April 7, 2017 • 47 mins
From humble beginnings to massive success, we follow the rest of the id Software story. When did the founders leave and why? And what's going on there now?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland's senior writer for how stuff
works dot com, and today's episode is part two of
the ID Software story. Remember this was a request from
(00:24):
Dave who wrote to me and asked for an episode
about ID Software. But as it turns out, there's too
much to talk about for one episode. So in our
last episode, Early talked about the people responsible for forming
ID Software and how they found early success with titles
like Commander Keene and Wolfenstein three D. Today we pick
up where I left off with the development of the
(00:45):
blockbuster title Doom. Now, the company was still just a
small team of developers and they had a problem. There
weren't enough people to work on a follow up to Wolfenstein,
and simuled peneously work on the new Doom project. What's more,
the people at in Software all wanted to work on Doom.
(01:07):
They wanted to work on something new rather than create
a sequel to an already existing game, but there was
a lot of pressure from Apage to create a sequel.
Wolfenstein had been the most successful title to debut on
apog in its history, so they decided to do the
reasonable thing. They outsourced Wolfenstein too. They licensed out the
(01:29):
work to APOG, which got started on the project, but
after some time in development in software didn't really see
it progressing very well. They didn't think it was making
any progress, so they pulled the plug on the project.
Appog ended up taking these lemons and making Lemonade later on,
(01:49):
converting the work they had already produced into a brand
new title called Rise of the Triad. Talk a little
bit more about that in a second. They also hired
a couple of folks in nineteen One of them ended
up making a big name for himself a little bit
later on in the video game world. That would be
American McGhee. He's perhaps most famous for his Dark Alice
(02:13):
in Wonderland inspired games, which he made with e A
after his tenure with ID Software ended in nine. McGhee
started at ID as a tech support worker and eventually
worked his way up to designer, but there was a
point where the company decided that McGee's work and the
company's direction were no longer a good fit, and so
(02:37):
he was let go. One thing that did make Doom
possible was the evolution of computer hardware. The team had
been bumping up against the upper limits of the previous
generation of PCs, but over time, the really expensive Intel
three eight six microprocessor cost had started to come down,
and now it was finding its way into consumer level PCs.
(03:03):
More people were able to afford a three eight six PC,
which was better equipped to handle the demands of a
beefy game engine, or at least beefy at the time.
Three six have been around for a while. It first
launched in this Intel microprocessor. It took about a year
for manufacturing to ramp up to prod the levels that
(03:25):
Intel wanted, but even when they did reach those levels,
they were still really expensive, so very few people were
actually able to afford them. By today's standards, a three
six microprocessor would probably seem pretty crude and clunky. It
had only two seventy five thousand transistors on it A
little microprocessor now, I say only because today's microprocessors have
(03:50):
more than a billion transistors on them, so two five
thousand is nothing compared to today's uh microprocessors. The clock rate,
as in how fast the three D six microprocessor could work,
was between twelve mega hurts up to forty mega hurts
if you're overclocking it on the extreme end. And again,
your basic smartphone today can outperform those specs. But at
(04:13):
the time it was a state of the art machine
and it was just what it needed to take the
next step in game development. John Carmack, at the ripe
old age of twenty one years old, began to experiment
with stuff that older game engines just couldn't handle. That
included creating irregular shapes in the environment like uh, irregular
(04:36):
walls or floors that sloped around. He also wanted dynamic
lighting and the option to move in or outdoors. These
were all elements that would have been really challenging back
in the older Wolfenstein days, that that game engine just
couldn't handle this kind of level of complexity. And then
he also had another goal. He wanted gameplay to be
(04:56):
immersive and fast. Fast was really importan and it had
to be a fast paced game and really get the
players blood pumping. So he wanted these abilities, this ability
to make more complex environments, but not at the expense
of the speed of the game. As Carmack worked on
the engine, uh Romero started programming the levels and designed
(05:20):
much of the look and sound of the game. For inspiration,
the team looked at the art of hr Geiger, and
that was Geiger's work that inspired the Alien film franchise,
so the team used that art to guide decisions in
level and monster design. The walls in Doom sometimes have
hideous faces incorporated into them, and many of the demons
(05:44):
look pretty monstrous as well. Romero points out that by
today's standards, uh they might seem a bit cartoony, but
at the time it was considered a really etchy approach
to game design. Tom Hall, who had put up some
resistance during the development of Wolfenstein three D, campaigned for
are a rich story for Doom. He had in mind
an opening scene that would set the rest of the
(06:05):
game in motion, and in that scene, the player would
be taking on the role of a soldier in the
middle of a card game with the rest of his squad,
and in the middle of the game, a demon would
burst in, killing everyone but the player, and then the
game would start, and his ideas helped shape design decisions,
but as he tells it all later on, the focus
was really more on the technical side of making the
(06:27):
game work and less on the narrative or story side.
He'd say it would be a few years before you
would see a first person shooter incorporate deep story elements,
and the game he sites is really nailing. It was
Half Life, which was a from a totally different company.
It's from Valve, That would be the first real example
(06:48):
of that sort of thing. But he wanted it to
be Doom, and he started to feel really discouraged that
a lot of his ideas were being rejected. He wanted
rooms to have a purpose in Doom, so that when
you walked into a room in the game, you understood
why the room was there. It had a reason for existing.
It wasn't just one in a series of rooms that
(07:09):
make up a level, or just a weird, interchangeable environment
with undefined spaces. In his Doom, you wouldn't wonder why
two rooms connected together, or what purpose a weird path
might serve. It would have a reason and you would
understand what it was. To him, level design needed to
make sense and serve the story, but the development of
(07:31):
the game didn't really allow for his designs, and so
the levels were less detailed, less logical. Hall himself designed
about seven levels, according to his own estimation. He said
Romero was responsible for some of the more iconic levels
in Doom, particularly the ones that used multiple vertical planes,
you know, multiple levels within a game level. So I'm
(07:53):
using level in two different ways here, game levels meaning
at a stage in a game, and love was within
the game or within that stage rather meaning different vertical platforms.
Hall's account of those days sound like they were pretty rough.
He said that the team was working every day, seven
days a week, for up to sixteen hours a day,
(08:14):
and he said he was feeling increasingly isolated at that time.
The rest of the team sensed this as well, and
eventually in Romero invited Hall over for dinner and then
told him they were letting him go. He was essentially fired,
but they had also secured another job for him over
(08:36):
at Apog, so he already had a place to go.
It wasn't like he was just cut loose, and in
two thousand and fourteen, Hall said that ultimately this came
as a huge relief. After the Shock War off, he
was the first of the four main founders of IT
to leave it's software. He would move on to Apog
and work on Rise of the Triad, which I mentioned earlier.
(08:56):
It was the game that Wolfenstein, too, would turn into
He'd work on other games too, before moving on to
co found another studio. The other studio he co founded
was one called ion Storm, rather infamous in video game circles,
and a fellow co founder was John Romero. But we'll
(09:18):
get to that part of the story a little later.
And ion Storm could be its own episode all by itself.
It was a heck of a story. I remember when
all of that was was unfolding. Meanwhile, in Adrian Carmack
relished the subject matter of Doom. It was kind of
like the opposite of Tom Hall's reaction. He thought it
(09:38):
was fantastic. He took great delight in designing and drawing
numerous demonic critters and nightmarish environments. He was happy to
move away from the more family friendly art style that
Tom Hall held dear. He and Kevin Cloud, his assistant,
designed tons of monsters and then they commissioned a sculptor
to come in and create three dimensional mob as of
(10:00):
the monsters out of clay. Then they would paint the
models and scan them in to create virtual models for
the game itself. And it gave Doom a really unique look.
And I realized that really unique is redundant. Someone who
joined in Software during the development of Doom was Sandy Peterson.
(10:21):
He was a programmer who had worked for Micropros before
joining ID Software. Micropros was another huge game that name
in the computer gaming industry in the nineteen eighties. In particular,
one of its founders is a real legend in games,
Sid Meyer. Peterson would end up designing nineteen levels for Doom,
even though he joined the project after it had already started.
(10:44):
As the game neared completion, they had a big decision
they had to make. They felt they had outgrown apages
business model, which involved that shareware approach to get gamers interested,
followed by sending a physical copy of the full game
once an order came in. Appage only had a couple
of employees handling incoming calls, and the folks over at
(11:07):
it we're getting frustrated because orders were coming in faster
than apag could respond to them. And they asked Scott
Miller if he would invest in that department and grow it,
and he seemed reluctant to do that. So it Software
decided they could do this for themselves and just do
what Appage had been doing for them, using the Internet
(11:29):
for distribution and keeping overhead costs low so that they
don't have to worry about producing physical copies and all
that kind of stuff. So they moved out to strike
out on their own. Now I got more to say
about this next phase and its software's evolution, but first
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. During
(11:56):
alpha testing of the Doom game, ID Software sent unfinished
copies to a few play testers to look for bugs
and get feedback on how the gameplay was coming together.
