planet romero » Game History

Latest Update & DOOM Post-Mortem

Romero — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:34:57 +0000

Wow, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here… thank you very much, Facebook. Most of my updates happen over there, but not really anything important or game history-related. I use Twitter as well, but don’t do much. I’m just very busy running my game company, Loot Drop, and forgetting to update my site.

At GDC 2011, Tom Hall and I did a DOOM Post-Mortem, which basically talked about the complete development of DOOM in a month-by-month format. You can watch the video and the slides right here.

Tom Hall has been working with me and Brenda at Loot Drop for an entire year, and it’s been a blast! He’s been designing and running his own game team, and his game is turning out great. Brenda is busy with her own game, designing and running her team (the game is COOL!), and I’ve been working on keeping the company running smoothly. My game, Cloudforest Expedition, is on a temporary hiatus.

Ravenwood Fair Post-Mortem

Romero — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:05:10 +0000

What would it feel like to actually make Disneyland in a magical, fairytale forest? That’s what I wanted to find out with Ravenwood Fair.

I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the team working on what I decided to call Ravenwood Fair. At the beginning, I did art direction toward a painterly style until the lead artist, Christine MacTernan, totally got the look and took over from there. I created and coded all the sound effects, and worked with a great composer named Aaron Walz from Game Audio Alliance on the game’s looping soundtrack. He did an excellent job, as the song can be played infinitely without annoyance – the true test of a great composition.

The team was very small: four programmers, two concept artists, two animators, a UI artist, a producer, Brenda and me. That’s only 12 people. In addition, the game launched on October 19, which means it took 2.5 months to go from concept to ship. This causes many a social game publisher to gasp, but there’s a good reason for it: the team worked very hard, and they had already been working on several game concepts for 7 months before I showed up, so they were already “at speed” and no ramp-up time was needed.

When I arrived at Lolapps, the owners told me I could create whatever, as long as the game would make money and launch by September 30. That was less than 2 months by the time I started working on it. I knew I had to hurry up and come up with a concept, so I quickly identified the best game on Facebook at the time, FrontierVille, and played it for three days so I could understand its design patterns and monetization model (I had been following the social game space since 2009). Then, I got the scoop on the engine we were using and found out it was really fast and could draw a ton of graphics on the screen quickly. I learned from the lead coder how much code had been written for the previous game prototypes, so I needed to use as much as possible to keep moving forward and not go backward much.

The idea for the game appeared very quickly. The setting was going to be a fairytale/storybook/magical place that floated in the air and was occupied by a slightly scary forest. Since the biggest games on Facebook were business sims, I needed to have the player build their own little business, and I wanted it to be like nothing else on Facebook. I thought a Fair would be a really nice obvious positive goal for the player to build, and there wasn’t a carnival/circus/fair sim on Facebook……yet. My thought was this: when you’re building a place for visitors to come and occupy, why wouldn’t you want them to be doing something really fun while they’re there? What’s more fun than Disneyland? I imagined what it must be like at a high-level point-of-view to actually RUN DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida – to have to carve out a bunch of wilderness packed with alligators and other denizens, and then have to build a fun place in the middle of that – and KEEP it happy and fun, all the while the alligators and beasts want their place back. I figured that would be a fun game to play – as I cut back a scary forest, I build a Fair, visitors come and use all the things I’m building, and I get to interact with them in a light fashion. That was the basis of my design, so we had our first meeting, and the producer and leads wrote down the long list of things that we needed to start working on immediately.

After August, we were still working on the foundations of the game systems and entire art overhaul, when Brenda joined the team from Critter Island (it had been shut down by Facebook). Brenda immediately started working on the quests, the map layout, and the tutorial parts of the game. She had to basically try to get all the final parts of the game together while I was still working on the foundational stuff, and we had to make sure that they would meet in the middle and the game would be complete by September 30.

Near the end of September, to make the launch date, the game had been re-scoped and re-prioritized so much that it wasn’t going to be anything I’d want to play if we shipped it in that state. Facebook games are well-known to ship incomplete and get fixed post-launch. I’m not from that world – I’m from the world of “You only launch once” and the first impression is extremely important. There were game systems missing that absolutely needed to be included in the game for the design to harmonize, and it got very tense at the end of September with the execs pressing for launch and me holding the game back to make it great. Every day in October was a “Can it ship?” day. It took 19 more 12pm-to-4am days to get the game in a state that I’d launch. In fact, I held back on doing interviews about the game until I knew it was going to be something I’d put my name on. Finally, around October 15, the game was quality enough for me to do the Dean Takahashi interview in VentureBeat.

