The next day, I saw Carmack stick his head into a computer lab where and friend and I were hacking on something, and I said "Hey John! I really liked Wraith! I just beat it!" (Wraith was an 8-bit tiled 2D adventure game that he had released). He smiled and said "Oh, I've gotten a bit better since Wraith..."

Of course by that time, he was about to release Doom. Not to belittle the ray-casting problem of determining which 2D tiles to hide and show in those adventure games, but he had indeed gotten a bit better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/

Masters of Doom is also required reading for any hacker.

I absolutely loved their answer to a question regarding better enemy AI, which boiled down to “better enemy AI doesn’t automatically make for a more fun game”. (they put fun and player experience first and aren’t tricked by shiny new toys)

Was also interesting hearing Carmack lament how so few much loved games release their source code (he attributed doom’s longevity partly to the release of its source code)

The main way to trick a player into thinking an AI is smarter than it actually is? Have their voicelines "cheat" a bit and respond very vocally to things the player does near them; even if the enemy can't see the player, the idea of "oh shit, they heard that" can really enhance the seeming intelligence of the enemies.

Given that F.E.A.R. is a horror themed shooter, that's a big boon.

I blame middleware. Hell, middleware makes even releasing the mod tools harder, i remember when i worked at some gamedev company and we wanted to release the editor for our game and the company behind some middleware we used wanted us to buy a separate license for it.

I think John Carmack does too - from memory Doom's source release had no sound code because it was done externally.

If not, we should start one.

Couldn't agree more - it's sad that id is/was one of the exceptions.

I'm still waiting for the GoldSource engine to be open sourced...

What other games even use it apart from Doom, Quake and Half Life? (HL 1 had some impressive AI)

Marathon is a game series from Bungie, the first version released shortly after Doom, but only on Macintosh.

There are defense drones [0] that aid the player and later on enslaved cybernetic aliens [1] that revolt against their alien overlords.

As in Doom, if an enemy would accidentally hit another enemy, they would fight one another.

The Marathon series can be played on modern computers using Aleph One [2]

---

[0]: https://marathongame.fandom.com/wiki/Marathon_Automated_Defe...

[1]: https://marathongame.fandom.com/wiki/S%27pht

[2]: https://alephone.lhowon.org/

They described how the player wants to feel like the game play is about themselves, not about some ultra smart enemy. So big and dumb enemies tend to work best, even though they don’t use sophisticated AI by today’s standards.

It was like the the Jurassic Park meme: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

(Also very strong agree on monster infighting, it added so much depth, as a kid I didn’t even know monsters could infight until the level with cyberdemon and arachnotron in the same room)

Couldn't that be said about all natural intelligences too? "state machines of some sort" is a very broad characterisation fitting almost anything.

I also remember at some point playing an RPG where you found an ongoing even fight between two armies and you could join one to make the fight go your way, but I don't remember what it was.

There's several talks on Youtube by John Romero where he tells the story of the early id software, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2MIpi8pIvY

This is incorrect. Doom took a year.

This was literally in the first answer Carmack gives on the Twitch stream yesterday - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvAkaJsvAXs&t=493

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Shareware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom

What I'm uncertain is, whether this was mentioned in the book "Masters of Doom" or Carmack's interview on Lex Fridman.

Edit: He had already mentally checked out of this job and was transitioning (already working at) a different company. As a comp-sci computer graphics specialist, he dug Doom at multiple levels. Me - I was not impressed by Doom - probably because I didn't have his background to understand what a feat of engineering it was to get such performance out of a 1992-era CPU.

But it was only known by Macintosh gamers at the time.

In which ways I feel Marathon was better:

- better light effects

- ability to look up and down

- secondary effects on various weapons

- deep story (done through interactions with computer terminals)

- variety in physics based on levels and weapons (e.g. grenade launcher) is affected by physics

- having to deal with oxygen depletion in some levels

- some AI that aids you (defense drones that support your fight against the aliens)

- more variety in level objectives (e.g. prevent humans from being killed by aliens)

- more comprehensive multiplayer (I believe Doom supported 4 players; Marathon supported 8 - Marathon has more types of multiplayer games than just Deathmatch).

I think Jason Jones [0] was probably at an equal level as John Carmack at this point in his career.

A deeper comparison between the 2 game engines can be found here: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/78805-marathon-vs-doom...

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Jones_(programmer)

It would be fun to see a graph with sales stats of NE2000 clones around that time. They were the cheapest Ethernet expansions boards at the time, and one of the few that Doom supported.

- Commander Keen (smooth scrolling)

- Catacomb 3D/Wolfenstein 3d (pioneered ray casting on PC)

- Quake (introduced full 3d worlds)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator:_Future_Shock

First generation 3D games were kind of a mess IMO. They usually hadn't figured out the controls yet and polygon counts were so low I always thought they looked worse than sprite based games. It isn't a surprise to me 2D-sprites hung around for awhile. Billboard sprites are still a pretty good/cheap choice for symmetrical things like explosions.

Nothing was like Doom when it came out. It was shockingly, impossibly smooth.

Experiencing for example, lights suddenly turning off and monsters appearing and making noises behind the player, was very intense and novel.

(There were also other revolutionary aspects in Doom, notably, multiplayer)

And yes your pc had a graphic card, or you wouldn't have had anything to hook your screen onto ;)

Anyway, the USD 6k price tag was very high since I remember running Doom on a sub USD 2k PC. Most probably closer to USD 1k.