An early build of the game. That alpha build ended
up leaking onto the Internet, which got a ton of attention,
despite the fact that it wasn't a complete game and
(12:18):
ID Software was genuinely worried that it could end up
tanking the game. If people played something that wasn't finished,
they might have a a an incorrect assumption of how
the game's going to turn out. But actually it helped
drive excitement for the title. People were really eager to
get hold of the finished copy. The retail price for
the game, at least at one point was was suggested
(12:42):
at nine dollars. That's insane, right. The game launched on
a server on December tenth at the University of Wisconsin
and almost immediately the server crashed because so many people
were ailing in to try and get a copy of
this game, and since it was about midnight when the
(13:05):
game went live, it meant there was several hours before
someone could get everything back online, but that really only
helped drive the demand for the game further and soon
it became a best seller. Wolfenstein three D gave birth
to the first person shooter genre, but Doom defined it,
and it's software built in a feature that would become
(13:26):
standard in nearly every FPS to follow Doom, and that
was the death match. That was Romero's term for a
competitive match between two or more players using the game engine.
With Doom, up to four people could play against each
other on physically networked computers, a local area network or land,
(13:48):
or you could play against a single person over the internet.
It was the birth of competitive multiplayer for first person shooters,
and it's another reason why people site Dom as the
real father of the FPS genre. So while Wolfenstein three
D did it first, Doom really got the form factor down,
(14:13):
and before Doom, Wolfenstein was the biggest hit from it
software with more than two hundred thousand copies sold, but
within a couple of years of launched, Doom sales blew
that number on the water by. It was estimated that
ten million computers had a copy of Doom on them.
Whether or not all those copies were full paid copies
(14:33):
is another matter, because again the first few levels were
offered as a shareware download. The game received positive reviews.
Fans loved it. The multiplayer was huge, an enormous innovation
and in software was the darling of the computer games industry.
And it also had another big innovation built in with Doom.
(14:54):
And this was a choice that John Carmack had made.
It was incredibly accessible to the mob community. Now. A
mody is someone who modifies games. They tweak code to
create new types of enemies or environments, new levels, new items,
new weapons. A modern friendly game is one that can
(15:14):
transform in all sorts of ways with a minimum minimum
a fuss upon the part of the matters. They don't
have to end up breaking code in order to make
it happen. Now, there are a lot of titles out
there today that have a reputation for supporting creative mods,
such as sky Rim or A Grand Theft Auto five.
Doom was an early example of this. John Karmack designed
(15:37):
the code so that it wouldn't be too difficult for
the moderate community to tweak it, and in fact, this
would remain one of his principles throughout his career. The
result was that Doom was viewed as a must have
game because even if you grew tired of the original gameplay,
the moderate community was always adding new stuff, which meant
that you had a continuously refreshed ame you could just
(16:01):
download the mods and incorporated into your own copy. It
was so big that during the presentation for Windows, Bill
Gates had a segment in which he was keyed into
the frame of a Doom game. And yes, it's just
as embarrassing and awkward as you are imagining right now.
Bill Gates standing there wearing a kind of a costume,
(16:27):
holding a rifle in the middle of the rifle, his
hand nowhere near the stock or the trigger, talking about
how he's going to enter the next Doom tournament, and
then a Doom sprite appears to his left. He turns,
holds the rifle out still by the middle, by the
way finger nowhere near the trigger, and blasts the bad guy.
(16:52):
It's awful and you should watch it anyway. The fact
that even Microsoft was acknowledging this showed what a big
deal it was, and the fact that this was a
game that was going mainstream. Like the Wolfenstein engine before it,
A lot of other computer game companies wanted to license
the technology powering Doom. It was light years ahead of
(17:13):
anyone else, so In Software was happy to oblige for
a fee. Companies could use the underlying engine for their
own games, and that brought in another steady stream of
revenue into the company, boosting the already impressive cash flow
from game sales. The ID crew found themselves flush with moolah,
and not everyone handled success the same way, So here's
(17:35):
a way to contrast. People. Both John Carmack and Romero
bought expensive sports cars like Ferraris, but John Carmack limited
his lavish spending and much of his life didn't really
change that significantly compared to what it was before. Meanwhile,
John Romero jumped a little further into the deep end
of luxury. He bought a big house, he bought more
(17:58):
luxury cars, He started growing big elaborate parties, and people
began to get a little worried that perhaps he was
getting caught up in the lifestyle. After Doom went gold,
John Carmack went back to the drawing board to create
guess what, yep, the next generation game engine. Essentially, every
(18:19):
time they release a game, Carmack wanted to build a
better game engine for the next game. He never wanted
to just rest on what he had built and then
churn out sequels. He didn't find that satisfying. He wanted
to make something better than what he made before, and
he really wanted to crack the nut that was true
three dimensional figures within a game, not three D that
(18:42):
projects out, but figures within the game that have three
dimensions within that virtual environment. Doom was a big jump
from Wolfenstein. But you couldn't look up or down in Doom.
You always look straight ahead no matter where you were facing,
and the critters you ran into were represented by two
domandational sprites. They weren't three dimensional virtual figures. They were
(19:03):
kind of like flat cardboard cutout characters. Uh what version
of him you saw was dependent upon how you were
facing them, but it was always flat. Carmak wanted something
more sophisticated than that, and when he wanted something, essentially
would go out and build it. Meanwhile, its software received
a request from a game publisher to create a version
(19:25):
of Doom for store shelves, which became Doomed two. So
Doom two was the one that you could find in
a box in computer game stores in the mid nineties.
It was actually really similar to the first game, just
with some new levels and a couple of new designs,
but mainly it was Doom, just with slightly different layouts.
(19:48):
But it was another big commercial success because it was
more of what people loved. Now on the company side,
It's software had grown to the point that it could
hire a few new people, and Romero cut back his
workout wars. He had been working fourteen or sixteen hour days,
and so now he moved to a more normal eight
hour day, much of it spent playing Doom against in
(20:10):
Software fans. Uh. He also spent a lot more time
in engagement with fans in general, and again people at
in Software began to worry that perhaps Romero wasn't as
involved as he needed to be. When it came time
to look at what came next, the group agreed upon
another idea, inspired by their Dungeons and Dragon sessions. So
in their games they had a mighty warrior named Quake,
(20:34):
and he was a fierce melee fighter. He used melee
weapons like hammers to whack bad guys, and Carmack and
Romero both thought this would be really interesting to create
a three D game first person shooter, but instead of
being a shooter, it's a first person melee game. You
have to use a hand to hand weapon and attack enemies.
(20:56):
It would require a new approach to game design, new
enemy to design in order to make it fair but challenging.
It was something the team was really eager to take
on because it was different enough from what they had
done before to really be engaging. So they set out
to make a fantasy based hand to hand first person
combat game. There's only one little problem. They did not
(21:19):
have a game engine yet. They had nothing to build
upon because John Carmack was falling behind on delivery dates
for a working game engine as he encountered unanticipated problems
while building a three D engine. Meanwhile, other teams were
creating concept art and level designs, but they couldn't do
anything with them because there was no engine to build upon.
(21:41):
So they company had already announced that was working on
a game called Quake, and it was already starting to
miss some promised release dates and Without a working game engine,
it didn't make any sense to put anything out, and
they couldn't really predict when something would be done because
it could take ages after the game engine is done
to build a brand new type of game. Remember, they'd
(22:05):
have to design a first person melee game and then
test it to make sure it was working, and then
fix anything that wasn't working. This process could take another
year or longer, and that's in addition to however long
it was going to take Carmack to finish the three
D engine. This is where things first came to a
head in IT Software. Romero and Kevin Cloud both felt
(22:28):
that it was really important to be innovative and push
for new features with every new franchise, so they really
wanted to incorporate this melee approach in this new game.
It would mean that Romero's designs would be part of
the game. It would mean that they would have something
totally new to talk about. They didn't want to just
keep making games and older franchises, but the rest of
(22:51):
the team, including John Carmack himself, said that it was
more important that they release another game in a timely fashion,
using the Doom and chise or using the Doom engine,
even because it would get the game out much more quickly.
So it came down to Romero and Kevin Cloud versus
pretty much everybody else, and everybody else won that argument. Ultimately,
(23:15):
they decided to drop the melee combat aspect for Quake. Instead,
it would become another first person shooter, similar to Doom
and Wolfenstein. However, they were going to wait for Carmack's
new game engine to be finished. The big advantage here
was that they had already built first person shooters. They
knew how to build first person shooters, so they didn't
(23:36):
have as much uncertainty about game mechanics. That part was easier.
