at it from theperspective of like, going back
down to maybe not binary ofones and zeros, but pretty close
to that of, like I need tocommand this to do this, so I
can actually set up the enginefor what I'm trying to
(36:44):
accomplish, which makes it thatthat programming code yeah.
Don (36:49):
It's akin to um, it's when you go to the theater, right?
So the the way I think aboutbinary space and this is rough
analogy, but just for ournon-computer science listeners
um, if you go to the theater andyou see a backdrop painted on
the set and there's a big couchin front of it, they didn't have
to build the set behind thecouch because nobody in the
(37:11):
audience right, right so that'swhat the computer is doing.
It's, it's deciding oh, nobodycan see what's behind that wall,
so I'm not rendering any ofthat right.
Um, but the.
But the other thing thatcarmack does is he also develops
this thing called hardwareabstraction, where each
component is modular.
So there's a component in hiscode that is just dealing with
(37:32):
the graphics and a componentthat is just dealing with the
sound and a different componentthat's dealing with the input,
and all of that runs throughkind of like a decoder ring
called the hardware abstractionlayer.
And so one of the reasons youcan port this to so many other
devices is all you have tochange is that hardware
abstraction, the decoder ring,and then the rest of the of the
code, works fine.
So two things right.
(37:54):
We've got the, the binary spacepartitioning that lowers the
computation requirement of thehardware, and then you've got
this decoder ring that you justhave to change this one element
and then it'll work on apregnancy test or it'll work on
a refrigerator or whatever.
So those are the two like thetechnical things that I found
that allow this to be ported somany different places.
(38:15):
But I don't think we've touchedon the question of why you can
do it but like why would you putpoor doom, why would you port
doom to a pregnancy test or togut bacteria or to a microwave
or to whatever?
Why?
Ron (38:31):
I think there's a missing element, yeah, that we're
talking about, which is um also,it just needs to be fun, like
it needs to be a good game,right, like it needs to not be
light and easy to uh manipulateand uh run on all these devices,
but it has to be like reallycool, right like, like you know,
(38:52):
pong pong didn't have much,yeah, yeah, people aren't
putting pong right, like youknow, but pong was like a was
like a artistic or like ahistorical artifact.
My parents would like I feellike they bought these atari,
stick it to like vga, plug itinto your tv like they bought
like five of these when we werekids, and you'd play it like on
christmas day and be like, ohwow, cool, we're gonna play some
(39:13):
older.
And then you're like, oh god,we're gonna play pong I still
love pong.
Don (39:19):
My grandparents bought the original pong.
Ron (39:20):
It was the coolest thing when it was the only thing that
existed.
Don (39:24):
Absolutely yeah, but uh you know, atari was cool too, and
it was the only thing thatexisted when star wars, shadows
of the empire exists.
Ron (39:31):
You don't want to play pong .
I mean that's.
Doug (39:34):
That's very fair, I think yeah, some people are even
pushing doom aside when you getto that level of going whoa,
yeah, it's true um but I meandoom.
Ron (39:43):
So you're saying the doom is fun.
Yeah, it's a fun game.
Don (39:45):
Right, it's a, it's a because who doesn't want to
shoot a meatball?
Ron (39:48):
yeah, like I think there are lots of elements of doom
that lend it like uh, you knowthere are lots of shooter games
and, like you said, this is notthe first shooter game, um, but
like uh the.
The game design is pretty geniusalso, right.
Right, you have these multipletypes of enemies.
They all have, like, differentbehaviors.
They provide differentchallenges.
You can kind of remix thecombat areas by just by choosing
(40:11):
which of these enemies show upand how many of them.
So now there's two flying guysand three guys who run at you
super fast.
So then it's like very quickdecision making who do I target
first, who do I hit?
Don (40:22):
And then there's like room to execute with actual skill
right and I I might be inventingthis, so I'm asking for help.
Are there sections where thereit's like a puzzle kind of like
you can?
See the enemy, but you don'tknow how to get to the enemy, to
to a bit like that.
Doug (40:37):
Um, the biggest thing and this was actually the part I of
course like love the shooting,because it's like ooh, explodey,
explodey, boom, boom.
Like of course you're going tolove that when you're younger.
But I think the staying powerwas the maps of having to get
certain key cards to accesscertain areas.
Or you would see like an areaof like I can't get up to there,
how is that possible?
