John Carmack Talks Doom on 20th Anniversary

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The problem with "When it's done it's done" is that the pace of tech development means any code you developed 6 months ago is prime, 12 months ago is mainstream, 18 months ago is outdated. If you've got a 5 year dev cycle I'd argue that you're guaranteed to fail - your game will look like something for the last gen console.
 
for me, doom was a 14" crt monitor, a 486dx2 (you actually saw the blue disk flickering) no alpha blending so you could hardly see anything in a dark corridor, and you actually feared running into the cyberdeamon. Doom 3 tried to recapture that dark theme, but the graphics were horrible. People looked like lumps. But doom was more, it was also a puzzle game, looking for the keys. I think that is an element everybody underestimates. It gave it a purpose, instead of just running around and killing people. But that's just how i experienced it.
 
Doom really came into it's own when you got a pile of drunk buddies together to frag each other all weekend. When we first started 10baseT was not yet affordable so we all had Token bus adapters... we'd spend from 7pm until 3am on Friday just getting the stupid network running (if any one leg of the ring wasn't right or the terminators weren't right... no network). Once it was running though... Doom was pure magic. We modded the game for more fun (rocket launcher shooting a couple shells a second) and the games would be simple "If it moves... kill it"... which back then was still novel enough to be fun. Good times.
 
Originally played it on a 25 Mhz AMD 386 and a 640 x 320 display, still play it on something a bit heftier. I can still kill ungodly amounts of time in the original Doom. And forget it when you get some friends together.

The good old days when games were made by gamers instead of bean counters and pointy haired bosses. I prefer Carmack's approach of "it's done when it's done" against EA's, Activision's, etc "we're releasing every year whether or not it's ready".

mere 2 MB transfer. Yet back then that was a huge file, and took seemingly forever to download using a dial-up modem.
Click to expand...

2 hours on a 15k modem, versus 6-10 hours for a large size game on Steam. I think we may have stepped backwards somewhere.
 
I've been gaming for a lot of years now and if I had to pick one single game as the most influential (arguable the 'Best', though it's tough to compare cross-genre) of all time... it would be Doom. Wolfenstein was a fun tease for what was coming... Doom was a revolution... it was a BFG upside the head... it was a 'take my money I need a faster computer' driver of PC development for years to come. The combo of first person immersion and multiplayer... it's hard to overstate how HUGE that was.
 
Doom was the second multiplayer game I ever played (the first FPS). The first was a battleship game for windows (bb2) that was designed for stealth on corporate networks. Doom's releases significantly reduced the productivity of many companies.
 
For me, Carmack, is the grandfather of FPS shooters. I didn't get into PC gaming until the mid-late 90s being a console gamer, and Quake was my first PC game with Quake II being the second.

It was a whole new world coming from gaming on an N64 on a 640x480 27" tube TV to a 17" 1280x1024 CRT monitor and gaming with a keyboard & mouse. I still remember being in awe of the pixels and details never seen before in a game. It was instant love and I never looked back, including countless all nighters just in awe of the graphics. In fact, these two games motivated me to learn how to build my own rigs and overclock instead of spending $1K plus on the latest Dell or Gateway PC. Some 16 years later, I never looked back. Still console game with a PS3 and now PS4, but nothing replaces PC gaming. Ever. Carmack owns that badge.
 
Doom was a revolution in gaming. It introduced FPS to the mainstream market, and invented competitive multiplayer and co-op over internet. Later Quake would refine the formula.

Tim Sweeney, one of the founders of Epic Games and main developer of Unreal Engine, said on a Anandtech interview that he gave up programming for a year because of Doom. He considered it witchcraft.
 
Doom wasn't anything all that special Midi Maze had up to 16 player FPS back in 1987 done over MIDI on a Atari ST running a meager Motorola 68000 CPU the same CPU used in a Sega Genesis.
 
