Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat

Yes, but then again you had to create the whole thing from scratch. Nowadays there are libraries that will do basically anything you can dream of. There's middleware. Whole game engines.

That era? Want to blit on the screen? Do it yourself. Want to load an asset? Not many pixmap formats to choose from. You may have to write the code to load it yourself. Want to play some beeps? Better control the PC speaker frequencies by turning it on and off (without spending too many cycles on it). Sound cards didn't make the problem any simpler.

You can't even code on one window and watch the results on another window. Unless you had loads of cash like Carmack at some point and could buy a NeXT. It's code, run the compiler, run the game. If it crashes it might take the entire machine with it. Reboot and try to figure out what went wrong. You _might_ be able to get a debugger but they were extremely primitive - and no memory protection so the debugger (which would likely modify the code and add side effects) could crash too.

Yeah, simpler games. But glacially slow to code anything. And very little publicly available information.

You try figuring out a highly performant ray casting engine without the internet. Or implement smooth scrolling after entire companies had tried and failed.

And you had to code everything yourself from scratch. There was no throwing a bunch of vertices and textures at some hardware and getting back a fully rendered scene. It was a fun era. I know I did the same as Carmack and went from writing 2D platformers to writing Phong-shaded, perspective-corrected texture-mapped worlds in under a year.

Everything that Carmack did had been done before, but Carmack made it cool. He had way more vision and imagination than the guys that had done it before.

To solve a new problem space, Carmack would buy a bunch of college text books, then check into a rando motel for a few weeks, and just dissect all the topics and books, until he'd come up with the design of, for instances a new ray tracing engine.

Crazy smart, focuses, and talended.

Second as other mentioned these are relatively simply games, not the ones like Ultima and Golden box that usually takes years to develop.

Third I think there is a unique culture in teams such as early ID: No bullshit, devs willing to devote 80, 100 hours per week, no management overhead as they KNOW what they are going to do.

Like, Commander Keen and the other of those games are the same amount of effort that might go in to a particularly well staffed month-long game jam today, just in terms of assets and total needed code. CV-11s video on Quake has a section covering that transition from mostly 2D to mostly 3D. It caught a lot folks off guard.

Three of those releases were Commander Keen games; Shadow Knights and Danger Dave shared engines; as did Catacomb 3D and Hovertank; Rescue Rover I/II were simple puzzle games built on an old demo code base. I'm not trying to take away from their accomplishments, merely pointing out that they didn't start from scratch every time.

I think id was trying to get out of come contractual obligations from Softdisk.

They were doing that. Finishing and shipping anything feels really really good. If you're a small team and you feel a deep personal investment in the product then shipping becomes addictive.

Brandon Sanderson and writing is a similar example. Is the quality always there? No. But, the guy is very very good at finishing and clearly rides to wherever his passion takes him. His output is, in comparison to other authors writing in similar genres, incredible.

Also, games were much simpler and players had much simpler expectations.

If you look at older games you'll often find the creator's / developer's quirks and mannerisms have seeped through showing mild biases, prejudice, stereotypes, etc (humanity). The freedom to express yourself in your work, resulted in people becoming emotionally invested in the product. This investment likely meant they spend many additional hours if not directly working on the product, than thinking about it resulting in a faster shipping date or a higher quality product in the same timespan.

In that period, you moved from mostly 2D to mostly 3D games so more complex code generally, plus the need for artists to do 3D modelling, texturing, rendering, optimisation, etc etc. Sound designers, composers, etc etc. AAA Games just got bigger, plus multiplayer. Hardware got more powerful (sound and graphics cards) so there was a desire/demand to make more use of that hardware. Generally, it all became a lot more "Hollywood".

There are still great games made by small teams of people in a short period of time. But to hit the AAA mark you need to be with a big studio and have the marketing budget behind you. Again, Hollywood.

  Softdisk is most famous for being the former workplace of several of the founders of id Software, who worked on a short-lived game subscription product, Gamer's Edge. Gamer's Edge was a monthly[3] PC game disk started in 1990 by John Romero.

They're kind of fun when they get into old stories about long gone companies. They don't come out very often however: They're 10% annoying and 90% really fun.

https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com

Look at game jams today, like the 48 hour game creation contests. A lot of stuff that comes out of those are little 2D things reminiscent of games of that early 90s era. It's because it's still pretty fast and easy to make assets for that style of game.

I think it's possible to have that same output in mid age. The difference is enthusiasm. It's still novel.

Further one of the games in the Spring Future Games show mentioned they were developed by a small team, using UE5 and AWS Gamelift, in about 9-12 mo.

I think a game in six months is doable with the proper talent. It's not gonna be Elden Ring in scope. But NES Legend of Zelda in 180 days seems possible now.

Tools like Github Copilot & NVidia GauGAN can also assist. But may be a steep research curve before resulting in actual workflow compression ;)

1. Less distractions (no Youtube, social media, etc..)

2. Games were simpler

3. The games produced probably weren't that good

Technically, I was probably born into a world where they had already revolutionised gaming -- I was a couple years late to watch it unfold personally.

On the other hand, I didn't grow up in an extremely well-off household, and our computers were for a long time pretty much dumpster-dive finds. This meant I was always exposed to hardware a few years old, which in turn meant I got to witness the technical revolution in real time, a few years after the cultural Revolution. (In other words, when Doom had taken over the world, I still couldn't play it. But a few years later, I could, and marvelled at what the computer could do.)

In another twist of fate, one of my parents strongly disliked that type of entertainment, and once they understood what I was doing, there was a strict ban on (most) violent media. (With very unclear boundaries of what constitutes violence.)

So, in effect, I missed the revolution, caught a glimpse of it, and then got cut off from it.

Reading Masters of Doom gave me back a chunk of my childhood that I feel was taken from me, in a weird sort of way.

A dream team.

Had 5 Mb of RAM. Just enough to run a browser and Winsock. Bo sound card.

I had an amazing experience on that machine playing W3D:

Got whomped on a level, and I forget which one, but the gist of it was having a couple health points, no ammo and ended up in a long, narrow hall, at the dead end.

I turned the other way, knife ready, determined to finish the level and proceeded to knife a nice string of baddies with god line speed and precision! It was three or four and I just had to knife them all, right at the end of the hall, poking each of them often enough to keep their shots at bay!

Truth is my 386 was a bit pokey, and that gave me just the little edge I needed to take them down and score that ammo! From there, and a couple more quick pop out and shoot kills later, med pack! Home free, gonna make it...

This was in the middle of the week, me up super late, tired at work the next day, no regrets.

I love how raw, simple, maybe pure is the right word, the game is. Twitchy as hell. Distilled down to the elements needed for fun.