John Romero, part I

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Why do we care about John Romero? You're joking right? This is frickin' John Romero - the co-founder of legendary developer id Software, and co-creator of Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen and Quake. Without this man, the PC would probably still be known as the refuge of flight sims, adventure titles and games with goblins in them. Romero eventually left id and helped set up the troubled-but-great developer Ion Storm in Dallas and Austin, producing the ambitious flop FPS Daikatana. After that he launched Monkeystone games with another ex-id employee Tom Hall, before joining Midway to work on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows.

So what's he up to now? Romero revealed exclusively to us recently that he's currently working on a top secret MMO at his new company. "It's awesome because I love MMOs and the one we're doing is very different from any other MMO for some special reasons," he says. "I can't really say too much - it's the opposite of the Ion Storm 'let's publish our game design in magazine ads' stylee. This is not a typical games company and we're not making typical games." You'll hear more news on his latest project as soon as we do.

Right, let's get on with the show with part one of our interview with John Romero. The concluding part two will be winging its way to you next week.

How did you get into the games industry?

John Romero: In 1979 I started programming and making my own games on the Apple II computer. I finally sold my first game to an Apple II magazine in June 1984, and that was the point I finally became a professional. After that, a lot of the stuff I had written started selling. Origin is where I wanted to work forever. After eight years of working I finally attained my goal - although I was only at Origin for nine months because I started a company with my boss in June 1988 called Inside Out Software. At Inside Out I was porting a game called Nebulous from Commodore to Apple II when the publisher cancelled all of their ports because they were spending all of their money on Lynx development. I got my project canned and at that point I realised that the Apple II market was dead and I needed to get in to PCs immediately.

Eventually you ended up at id Software. What was it like in the early days at id?

John Romero: It was a continuation of what I was doing at SoftDisk. I was there for about a year before I'd had enough of not making games, and I told the president that I was probably going to apply for LucasArts because I had to make games. He was like "OK, lets make a division where you can make games." Basically, I started a new product with SoftDisk called "Gamer's Edge", which ironically now is the name of a gaming column. When I started that, I had to get people into my department, another coder, an editor and an artist.

I wanted to interview Carmack because he was a contributor to SoftDisk - he had made some games that they had published and his games were really good. He came down and he was excited to meet myself and my friend Lane Roathe who was another Apple II expert - I think he thought he could learn something from us.

We started working on the first issue of Gamer's Edge, and the kind of culture that we had in that little department - which was crazy amounts of work - carried over into id. We were working on games during the day for SoftDisk, then around December 1990 we decided we would do a trilogy of games for Scott Miller - then at night time we were making games too. Life was crazy, busy and really fun. Me and Carmack were coding like crazy day and night. I stayed full-time at SoftDisk until we published our first game, made a lot of money and then left.

When we eventually set up id Software, I said "OK, what do you want to focus on, because we can't be working on the same thing?" And Carmack said "I kind of want to work on the graphics." I was pleased because I was good at working on tools and the game design stuff, so that's how we both went on our paths.

How did you come up with Wolfenstein 3D?

John Romero: About four months after starting id, Carmack said "I want to work on some 3D polygon stuff," so our designer went and came up with an idea called Hover Tank. It was a really big challenge to make in 3D, but Carmack did it - this was May 1991 and we had our first first-person view game. John then created his own texture-mapping technology in six months, to allow us to place an artist-drawn texture on a polygon - the result being Catacomb 3D, which was pretty much lost to the world because it was published by SoftDisk and hardly anyone saw it.

However, we thought that first-person perspective looked awesome and were wondering about our next game, initially titled "It's green and pissed", which was a biological research lab going mad, mutants - the typical mad scientist stuff. I thought it was really lame, like a really bad B-movie, so I suggested we remake the Apple II classic Wolfenstein. I thought that game was awesome and I love the name "Wolfenstein". There were just four of us - John, Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall and myself - and although Adrian wasn't a gamer at that time, the three of us were all Apple II nuts.

Carmack had the engine up and running after just two months of work, so we were actually doing full-on level design by February 1992. When we finished the game at the end of June we were going to work on something else, so we figured we'd work on a Wolfenstein sequel Spear of Destiny straight away, which only took two months! There were basically new levels, new graphics, new bosses - not too much - and we got it done very quickly.

Tell us about the creation of Doom...

