DOOM development on NeXTSTEP
Here’s as much information as I can glean from this scan:
- it’s John Carmack’s NeXTStation; we had a NeXTCUBE which was used to scan the videocam images we made of our monsters (clay and latex)
- the cookie monster icon is for John’s app, Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop, which we ran on the Cube and processed the images that the videocam captured. The videocam was plugged directly into the Cube.
- the screen is mainly showing the debugging environment of SuperDebugger as DOOM is being debugged
- the DOOM app window has a black, draggable title bar with the 320×200 game screen rendered within it
- the Objective-C compiler is just under the game window
- at the bottom of the screen are icons representing the running apps; many are source files
About the article, here are my clarifications and bug fixes:
- the reason Scott Miller was trying to get in touch with me was because of my PC game (port) Pyramids of Egypt, a game i wrote originally in 1985 on the Apple II and ported to the PC in 1989. No one else was involved in making this game.
- John, Adrian and myself did NOT quit Softdisk after we started making Commander Keen; we did it all after work and on the weekends at the lakehouse
- Tom Hall was included in this group and it was mainly John C., Tom and myself that made Commander Keen 1-3. Adrian did a few graphics for Keen 3 at the very end of the project but he wasn’t involved at the beginning
- One month after releasing Keen 1-3 we received our first royalty check and decided to quit Softdisk and form id Software on February 1, 1991
- id was located in Madison, Wisconsin between September 1991 and March 1992; this was when i started getting involved with Raven Software as they were local to the area
- id moved to Mesquite, Texas in March 1992; at this time, Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud joined the original team: John Carmack, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack and myself
- DOOM was never originally going to be “Green and Pissed”; that was a game idea Tom had before we made Wolfenstein 3D and i thought it was a hackneyed idea (science lab experiment goes bad and mutants run amok) so i came up with the idea of a Castle Wolfenstein remake
- when Tom left id he immediately started working on Wolfenstein II – we licensed Apogee the Wolfenstein name to make the sequel but later decided not to continue with it…..so Wolf II became Rise of the Triad
- id’s taking over distribution for DOOM is described as a “staff split” but Apogee and id were always two seperate companies
- the “medium detail” mode mentioned in the article was called “high-color mode” and was only available in the first version or so of DOOM and was removed because of its incompatibility with some video adapters
- bullets aren’t physical projectiles in the DOOM engine
- we only put in multiplayer near the very end of the game even though we announced the feature in our January 93 press release about DOOM
- the graphics for Wolfenstein were mostly drawn by Adrian Carmack but Kevin Cloud helped a lot after he came onboard on April 1, 1992
- when we did video capture of our latex and clay models, the video camera was pointed at the model and a live video feed was plugged into the NeXTCUBE which, at any time, we could click a button to take a frame grab. This frame was then fed into our program Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop which took it from 24-bit color down to a 256-color VGA paletted graphic. At that point it was saved on our network where Adrian and Kevin could load it into Deluxepaint II and clean it up.
- during Wolf3D’s development we came up with the idea of a contest to find the hardest thing in the game; for beta, we drew a graphic that was NOT going to be the final code, so just before mastering we changed the graphic – we had never been “plagued by leaks”; an alpha version of DOOM *did* leak however
- Wolf3D was banned because of Nazi content in addition to violence; in Germany there is a sheet of banned imagery that will put you in jail if you are seen with it on – Wolf3D was full of this imagery (Nazi imagery)
- Cygnus Studios became Rogue Entertainment after an internal revolt; they were working on Strife for us
- a SNES version of DOOM *was* created in secrecy by Sculptured Software; they presented a final, finished SNES version of DOOM and sent it to us asking if we wanted to publish it; oh hell yeah!
- the Jaguar version of DOOM was done internally at id; it was very fun and challenging but the Jaguar died a slow death
Great article!
Download this page in PDF format
Thanks John – great to see that article, having missed it the first time around. I used to play Doom on a 486 over a make-shift network with friends ‘back in the day’. Lights out and sound up. The rocket launcher had to be my all-time favourite weapon. Thanks for a great game and hope your new one is going well!
Thank you, John, for posting.
Ever since I found your site a few weeks ago I’m a regular here.
Playing QWCA were the BEST years of my gaming life, never to return, but never to be forgotten…
Now I see how it was.
I remeber the last level of Doom2 gets my PC(486DX66) a little lag when monsters surrounded me.
There was some level editors that I get from PC magazine for Wolf(Wolfedit?) and for Doom too.
To hard to understand for small boy.
I didnt know that ROTT have been made by Tom Hall. Was pretty fun game -many weapons, double pistols, hand of god mode and dog spell.
Cygnus made awesome arcade fighter Raptor. Much more epic than Tyrian
Revan is still solid company.
Thanks for history John.
The german ban on Wolfenstein 3D actually ended in 2004 (such bans (“Beschlagnahmung”
void after 10 years). As the game contains “imagery of anticonstitutional organisations” and the Horst-Wessel song, it still must not be spread. Owning it is allowed. That applies to all things with such content (unless it is considered art or something, yeah, videogames are the devil’s work).
So nowadays there is no specific ban on Wolfenstein 3D anymore. It just happens to violate the law in Germany.
John sounds a little nostalgic about the days
Although I’m more quake-of-a-guy, very interesting read. I found the article at gamasutra first, but then again I thought I’d stop by here as the URL is somewhat easy to remember.
ID had and has the no.1 impact on game industry.
Id, carmack, romero and doom change the world of pc and games forever. 1997, lots of doom deatchmatch and coop on USRobotics 56… nhaaaa… good oldie times!
Wow this article was perfect timing! I’m currently reading the book “Masters of Doom” by David Kushner. I’m almost done with the book and this article fit in perfectly with what I’ve read over the last few days.
I remember reading somewhere else about the secret in Wolfenstein. “Call Apogee, say ‘AARDWOLF’” or something like that. I’ve been meaning to fire up the game and go find it (I know what level it’s in, just never got through the maze all the way, lol).
I’ve been a loyal id gamer since I was 6 or 7. I’m 22 now. I remember the first game that got me into PC gaming was Commander Keen 4: Goodbye Galaxy. I beat it (including the Forbidden Fortress secret level). Then Came Wolfenstein 3-D, then Doom. I remember my birthday present when I was (I think) 10: my very own copy of Quake. I managed to run it (albeit at about 3-5 FPS) on my 33Mhz 486 machine.
Good days, those were. I’m feeling nostalgic now…
I just started porting Doom to Plan9 a few days ago. here. Doom has a special place in my heart.
Great post sir..
thanks for sharing. really helped a lot here.
Hey, I actually decided not to become a programmer because I was totally blown away by the some-how leaked doom alpha. And before that I saw “Second reality” from the future crew. Because of that and my incapability to switch from M68k assembly to x86 assembly (I also progammed turbo c and did graphics demoson the atari st) I rather went for a degree in medicine. somehow I got stuck in IT again after learning c++ and I now feel bored as hell coz I have to do boring stuff in java. I wanted to take a look at 3d graphics again… Anyway 3D nowadays seems to be much closer to movie production and seems to be limited by 3d hardware. you can throw a lot at the graphcs subsystem. i am still studying the doom and the quake3 engine and am rewriting it as an exercise.. whatever
WTF is wrong with me .. writing such a long comment lol
Romero, DOOM is all in my life…
Thanks for it…
I LOVE DOOM SO MUCH….