It meant that there was going to be less on
the development time once the game engine was finished. If
they had gone with that melee approach, they have a
lot more testing on their hands. So they went with
the first person shooter model, and they cut out a
lot of uncertainty, even though that meant refining something they
(23:59):
had already done earlier. They had also, by that time
gained a pretty substantial fan club, including some famous fans.
One of those fans was Trent Resiner from nine Inch Nails.
He was a big fan of Doom, and so once
they found out about this, they reached out to him
and asked if he might be interested to become the
(24:21):
music and audio director for Quake, and he said yes.
So he ended up doing the sound design and music
for a Quake and turning it into an immersive audio
experience on top of its visual impact. So if you
ever played Quake and thought, while the sound design for
this is pretty pretty special, it's because of Trent resin
(24:42):
Now When it was finished, Quake allowed players to look
in all directions. You could look up and down, which
meant you had to worry about aiming up or down
for the first time. Because in Doom, if an enemy
was in front of you and you shot at it,
you were aiming at it. It didn't matter if it
was on top of some airs or at the bottom
of some stairs. Your character was magically aiming up or
(25:04):
down based upon you facing the enemy. You didn't really
have to worry about aiming so much because you couldn't
look up or down, and Quake it was totally different.
You could look up and down, which meant that you
suddenly had to worry about that aiming. And so a
lot of the environments included things like balconies stairs raised platforms,
(25:25):
requiring you to be to look up or down or
else you would get blasted into oblivion. And Quake also
built on the success of Doom's multiplayer format. With Quake,
up to sixteen players could compete online simultaneously, a pretty
big jump from the four local area network players of Doom.
Deathmatches became much more chaotic and fast paced and pretty.
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It was such a popular mode that some fans in
Texas decided that they wanted to hold a big event
and invite people to come in and bring their computers
with them. So if you wanted to attend, you brought
your Peter rig. You set it up inside this big
conference hall, and it would become an enormous local area
network where Quake could be played with huge groups, and
(26:09):
they called it Quake Con. It was such a big
deal that even the software team came out to it,
and it would become so popular that they would hold
it every year and its software would take advantage of
it to use it as an event to announce upcoming
titles and projects. So it became a kind of a
marketing thing for in software, even though it was organized
(26:31):
by fans. Very useful for for a company to have
the fans to allow to work for you. Quake was
incredibly successful, though it had a little bit of a
hiccup in its growth because of a decision that its
software made when it came to distributing the game. They
decided to offer part of the game for ten dollars.
(26:52):
So you pay ten bucks and you get access to
the early part of the game. Technically, you would get
the full game, but only the first few levels would
be accessible. Once you completed that section, you would get
informed at to unlock the rest of the game, you
would have to pony up the money that made up
the difference in the full price tag, which was another
fifty dollars. But hackers began to examine the code for
(27:14):
Quake because they knew if you had that first part
of it, you had the whole game, and eventually they
figured out how to bypass the system and get access
to the full game without paying that fifty dollars, and
the hack spread across the internet very quickly, but it
still was a success for in software, and it also
inspired a new art form. A group of Quake players
(27:36):
created a little comedy sketch using the game Quake. They
had a group of game characters that were trying to
seek out and stop someone who was cheating in the game,
and it turns out that the person cheating is actually
John Romero. They used the Quake game engine to tell
a story, something that was pretty new at the time,
and eventually people started calling this art form mashinima for
(28:00):
machine animation. If you want to hear more about this process,
you should check out the episode tech Stuff Talks to
Rooster Teeth, which we published originally back in February two
tho twelve. In it, I talked to Bernie Burns, founder
of Rooster Teeth, and one of the big shows they
did that got them started was a series called Red
(28:20):
Versus Blue that used the Halo game engine to animate stories.
These days, Rooster Teeth does all sorts of stuff, including
feature length films. So maybe sometime I can do a
follow up story with somebody from there. Fascinating company and
I'm a huge fan of their work. Back to its software,
just like Doom and Wolfenstein, that Quake engine became a
(28:43):
sought after asset. Valve Software licensed it for their first
person shooter Half Life, which Tom Hall once cited as
the next real landmark in first person shooters. For its
incorporated storyline. The Quake Engine would dominate in the computer
industry until it was eventually conquered by the Unreal Engine.
After Quake went gold, the company held internal conversations about
(29:06):
its direction, and things really came to add Romero felt
that they were relying too heavily on formats that they
had already perfected, and he said, we should really be
doing something new and innovative. We shouldn't just keep doing
what we do well. John Carmack and most of the
rest of its software felt that Romero wasn't really dedicating
himself to the work anymore, and that he'd become too
(29:28):
wrapped up in his own fame and lifestyle, and so
the company said, hey, Romero, can you make tracks. They
told him to resign, and he did. He then went
on to reconnect with Tom Hall and together they formed
the company ion Storm. More on that at the end
of the episode, It's got kind of a sad ending.
(29:49):
The ID Software team, meanwhile, went back to work creating
a sequel to Quake because of the hacking that they
experienced when they launched the first Quake. They I did
that the best way to move forward would be to
partner with an established publisher that They had been doing
this on their own for a while, and when they
were smaller it was easier to handle, but as they
(30:11):
grew they realized that they needed someone with a more
established approach to publishing. But they definitely didn't want to
deal with having their IP stolen anymore, so they formed
a long term relationship with Activision. The first game they
put out was Quake two in and then they immediately
(30:32):
got to work on Quake three. We're in the home
stretch here, but before I conclude the story of the
software company, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
(30:52):
It wasn't that much longer after Romero's departure that it
seemed like his accusations were really accurate ones, and John
Carmack's leadership style complicated matters. He decided that Quake three
would be a multiplayer only style game, online only, multiplayer only,
(31:12):
no single player component, no monster designed because it would
only be player characters fighting each other, and the rest
of the team wasn't really happy because they felt it
was limited and it really meant that a lot of
them didn't have much to do. But Carmack insisted that
that was the approach they take. It was also said
that Romero, for whatever faults he may have had, was
(31:34):
much better at managing people than Carmack was. People felt
ignored or dismissed, and morale started to dip. Quake three
Arena launched in ninet. It of course had a brand
new game engine powering it. The first Call of Duty
game actually uses that Quake engine as its foundation, but
(31:56):
that didn't help people at ID Software feel that the
come but he wasn't just doing the same thing repeatedly.
And also, the Unreal engine ended up debuting and was
comparatively easy to use. If you looked at the Quake
engine and the Unreal engine side by side, and you
looked at the actual interfaces for the two, Unreal engine
(32:18):
was very attractive, and it ended up becoming stiff competition
for that Quake engine. On the game development side, things
slowed down at in Software Now that wasn't on purpose.
John Carmack felt that the next game on the company,
uh Dime, would have to have an even better game engine.
Big surprise there. Every time the game came out, Carmack said,
(32:41):
the next engine has to be even better. We can't
just make a game on this engine. That's where he
found his satisfaction in designing the latest, greatest gaming engine
with new features and new capabilities, something that could really
take advantage of the latest generation of hardware. But he
also wanted to keep his development team at its soft
where small. He felt that that made communication better, ad
(33:03):
meant that you were more nimble, you could react faster.
He didn't want to see id Software balloon into a
large corporation. So there's the problem, right, That's there's a
consequence to to these two decisions, and that is it
takes longer to make games because games were getting more complex.
(33:24):
You were no longer in an era where one or
two people could launch a triple A title game. You
had to have a group of people working on it.
The games were so much more complex that it was
taking groups of experienced programmers longer to make games, especially
by restricting the size of the development team. So if
(33:46):
you keep the development team the same while the games
get more and more complex, guess what it means everything
takes longer to produce. When It's Software announced in two
thousand that their next game was going to be Doomed three,
they didn't have an idea at the time, nor did
the fans that it would take more than three years
for that game to come out, which meant that when
(34:07):
it finally did launch in two thousand four, there had
been five years between games from its software Quake three
Arena in Doom three in two thousand four, yikes. While
working on the game, it Software did something that they
had not done before. They began to license out their
actual game intellectual property to other game studios. Not Apage,
(34:33):
you know, that's who they used to work with, but
to other game studios in general. So they allowed other
developers to create games and franchises that they had themselves designed.
So the first of those was Returned to Castle Wolfenstein,
which was developed by gray Matter Interactive and Nerve Software.
That game received some mixed reviews, especially for the single
(34:54):
player campaign, but the multiplayer aspect was generally praised. Activision
wanted an ex spansion pack for the game, and they
ended up working with a company called Splash Damage to
design that expansion pack. But boy were they not happy
when they saw the single player component to Wolfenstein Enemy
(35:14):
Territory that was the expansion pack. Activision said that the
single player campaign was not good enough to publish OUCH,
but the multiplayer was seen to be really, really fun
and enjoyable, and it worked fine, so Activision released it
for free. Here's the crazy thing. You could download the
(35:36):
multiplayer expansion and play it even if you didn't own
the original game, which means Activision gave away a free
multiplayer game. Why oh, I couldn't find an answer to that.