(40:57):
But there'd be like a secretdoor in the corner or switch
that you'd flip or you'd go to acertain area and something
would happen, or a trap doorwould kind of spring, which is
also very Dungeons and Dragons,like all of these maps that are
kind of outlined, with all ofthese tricks that are designed
for you to go through, and sothat's a part of it too is as
much as it's a shooter, it'salso, I agree, like it's very
much a puzzle as well, as you'regoing through Scratches that
(41:21):
like a human exploration itchright, Like it is not just a
combat game, it is also yeah,you can kind of like pick the
parts of it you want to do.
Ron (41:31):
Really well, I actually I never had patience for the
exploration parts.
I was like I don't care that,I'll watch someone on.
Youtube, get up there.
I just want to go do moreshooting Stick with your 2016,.
Man, a hundred percent, no, butto go do more shooting stick
with your 2016 man yeah 100percent?
Doug (41:44):
um no, but to go back to your question, don't yeah like
what?
Why this?
one I would answer.
It's a bit more abstract, but Ithink that it's a great example
of artistic expression withvideo game, and what I mean by
that is you're looking at a gamethat's coming out that has yes,
it's innovative for its time,but right before that, the
(42:07):
Wolfenstein 3d was also amassive success, which was
taking a world war two stealthygame and then putting it into
first person perspective.
That did a very similar thing.
Before that they had a gamecalled catacomb 3d, which my, my
dad and I had, which was theirfirst experience, or like kind
of one of their first delvesinto first person perspective,
although you kind of have like amage hand that you're like
(42:29):
fighting enemies in a dungeonwith Um.
But doom seemed like it had acertain amount of artistic flair
in that.
Uh, people have described it as2.5 D, like where it's just
it's giving you vertical height,it's giving you it's not just
corridors, but you're alsoseeing it that it seems like
it's more expansive levels.
(42:49):
There's lighting design, that ithas just enough dynamics, that
I think it was the first onethat really seemed like it
brought things into 3d, eventhough it wasn't full.
3d, like quake, is actuallytheir next game.
Quake is actually the real bigone.
That um kind of set that up,that that we have polygons and
textures that are mapped there.
And I wonder if that designchallenges because that was such
(43:11):
a big leap in terms of theartistic expression of video
games, in terms of like theseare these things that we've
designed from our minds, fromthe metal that we're listening
to as're designing this thing,from our Dungeons and Dragons
campaigns that we're pulling artand design.
They even had something calledthe Doom Bible which they were
going through and saying likethese are the rules and
environments of doom.
It is in this kind of sci-fiatmosphere but scientists have
(43:33):
messed too much with thistechnology and they've brought
in the realms of hell to thisMars base that everybody's
fighting through.
And though the story isn't everreally implicitly, it's not a
very like the forefront elementof the game.
As you can progress through thegame and things get more and
more, I guess, hellish as you'regoing, like deeper into the
(43:54):
realms.
The level design kind of speaksto that and I wonder if, like
those small pieces that I saw asa kid and going, this is
something completely different,if that staying power, the
simple code, so like the art,the code and the fact that it's
something that is kind of thisMarvel, is why it sticks around
like that.
Cause I don't know if I meanmaybe super Mark, but I would
(44:15):
put the I mean it's up therewith the biggest games of all
time, like maybe super Mariowould be there and, and all time
, like maybe super Mario wouldbe there, um, and, and a lot of
these like the biggest namesever.
Don (44:25):
But I think that that might be a part of it as well.
I think you're right, and the,the, that artistic expression,
right, the, the.
I think computer programmersare not often given a whole lot
of artistic credit because itseems so technical, um, but uh,
but that artistic expression,like it, can be used for, um,
(44:46):
for other purposes too.
So, um, porting doom onto somedevices has even been a type of
activism, um, so there's a, the,there's a tractor, a John Deere
tractor, right and uh, and itwas uh, the, so the, the image
of doom running on thetouchscreen on the tractor, um,
(45:07):
it was a statement that you know, John Deere locks down its
computer code and and it won'tlet you mod the tractor and it
won't let you repair the tractorand and so the the proof of
concept that you could run doomon the tractor was um the idea
that that users are able tomanipulate their own hardware
and their own computer devices.
(45:27):
So why?
Why don't their manufacturerslet that happen?
It's a it was a right to repairum activism campaign.
Um, so that right, it linksthat, that idea of artistic
expression to a cause in thiscase.
But but I think you're right.
Um other thing that I I waswondering about too is um have
(45:48):
you guys heard of the omelettest?
Ron (45:50):
Hmm, can it cook an omelet yeah?