John Romero: John was already thinking about what was next, what's the next level of the technology, so he modified the engine and put in some variations of form - sloping floors, ramps, new lighting and stuff. But he wanted to get further than that. He brainstormed on it for the next few months, when the engine was kind of growing in his brain. When he was telling us about the things the new engine could do, Tom and myself were like "Yeah, now we can make something really cool!" We all loved the movie Aliens, because we were all about action, and we found out that we could actually get the license. We didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it though - we thought that it'd suck to work on that game because we wouldn't have full control over it. We'd constantly have a movie company smacking us around.

So, we came up with our own idea that was very Alien-ish, but not typical aliens. Everyone expects aliens in space, but then John came up with the initial idea of "How about we have demons from hell in outer space?" and we thought "Yeah! We can totally do that." We kind of merged the whole Aliens things with the demons, chainsaw and shotgun and stuff from Evil Dead - that's where we got the idea to do the chainsaw. We were doing a lot of concept stuff back then, and every time we did a new 3D game, it was a lot of work for us mentally to break our previous design habits.

When we did our first Doom level, it looked exactly like a Wolfenstein level with 90-degree corners, fixed heights and stuff. I wasn't happy with it, I was like "Right, we need to make sure that no area of the game looks like Wolfenstein" - that needed to be our design goal. It was the same thing with Quake. I didn't want to ever look at any area of the game and think that it could've been done in Doom. I knew movement through the space was going to be similar because we were still doing a run-and-gun type thing, but I didn't want the space to look the same. I wanted it to be impressive and I wanted people to look around with the look function - maybe there's a glimmer, some detail in the distance that makes you think, "Hey there's a lot of stuff up above me!"

So when you finished Doom you really thought that you had something quite special?

John Romero: Yeah. The last 30 hours were a lot of work, a lot of stress testing, mastering it for download and the whole time we had people calling the office, we had people on the internet who knew where we were going to put the game and they were creating fake file names like "Where. Is. It." There were 250 users or something, which back then was a lot. When we finally uploaded it, the University of Wisconsin FTP server went down, so we uploaded it a second time and the server went down again. Finally, after they limited the users or something we finally managed to upload it, and we were exhausted. Sandy Peterson was sleeping on the floor under his desk, and we were tired of seeing the game as well - for us we had seen it so much over the last year that we were glad to be done with it.

The reaction was obviously amazing and Doom became a smash hit. How does it feel having millions of people loving your game?

John Romero: It was really cool. When Doom came out, everything that happened before was like nothing. Every single game magazine wrote about Doom and every issue we saw for at least a year or two. Everyone was talking about Doom - complete addiction. It was insane, definitely the biggest cultural thing I've seen in gaming so far. Maybe EverQuest and World of Warcraft were similar, but back then and probably for about 10 years after that there was nothing like it. It was cultural rather than just games.

People were spending a lot of time on the computer, but hardware had only just become good enough to do great stuff with. Games before that point were never high on action and engaging, but when Doom came out it was almost "Here's what a computer is for." There was the craziest violence you've ever seen on a computer screen too, and since everyone was so addicted it was almost like it was accepted. There was some backlash, but it was so minor compared to the overwhelming tidal wave of acceptance that I think violence became a lot more mainstream in the media because of it.

How did your head end up on a spike in Doom 2?

John Romero: That was a funny little Easter Egg thing. At the end of a project, that's usually when you want to stick your Easter Eggs in - especially if you don't have a QA team. What happened was, I was working with Bobby Prince on getting some music and sound in the game, and I was on the boss level 30. We needed sounds for when the boss got hit and died, so to test it, we had a sprite behind a wall in a little room - some kind of object to represent the brain of the evil thing that you'd hit it with the rocket.

Every object always had a little graphic associated with it, and I guess Adrian decided it would be funny to put my head on a stake back there. So he secretly drew my head on a stake, which was funny because I had to play through the level and hit that object with a rocket. So I ran through the level and as I was getting close to it I thought for second that I saw my reflection, but then I got closer and I thought, "No way!" I knew they wanted to keep it in there as an Easter Egg so that after the game had shipped they could say "Guess what John! Ha-ha-ha!"

So, I went to Bobby Prince and I showed him, and I was like "I've got to have an even deeper Easter Egg for these guys, to show that I knew that they did it." And so we decided to do a scary evil backwards sentence that played when you came out of the teleporter. I wanted to say "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero." Bobby recorded it with his microphone, pitch shifted it and did all of this stuff to it to make it sound all evil and slow. I was thinking that when the game was shipped they'd be like "Ha-ha-ha! Your head's on a stake!" and I could be like "Ha-ha-ha! I already knew!"