I guess maybe at the time, no one really thought
it through. Doom three debuted in two thousand four two
(35:59):
mixed reviews. It looked really pretty. The new game engine
was phenomenal. It had amazing lighting effects, lots of dynamic
lighting in that game, but many people felt that the
actual design of the enemies and the gameplay was pretty derivative.
Enemies tend to come straight at you once they spot you.
(36:19):
There wasn't a whole lot of variety to it. There
was a game mechanic that required you to switch between
a flashlight and your guns, which irritated people so much
that someone created a mod that allowed you to have
a flashlight taped to your gun, because they said, if
you're on Mars, you probably have tape. I think that's reasonable.
(36:39):
I remember playing this game and I did it without
the mod and I hated that fact that, you know,
you had to switch between your flashlight and your gun.
The whole idea was to make it more exciting and
to ramp up the tension, but ultimately it just made
me tecked off. Anyway, the game was a huge hit,
ended up becoming the top selling title and in Software's history,
(37:00):
partly because it was available on multiple platforms like consoles
in the PC. In two thousand five, Adrian Carmack left
the company, which meant that the only original founder remaining
with the company was John Carmack. And remember Adrian Carmack
and John Carmack not related. Adrian Carmack later sued in Software.
(37:23):
He alleged that he was forced out of the company
by the other co owners so that they could get
shares of ownership of the company. So, according to Carmack,
Adrian Carmack, that is, Activision had made an offer to
purchase the Doom Quake and Wolfenstein intellectual properties for about
fifteen million dollars, but he was rejected, or rather Activision
(37:46):
was rejected by it, and then the other co owners
of the company tried to pressure Adrian Carmack to sell
his shares back to them for eleven million dollars. He said, well,
that severely undervalues the shares that I own. I own
of ID software. It's way too little money for so
(38:07):
valuable a property. Then they gave him an offer of
twenty million, according to Adrian Carmack, and then they terminated
him once he did not agree to sell at that price. Ultimately,
the lawsuit that he leveled against in Software never went anywhere,
and that's most likely because Activision never actually purchased in Software,
(38:28):
so it all remained hypothetical in the first place. Uh.
In two thousand five, a major major event happened, not
just for its software, but I would say the world.
That's when the Rock Dwayne Johnson himself starred in the
film version of Doom. I guess you could say it
(38:52):
was inspired by the game, It wasn't really connected to
Doom that much. There's a first person perspective section in
the film that's meant to be a nod to the
original source material. It's a really cheesy movie. I saw
it for free at a pre screening and ask for
my money back. It stands at nine on Rotten Tomatoes.
(39:13):
Just a reminder though, that The percentage on Rotten Tomatoes
tells you how many critics gave it a negative or
a positive review. So a nine percent movie isn't necessarily
worse than say, a thirty percent movie. It just means
fewer critics gave it a positive review. If it's a
movie that's right in the middle somewhere, then it could
go either way, right like, if if it's a one
(39:34):
out of ten scale and everyone gives it a four,
the percentage could be really low, but you would still
say it's a better movie than something that warrants a one.
All that being said, Doom the movie is awful, don't
watch It's terrible is being generous. So John Carmack had
decided that he's going to work on another game, which
(39:56):
means yep, you guessed. He wanted to make an all
new aiming engine. Big surprise there, and so that meant
there'd be more years between games. Meanwhile, there were rumors
that other companies besides Activision were interested in ID software.
They were still licensing out properties like Quake and Wolfenstein
to other companies. Reviews mostly criticized the style of play,
(40:19):
echoing the concerns Romero had expressed years earlier saying you
guys are stuck in a rut. Carmack, in the meantime,
started looking into mobile games and how he might make
a big impact there. One of the projects from his
initiative was called Orcs and Elves, which was the first
new intellectual property involving ID Software UH in years, and
(40:41):
it was for mobile platforms. In two thousand nine, a
company called ZeniMax Media approached ID Software and an acquisition deal,
which the company ultimately accepted. Xenomax Media also owned another
big name in computer games, Bethesda. That's the company behind
games like the most recent incarnation of the Fallout series
(41:03):
and the Elder Scrolls franchise. Now, what set Zemax Media
apart from other suitors was it had a reputation for
letting subsidiary companies followed their own paths in a more
or less handsoff approach. This gave ID Software the resources
they would need to develop two games simultaneously, so they
(41:26):
could actually work on two titles at the same time
for the first time ever. Really. One of those two
titles was Rage and the other was a new incarnation
of Doom. Both games would end up using carmas next
game engine called id Tech five Rage launched in two
(41:46):
thousand eleven, totally new franchise. It's set in a post
apocalyptic world and features players driving around, shooting its stuff
and generally causing mayhem. The team at ID Software called
it an open but directed world, meaning the player didn't
have absolute freedom to do everything, but had a lot
more options available with some guidance of what was to
(42:07):
come next. The game received good reviews but failed to
make a big impact on the market, possibly because by
two thousand eleven the computer and video game industries were
way more competitive than they had been a few years earlier.
John Carmack also co founded a new company called Armadillo Aerospace.
His gig over there is to design spacecraft, which is
(42:29):
a pretty nifty side project for a computer game designer.
On November twenty second, two thirteen, he resigned from ID Software.
Carmac had expressed excitement and interest in the Oculus virtual
reality platform he had joined the company earlier in and
then realized that he was going to have to switch
(42:49):
to full time over at Oculus and leave ID Software.
His twenty two year tenure at ID Software came to
an end, and for the first time time in its history,
its Software no longer had a founding member on staff.
Carmack had said, I wanted to remain a technical advisor
for ID, but it just didn't work out, probably for
(43:13):
the best, as the divided focus was challenging. It Software's
new version of Doom took a little longer to come
out than they anticipated. It launched just last year on May.
It's the fourth game in the Doom franchise and technically
is a second reboot of the series. The setting is
(43:33):
a research facility on Mars where the portal to Hell
has opened up, and the player takes on the role
of the Doomslayer, and featured some old school shooter mechanics,
such as the fact that your health does not regenerate
over time, you have to find health packs and you
don't have to worry about reloading weapons, but you can
run out of ammunition, and it also brings back deathmatch modes.
(43:56):
Its software is The company continues to work on new
games on various platforms. But let's talk about the old
founders and some of their co workers. Where are they now.
John Romero went on to found other studios like ion Storm,
which he left in two thousand one after he left,
the Dallas office closed, and then about four years later
(44:17):
the Austin office for ion Storm closed. That's a whole
story in itself. He also worked at Midway for a
while and Gazillion before he founded a new social gaming
company called lut Drop, and he and his wife Brenda
Romero do a lot of advocacy work for education. John
Carmack is with Oculus, which is part of Facebook. He
(44:39):
continues to be a big advocate for virtual reality in
general and is still quite outspoken in the world of tech.
Tom Hall, who was the first of the founders to
leave ID Software, co founded ion Storm with Romero. Obviously,
that did not last. He also has worked at Midway
Games along with Romero, and at lute Drop along with Romero.
(45:03):
Adrian Carmack got out of the game business after his
contentious departure, at least for a while. He returned fairly recently.
In April sixteen, John Romero released a video teasing a
new first person shooter and announced that Adrian Carmack was
involved in the project. It was called black Room and
it was all attached to a Kickstarter campaign, but the
(45:24):
campaign was canceled in just four days before it could
reach its seven hundred thousand dollar goal. It had hit
a hundred thirty one thousand before Romero canceled the Kickstarter campaign.
He said that he was canceling it until they could
produce a working demo to show gamers what the finished
product would be like, so that people weren't just backing
(45:45):
an idea that may not ever materialize. Sandy Peterson had
left in Software in nine seven. He joined a company
called Ensemble Studios in and got involved in a little
game called Age of Empire Airs, which met with some success.
These days, he tends to work on cool board games.
There's one called Cathulu Wars that I really want to
(46:08):
try out. It also has a video game version and
was a highly successful crowdfunded project. Kevin Cloud remained at
ID Software and served as creative director for the company
for a while. One of the notes trivia I've found
out about Kevin Cloud is that when you look down
and you see the hands and doom and Doom too,
those are Kevin Cloud's hands. And that's all I've got.
(46:30):
That's the story of it Software. It continues on to
this day, and maybe sometime I'll have an update about
them in the future. For now, it's time to sign off.