I always wanted a cross between Myst and Doom. Full on puzzle where you lock your self in a room and try and figure it out while monsters are beating down the door. True survival horror which is what made the original Resident Evil so fantastic.
 
The best thing about Doom was the user written levels, thousands of them. All the toolkits so you could make modifications and levels. The command line options and the ability to add your own music. Some of the great themed ones like Star Wars or Teri Garr. D!Zone level collections. The Doom Gun later re-named Demon Gun I still have mine not great but fun to own. The SpaceOrb 360 controller. And secret levels.
 
Loved all Doom, still play it modified today (am sure many still do) with opengl, jumping/mouse aim support.

Loved the aspect of puzzles, mazes and secret rooms and most of all the secret room returning to Wolfenstein3D where the demons invaded them as well - not to mention finding what really happened to poor Commander Keen >;D

 
"I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it's done when it's done and you're talking a month or two, fine. But if it's a year or two, you need to be making a different game."

Gabe, listen up.
 
Yeah, but nowadays that devs are rushing to get it out, you are ending up with Freemium, Microtrans, DLC, and weak or no story that is soley meant to drive the money making things.

Honestly, I'd be willing to play last gen graphics with a captivating continuous story than some of the blinged up, story-made-such-that-can-make-more-DLC crap that gets shovelled out nowadays.


I remember always jumping off the balcony in level three and nuking my drunk buddies with the BFG :)
I was always the one to setup the ethernet coax cables (dont forget to terminate them) and ipx network.
 


On the other hand, many games today are simply rushed. We see what happen with Battlefield 4. Publishers wanted to rush products to meet an artificial deadline, to roll out basically a beta software. On PC side, it is a nice excuse to release an unfinished product, now even console versions are also like their PC counterpart, though I don't play on consoles, but I found this one amusing, what excuse do they have this time. Creative process also takes time, many sequels can't compare to their first iteration because of this.
 
Doom, has the potential to be the greatest game ever, the play mechanics need some updating but otherwise it should be quite simple to do, it's been proven we like space marines, guns, demons and aliens along with creepy music. I really still miss that old doom music. Remix it for doom 4 please.
 
I remember doom was the PC game to have.The sound and dark feel alone was amazing. Unfortunately that time I didn't have enough ram to run it. I was stuck playing Wildenstein 3d and Blake stone lol
 
Yes!! I remember those days in 1994+! My Amiga was still my main computer - but C= was dead. I was in the PC store business (Back when there were thousands of mom & pop shops). So my first MS-PC was a 486-66 with a Tridant VESA video card. Back when you'd fill 5 of 7 slots just to get the PC working!
1 - video card
2 - audio card (the size of todays typical $150 cards)
3 - IDE controller + Floppy
4 - SER / PAR card for Mouse and printer
5 - modem
6 - SCSI for printing (and CD-ROM drives, then CD-R)
7 - network card

I haven't thought about terminators in YEARS! We'd play until the sun came up. But typically, we'd only spend 1-2 hours setting up network... of course, a bad cable, bad card or terminator would bring everything down. grrrr And as you say "good times". Ah, we'd curse each other out and laugh at funny and skilled deaths.

Oh, I remember playing it late at night (single player) - going down a dark hallway with a flickering broken light that I thought was so REALISTIC - back then. It was creepy. :) Of course Doom1 is about 1/10,000 the power of todays graphics. Unreal made me buy my first Voodoo1 card.
 
It didn't take long to download at Case Western Reserve University back then. We had 10Mbps fiber optic connections into the back of our computers (not just a mere fiber optic backbone).
 
The 2MB file for doom wasn' t that big back in the day. 2 megabytes even on a slower 9600 baud modem would be done in 33 minutes or so. Now, if you happened to have a really slow modem of 2400 baud, then you would be looking at 2 hours 15 minutes... still, that wasn't really that bad.
 
I prefer Duke Nukem 3D......Carmack abandoned PC for console, I can not forgive him for that. I have so much RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEE towards him
 
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