We put it in late at night, and then the next day American McGee came in testing. He noticed it and was like "Oooh, scary backwards thing," played it forwards and went and told the artists. But we left it in there because it was funny.

Can you remember any stand out moments from the development of Quake?

John Romero: The only real stand out moment from Quake was when we had a big company meeting in November 1995 and basically decided to not go with our original plans for Quake. Everyone was really stressed out, the game engine had taken a year to get to the point where developers could actually make a game with it, whereas Doom was probably four months of engine work before we could actually start work on the game.

What I was doing at the time was the tools for Quake but I was also working on Ultimate Doom and Hexen at the same time. So I was making some Quake levels, but not anything that I thought was going to be final because the engine was still in a state of flux. Being there and seeing how we took six months for Wolfenstein, a year for Doom, I thought maybe it would take a year and half for Quake.

I remember having this meeting because a couple of people were concerned that it was taking too long and they were really burnt out, and everything on the engine was barely at a point where we could use it for a real game. There was no proof of concept for the way that I wanted to do the game design which was like the early Quake design, because we just didn't have the programmers - they were only working on the rendering and network technology and that was all we could do.

I fully understood that John didn't want to hire any more people and it was going to take longer. We were innovating with technology and I wanted to innovate with game design as we had done in the past.

But we had more voices in the company at that time that were inexperienced with the way we had done product development - the ones voicing concern had never been there through the main project development phase. And so the other owners, Kevin and John, were both really tired of this grind and John was kind of on the fence with "Well we need to lead with our game design as well but..."

I was tired of the bickering and not getting any recognition for all of the work and other projects I was doing for the company. I was always about starting a distribution company, wanting to do more with the IP we had, doing engine licensing. All of the business decisions - I was instrumental in doing all of that stuff. If I wasn't working on the main game, to them that looked like I wasn't working. I was kind of tired of that perception.

We had the meeting with everybody and I voiced my thing to the other owners, that this is what we do - engine development and game development. I said that we needed to innovate on the game side and that we didn't have enough people to do that. So when I saw that the other owners were actually listening to the inexperienced developers, and people were leaning towards "Let's just throw Doom weapons in this thing and get it done", I was totally against that idea, but I went along with it because I was tired of arguing. I re-wrote the design doc so we could use the most complete levels we had for some kind of framework and just power this thing out.

From that point in November 1995, after about two months of intense work, I stopped all work on everything else. That was the hardest I worked at id - seven months of insane death-march mode. We all moved in to one room after that point. We called it the war room. My computer was next to John Carmack's and we started having arguments about game design stuff. I was trying to stretch things as far as the new design, but he just wanted to get the game done. He didn't want to do any special extra stuff. So I was like "Well, if that's the way is..."

After about two months of that, in January of '96, I called up my friend Tom Hall and he was doing Prey at 3D Realms and he was developing it.

And now Prey is almost up on us...

John Romero: Isn't that funny? Tom had the original game idea and he developed it over two years at 3D Realms before I took him to Ion Storm and they stopped it. I called up Tom and I said, "After Quake I'm out of here, let's start a company again" and he was like, "Alright, sounds great", so I just powered through Quake's development. Even after doing Ultimate Doom and Hexen, I still had more levels in Quake than everyone else.

I was kind of sad that it was the end of Quake development, because during the releases of all of our other games everyone was there and it was exciting and energising. With Quake it was a Saturday and nobody else was there. I was talking to everybody on IRC. I brought a friend of mine in for a hardcore Doom deathmatch I loved playing. I eventually hired him as my IT manager at Ion Storm. I was basically there by myself at the weekend putting together the distribution at 5.30 am of June 22 1996, but everyone else was gone. I was like, "You know what, this place is done!" It was only after taking a vacation after Quake - about a month and a half - I came back, created the retail masters and then I started to talk to potential publishers about my next deal. And co-incidently, the guys at id decided to ask me to leave.

Maybe they found out, who knows - whatever happened happened because that's the way it was going to be. I had planned to get out of there eight months before that. Everything worked out the way that it worked out.

Don't forget to tune in next week for the second and concluding part of the interview, where John Romero discusses his time at Ion Storm - and yes, he talks about Daikatana - his stint at Midway with Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, his favourite game he's been involved with ever and more.

CVG Staff