If any of you have suggestions for future episodes or guests,
right and let me know the addresses Text stuff at
how stuffworks dot com or drop me a line on
Facebook or Twitter. The handle at each of those is
(46:52):
tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland's senior writer for how stuff
works dot com, and today's episode is part two of
the ID Software story. Remember this was a request from
(00:24):
Dave who wrote to me and asked for an episode
about ID Software. But as it turns out, there's too
much to talk about for one episode. So in our
last episode, Early talked about the people responsible for forming
ID Software and how they found early success with titles
like Commander Keene and Wolfenstein three D. Today we pick
up where I left off with the development of the
(00:45):
blockbuster title Doom. Now, the company was still just a
small team of developers and they had a problem. There
weren't enough people to work on a follow up to Wolfenstein,
and simuled peneously work on the new Doom project. What's more,
the people at in Software all wanted to work on Doom.
(01:07):
They wanted to work on something new rather than create
a sequel to an already existing game, but there was
a lot of pressure from Apage to create a sequel.
Wolfenstein had been the most successful title to debut on
apog in its history, so they decided to do the
reasonable thing. They outsourced Wolfenstein too. They licensed out the
(01:29):
work to APOG, which got started on the project, but
after some time in development in software didn't really see
it progressing very well. They didn't think it was making
any progress, so they pulled the plug on the project.
Appog ended up taking these lemons and making Lemonade later on,
(01:49):
converting the work they had already produced into a brand
new title called Rise of the Triad. Talk a little
bit more about that in a second. They also hired
a couple of folks in nineteen One of them ended
up making a big name for himself a little bit
later on in the video game world. That would be
American McGhee. He's perhaps most famous for his Dark Alice
(02:13):
in Wonderland inspired games, which he made with e A
after his tenure with ID Software ended in nine. McGhee
started at ID as a tech support worker and eventually
worked his way up to designer, but there was a
point where the company decided that McGee's work and the
company's direction were no longer a good fit, and so
(02:37):
he was let go. One thing that did make Doom
possible was the evolution of computer hardware. The team had
been bumping up against the upper limits of the previous
generation of PCs, but over time, the really expensive Intel
three eight six microprocessor cost had started to come down,
and now it was finding its way into consumer level PCs.
(03:03):
More people were able to afford a three eight six PC,
which was better equipped to handle the demands of a
beefy game engine, or at least beefy at the time.
Three six have been around for a while. It first
launched in this Intel microprocessor. It took about a year
for manufacturing to ramp up to prod the levels that
(03:25):
Intel wanted, but even when they did reach those levels,
they were still really expensive, so very few people were
actually able to afford them. By today's standards, a three
six microprocessor would probably seem pretty crude and clunky. It
had only two seventy five thousand transistors on it A
little microprocessor now, I say only because today's microprocessors have
(03:50):
more than a billion transistors on them, so two five
thousand is nothing compared to today's uh microprocessors. The clock rate,
as in how fast the three D six microprocessor could work,
was between twelve mega hurts up to forty mega hurts
if you're overclocking it on the extreme end. And again,
your basic smartphone today can outperform those specs. But at
(04:13):
the time it was a state of the art machine
and it was just what it needed to take the
next step in game development. John Carmack, at the ripe
old age of twenty one years old, began to experiment
with stuff that older game engines just couldn't handle. That
included creating irregular shapes in the environment like uh, irregular
(04:36):
walls or floors that sloped around. He also wanted dynamic
lighting and the option to move in or outdoors. These
were all elements that would have been really challenging back
in the older Wolfenstein days, that that game engine just
couldn't handle this kind of level of complexity. And then
he also had another goal. He wanted gameplay to be
(04:56):
immersive and fast. Fast was really importan and it had
to be a fast paced game and really get the
players blood pumping. So he wanted these abilities, this ability
to make more complex environments, but not at the expense
of the speed of the game. As Carmack worked on
the engine, uh Romero started programming the levels and designed
(05:20):
much of the look and sound of the game. For inspiration,
the team looked at the art of hr Geiger, and
that was Geiger's work that inspired the Alien film franchise,
so the team used that art to guide decisions in
level and monster design. The walls in Doom sometimes have
hideous faces incorporated into them, and many of the demons
(05:44):
look pretty monstrous as well. Romero points out that by
today's standards, uh they might seem a bit cartoony, but
at the time it was considered a really etchy approach
to game design. Tom Hall, who had put up some
resistance during the development of Wolfenstein three D, campaigned for
are a rich story for Doom. He had in mind
an opening scene that would set the rest of the
(06:05):
game in motion, and in that scene, the player would
be taking on the role of a soldier in the
middle of a card game with the rest of his squad,
and in the middle of the game, a demon would
burst in, killing everyone but the player, and then the
game would start, and his ideas helped shape design decisions,
but as he tells it all later on, the focus
was really more on the technical side of making the
(06:27):
game work and less on the narrative or story side.
He'd say it would be a few years before you
would see a first person shooter incorporate deep story elements,
and the game he sites is really nailing. It was
Half Life, which was a from a totally different company.
It's from Valve, That would be the first real example
(06:48):
of that sort of thing. But he wanted it to
be Doom, and he started to feel really discouraged that
a lot of his ideas were being rejected. He wanted
rooms to have a purpose in Doom, so that when
you walked into a room in the game, you understood
why the room was there. It had a reason for existing.
It wasn't just one in a series of rooms that
(07:09):
make up a level, or just a weird, interchangeable environment
with undefined spaces. In his Doom, you wouldn't wonder why
two rooms connected together, or what purpose a weird path
might serve. It would have a reason and you would
understand what it was. To him, level design needed to
make sense and serve the story, but the development of
(07:31):
the game didn't really allow for his designs, and so
the levels were less detailed, less logical. Hall himself designed
about seven levels, according to his own estimation. He said
Romero was responsible for some of the more iconic levels
in Doom, particularly the ones that used multiple vertical planes,
you know, multiple levels within a game level. So I'm
(07:53):
using level in two different ways here, game levels meaning
at a stage in a game, and love was within
the game or within that stage rather meaning different vertical platforms.
Hall's account of those days sound like they were pretty rough.
He said that the team was working every day, seven
days a week, for up to sixteen hours a day,
(08:14):
and he said he was feeling increasingly isolated at that time.
The rest of the team sensed this as well, and
eventually in Romero invited Hall over for dinner and then
told him they were letting him go. He was essentially fired,
but they had also secured another job for him over
(08:36):
at Apog, so he already had a place to go.
It wasn't like he was just cut loose, and in
two thousand and fourteen, Hall said that ultimately this came
as a huge relief. After the Shock War off, he
was the first of the four main founders of IT
to leave it's software. He would move on to Apog
and work on Rise of the Triad, which I mentioned earlier.
(08:56):
It was the game that Wolfenstein, too, would turn into
He'd work on other games too, before moving on to
co found another studio. The other studio he co founded
was one called ion Storm, rather infamous in video game circles,
and a fellow co founder was John Romero. But we'll
(09:18):
get to that part of the story a little later.
And ion Storm could be its own episode all by itself.
It was a heck of a story. I remember when
all of that was was unfolding. Meanwhile, in Adrian Carmack
relished the subject matter of Doom. It was kind of
like the opposite of Tom Hall's reaction. He thought it
(09:38):
was fantastic. He took great delight in designing and drawing
numerous demonic critters and nightmarish environments. He was happy to
move away from the more family friendly art style that
Tom Hall held dear. He and Kevin Cloud, his assistant,
designed tons of monsters and then they commissioned a sculptor
to come in and create three dimensional mob as of
(10:00):
the monsters out of clay. Then they would paint the
models and scan them in to create virtual models for
the game itself. And it gave Doom a really unique look.
And I realized that really unique is redundant. Someone who
joined in Software during the development of Doom was Sandy Peterson.
(10:21):
He was a programmer who had worked for Micropros before
joining ID Software. Micropros was another huge game that name
in the computer gaming industry in the nineteen eighties. In particular,
one of its founders is a real legend in games,
Sid Meyer. Peterson would end up designing nineteen levels for Doom,
even though he joined the project after it had already started.
(10:44):
As the game neared completion, they had a big decision
they had to make. They felt they had outgrown apages
business model, which involved that shareware approach to get gamers interested,
followed by sending a physical copy of the full game
once an order came in. Appage only had a couple
of employees handling incoming calls, and the folks over at
(11:07):
it we're getting frustrated because orders were coming in faster
than apag could respond to them. And they asked Scott
Miller if he would invest in that department and grow it,
and he seemed reluctant to do that. So it Software
decided they could do this for themselves and just do
what Appage had been doing for them, using the Internet
(11:29):
for distribution and keeping overhead costs low so that they
don't have to worry about producing physical copies and all
that kind of stuff. So they moved out to strike
out on their own. Now I got more to say
about this next phase and its software's evolution, but first
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. During
(11:56):
alpha testing of the Doom game, ID Software sent unfinished
copies to a few play testers to look for bugs
and get feedback on how the gameplay was coming together.