The game launched, but the team kept working. We had lots of holes to fill, and obscure bugs to fix. The launch on Facebook went as good as a launch could possibly go: millions of people played the game and hundreds of thousands still join every week. Brenda and I ended our consulting with Lolapps on February 25, 2011 so we could concentrate full-time on our new startup, Loot Drop, Inc.

Just recently at the beginning of March, Ravenwood Fair made the #15 slot on the AppData Top 15 Applications list – this list is of ALL applications on Facebook, not just games (over 125,000 apps are on Facebook). Ravenwood Fair is the #1 non-Zynga game, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Currently, over 25 million people play Ravenwood Fair every month on all social platforms (over 11 million on Facebook alone), and over 1 million play every day on Facebook only. I never thought I’d see the day that I would make a game that doubled World of Warcraft, player count-wise. I’d like to thank Brenda and Lolapps for giving me the opportunity, and the Ravenwood Fair launch team that worked so hard on the game.

Ravenwood Fair Trivia Time!

Except John and Brenda, the team that developed and launched Ravenwood Fair had never made a game before.

The loading screen graphic has Frontier Jack’s skeleton buried underground – it’s a reference to FrontierVille, and a statement that we were out to bury him. Most everyone at Zynga saw the reference and loved it, and it continues the tradition of game developers referencing each other’s work in a fun spirit. Duke Nukem 3D had a TON of hilarious references in it.

The names of my and Brenda’s kids are in the game: Maezza, Avalon, Donovan, Mike, and Lillia. I also included my amazing grandmother, Socorro, nicknamed Suki.

Huginn is the mentor of Ravenwood. He has a brother named Muninn. They both come from Norse mythology and are Odin’s ravens who fly around the world and bring him news of everything that’s happening.

The outhouse is called a Thunderbox because that’s the name Australian’s have for it.

The Dirty Donkey Pub is named after the Dirty Donkey Tavern in Oakhurst, California. Brenda and I visited the final location of the legendary Sierra Online game company and when we entered the legendary location into Foursquare the Dirty Donkey was nearby.

Ravenwood is not the first cute game by me. That honor would probably go to almost any of my 1980′s Apple II games. More recently, my games at Monkeystone Games.

The Churro Wagons are there because I’m part-Mexican and Disneyland has churro carts, too.

The Super Sweet Corn stand is there because Brenda and I *love* to eat it.

The Dopefish Stand is there because……..well, it’s the Dopefish!

The Fettucine Bros. Cannon is there because it was in The Secret of Monkey Island, and Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer are awesome.

The Mystic Wagon is there because of Ultima 4, one of the best games ever made.

Ravenwood Castle was supposed to be called Dark Castle, after the classic Mac game, but the artists changed the look into a tree-thing, so I had to name it Ravenwood Castle.

Muscle Mania is in the game because it was in Chrono Trigger’s Millennial Fair. Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all-time.

Sarlacc Pegball is there because…….uh….STAR WARS.

The Toader game is an homage to Frogger.

The decoration named Ursoc the Amazing comes from World of Warcraft’s Ursoc boss.

The decoration named Apollon the Mighty comes from the legendary strongman.

When the game first launched, many of the decorations were from the previous incarnation of the game’s design.

The decoration named Gaea is a reference to a controversial beaver statue – I thought it would be a hilarious hidden reference.

The Ing-Frey totem is a reference to more Norse mythology.

The protector named Feathertop comes from a classic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Sincere Pumpkin protector is a reference to It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – wherein The Great Pumpkin visits only the most sincere pumpkin patch on Halloween Eve. My original plan was to have the game check to see if the player had 19 pumpkins close to each other, and if so, make a great pumpkin ghost randomly appear. The 19 was a reference to our ship date, since it was in October.

The magical substance called Vitalin originally appeared in Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine.

The Sleeping Potion is a reference to Sleeping Beauty, but no need to stab your finger on a spinning wheel – just drink the potion.

