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A Doom Guy under a hellish wind - John Romero DevGAMM Interview

The head of Romero Games was in Lisbon to talk about his book and the creation of the classic Doom month by month, but afterwards we caught up to learn more about unheard anecdotes from the nineties, memes, Doom: The Dark Ages, and more...

Audio transcription

"Alright, I'm at the windy DevGAMM in windy Lisbon, but you know, this gives like a more hellish look to it and it's always nice to catch up with you and to have the sea in the background.
It's a tradition. Tenerife, right! It's a tradition of ours. We'll show a little bit of Tenerife interview here so that we prove it's right."

"So, thank you so much for joining us again.
You've had this panel in the morning, it was sort of the keynote to this DevGAMM and it was very interesting and of course it was about the creation of Doom because you released a little book last year.
So what can you tell me, of course you want people to buy the book, but what can you tell me is the main takeaway, the main message you're sharing with this book?
I think really the overall message is positivity, that having a long career in game development is really, really fun."

"There's a lot of things that just happen in life and it's all in the book, but it's mostly about positivity.
Things are going to happen that are negative to you during your journey, you know, game dev journey or life journey.
And I think the book really shows, like, it's always good to, like, I'm not writing a book that is trying to make anyone look bad."

"If anyone did something to me in the past, it's like, oh, they had a reason for doing it, you know?
Maybe it wasn't so great, but like, I don't hold grudges, you know?
It's like, just keep moving on, you know, just keep going.
Don't waste your time being upset about something that happened in the past."

"Perhaps it's a nice message to share now that the industry is, you know, having a bad moment.
You know, AAA, big, big, big companies are not functioning as we were expecting and some developers are preferring to go smaller and to go AA and to have a smaller studio.
So how do you feel about how the industry is right now and, you know, all the layoffs and perhaps it has to do with the message you're sharing?
Well, you know, a lot of the reason, the economic reason for layoffs is like COVID was amazing for the game development."

"I mean, the amount of people, the companies grew so big during COVID because everyone stayed home and played games and they needed to make lots of games for everybody.
And then COVID's over and companies have to get back to normal, you know?
It's not a, oh, AAA games are too big kind of thing."

"It's like the game industry got much bigger.
You know, I mean, it was demand and supply, right?
So a lot of people were demanding games.
A lot of games were made."

"And then when it cools down, then it's like, well, we can't make as many games now.
So we can't really afford it.
So it's really about the COVID, you know, just right sizing the industry.
And speaking about studios and sizes, I think you mentioned your studios around 20 people, the team making the FPS?
80."

"We're at 80.
80, okay.
About to get to 100 pretty soon.
100, all right, all right.
So that's much bigger than expected."

"And you're still years away from releasing.
But anything else that you would like to share?
It's Unreal Engine 5.
Of course, you wanted to sort of..."

"It's a shooter.
It's a first-person shooter.
We have a major publisher behind us.
If the game wasn't innovative and unique enough, of course, you wouldn't get funded if you didn't have something like that."

"So look for something that's a little different.
Okay, nothing to share.
Perhaps next year, no idea.
It's up to the publisher."

"Yeah, it's up to them because, you know, there's just a lot going on in publishing.
And so, like, we have to slot in with the releases and all that stuff.
And, of course, you're not doing things as you guys did in the 90s.
So you shared a bunch of very interesting anecdotes with Tom Hall and how you guys did these clay monsters and also how you guys designed the weapons."

"So can you share a little bit of that, both the monsters and how you sort of have to conceive them in 3D before anyone else?
And also the weapons, how you sort of put different weapons and stuff you had around together.
Yeah, I mean, we came up with a list of characters that had different aspects to them that would be interesting to fight against."

"And back then, we were doing sprites for everything.
And before Doom, all of our sprites were drawn by hand clicking every dot in Deluxe Paint II.
And so we wanted to do something faster, you know, something that was faster because we're going to have more frames of animation and we're going to have more enemies than Wolfenstein.
So we came up with the idea of like, what if we just like made something on a table?
We used a video camera to scan it in and we just rotate the table eight different times for the back of it and all that stuff."

"And that's how we'll do the animation, you know, and then you move it and then you do the rotations and the captures.
And like for every frame of animation, which is typically four frames of animation with eight rotations, that's 32 frames per animation.
And that's just one animation.
There's death, there's attacks, there's like all the different things that can happen in a game."