An early build of the game. That alpha build ended
up leaking onto the Internet, which got a ton of attention,
despite the fact that it wasn't a complete game and
(12:18):
ID Software was genuinely worried that it could end up
tanking the game. If people played something that wasn't finished,
they might have a a an incorrect assumption of how
the game's going to turn out. But actually it helped
drive excitement for the title. People were really eager to
get hold of the finished copy. The retail price for
the game, at least at one point was was suggested
(12:42):
at nine dollars. That's insane, right. The game launched on
a server on December tenth at the University of Wisconsin
and almost immediately the server crashed because so many people
were ailing in to try and get a copy of
this game, and since it was about midnight when the
(13:05):
game went live, it meant there was several hours before
someone could get everything back online, but that really only
helped drive the demand for the game further and soon
it became a best seller. Wolfenstein three D gave birth
to the first person shooter genre, but Doom defined it,
and it's software built in a feature that would become
(13:26):
standard in nearly every FPS to follow Doom, and that
was the death match. That was Romero's term for a
competitive match between two or more players using the game engine.
With Doom, up to four people could play against each
other on physically networked computers, a local area network or land,
(13:48):
or you could play against a single person over the internet.
It was the birth of competitive multiplayer for first person shooters,
and it's another reason why people site Dom as the
real father of the FPS genre. So while Wolfenstein three
D did it first, Doom really got the form factor down,
(14:13):
and before Doom, Wolfenstein was the biggest hit from it
software with more than two hundred thousand copies sold, but
within a couple of years of launched, Doom sales blew
that number on the water by. It was estimated that
ten million computers had a copy of Doom on them.
Whether or not all those copies were full paid copies
(14:33):
is another matter, because again the first few levels were
offered as a shareware download. The game received positive reviews.
Fans loved it. The multiplayer was huge, an enormous innovation
and in software was the darling of the computer games industry.
And it also had another big innovation built in with Doom.
(14:54):
And this was a choice that John Carmack had made.
It was incredibly accessible to the mob community. Now. A
mody is someone who modifies games. They tweak code to
create new types of enemies or environments, new levels, new items,
new weapons. A modern friendly game is one that can
(15:14):
transform in all sorts of ways with a minimum minimum
a fuss upon the part of the matters. They don't
have to end up breaking code in order to make
it happen. Now, there are a lot of titles out
there today that have a reputation for supporting creative mods,
such as sky Rim or A Grand Theft Auto five.
Doom was an early example of this. John Karmack designed
(15:37):
the code so that it wouldn't be too difficult for
the moderate community to tweak it, and in fact, this
would remain one of his principles throughout his career. The
result was that Doom was viewed as a must have
game because even if you grew tired of the original gameplay,
the moderate community was always adding new stuff, which meant
that you had a continuously refreshed ame you could just
(16:01):
download the mods and incorporated into your own copy. It
was so big that during the presentation for Windows, Bill
Gates had a segment in which he was keyed into
the frame of a Doom game. And yes, it's just
as embarrassing and awkward as you are imagining right now.
Bill Gates standing there wearing a kind of a costume,
(16:27):
holding a rifle in the middle of the rifle, his
hand nowhere near the stock or the trigger, talking about
how he's going to enter the next Doom tournament, and
then a Doom sprite appears to his left. He turns,
holds the rifle out still by the middle, by the
way finger nowhere near the trigger, and blasts the bad guy.
(16:52):
It's awful and you should watch it anyway. The fact
that even Microsoft was acknowledging this showed what a big
deal it was, and the fact that this was a
game that was going mainstream. Like the Wolfenstein engine before it,
A lot of other computer game companies wanted to license
the technology powering Doom. It was light years ahead of
(17:13):
anyone else, so In Software was happy to oblige for
a fee. Companies could use the underlying engine for their
own games, and that brought in another steady stream of
revenue into the company, boosting the already impressive cash flow
from game sales. The ID crew found themselves flush with moolah,
and not everyone handled success the same way, So here's
(17:35):
a way to contrast. People. Both John Carmack and Romero
bought expensive sports cars like Ferraris, but John Carmack limited
his lavish spending and much of his life didn't really
change that significantly compared to what it was before. Meanwhile,
John Romero jumped a little further into the deep end
of luxury. He bought a big house, he bought more
(17:58):
luxury cars, He started growing big elaborate parties, and people
began to get a little worried that perhaps he was
getting caught up in the lifestyle. After Doom went gold,
John Carmack went back to the drawing board to create
guess what, yep, the next generation game engine. Essentially, every
(18:19):
time they release a game, Carmack wanted to build a
better game engine for the next game. He never wanted
to just rest on what he had built and then
churn out sequels. He didn't find that satisfying. He wanted
to make something better than what he made before, and
he really wanted to crack the nut that was true
three dimensional figures within a game, not three D that
(18:42):
projects out, but figures within the game that have three
dimensions within that virtual environment. Doom was a big jump
from Wolfenstein. But you couldn't look up or down in Doom.
You always look straight ahead no matter where you were facing,
and the critters you ran into were represented by two
domandational sprites. They weren't three dimensional virtual figures. They were
(19:03):
kind of like flat cardboard cutout characters. Uh what version
of him you saw was dependent upon how you were
facing them, but it was always flat. Carmak wanted something
more sophisticated than that, and when he wanted something, essentially
would go out and build it. Meanwhile, its software received
a request from a game publisher to create a version
(19:25):
of Doom for store shelves, which became Doomed two. So
Doom two was the one that you could find in
a box in computer game stores in the mid nineties.
It was actually really similar to the first game, just
with some new levels and a couple of new designs,
but mainly it was Doom, just with slightly different layouts.
(19:48):
But it was another big commercial success because it was
more of what people loved. Now on the company side,
It's software had grown to the point that it could
hire a few new people, and Romero cut back his
workout wars. He had been working fourteen or sixteen hour days,
and so now he moved to a more normal eight
hour day, much of it spent playing Doom against in
(20:10):
Software fans. Uh. He also spent a lot more time
in engagement with fans in general, and again people at
in Software began to worry that perhaps Romero wasn't as
involved as he needed to be. When it came time
to look at what came next, the group agreed upon
another idea, inspired by their Dungeons and Dragon sessions. So
in their games they had a mighty warrior named Quake,
(20:34):
and he was a fierce melee fighter. He used melee
weapons like hammers to whack bad guys, and Carmack and
Romero both thought this would be really interesting to create
a three D game first person shooter, but instead of
being a shooter, it's a first person melee game. You
have to use a hand to hand weapon and attack enemies.
(20:56):
It would require a new approach to game design, new
enemy to design in order to make it fair but challenging.
It was something the team was really eager to take
on because it was different enough from what they had
done before to really be engaging. So they set out
to make a fantasy based hand to hand first person
combat game. There's only one little problem. They did not
(21:19):
have a game engine yet. They had nothing to build
upon because John Carmack was falling behind on delivery dates
for a working game engine as he encountered unanticipated problems
while building a three D engine. Meanwhile, other teams were
creating concept art and level designs, but they couldn't do
anything with them because there was no engine to build upon.
(21:41):
So they company had already announced that was working on
a game called Quake, and it was already starting to
miss some promised release dates and Without a working game engine,
it didn't make any sense to put anything out, and
they couldn't really predict when something would be done because
it could take ages after the game engine is done
to build a brand new type of game. Remember, they'd
(22:05):
have to design a first person melee game and then
test it to make sure it was working, and then
fix anything that wasn't working. This process could take another
year or longer, and that's in addition to however long
it was going to take Carmack to finish the three
D engine. This is where things first came to a
head in IT Software. Romero and Kevin Cloud both felt
(22:28):
that it was really important to be innovative and push
for new features with every new franchise, so they really
wanted to incorporate this melee approach in this new game.
It would mean that Romero's designs would be part of
the game. It would mean that they would have something
totally new to talk about. They didn't want to just
keep making games and older franchises, but the rest of
(22:51):
the team, including John Carmack himself, said that it was
more important that they release another game in a timely fashion,
using the Doom and chise or using the Doom engine,
even because it would get the game out much more quickly.
So it came down to Romero and Kevin Cloud versus
pretty much everybody else, and everybody else won that argument. Ultimately,
(23:15):
they decided to drop the melee combat aspect for Quake. Instead,
it would become another first person shooter, similar to Doom
and Wolfenstein. However, they were going to wait for Carmack's
new game engine to be finished. The big advantage here
was that they had already built first person shooters. They
knew how to build first person shooters, so they didn't
(23:36):
have as much uncertainty about game mechanics. That part was easier.