The first quest is titled Secret of the Forest. It’s the name of one of my favorite Chrono Trigger songs.

The buildings hidden in the forest for the player to uncover are a reference back to the game Civilization.

Originally, I spelled the game’s name Ravenwood Faire. This resulted in a big discussion over the name that entailed A/B advertisement testing, and numerous wasteful discussions. Eventually, they decided to keep the name but drop the ‘e’ on Faire. The big hulabaloo was that people would think the game is about Renaissance Fairs. Which, evidently, is bad? The game takes place in a medieval time. It’s a Fair. So, to compensate, I named the market Ye Olde Shoppe with an ‘e’ after each word. Then, I designed the expansion pack and called it Ravenrock Mine – that’s Mine with an ‘e’ on the end! Later on, we found out that Ravenrock Mine is a part of the Elder Scrolls world, so I renamed it to Ravenstone Mine. Still, with the ‘e’ on the end. As of right now, it’s still not launched – and that’s another story.

The protectors in the game were originally called Super Decorations. I wanted to have decorations that were way cooler than fences, trees, rocks, etc. Decorations that danced with the visitors in your Fair. So, we created a bunch of them and they don’t look anything like Vitalin Cannons, but that’s what they turned into. You see, while in development, Brenda told me that she didn’t feel good leaving the game because her visitors would be scared by the forest and the monsters she left there. She wanted something that would make her feel that it was okay to leave the game. So, I came up with the idea to make the Super Decorations shoot balls of Vitalin magic at the monsters and scary forest. That made her feel better. Then I renamed the Super Decorations to Vita-Decos for a couple days, then changed the name to something that made sense: Protectors. They’re alive because they tap into the Vitalin that’s in the very rocks of Ravenwood. At the edge of the map, you can see some Vitalin in the rocks.

The Crittle Bear got its name like this: before settling on mushrooms as the food you get as a drop in the game, I wanted to come up with a food that the animal visitors in your Fair would eat. The word was a merger of Critter and Vittles: Crittle. The food in the game was going to look like little brown triangles (probably like dog food) and was going to be named Crittle until I looked up the word on the net. It turns out that Crittle is urban slang for Crystal Meth! So, I decided to go with mushrooms for food (they live on trees anyway), and since the Bear looks like he’s messed up, I named him the Crittle Bear since he’s probably been doing too much crittle and now he attacks visitors.

The Domovoi is from Russian folklore. Domovoi typically live inside the house as a friendly spirit, but since the previous occupants of Ravenwood have up and left, they also left their Domovoi, who is mad and attacks you, the newcomer. Supposedly, the Domovoi is still protecting the previous master’s house.

Grock was a famous clown in the early 1900′s, so I named the clown monster after him. Many of my references are to refresh the memory of those who’ve gone before us.

When you build the Gingerbread House, a new visitor appears named Hansel. This was done against my wishes. Originally, I had named the gingerbread man visitor Nuremberg. Why? Well, not because of the Nazi trials, of course, but because Nuremberg has been famous for centuries for its gingerbread! At the last minute before rolling the gingerbread house content out, one of the owners of Lolapps had the name changed to prevent players from possibly being offended. Were you all offended by Wolfenstein 3D?

Bumble the snow monster is named after the character in the Rankin/Bass Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

One night, some coders came up with the idea of having Huginn wear a monocle, so the UI artist added it to him. I thought that having Huginn look like he’s a young raven, but wearing a monocle, would be cute. Like he’s trying to act smart just by wearing the monocle.

The crow that flies up and out of the forest and past “the camera” was influenced mainly by the scene in The Secret of Monkey Island where you actually reach the island in chapter 3 and see a bird fly past the camera and down to the island – the reverse of what I do in Ravenwood, but still very cool-looking. It’s actually similar to the scene in the game LOOM where the Cleric’s head is ripped off by Chaos and flies into the camera. Making the crow look as good as it does required a lot of animator revision and direction. It had to be redone a few times before it looked the way I wanted it to.