"It's a lot of frames of animation.
No one wants to pixel click all of those, right?
So we did this idea of scanning them.
And it's like, well, that worked out really well."

"Let's just do it to the weapons too.
So we went out and bought a bunch of toys and held them in front of the camera and then scanned them in and then pixel edited them so that they look good.
And we got shotguns and double barrels and chainsaws and all that stuff.
So it worked out really well."

"It was a new way of doing things.
We were using NeXTSTEP computers to do whatever we could.
You know, all the development was done on NeXTSTEP and all the scanning was done on NeXTSTEP as well.
It would scan it in a really high, like 16-bit color, and then we would have to translate it into Doom's 256-color palette."

"So we had a program that would do that.
It was called Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop.
All ad-hoc! Yeah.
So it was very technical."

"It was like there's a lot of stuff in that game.
But, you know, it worked out really well.
Everything that we did in that game was all brand new to us, even.
Like developing on NeXTSTEP, we'd never done that before."

"How do you feel about the meme of Doom being run on pretty much every single… I think I never asked you about this.
Yeah, it's one of the most portable code bases you can find.
It's written in C."

"Yeah, and the thing that made Doom go really fast was the renderer, which was done in assembly language on an 8086.
Then you moved to C.
It is.
So there's a bunch of C code, and then there's the assembly language right in the middle of the C to make that one strip go fast."

"That code is actually written in C just in case you don't write assembly, right?
So you can just uncomment the C line, and it'll work, but a lot slower, right?
But it's an example of what you need to translate into assembly.
And if you do that one function, then the whole render will go fast."

"And so it can run on anything.
It can run on anything that has a display in it.
Have you been surprised by any of these devices that Doom has been run on?
I was very surprised that a pregnancy stick actually has enough RAM to hold Doom and run it."

"And then making bacteria generate a Doom screenshot, and it's like eight hours per frame to go through Doom with bacteria creating each screen.
That's crazy.
Speaking about creatures, another fact I didn't know about is that you guys got offered Doom to be turned into an Alien-licensed sort of adventure.
But you know, it was a little bit generic, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah."

"Before Doom, we did go through a Nazi castle and blow up Nazis.
No other game, other than Castle Wolfenstein, no other game did that.
So in 3D for a new generation, it was a great idea.
And then with Doom, it was like, well, when you go into space, it's always finding aliens."

"What if you found hell instead?
So it's like the science versus religion, you know, bit in there.
So it was interesting.
We're going so far into experimentation with portals and teleporting that we find hell."

"Like, oh my God, it really exists.
So that was a really unique idea.
And then when we get the offer to take the experience of what Doom was and turn it into an Alien franchise type game.
So when we were looking at the idea of using Alien as the franchise idea around the experience of what Doom is, the biggest problem was dealing with a movie company and the creative control that would be taken away from us."

"And we never did that before.
And then it was like, why would we make Alien's IP more valuable and not make our own IP, intellectual property?
Like, why wouldn't we do that?
That didn't make any sense."

"We're creating our own world and our franchise.
Why would we just give it all to them?
Like, it doesn't make any sense.
So forget it."

"And so it was only 30 minutes of discussion.
It was like over.
Yeah.
All right.
That's into space, into hell."

"What about medieval fantasy and dark fantasy?
How do you feel yourself about [Doom]: The Dark Ages and the idea of medieval dark fantasy?
We made Heretic and Hexen, which are the medieval shooters back then.
And it was because I wanted to see."

"We love D&D.
And it's like, what would high speed D&D look like?
Because we've never seen that before.
Everything in the past was like, you know, the SSI gold box games."

"Everything is like step based.
Everything is slow turn based stuff.
It's like high speed medieval.
I want to see that.
And that's why Heretic was created, you know, with Raven."

"And Hexen was the sequel to that, even harder game to play.
But it was great.
It was the beginning of being able to play something that was in the medieval time period, the Dark Ages, at a high speed."

"And now we have, of course, Doom: The Dark Ages.
That's going to be coming out soon.
So you get to see, to me, I think it's the Army of Darkness version of Doom.
Like modern character coming back to the past and mowing them all down."

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