It meant that there was going to be less on
the development time once the game engine was finished. If
they had gone with that melee approach, they have a
lot more testing on their hands. So they went with
the first person shooter model, and they cut out a
lot of uncertainty, even though that meant refining something they
(23:59):
had already done earlier. They had also, by that time
gained a pretty substantial fan club, including some famous fans.
One of those fans was Trent Resiner from nine Inch Nails.
He was a big fan of Doom, and so once
they found out about this, they reached out to him
and asked if he might be interested to become the
(24:21):
music and audio director for Quake, and he said yes.
So he ended up doing the sound design and music
for a Quake and turning it into an immersive audio
experience on top of its visual impact. So if you
ever played Quake and thought, while the sound design for
this is pretty pretty special, it's because of Trent resin
(24:42):
Now When it was finished, Quake allowed players to look
in all directions. You could look up and down, which
meant you had to worry about aiming up or down
for the first time. Because in Doom, if an enemy
was in front of you and you shot at it,
you were aiming at it. It didn't matter if it
was on top of some airs or at the bottom
of some stairs. Your character was magically aiming up or
(25:04):
down based upon you facing the enemy. You didn't really
have to worry about aiming so much because you couldn't
look up or down, and Quake it was totally different.
You could look up and down, which meant that you
suddenly had to worry about that aiming. And so a
lot of the environments included things like balconies stairs raised platforms,
(25:25):
requiring you to be to look up or down or
else you would get blasted into oblivion. And Quake also
built on the success of Doom's multiplayer format. With Quake,
up to sixteen players could compete online simultaneously, a pretty
big jump from the four local area network players of Doom.
Deathmatches became much more chaotic and fast paced and pretty.
(25:48):
It was such a popular mode that some fans in
Texas decided that they wanted to hold a big event
and invite people to come in and bring their computers
with them. So if you wanted to attend, you brought
your Peter rig. You set it up inside this big
conference hall, and it would become an enormous local area
network where Quake could be played with huge groups, and
(26:09):
they called it Quake Con. It was such a big
deal that even the software team came out to it,
and it would become so popular that they would hold
it every year and its software would take advantage of
it to use it as an event to announce upcoming
titles and projects. So it became a kind of a
marketing thing for in software, even though it was organized
(26:31):
by fans. Very useful for for a company to have
the fans to allow to work for you. Quake was
incredibly successful, though it had a little bit of a
hiccup in its growth because of a decision that its
software made when it came to distributing the game. They
decided to offer part of the game for ten dollars.
(26:52):
So you pay ten bucks and you get access to
the early part of the game. Technically, you would get
the full game, but only the first few levels would
be accessible. Once you completed that section, you would get
informed at to unlock the rest of the game, you
would have to pony up the money that made up
the difference in the full price tag, which was another
fifty dollars. But hackers began to examine the code for
(27:14):
Quake because they knew if you had that first part
of it, you had the whole game, and eventually they
figured out how to bypass the system and get access
to the full game without paying that fifty dollars, and
the hack spread across the internet very quickly, but it
still was a success for in software, and it also
inspired a new art form. A group of Quake players
(27:36):
created a little comedy sketch using the game Quake. They
had a group of game characters that were trying to
seek out and stop someone who was cheating in the game,
and it turns out that the person cheating is actually
John Romero. They used the Quake game engine to tell
a story, something that was pretty new at the time,
and eventually people started calling this art form mashinima for
(28:00):
machine animation. If you want to hear more about this process,
you should check out the episode tech Stuff Talks to
Rooster Teeth, which we published originally back in February two
tho twelve. In it, I talked to Bernie Burns, founder
of Rooster Teeth, and one of the big shows they
did that got them started was a series called Red
(28:20):
Versus Blue that used the Halo game engine to animate stories.
These days, Rooster Teeth does all sorts of stuff, including
feature length films. So maybe sometime I can do a
follow up story with somebody from there. Fascinating company and
I'm a huge fan of their work. Back to its software,
just like Doom and Wolfenstein, that Quake engine became a
(28:43):
sought after asset. Valve Software licensed it for their first
person shooter Half Life, which Tom Hall once cited as
the next real landmark in first person shooters. For its
incorporated storyline. The Quake Engine would dominate in the computer
industry until it was eventually conquered by the Unreal Engine.
After Quake went gold, the company held internal conversations about
(29:06):
its direction, and things really came to add Romero felt
that they were relying too heavily on formats that they
had already perfected, and he said, we should really be
doing something new and innovative. We shouldn't just keep doing
what we do well. John Carmack and most of the
rest of its software felt that Romero wasn't really dedicating
himself to the work anymore, and that he'd become too
(29:28):
wrapped up in his own fame and lifestyle, and so
the company said, hey, Romero, can you make tracks. They
told him to resign, and he did. He then went
on to reconnect with Tom Hall and together they formed
the company ion Storm. More on that at the end
of the episode, It's got kind of a sad ending.
(29:49):
The ID Software team, meanwhile, went back to work creating
a sequel to Quake because of the hacking that they
experienced when they launched the first Quake. They I did
that the best way to move forward would be to
partner with an established publisher that They had been doing
this on their own for a while, and when they
were smaller it was easier to handle, but as they
(30:11):
grew they realized that they needed someone with a more
established approach to publishing. But they definitely didn't want to
deal with having their IP stolen anymore, so they formed
a long term relationship with Activision. The first game they
put out was Quake two in and then they immediately
(30:32):
got to work on Quake three. We're in the home
stretch here, but before I conclude the story of the
software company, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
(30:52):
It wasn't that much longer after Romero's departure that it
seemed like his accusations were really accurate ones, and John
Carmack's leadership style complicated matters. He decided that Quake three
would be a multiplayer only style game, online only, multiplayer only,
(31:12):
no single player component, no monster designed because it would
only be player characters fighting each other, and the rest
of the team wasn't really happy because they felt it
was limited and it really meant that a lot of
them didn't have much to do. But Carmack insisted that
that was the approach they take. It was also said
that Romero, for whatever faults he may have had, was
(31:34):
much better at managing people than Carmack was. People felt
ignored or dismissed, and morale started to dip. Quake three
Arena launched in ninet. It of course had a brand
new game engine powering it. The first Call of Duty
game actually uses that Quake engine as its foundation, but
(31:56):
that didn't help people at ID Software feel that the
come but he wasn't just doing the same thing repeatedly.
And also, the Unreal engine ended up debuting and was
comparatively easy to use. If you looked at the Quake
engine and the Unreal engine side by side, and you
looked at the actual interfaces for the two, Unreal engine
(32:18):
was very attractive, and it ended up becoming stiff competition
for that Quake engine. On the game development side, things
slowed down at in Software Now that wasn't on purpose.
John Carmack felt that the next game on the company,
uh Dime, would have to have an even better game engine.
Big surprise there. Every time the game came out, Carmack said,
(32:41):
the next engine has to be even better. We can't
just make a game on this engine. That's where he
found his satisfaction in designing the latest, greatest gaming engine
with new features and new capabilities, something that could really
take advantage of the latest generation of hardware. But he
also wanted to keep his development team at its soft
where small. He felt that that made communication better, ad
(33:03):
meant that you were more nimble, you could react faster.
He didn't want to see id Software balloon into a
large corporation. So there's the problem, right, That's there's a
consequence to to these two decisions, and that is it
takes longer to make games because games were getting more complex.
(33:24):
You were no longer in an era where one or
two people could launch a triple A title game. You
had to have a group of people working on it.
The games were so much more complex that it was
taking groups of experienced programmers longer to make games, especially
by restricting the size of the development team. So if
(33:46):
you keep the development team the same while the games
get more and more complex, guess what it means everything
takes longer to produce. When It's Software announced in two
thousand that their next game was going to be Doomed three,
they didn't have an idea at the time, nor did
the fans that it would take more than three years
for that game to come out, which meant that when
(34:07):
it finally did launch in two thousand four, there had
been five years between games from its software Quake three
Arena in Doom three in two thousand four, yikes. While
working on the game, it Software did something that they
had not done before. They began to license out their
actual game intellectual property to other game studios. Not Apage,
(34:33):
you know, that's who they used to work with, but
to other game studios in general. So they allowed other
developers to create games and franchises that they had themselves designed.
So the first of those was Returned to Castle Wolfenstein,
which was developed by gray Matter Interactive and Nerve Software.
That game received some mixed reviews, especially for the single
(34:54):
player campaign, but the multiplayer aspect was generally praised. Activision
wanted an ex spansion pack for the game, and they
ended up working with a company called Splash Damage to
design that expansion pack. But boy were they not happy
when they saw the single player component to Wolfenstein Enemy
(35:14):
Territory that was the expansion pack. Activision said that the
single player campaign was not good enough to publish OUCH,
but the multiplayer was seen to be really, really fun
and enjoyable, and it worked fine, so Activision released it
for free. Here's the crazy thing. You could download the
(35:36):
multiplayer expansion and play it even if you didn't own
the original game, which means Activision gave away a free
multiplayer game. Why oh, I couldn't find an answer to that.