The development of the Ravenwood Theme song took quite a while. I contacted Soundrangers to see if they could create original compositions to spec. We had just gotten them to modify the title song that I had picked out for Critter Island (it was in the music section on Soundrangers’ site) and I wanted to see what they could do with an original piece. Soon, they came to Lolapps and I had a meeting with them where I explained to Aaron Walz exactly what kind of song I wanted. When I’m choosing music for my games, I’ll usually give reference music or a specific reference song to the composer and tell them what I’m looking for and why the reference song is important. With Ravenwood, the reference song is called Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms and was composed by the amazing Yoko Shimomura for Nintendo’s game, Super Mario RPG (1996). She was born the day Ravenwood Fair launched and during my birth year (9 days before I was born!) The song is a little fast for something that is going to play a million times, but the way the song is very positive with just a hint of scary (as a reference to the scary forest) made it perfect for Ravenwood. I wanted Aaron to compose a song JUST LIKE IT. After almost a month of work on the song, it sounded nothing like Yoko’s song, but had its own unique identity and I love it.

Originally, I had a song playing during the game’s loading screen. It sounded just like a medieval Fair and was really great. Unfortunately, it took too much bandwidth for most folks playing the game, so instead I created the Ravenwood Signature sound to play as soon as the loading screen came up.

The Giant Snowman named Daglow is named after Don Daglow, a legend in the game industry.

Putting credits in social games is not done currently. It’s very sad to see so many coders, artists and designers not getting credit for their work, something they could see on MobyGames. At Lolapps, Brenda and I fought hard for credits in Ravenwood. Just type the word ‘credits’ anytime you’re playing the game. At Loot Drop, however, credits will always be viewable.

id Software: 20 Years Old Today!

Romero — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:01:09 +0000

When John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and I officially started our first day at the lakehouse on Cross Lake in Shreveport, Louisiana, we had absolutely no idea that our company would last twenty years.

After three months, Tom Hall officially joined us in May 1991. He wanted his transition from Softdisk to go smoothly, so he stayed to train his replacement. Our first year at id was spent mostly developing games for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge subscription disk – the product I started, but then left when the company could hold us no longer.

In our first year, 1991, we created Shadow Knights, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Rescue Rover, Hovertank One, Rescue Rover II, Keen Dreams, Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle, Commander Keen: The Armageddon Machine, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter!, Catacomb 3D and Tiles of the Dragon. Eleven games in one year! Not counting the Keen games, Softdisk paid us $5,000 for each game. It was a good thing our first Commander Keen trilogy was making money and gaining each month, otherwise our trajectory would have been drastically different. (In the halls of id Software, some of these games are on display in hanging frames.)

When we started creating Wolfenstein 3D in January 1992 (in Madison, Wisconsin), we still had one more game to create for Softdisk, but we didn’t want to do it. We were too excited to create Wolfenstein 3D! So, George Broussard, co-founder of Apogee Software/3D Realms, offered to create the final game for us. The result of his labors, using our game engine, was the rare and obscure game, ScubaVenture: The Search For Pirate’s Treasure! (An interesting trivia point about the game’s title: one of my programming heroes, Nasir Gebelli, wrote a game called ScubaVenture back in 1983.)

Our first year was the last time we were so prolific. As the games got more complex, and better, the time to develop them grew. Wolfenstein 3D took 6 months, DOOM took one year, Quake took 18 months. In between, our sequels took less time (Spear of Destiny, 2 months; DOOM II, 8 months), but they were using existing code we’d already written.

Twenty years, wow. That is quite an impressive accomplishment, due in large part to the torch-carrying efforts of John Carmack and Kevin Cloud, both of whom remain at id Software today. May id Software live another strong 20 years!

Duke Nukem Forever Returns

Romero — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:10:34 +0000

I’ve been asked several times by people on Twitter what I think about Duke Nukem Forever having an actual due date; that the game might actually come out.

Well, I think it’s awesome for several reasons. First, because I’ve been a huge Duke fan since Duke Nukem 3D. I absolutely loved that game. My memories of playing DN3D are as awesome as my memories playing Dark Forces, Outlaws, Jedi Knight, and Ghost Recon. Secondly, I’ve been friends for years with Randy Pitchford, the man who bought the Duke IP from 3D Realms; to carry the torch as it were. I’m really proud of Randy for doing that – Duke is a great character that deserves another major release, and I’m interested to see what directions Gearbox will take Duke in the future.