Don (45:52):
And uh, and do you know what it's supposed to show?
Ron (45:56):
That, uh, some surfaces are very hot.
Don (45:58):
Exactly, we're on the right track, perfect, hot, exactly.
Yeah, on the right track,perfect, it's so.
The the omelet test is a.
It's a test of a of of cookingright.
It's supposed to demonstrateyour ability to cook, because
it's a relatively simple taskbut it's really complex in in
other aspects, and so it's a,it's a complete sort of event
that will demonstrate youroverall cooking ability and and
(46:21):
I'm wondering if, if portingdoom is like that because it's a
it's, the code is clean, thecode is simple.
You've just got to, you know,change that hardware abstraction
layer, but it does two thingsit proves your ability as a
coder to manipulate those things, but it also proves the
hardware's ability to run thatwhen you're done with it, right.
So it's a.
(46:41):
It's like, uh like I thinkthere's a law, right, if you go
to um like Sam Ash or a guitarcenter.
Doug (46:47):
I was just going to say this right.
Don (46:49):
When you're testing a guitar, you have to play a
stairway to heaven Right and, ofcourse, they always have a
signs up.
Doug (46:54):
Don't play stairway to heaven.
Don (46:55):
No, stairway is always what they have.
But yes, but there's alwaysright, and, and I imagine out of
the musical instruments there'sprobably a, a, a thing you're
supposed to play when you pickup a violin to see if it, if it
works.
I think that this is kind oflike how do you test the
capability of a computer?
Well, will it run doom?
And and then you prove that it,that it can, and it's.
It's the omelet test of yourhacking, it's the omelet test of
(47:18):
um, of the computer's abilityto to run it and um.
So I wonder if that's going ontoo.
Ron (47:24):
So what's kind of like a I was going to say like in the
world of literature.
Doug (47:27):
It's kind of like you have to write a book about someone
undergoing a divorce, right Likewhat stairway to heaven is to
rock music is what doom is toyeah is to the classics.
Well, I don't know about youguys, but I'm ready to go play
Deathmatch right now.
Shall we boot it up?
Yeah, please, I want the rocketlauncher Absolutely.
Do you want to play it on gutbacteria, or would you rather do
(47:49):
it on the ATM?
It only takes 600 years,absolutely.
Ron (47:52):
I'm hoping we can get it on some hair follicles or
something.
Don (47:58):
You know it's funny.
You should mention that becauseI found.
So it's not reporting doom, butI did find a story about some
scientists in Australia that areactually they've I don't know
how they've connected rat braincells onto a computer chip and
they're actually training theserandom brain cells how to play
(48:20):
doom.
Ron (48:22):
Oh, so that's the next level.
Don (48:23):
Yeah, so it's going to.
So it's, can you run it?
Can you play?
Doom Skynet is real, absolutelyWait, is it?
Ron (48:30):
working?
Are they are?
They are the?
Are the rats playing Doom?
Don (48:33):
As far as, so, as far as they have gotten so far, they've
gotten the brain cells to growon the on the chip and they on
the on the chip, and they are,they are learning.
I don't think they've actuallyplayed the whole game yet, but
it's has to do with with aimingand and and sending happy
electric signals and anduncomfortable electric signals
to the brain chip, to to tell usyeah, they are, but it's not a
(48:57):
real, it's not a real brain yet,and it's just themselves.
Doug (48:59):
So well, hopefully.
A real brain yet and it's justsome cells.
Ron (49:04):
So well, hopefully they get to at least e1 m2 by the time,
that uh incredible breakthroughsin the fields of uh
neurobiology, absolutely.
Thank you, john karmack.
Doug (49:11):
Absolutely yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I.
I am eternally grateful to idsoftware for some of the best
memories of my childhood, and soI am really.
But it is amazing to me to seethe ways that it continues to
play out, because I do thinkthat it's art and I think that
this conversation is anexpression of that.
Ron (49:30):
And it is cool to see something from your childhood
like persist right and beadopted by subsequent
generations who find somethingcool about it and make it their
own in some way.
Doug (49:39):
Right, Big, time, absolutely, gentlemen.
Thank you for indulging me andtaking me back.
I'll go boot up the computersright now.
Ron (49:47):
Thank you, Dougie doom.
Don (49:48):
And we're never going to get another episode done.
You guys are going to beplaying forever.
Doug (49:52):
What can I say?
I love that BFG 9,000 childrenof the nineties.
You.
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