Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released
doomwiki.org
doomwiki.org
To me it sounded as if Carmack was talking about their relationship and Romero evading this topic. If that is the case, I really hope they will find a way to reestablish what might have been a friendship once.
Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer gaming.
Again, it was magic.
Edit: without wanting to sound too “get off my lawn”. I was loading up some games on a tablet for a flight with the kids today and they just don’t care that much. They could get a new game at any moment. For us a new game was a rarity. If one of us got a new game from somewhere we’d bmx over to our mates so they could copy it. I recall a friend getting the quake demo and zipping it on to 8 disks for me, the 6th of which was corrupt. It took a week of back and forth before I finally got to play it.
Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same without online resources.
Got it right!
Back then cheat codes were hard to find, especially if you found doom on shareware floppies and didn’t have BBS access to the DooM FAQ.
And a couple of years later we had dlh.net
It was not a playable experience. Even at the smallest screen size, it still ran at about 1 FPS.
But, I was playing Doom!
I do not miss the nonsense with unreliable media, however. Loading Elite from tape took five minutes and if humidity or temperature were unusual or the moon occluded Santraginus or whatever it'd be spewing endless CRC check errors. Some hardships are valuable learning experiences, but this one is just trauma.
My point sort of drifted off into nostalgia a little, but I think there was something in the scarcity of it back then - probably helped somewhat by growing up in rural NZ.
Did you manage to find something ?
If you were to find it today, it'd probably have to be an indie game. It's a bit of a jump, but if you like exploring alone you could try Scanner Sombre.
well, With Quake not really :) It’s hard to explain why. I’ve seen nothing as satisfactory as shotgun in Doom. ;) More realistic - yes. Better rendered - yes, but nothing of the same level of satisfaction :) I think I know the answer but like with any art it’s difficult to put into words. Easier to make something with the similar energy. Perhaps one day …
>… Scanner Sombre
Thank you for the advice. I’ll take a look. I recall Elite was also nice once . I’ve made computer that was able to run it with my own hands which involved soldering and debugging it with oscilloscope for the first time in my life. So it was a double pleasure once it worked :) Or double magic :)
Making dedicated hardware seems amazing. I wish I had the time for it.
Horribly paraphrased:
Carmack was able to pull off impressive tech without impressive level designers was the gist of it.
Romero is talented at the design side but at the time that didnt translate into better games / companies like the fundamental tech did.
First of all, most game designers don't have as much success as he had after Id. Second, how are you going to follow up games as successful as Doom.
Also don't forget Wolfenstein, Hexen..
(Full disclosure: I met him once and he was nice.)
He does seem cool as an older, chill guy now that he doesn't have to live with the pressures of being a hit parade.
When I talked to fellow gamers about the awesome stuff Carmack does, they were all like "he's just a engineer, Romero is the real genius!"
But somehow I didn't see anything impressive from Romero, while Carmack was doing cool stuff all the time.
Sure, it wasn't artsy like Romero's work, but it was still impressive.
Many other level designers rapidly surpassed Romero.
Carmack was doing a great job until he started building rockets.
One thing that kept both grounded was the brutal timing of their releases. Doom had 6 months or so, and if it failed they knew they had to go back to boring jobs.
Apart from that, Masters of doom paints doom-id culture like the 1970's rock n roll band stories. A group comes together, works as well oiled team for a while and produces genius results. But the success and differences in personal growth trajectories inevitably pull the group apart. There is typically a painfull divorse phase between the main egos. The reality was that this kind of synergy never lasts more than a few years in any case.
They had equal shares and were all very young, the only option for them at the time appeared to be parting ways. Carmack has voiced in multiple more recent interviews that in hindsight there were probably better options to make things work out, but they didn't have the maturity and experience at the time to pursue them.
Given this context I don't think it's surprising that Romero would crash and burn on his own after being pushed out of id. The self-discipline and maturity side was only more critical to success without the id team's support, not less.
I don't know enough about the specifics of Romero to say which it is, possibly more than one, but it doesn't seem to be unique to him, I see this kind of pattern in pop culture all the time.
They needed talent to pull it off, but also lots of stars aligned for a bold experiment to work out, and true experiments don't always work out. Conversely, for each success there were many talented folks who tried good ideas and didn't see them work out. The more surprising the first success was, the more foolish you'd be to expect a repeat, it seems like.
If that's the basic problem, you can't "fix" it in the sense that you can't make someone keep churning out revolutionary new things. But you might get better outcomes and fewer embarrassing failures the more you think of individual talent as one factor. Folks still have to iterate, get feedback, work with good people, sometimes put a lot of work into an idea then see it they have to rework it, or even release some quick experiments that don't do that well. You don't maximize your odds of great results by sending someone off to work in isolation as long as they want.
One thing I see hints of here and there, but don't really have a great picture of, is the inner workings of organizations that produce new/weird but successful things more than just once. It interacts with business, luck, and changes in the world outside of course, but internally--how do they balance single vision vs. input from many folks? Do they build a lot they throw away? Do they go outside the team a lot for feedback (in Romero's world "playtesting")? Of course there's no one Right Way to do things, especially across domains, but it could be fascinating to see a bit more how various places work.
I’m not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know that being a success doesn’t imply generalizable skill, whether it’s a one-hit-wonder song, game, app, or business.
Who knows.. Even Minecraft was catching lightning in a bottle. It was there just at the right moment at the right time. The odd choice of Java was just the right thing needed to make it take off. First since you could play it in the browser(remember applets?), later when easy decompilation and modding arrived.
Other commenters give more substantial answers, but I can vouch for the book as having a lot of history, clearly being written by Romero himself, and having a lot of self-reflection on the questions you're asking.
Here's some additional HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649594
In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code) without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up and left.
Direct download link: https://romero.com/s/SIGIL_II_V1_0.zip
Clearly, many gamers don't consider the amount of work and resources that go into a game being the decisive factor in its price!
With that framing, Romero's pricing makes perfect sense. It doesn't much matter if he's designing levels for a game rather than developing a game, because the resources that go into the game's production are irrelevant to the cost.
What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product. Unlike AAA games, who are targeting the marginal player—that is, the person who isn't necessarily going to buy the game anyway—Romero is selling to true believers (in him, in Doom, in their nostalgia for their childhoods, whatever). The cost is extra irrelevant to that group.
The price of a video game is not a function of how much it cost to make it. The price is set by maximizing unit price * expected sales where expected sales is a function of cost. The demand curves are cultural and that is how it works for any industry.
>despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are today?
Conversely, gaming is a mass market that appeals to a larger amount of people than it did in the past. The masses may be less willing to spend as much as an enthusiast.
>What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product.
He chose to make it a niche product. It would not have been that much extra work to make it into a full game and release it on Steam. He could have even outsourced that work. There are freely licensed doom clones that could be used so it would not need much development time.