The Making of Doom: Id's shooter masterpiece | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Doom: Id's shooter masterpiece

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105 pointspykello37 comments

If you have not yet read "Masters of Doom", I strongly advise any aspiring hackerpreneur to read it. It's an enthralling and easy read and details the early day of id, including the releases of their breakout hits "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", and "Quake", as well as the fall of Romero, following his departure from id, particularly with the "Daikatana" flop.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...

I read it when it was new 8 years ago, and I think I'm probably due for another reading, myself.

I read this book around a year ago, and it's one of my favourites. If you've been enjoying the recent Warcraft[1] and Starcraft[2] blog posts from Patrick Wyatt, you'll love Masters of Doom. It doesn't focus on the technical details as much, but it's an excellent story.

[1] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tag/warcraft

[2] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tag/starcraft

One of my favorite books. Almost makes me wish I was born at a different time and place.

Even the Super Mario Warner Bros 4 rewrite Carmack made is two days older than me.

>Almost makes me wish I was born at a different time and place.

I've often found myself feeling the same way.

Thing is, we're in no danger of running out of things to invent or advance. There's effectively just as much uncharted territory for us as there was for anyone else. We even have the benefit of standing on their shoulders to achieve perspectives they couldn't realize.

This is true, hence my use of "almost".

On the other hand, there is a lot magic to eating pizzas and sipping diet cokes in the house by the lake only to play and make games.

I just no longer see myself being able to be blessed by that privilege.

what's stopping you? there's people doing that even today in 2012.

Even if you don't like games and you like startups, this is a great book. These guys took their passion and made something awesome. And they bootstrapped it AFAIK.

Reading about Doom in a historical sense, I always find that there is a bigger absence of emphasis on the ability to modify the game than there should be. Doom not only revolutionized gaming and the FPS genre, it tore open the doors for game modifications. Projects like DeHackEd[1] allowed us meddling kids to start to see the possibilities of modifying our games at very fundamental levels. Sure, you could open a hex editor and edit Ultima VII to make your own maps, but Doom, DeHackEd and WAD editors meant you could, relatively easily, modify and share your creations.

Aliens TC[2]. The Energizer Bunny[3] mod. These were the beginnings of what would later become some of the most popular games that have ever come out for the PC. Being able modify a game and engine allowed for things like Counter-Strike[4] and Team Fortress[5]. Anyone else remember QTF or Beta 5.3? These humble beginnings of shared modifications grew into entire empires and created celebrities in the game development world. The gamers needed new heroes that weren't all caught up in ridiculously silly enterprises like Daikatana[6]. They needed cliffe[7] and goose[8]; independent developers working on something incredible for everyone to enjoy. From small teams to huge mega corporations and back again, game modification has had a lasting and incredible impact on the PC game market and will continue to for a long time.

We have Doom to thank for this. Now, where are my serial cables? I wanna do some multiplayer fragging.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeHackEd

[2] http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aliens_TC

[3] http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=68

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Cliffe

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minh_Le

Not just the mods, consider the tools as well. As far as I can recall id Software rarely released their own tools for content creation in the early days. Often because their tools were made to run on expensive industrial strength computers, especially in the Quake days. They only just described in various ways how to create content for their engines and/or released source code to their tools.

If the tools people didn't step up to create these things then the mod scene may not have turned out the way it did. This tool creation "scene" led to some interesting creations that the industry benefits from today. For example, we had Worldcraft until Valve hired the creator and made it into Hammer; which is still in use today.

This type of thing doesn't really exist as much today simply because most of the common engines are supplied with content creation tools out of the box. Part of me longs for the days of exploring new crazy ideas that was done back then. I knew a guy that designed his first few levels in Quake with notepad (three dimensional BSP node coordinates by hand!), graph paper, and the compile tools until editors starting showing up. To pat myself on the back I built the first Quake2 "unit" of levels (AFAIK) to be released and I did that by opening the compiled id BSP files in notepad and followed the trail of entities through the plain text. Those were fun days.

John Carmack said no. “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”

I love this quote. I think many of today's AAA game designers need to take heed.

I think it's totally true. I don't want to dismiss the fact that a great story combined with a great game - "Deus Ex" comes to mind (i liked the story) - can make for maybe a slightly better experience, but the underlying philosophy, that gameplay >>> story is totally true.

If i really think about it: Would i have been equally happy with the Deus Ex game consisting of different Levels/Challenges instead of a whole story? I really think it wouldn't have mattered that much. Just going through different challenges/stages with no big story to tell, i would have been equally happy with that.

Note: I am of course talking about the original Deus Ex, not that i don't like the newer one, but i just have never played it.

Maybe for some games, but for others it's nice to see some elements of great story-telling.

Of course, you still want to have good game mechanics, interactivity, graphics and fun, but the medium has evolved to the point where you can tell a good story.

I think it's very much a quote of its time - I agree with you that the problem is primarily one of medium, and at that time the medium wasn't able to adequately tell complex, compelling stories.

The market has definitely evolved now - there's still a demand for great action games where story takes a back-seat to the sheer enjoyment of playing, but there's also demand for games with compelling stories (just look at the backlash Mass Effect 3 had, rightly or wrongly). It's like films, or TV - sometimes you just want to watch big things blow up, other times you want things that make you think.

Love this quote as well. Diablo 3 especially comes to mind here. Couldn't stand all the the excess scripts & voice acting they stuffed into that game; just dilutes the experience. And I'm not even opposed to story in games - I really liked the story in Deus Ex (original) for example. But they knew how to strike a balance.