EDIT - looking at some ads in the December '93 issue of Computerworld [0] there's a Compaq ad saying "the Deskpro with Pentium starts at just $3,199" (both the "starts at" and the "just" make me think you could make it cost a lot more than $3,199, altho you could surely also play Doom on a cheaper computer).

[0] https://books.google.de/books?id=WESBpiNtNTEC&pg=PA19&hl=en&...

We are as far away from that period now as that period was from the birth of video games. Tennis for Two, Space Wars, Pong, Super Mario, DOOM, Quake, Half-Life.

Compare that 20-year evolution to the evolution of gaming in the last 20 years. You can see areas where games have gotten vastly better, not just graphically or cinematically, but with level design, mission design, characterization, contextual integration, procedural elements.

But still nowhere near the explosion of the first 20 years as innovation poured in, and all of the main players were scrappy young companies, ready to innovate in an atmosphere where it still meant something to create entirely novel experiences that challenged the player.

You can also very easily see an industry-wide shift in game design after both GTA and Minecraft, which seemed so far apart at the time but really were about a decade apart. What comes next?

Not that it's not impressive; look at the PS5 tech demos (large scale areas that players can go through fast without loading times thanks to fast storage), or the Unreal Engine demos, e.g. the Matrix one you can download to the PS5 or the one where they highlight generative level creation.

But it doesn't feel as revolutionary anymore. Mind you, that may just be fatigue, or "getting used to" things quickly.

A new genre in the last 10 years? Probably nothing really. We're probably past the point of new genres being invented until the technology dramatically changes.

We'll see some wild Genre Fusion though. I'm excited for that. I can't wait to see what happens when we stop just stapling "RPG" to every genre and start to really innovate.

I wonder if we will live to see another such revolution in the wake of mature generative AI tools? If creating a game of the density and caliber of Red Dead Redemption 2 becomes feasible with a modest team of 10?

That said, it's a work/life balance thing too; the Doom team did pretty much a year of grinding, pizza and coffee fueled 14+ hour workdays.

Not to mention the graphics evolution; compare G-man from HL to HL2.

https://www.blackcompany.com/images/id_cap_signed_john_carma...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpgcz6s-eI

Even though he has aged, he still seems like a 90s whiz kid, and that's something every hacker wishes they could pull off in middle age.

The birth of id software – Excerpt from John Romero's autobiography

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808939

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594405

Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38593248

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hnQ1RKhbo

To my mind, the engine was as solid as Quake. For example it didn't have the misbehaving Z-buffer/intersection issues of Tomb Raider.

Not only they revolutionized games, but their decision to open source their game engines has so many implications that it is hard to even begin quantifying their impact.

And it's not only the FPS games that left a mark in history, the 2D platformers were awesome too.

What are you thinking of?

As far as I recall, the main benefit has been to developer curiosity but I don't know of much impact beyond that. The games that used Id engines like HL or Call of Duty had to license it anyway right and didn't use the open source versions? I don't recall much of a scene around the open source engines unlike the mod scene that used the official game and assets.

Things like Quake2 running on the Quest uses an engine that I think started off with original source but eh, it's not that significant. Q2 was huge to me at the time but I can't muster the enthusiasm to play it in VR. I look at it briefly and I'm done.

There was Quake II RTX created by Nvidia but again, eh. That and Portal RTX did not make a convincing case for ray tracing. They ran like pigs and didn't look terribly good to me.

I could easily keep myself entertained with doom wads for quick a long time.

Is there another game that has that level of dedication? I think sim city 4 does but doom is much much older.

When unreal was released I tried to create some maps for it, but was quickly overwhelmed. You're basically thrown into blender and supposed to construct a 3d world from cubes and other simple 3d shapes. I ended up with I think one and a half somewhat decent levels, but they still felt clearly inferior to any of the official maps.

I think DOOM3/Half-Life 2 is the last generation of engines that still allow a decent amount of mods (HL2 does have quite a few high quality mods), but everything afterwards is simply too complicated for hobbyists to compete with professionals.

But still, even with the toolset Skyrim is still pretty time consuming to develop large mods. It won't be possible without its dedicated fans -- which is kind of ordinary for RPG but less for modern FPS.

Quake is more difficult to mod (map building is more complicated and you need to build models rather than sprites) but it seems to have a few active source ports.

The kinds of things they've added to the game are absolutely incredible, and it feels like every couple of months a new mod comes out that makes a huge impact on the landscape.

It's very cool. I've been thinking about trying to contribute to some of my favorite mods, but I have to start learning this stuff first.

Warcraft 3. It shipped with a powerful but approachable map editor, had thousands of custom maps and game modes, and spawned two separate gaming genres (Tower Defense, MOBAs).

Morrowind and Skyrim. Both were solid base games to build on top of, both shipped with a powerful creation kit, and both have an incredible amount of modded content available for them.

Technically, Neverwinter Nights would also qualify, but that was less of a game and more of a DnD dungeon master sandbox.

It has animated cutscenes, voice acting, pretty much on the level of original game(s).

There are still high level playes participating in tournaments with prizes.

Also some custom games scene, but it is much slower than in the past. There is some website that tries to collect custom maps: there are hudreds of thousands of them.

StarCeaft spawned: MOBAs, turret defense, even had something similar to Among Us. ..