I guess maybe at the time, no one really thought
it through. Doom three debuted in two thousand four two
(35:59):
mixed reviews. It looked really pretty. The new game engine
was phenomenal. It had amazing lighting effects, lots of dynamic
lighting in that game, but many people felt that the
actual design of the enemies and the gameplay was pretty derivative.
Enemies tend to come straight at you once they spot you.
(36:19):
There wasn't a whole lot of variety to it. There
was a game mechanic that required you to switch between
a flashlight and your guns, which irritated people so much
that someone created a mod that allowed you to have
a flashlight taped to your gun, because they said, if
you're on Mars, you probably have tape. I think that's reasonable.
(36:39):
I remember playing this game and I did it without
the mod and I hated that fact that, you know,
you had to switch between your flashlight and your gun.
The whole idea was to make it more exciting and
to ramp up the tension, but ultimately it just made
me tecked off. Anyway, the game was a huge hit,
ended up becoming the top selling title and in Software's history,
(37:00):
partly because it was available on multiple platforms like consoles
in the PC. In two thousand five, Adrian Carmack left
the company, which meant that the only original founder remaining
with the company was John Carmack. And remember Adrian Carmack
and John Carmack not related. Adrian Carmack later sued in Software.
(37:23):
He alleged that he was forced out of the company
by the other co owners so that they could get
shares of ownership of the company. So, according to Carmack,
Adrian Carmack, that is, Activision had made an offer to
purchase the Doom Quake and Wolfenstein intellectual properties for about
fifteen million dollars, but he was rejected, or rather Activision
(37:46):
was rejected by it, and then the other co owners
of the company tried to pressure Adrian Carmack to sell
his shares back to them for eleven million dollars. He said, well,
that severely undervalues the shares that I own. I own
of ID software. It's way too little money for so
(38:07):
valuable a property. Then they gave him an offer of
twenty million, according to Adrian Carmack, and then they terminated
him once he did not agree to sell at that price. Ultimately,
the lawsuit that he leveled against in Software never went anywhere,
and that's most likely because Activision never actually purchased in Software,
(38:28):
so it all remained hypothetical in the first place. Uh.
In two thousand five, a major major event happened, not
just for its software, but I would say the world.
That's when the Rock Dwayne Johnson himself starred in the
film version of Doom. I guess you could say it
(38:52):
was inspired by the game, It wasn't really connected to
Doom that much. There's a first person perspective section in
the film that's meant to be a nod to the
original source material. It's a really cheesy movie. I saw
it for free at a pre screening and ask for
my money back. It stands at nine on Rotten Tomatoes.
(39:13):
Just a reminder though, that The percentage on Rotten Tomatoes
tells you how many critics gave it a negative or
a positive review. So a nine percent movie isn't necessarily
worse than say, a thirty percent movie. It just means
fewer critics gave it a positive review. If it's a
movie that's right in the middle somewhere, then it could
go either way, right like, if if it's a one
(39:34):
out of ten scale and everyone gives it a four,
the percentage could be really low, but you would still
say it's a better movie than something that warrants a one.
All that being said, Doom the movie is awful, don't
watch It's terrible is being generous. So John Carmack had
decided that he's going to work on another game, which
(39:56):
means yep, you guessed. He wanted to make an all
new aiming engine. Big surprise there, and so that meant
there'd be more years between games. Meanwhile, there were rumors
that other companies besides Activision were interested in ID software.
They were still licensing out properties like Quake and Wolfenstein
to other companies. Reviews mostly criticized the style of play,
(40:19):
echoing the concerns Romero had expressed years earlier saying you
guys are stuck in a rut. Carmack, in the meantime,
started looking into mobile games and how he might make
a big impact there. One of the projects from his
initiative was called Orcs and Elves, which was the first
new intellectual property involving ID Software UH in years, and
(40:41):
it was for mobile platforms. In two thousand nine, a
company called ZeniMax Media approached ID Software and an acquisition deal,
which the company ultimately accepted. Xenomax Media also owned another
big name in computer games, Bethesda. That's the company behind
games like the most recent incarnation of the Fallout series
(41:03):
and the Elder Scrolls franchise. Now, what set Zemax Media
apart from other suitors was it had a reputation for
letting subsidiary companies followed their own paths in a more
or less handsoff approach. This gave ID Software the resources
they would need to develop two games simultaneously, so they
(41:26):
could actually work on two titles at the same time
for the first time ever. Really. One of those two
titles was Rage and the other was a new incarnation
of Doom. Both games would end up using carmas next
game engine called id Tech five Rage launched in two
(41:46):
thousand eleven, totally new franchise. It's set in a post
apocalyptic world and features players driving around, shooting its stuff
and generally causing mayhem. The team at ID Software called
it an open but directed world, meaning the player didn't
have absolute freedom to do everything, but had a lot
more options available with some guidance of what was to
(42:07):
come next. The game received good reviews but failed to
make a big impact on the market, possibly because by
two thousand eleven the computer and video game industries were
way more competitive than they had been a few years earlier.
John Carmack also co founded a new company called Armadillo Aerospace.
His gig over there is to design spacecraft, which is
(42:29):
a pretty nifty side project for a computer game designer.
On November twenty second, two thirteen, he resigned from ID Software.
Carmac had expressed excitement and interest in the Oculus virtual
reality platform he had joined the company earlier in and
then realized that he was going to have to switch
(42:49):
to full time over at Oculus and leave ID Software.
His twenty two year tenure at ID Software came to
an end, and for the first time time in its history,
its Software no longer had a founding member on staff.
Carmack had said, I wanted to remain a technical advisor
for ID, but it just didn't work out, probably for
(43:13):
the best, as the divided focus was challenging. It Software's
new version of Doom took a little longer to come
out than they anticipated. It launched just last year on May.
It's the fourth game in the Doom franchise and technically
is a second reboot of the series. The setting is
(43:33):
a research facility on Mars where the portal to Hell
has opened up, and the player takes on the role
of the Doomslayer, and featured some old school shooter mechanics,
such as the fact that your health does not regenerate
over time, you have to find health packs and you
don't have to worry about reloading weapons, but you can
run out of ammunition, and it also brings back deathmatch modes.
(43:56):
Its software is The company continues to work on new
games on various platforms. But let's talk about the old
founders and some of their co workers. Where are they now.
John Romero went on to found other studios like ion Storm,
which he left in two thousand one after he left,
the Dallas office closed, and then about four years later
(44:17):
the Austin office for ion Storm closed. That's a whole
story in itself. He also worked at Midway for a
while and Gazillion before he founded a new social gaming
company called lut Drop, and he and his wife Brenda
Romero do a lot of advocacy work for education. John
Carmack is with Oculus, which is part of Facebook. He
(44:39):
continues to be a big advocate for virtual reality in
general and is still quite outspoken in the world of tech.
Tom Hall, who was the first of the founders to
leave ID Software, co founded ion Storm with Romero. Obviously,
that did not last. He also has worked at Midway
Games along with Romero, and at lute Drop along with Romero.
(45:03):
Adrian Carmack got out of the game business after his
contentious departure, at least for a while. He returned fairly recently.
In April sixteen, John Romero released a video teasing a
new first person shooter and announced that Adrian Carmack was
involved in the project. It was called black Room and
it was all attached to a Kickstarter campaign, but the
(45:24):
campaign was canceled in just four days before it could
reach its seven hundred thousand dollar goal. It had hit
a hundred thirty one thousand before Romero canceled the Kickstarter campaign.
He said that he was canceling it until they could
produce a working demo to show gamers what the finished
product would be like, so that people weren't just backing
(45:45):
an idea that may not ever materialize. Sandy Peterson had
left in Software in nine seven. He joined a company
called Ensemble Studios in and got involved in a little
game called Age of Empire Airs, which met with some success.
These days, he tends to work on cool board games.
There's one called Cathulu Wars that I really want to
(46:08):
try out. It also has a video game version and
was a highly successful crowdfunded project. Kevin Cloud remained at
ID Software and served as creative director for the company
for a while. One of the notes trivia I've found
out about Kevin Cloud is that when you look down
and you see the hands and doom and Doom too,
those are Kevin Cloud's hands. And that's all I've got.
(46:30):
That's the story of it Software. It continues on to
this day, and maybe sometime I'll have an update about
them in the future. For now, it's time to sign off.
If any of you have suggestions for future episodes or guests,
right and let me know the addresses Text stuff at
how stuffworks dot com or drop me a line on
Facebook or Twitter. The handle at each of those is
(46:52):
tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff works dot com
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