20 Years of Doom: Memories by John Romero & John Carmack

Julio Franco

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years doom memories john romero happy birthday fps id software kotaku john carmack nostalgia

Twenty years ago, on December 10, 1993, John Carmack, John Romero and the rest of the team at upstart id Software unleashed a game called Doom upon the world. Twenty years later, both men have written about their favorite memories of the game for you and all fans of Doom to read. Here they are, in their own words...

In terms of setting this up, as many fans of Doom know, Romero and Carmack are in the post-Doom, post-id phase of their careers. Romero's an industry veteran with numerous games under his belt and many different gigs at the moment. Carmack is the chief technology officer at Oculus, the company behind the Rift virtual reality gaming headset.

Carmack and Romero haven't worked together for nearly a decade and a half. I'm nevertheless delighted to have them here on the same page, sharing some favorite memories about what it was like to bring Doom to the world. 

Thank you to both men for agreeing to celebrate their great creation with Kotaku readers (and TechSpot's by extension).

John Carmack's favorite Doom memory

I still remember the day that multiplayer started just barely working in Doom. I had two DOS boxes set up in my office—in addition to my NeXT workstation—to test multiplayer. The IPX networking was forwarding user input between the systems, but there was no error recovery, so it was very fragile. Still, I could spawn two marines in a test level, and they could look at each other.

I was strafing back and forth on one system and looking over my shoulder at the other computer, watching the marine sprite slide side to side in front of the other player's pistol. I let it coast down, centered on the screen, and turned to the other computer. "Bang!" "Urgh!" Twitch. Shuffle. Big smile. :-) "Bang!" "Bang!" "Bang!" "Bang!" There was a consistency failure before the first frag was truly logged, but it was blindingly obvious that this was going to be awesome.

Carmack: "It was blindingly obvious that this was going to be awesome."

From that point up to the first public release, Doom used IPX broadcast packets to communicate between the players. This seemed like a good efficiency to me—a four player game just involved four broadcast packets each frame. My knowledge of networking was limited to the couple of books I had read, and my naive understanding was that big networks were broken up into little segments connected by routers, and broadcast packets were contained to the little segments. I figured I would eventually extend things to allow playing across routers, but I could ignore the issue for the time being.

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Carmack: "I got chewed out by a network administrator who had found my phone number just to yell at me for my game breaking his entire network."

What I didn't realize was that there were some entire campuses that were built up out of bridged IPX networks, and a broadcast packet could be forwarded across many bridges until it had been seen by every single computer on the campus. At those sites, every person playing LAN Doom had an impact on every computer on the network, as each broadcast packet had to be examined to see if the local computer wanted it. A few dozen Doom players could cripple a network with a few thousand endpoints.

The day after release, I was awoken by a phone call. I blearily answered it and got chewed out by a network administrator who had found my phone number just to yell at me for my game breaking his entire network. I quickly changed the network protocol to only use broadcast packets for game discovery, and send all-to-all directed packets for gameplay (resulting in 3x the total number of packets for a four player game), but a lot of admins still had to add Doom-specific rules to their bridges (as well as stern warnings that nobody should play the game) to deal with the problems of the original release.

John Romero's favorite Doom memory

When you're making a game, you know everything about it, because you're in all of its code and data. This means there are rarely any surprises or mysteries in it. If you've made a lot of games, you get used to that and it's normal. Playing other people's games is when you get to experience something fun and new and unexpected.

I remember, though, when I played Doom during a period of time when its character emerged from the data and it was something new, and unknown and thrilling. This wasn't what one normally got to see during development, but it happened often after we got the monsters in the game—moving around and making their sounds in our brand-new levels.

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Romero: "It gave me chills to experience playing Doom the way everyone else later saw it."

It was incredible to play one of Tom Hall's new maps for the first time and not know what was around the corner or lurking in the darkness, because these sounds were new—the doors opening, the buttons and platforms, and the terrifying howls of wandering demons. They were new sounds in the world's most advanced game environment and it gave me chills to experience playing Doom the way everyone else later saw it, during this brief window of time when it was being born.

Bonus: A 2012 review of Doom by a member of the Romero household, age eight...

years doom memories john romero happy birthday fps id software kotaku john carmack nostalgia

Bonus II: When They Made Doom...

years doom memories john romero happy birthday fps id software kotaku john carmack nostalgia

John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, & Jay Wilbur. Picture via the 3DRealms website.

Have your own favorite Doom memory? Share it below.

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Doom II was one of the first PC games I really played as a kid! So many fond memories. I remember in one of the levels a secret door flying open with one of the demons right behind it, almost made me fly off my chair backwards :')
It was also the first game I ever played online, that for me was something magical at the time.
 
I remember using the Doom 3D Guru to build and manipulate the sprites and levels to customize the game. My favorite custom Doom 3D was Simpsons Doom 3D.
 
A friend of mine told me that Doom was the hottest thing going at this college, so I had another buddy who ran a local BBS download it at blazing 56k HST speed. When a few of us saw it running on the admin's machine for the first time, our jaws were on the floor. This was Wolfenstein on radioactive steroids - the engine was a quantum leap ahead. It was truly scary. And it didn't take long before it was the #1 download on the board. I made sound WADs for Doom that my friends really liked. Even tried some map making but I sucked at it..I have no grasp of 3D design. Co-op Doom was so much fun that to this day I really can't enjoy a deathmatch FPS..its gotta be co-op.
 
Doom was it for me. I had to get a larger hard drive because of all the maps I was making and tools I was installing. I remember everyone thought I was crazy because I got 2 GB of total space for this and still didn't have room for everything.
 
My favorite part of Doom was the Marine scream when he fragged himself with a rocket.
 
I never really played doom but I was in middle school when Quake 1 came out... we played that every day in the IPX based Novell network during computer class and break. Ahhh those are the days, such fond memories...
 
I remember playing Doom when it first came out and it was awesome. Playing across a LAN at work was a blast.
 
Prince of Persia, Doom, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires all these are classics. I still enjoy playing the Age of Empires II HD in Steam.
I remember the last level of doom ii with the all those mobs makes my 80386 SX run at 1 fps :)
 
First came prince of persia. it got me addicted to computer gaming. I used to play it at my teacher's house. I was 8 or something! then came doom, OMG! Blood was a close competetitor. It gave me time to spend with my dad when I was a kid. I used to fire. he used to navigate! Those were the best days of my life! :)
 
The codes/cheats are still implanted into my memory and I haven't played it in well over 15 years....
IDKFA
IDDQD
IDSPISPOPD
 
I always found wolfenstein 3D to be more fun. Doom was cool but I would have preferred Wolfenstein 2.

But there WAS a Wolfenstein 2. Two of them, in fact. The first was the prequel Spear of Destiny, and then there was the (kinda) spiritual-successor Rise of the Triad.
 
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