I visited 3D Realms in May 2000, right after shipping Daikatana. I went over to check out the latest on DNF. George Broussard showed me the game, and it was seriously awesome. Granted, I was seeing the best stuff they had available at the time, but what I saw was really great. I was excited to play the game. Alas, development of the game went through many changes, and not having a dedicated producer early on took its toll. When I heard 3D Realms had halted development of the game, I was half surprised, and half not. It had been 12 years, and that’s an incredibly long time to be in development – I mean, it’s really incomprehensible. I can’t fathom what it must feel like working on a game that long, then not releasing it, especially if you were there at the start of development.

But now we can all breathe a sigh of relief, those of us who kept the excitement at bay for so long. The Duke Nukem Forever development team that continued creating the game, even after being laid off, without being paid, for the pure love of the game, deserve an epic amount of applause and attention. These guys are the heroes. And I’m still excited to play DNF.

GameTales: HomeCourt

Romero — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:33:48 +0000

HomeCourt Box Concept

I recently tweeted about the fact that there was actually a sequel, mostly finished, for Origin Systems’ game, 2400 A.D. titled 2500 A.D. MobyGames and Wikipedia were updated with the information which prompted someone on my TwitterFeed to ask about an unreleased Origin game titled HomeCourt.

Luckily, I’m one of the few people to know about this project. HomeCourt was a basketball game designed by two brothers, Don and John Walker. They were stronger on the design side than the coding side, so they had help from classic game programmer, Steve Meuse. I believe the game idea was brought to Origin in 1987 to make a full court basketball game (One on One was a half-court game).

HomeCourt ad concept

Steve Meuse worked with the brothers, mostly with Don, to get a graphical prototype working. The prototype had players on a projected 2D court running around and passing the ball on an Apple II. I saw this prototype working once when Don Walker was visiting, and it looked pretty nice. It was black and white graphics at the time, and the running and ball-passing worked great. Unfortunately, Steve left Origin in 1988 shortly after I left to co-found my studio, Inside Out Software.

The New Hampshire office of Origin Systems closed, and the company was consolidated in Austin, TX at the start of 1989. That effectively put an end to HomeCourt. Says Steve Meuse, “The game design aspect was getting more complex, and by the time I left Origin in 1988, it seemed to me to be only getting moreso. With the company move and all, the Walkers probably could have used more help and guidance than they got, but that’s just the way things turned out.”

Retro Gamer #75

Romero — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 03:29:18 +0000

This month, Retro Gamer in the UK published issue 75 (over 6 years) and did something they’ve never done before: they had a guest editor. And, you guessed it, that was me. It also has my name on the cover, so that kinda gives it away.

The cover of the magazine is Wolfenstein 3D (much like another issue several months before that was all about the making of Wolf 3D). I got to read/edit all the magazine content before they published it, and I made comments about several of the articles. The biggest part of the magazine I’m involved with is a 12-page interview with me. There are also industry notables who wrote some paragraphs about me, and readers wrote in about their favorite games of mine.

All in all, I was very happy with the result. Darran Jones did a tremendous job planning and executing this feature. Retro Gamer is sold in most major bookstores.

Retro Gamer put out a press release about this issue:

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
30 March 2010

Retro Gamer gains industry legend as guest Editor

John Romero and Imagine Publishing team up for special issue of the world’s greatest retro games magazine, Retro Gamer, is proud to announce an exciting new collaboration with John Romero, co-founder of one of today’s most important and popular genres – the first-person shooter.

On Wednesday 31 March, issue 75 of Retro Gamer goes on sale across the UK and the world with a special celebration issue featuring industry legend John Romero as guest Editor. As well as a host of special content picked by Romero, the issue is packed with comments, tributes and insights from those who have worked with him over the years, such as John Carmack and Dave Perry. The special issue also includes an exhaustive 12-page interview with the man himself, outlining his career, his thoughts on the industry today, and his intriguing current project.

Making his name at companies such as Origin Systems and Softdisk, Romero cut his programming teeth on the Apple II before moving into the PC market. Teaming up with fellow Softdisk workers John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall, he co-formed id Software. After finding success in the shareware scene with the Commander Keen games, id created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, and with them ushered in a new era of gaming that’s still immensely popular today.

