HomeCourt Box Concept

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

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.”

                          

It brought back the memory of how the same thing happened to me back in 1991 when I was working on Commander Keen 4-6. I was driving my brown 1975 Cougar in the winter down a pretty short road that was just in front of id’s apartment. I had the accelerator down to get some speed, and when I took my foot off the car kept accelerating! I started messing with the pedal but it didn’t stop. I realized the smartest thing was to put the car in neutral and hit the brakes before I got to the intersection. It worked and I quickly pulled over and popped the hood while the car engine was whining loudly as it was still accelerating. I pulled the fuel hose out to stop the engine and then pulled back on the accelerator cable to get it back to normal. That was pretty terrifying for about 30 seconds.

The reason the accelerator got jacked is because I changed the cable assembly because the previous one broke. But it wasn’t calibrated correctly and the cable snagged on something that time.

The lesson? DON’T TRY TO FIX YOUR OWN CAR! Lol.

                          

There are some other great articles inside, such as Ensemble Studios’ development transition from Age of Empires 1 to 2 (Age of Kings), a short interview with my friend Randy Pitchford, and an article with ideas about how to you can spend your time if your game has been canceled.

The people who put this magazine together are a great bunch. They have many, many years of experience in the industry and want the magazine to be only the highest quality. I worked with Jessica Tams and Jake Simpson, and they are both very kind and generous to include me here. Gamesauce is only for professional game developers and those in the game industry.

You can read the entire magazine right now.

                          

It was easier for me to edit every php file rather than re-download all my plugins again (except the W3 Caching plugin – it has about 100 files). I also had to reinstall the theme because it was fully infected, too.

So, everyone, make sure you have proper permissions set on all your files or things like this can happen.

                          

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.”

                          

Here are my updated directions for Mac OS X:

(1) Copy entire contents of the Dark Forces CD to a directory (ex. ~/Games/Dark). Keep the directory name to 8 letters or less.
(2) Download the latest Mac OS X version of DOSBox and install it.
(3) mount c ~/Games/Dark (or wherever you put the game on your hard drive)
(4) c:
(5) subst p: c:
(6) p:
(7) cd dark
(8) type either imuse or dark to run the sound config utility or the game

To go in/out of full-screen mode, press Option-Return. That’s it – it works great!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, for Mac users there is an awesome program named Boxer that will wrap your DOS games up in a simple app file and you just double-click to launch. It’s really amazing. Check it out here.

                          

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!

                          

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.

                          

News 8 Reporter watching Carmack on NeXT Cube

It was June 1992. We had already shipped Wolfenstein 3D, the shareware episode only at that point, and were working on finishing the rest of the 6 episodes. Bobby Prince was in the house busy making the music for those last 5 episodes. Bobby brought his entire audio rig with him which consisted of a huge sampling keyboard, speakers, and a rack with lots of effects units.

id Software was working out of a one-bedroom loft apartment at La Prada Club in Mesquite, Texas. The six of us lived at La Prada or at adjacent complexes, so getting to work was only a couple minutes. We didn’t think that was strange; we were on a mission.

Whenever Bobby left for the night, Tom and I would start playing around with his sampling keyboard. We came up with some crazy songs, and somehow we decided to come up with some answering machine messages. There were a bunch of samples already in the keyboard, and we came up with these right on the spot with no practice.

Kevin Cloud drawing Spear of Destiny title

I used samples from some Judas Priest and W.A.S.P. songs as intros, and also a Vince Guaraldi song for one. Most of the answering machine “stories” are about a huge, red demon that is looking for id Software and showed up just after id escaped the building. Tom is the guy interviewing the demon, who then tires of Tom when he has no information about id’s whereabouts and instantly destroys him. Or throws him down the stairs. This happens again and again.

The recordings are a little high-pitched and missing some bass to them. We only used a couple of these on the answering machine, and then Jay took them off and recorded a more corporate message, thus ending the fun.

Until now, only a few people knew about, and heard, these messages. I shall release the Kraken!

01 Well…….. Begone!
02 The Letter ‘i’ and the Number 5
03 We’re So Very Sorry
04 Powers You Won’t Believe
05 Powers That You Can’t Imagine06 We’re Not Here Right Now
07 Having Them for Dinner
08 Here’s a Tone You’ll Really Like
09 I Like the Hot Dogs
10 I Want to Speak to Mankind
11 Demonic Task Force
12 Goodbye, Ass!
13 Goodbye!
14 Shut Up
15 Suck This!
16 Fuck Off!

Message #2 was made after the Sesame Street counting segments like this one. Watch the baker at the end.

                          

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.