Doom defined my childhood. I was lucky enough to have an older brother who was really into computers and knew how to get Doom multiplayer working over serial cables. I can remember being blown away by the first multiplayer FPS experience I'd ever had. Some of my best memories were spent fragging our friends while Rush or Dream Theater played in the background. The mods were amazing too. We would mess with the firing rate of the different weapons to create an entirely new experience. We found user created levels to play, too. Our favorite was a map entitled butt.wad (wow, I only just now got that joke) which had the Marriage of Figaro playing in the background. I even got into modding myself, creating maps and re-skinning characters in the game. Man those were good times.

I could have written that comment (except for the brother part -- I was the one who introduced my friends to DOOM). So many good memories doing 4-player LANs... Wish I had a time-machine sometimes..

Another notable thing about DOOM was that it was unabashedly written in 99.9% C, with only a few (http://code.metager.de/source/xref/idsoftware/doom/README.as...) exceptions for rendering inner loops. The myth that a performant game required copious assembly code was on the ropes at this point, but DOOM completely killed it (as did having faster/better compilers and CPUs).

Even Quake optionally used some assembly code. According to https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/readme.txt the plain C version was running at half the speed of the one compiled with the assembly code, when not relying on hardware graphics acceleration.

What a coincidence, I've been playing Doom 2 for the first time over the last couple of days. I've also recently replayed the first, but I had actually played that back when I was in primary school (behind my parents back of course).

I'm surprised just how much fun it still is and if you use something like ZDoom [1] (which I have been) you can literally just run the binary with no setup and it runs flawlessly on a modern system.

One thing that really stuck out to me as I've been playing it is that there really isn't anything from modern shooters I miss. I'm not trying to diminish the work that has been put into AI, Physics, Graphical fidelity etc, but what does it say about the genre when you can remove all the innovations over the last 20 years and it's not any less "fun"?

[1] http://zdoom.org/

Jumping, mouselook, crosshairs? That does not sound like Doom to me. Give http://www.chocolate-doom.org/ a try, that engine is faithful.

I'm not playing with any of those things so they must be off by default. I'm just using it as a way to be able to easily run it on a modern system without having to mess around.

Doom II is possibly my favorite game of all time. In the early-mid 2000s there was a pretty active multiplayer scene around a port called ZDaemon[1] and another called Skulltag. Conplete with a GameSpy-like client for finding and joining servers, new modes of play like CTF and monthly tournaments. Not sure what it's like today but worth a look if you're liking ZDoom.

1: http://zdaemon.org/

I don't think it says anything specific about the genre. The same applies to platformers (Super Mario Bros), and most other genres.

d'You give brutal doom a try yet? It's a little violent but amazing and fast. http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI3zJJW4m9g&feature=relmf...

"Players can play the entire game from the map mode. Zoom in close enough and you can even see individual bullets flying around the levels."

I don't remember that from the original Doom? I didn't think you could see any other 'things' on the map, let alone that the bullet weapons are hitscan so don't have any projectiles flying about.

Am I misunderstanding what they mean here? Or is my memory just failing me?

I can't recall if it required a cheat or not (secret stuff didn't show up on the map by default), but you could absolutely see every entity in the level from the map screen.

This included enemies, projectiles, powerups, bullet sparks and assorted decorations. Many of them were shown as little arrows indicating which direction they were facing.

From memory, "things" / entities aren't visible on the map by default, but toggle keys and/or cheat codes can make more stuff visible.

Projectiles (from the rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG9000) will fly around.

You can't see the projectiles from hitscan weapons fly across the map, but things like puffs of smoke on the walls where a weapon hits it are short-lived "things" and you can see them blink into (and out of) existence.

If I'm not mistaken, keying in "iddt" multiple times would show more and more detail, up to and including entities.

I definitely remember that from the original Doom. I don't recall if you needed a cheat code to activate, or if it was just an option.

If you've not read Masters of Doom, do so now. It is an amazing read.

Oh man that was an awesome game. I used to stay until 11pm at night playing colleagues over the Lotus network. And then once we found out how to download wad files from some US university over FTP...

Mind you, walking out through a darkened office with lights turning on and off used to give you a few flashbacks...

Doom was the reason for building my first PC. Anyway, many years later, I read and studied doom source code, mostly to see how the game engine worked. I had it printed out on paper and read it line by line and found it to be very readable, and even entertaining.

edit: Hall, humiliated, quit midway through 1983, should read 1993

A little violent game

I know this is an utter troll, but I think it is worth broadcasting to any HN member that DOOM is a notable feat of software engineering: not only did Carmack invent and perfect a wide variety of technologies, they also included what was the first seriously adopted modding kit that lead to a lot of people being introduced to game modification and programming.

Doom did not include a modding kit. All utilities were made by fans. Modding was easy in part because the engine had been designed to load all game content from separate, easily modified .wad files. (The rampant popularity of the game itself also helped pave the way for a modding community, of course.)

That's not actually true. Carmack uploaded the source for the level editor and utilities for modders to use. The modding community just made much better and easier to use tools. .wad files were also created specifically to encourage modding and make it non-destructive.

Excerpt from Masters of Doom:

> Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions, they were concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players had to erase the original Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images; once a Nazi was changed into Barney, there was no way to bring the Nazi back quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized the data so players could replace sound and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He created a subsystem that separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym suggested by Tom Hall, it stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every time someone booted up the game, the program would look for the WAD file of sounds and images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the main program to a different WAD without damaging the original contents. Carmack would also upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and utilities program so that the hackers could have the proper tools with which to create new stuff for the game.

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