“I absolutely love Retro Gamer magazine because it covers all the game history that I love and remember fondly,” said Romero. “Being allowed the chance to do a little writing for the magazine was an amazing opportunity and I hope you all enjoy it the way I did.”

“John Romero is a genuine legend in the videogame industry,” said Darran Jones, Editor of Retro Gamer, “and he has been behind some of the most influential games this industry has ever seen. It’s been a real pleasure collaborating with him on this exciting project.”

QTest was Ground Zero

Romero — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:58:48 +0000

Today is the 14th anniversary of QTest, our release to the public of the Quake executable along with three deathmatch maps, to test our network code over the internet.

Quake was our first internet-playable game, and we knew it would be great to let players try out the net code before the game’s release so we had some lead time to fix all the bugs found with it.

At id Software, we never had a QA department. We were our own QA team, us programmers, designers and artists. A pretty small group, but we were pretty thorough. The network code in Quake, however, needed to be tested way more than our small group could handle because of the amount of networking hardware our packets had to travel through.

It paid off – Quake was released with pretty reliable network code. Playing Quake on a LAN was always a much, much better experience, so John Carmack addressed that with the QuakeWorld release in November 1996 by fixing the network code and adding client-side prediction. Now, the issues he fixed are just part of normal network programming.

The day we released QTest, we invited a very small, select group of hardcore DOOM players to our office to test our release right in front of us. They’re known as the QTest 7. They are:

NaTaS (Mark Fletcher)
Hardball
DoomDeity
PoLiSh (Jaroslaw Krzysztof Marcin Wolski, aka Jerry Wolski. R.I.P.)
Wendigo (Brian Hess)
Monolith
Avatar (Mackey McCandlish)

Here are the original photos of the QTest event at id Software that Wendigo took that Sunday.

The release of QTest paved the way for high-speed internet FPS gaming. I guess you could say that February 24, 1996 was the beginning of the future. Long live QTest!

Quake sketches

Romero — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:27:10 +0000

I was going through some old pictures, and figured I might as well just start uploading my old stuff. Why wait? So, in the Quake section I’ve put up some sketches of maps, artifacts, etc. that I drew for the game.

I have several pages of notes that describe a game different from the Quake that you know. I’ll put these up when I start the Quake game page so I can explain what I was thinking for that design.

I’ve also put up lots of other pictures in many other sections. The smugmug site is really great – you should try it out for your own collections. You can totally customize it however you like.

30 Great Gaming Geeks

Romero — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:07:26 +0000

How great is it to be ranked #5 on a list of the top 30 “gaming geeks”? Pretty great, if you ask me! Ahead of me are Steve Jackson, Shigeru Miyamoto, Reiner Knizia and Will Wright. That’s a pretty awesome group of people.

There’s a down arrow on me, and an up arrow on Will Wright, suggesting that I used to be ranked higher than #5. Wow. Thanks, Geek-O-System guys!

It’s great to see 10% of the list from id Software. Plus, Warren Spector from Ion Storm, at one point. Tom Hall should be here, though. He’s brilliant and under-appreciated.

Happy Birthday, id Software

Romero — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:35:00 +0000

It’s id Software’s 19th birthday today. It makes me wonder: how many people working at id right now actually know that?

Next year will be two decades of Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. How many game companies still standing can boast 20 years? Not many. And most companies that live past 20 years are so far removed from their origins that they’re not even the same company.

John Carmack and Kevin Cloud, two of id’s earliest team members, and John as a co-founder, are still with the company, and working hard on RAGE and Doom 4. John is right down in the pit with the development team, where all the action happens. Kevin manages, as always, exceptionally well on multiple fronts. I salute their efforts to continue the dynasty.

It all started on February 1, 1991. John, Adrian and I left our jobs at Softdisk (R.I.P.) and began work immediately on Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion at the id lake house in Shreveport, Louisiana. Tom Hall needed to stay a few months longer at Softdisk, to help them ease his transition out of the Apple II team. But after work, he’d come over and help out.

Those were prolific years. The years 1990 and 1991 saw us develop almost 20 games with wildly different play styles and themes. The Keens, The Dangerous Daves, the Rescue Rovers, the Catacombs, and more. There were a lot of them and all were fun. Wolfenstein 3D begat the first-person shooter genre in 1992, and id hasn’t looked back.

Congratulations on 19 years, id!