TechStuffTechStuff Classic: The id Software Story Part One
They made games like Doom and Quake, but where did id Software come from? In this episode, we explore the origins of a major name in computer games.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's a Friday. That means it's time for a tech Stuff classic episode and we've got a two parter to go through. So part one is this week. Part two will be next Friday. And this is the ID Software story. So ID Software very important video game company back in the day. And yeah, I did a two parter back in twenty seventeen.
So this episode.
Originally published on April fifth, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy. Hello, really loved your flashback MP three episode. I'd start with Vangeli's theme songs, but please do a podcast on the creators of Doom ID Software. Well, David, this one goes out to you. This is going to be all about ID and because ID software story stretches back quite a ways and a lot has happened with it, it's gonna be a two parter. So here's part one of the ID Software story. And you guys know me, if I'm gonna tell you the history, I go back before the story begins right. In this case, the story of ID software really begins with another company called soft Disk. Soft Disc started off in nineteen eighty one as a publisher in Louisiana and it created magazines on disc and you would get programs on disc. You would subscribe to a service. Every month you'd get a new disc and that would have various articles on it as well as programs that you could run on your computer. It was actually related originally to another company called soft Talk, and soft Talk was a print magazine company, but soft Talk eventually went out of business. Soft Disk continued. It managed to stay afloat. So besides publishing a magazine on a disc, they created this utility software that you would subscribe to, you know, boring useful stuff. Now, those programs were sold through that subscription on that monthly basis, so you didn't go to a store and buy a box with soft Disk's name on it. Instead, you would subscribe to this service and they would send it to you. As the computer industry grew, soft Disc did pretty well, but there was a major challenge. As computers were becoming more sophisticated, that meant software also got more complicated or bloated, and that meant that your team of developers who had to create new software every single month had an increasingly difficult challenge ahead of them. Delivering a disc with programs on it on a monthly basis was really hard to do as time went on. So imagine that your job is to write a new program every month, only the programs are getting more complicated, which means there's also more potential for computer bugs.
In the code. It was by the early nineties.
By nineteen ninety at least, it was getting to be pretty rough now. They were also looking to expand around that time, so in August of nineteen ninety, Soft Disc launched a new bi monthly gaming disc magazine called Gamer's Edge. By going bi monthly, you would have more time to develop games. Programmers could take a little bit more time to design and polish a game before shipping it. However, two months is still incredibly short. I mean to tell someone today like you've got two months to create a game, you'd probably see them flip out because a lot of modern games take months or even years to develop from the concept to shipping it, So a two month window is super tight.
The gamers among.
Your really probably hyper aware of that based upon shipping dates slipping from now and again. Like whenever you hear about a company having to miss a ship date, that's usually because the game ended up being more complicated than they had anticipated at some stage of the development process. Now, the head of the Gamer's Edge project was a guy named John Romero, who was originally from Colorado's Springs and had moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to work with Soft Disc. John Romero's a pretty famous name in gaming, so the gamers among you, I'm guessing I've heard of him, but everyone else might not know who he is. He's got a really long history in the computer game business and has been involved in some major successes and big names, as well as some pretty popularized flops. Romero already had a history in computer game design before he took on a job over at Soft Disc and became the leader at gamers Edge. His very first published game was for the Apple two and it was called Scout Search. That's from the early eighties. He's also the guy behind Cavern Crusader if you remember that game. For a while he worked at Origin Systems, which was the company behind such games as The Wing Commander franchise and the Ultima series, although he didn't work on those titles. He then went on to co found a couple of companies between then and working for Soft Disk, and he was still working in games. But you know, being a self starter is sometimes pretty hard, so eventually he decided to move to Shreveport, Louisiana in nineteen eighty nine and worked for Soft Disc because it was a steady gig. Now, Romero brought over a guy named Adrian Carmack from Soft Disk's art department over to Gamer's Edge, and Adrian Carmack was originally from Shreveport, so he grew up there and he had taken on a job at Soft Disk to make money while he was searching for a way to a mat a living in the fine arts. He was twenty one when Romero asked.
Him to join Gamer's Edge.
Then he also asked another Carmack, this time John Carmack, no relation to Adrian Carmack.
Now.
John Carmack was a programmer for Soft Disk who specialized in the company's monthly Apple two GS publication. Those among you who remember the Apple two Gs, make sure you give me a shout out. I'm curious to hear from you. I never owned an Apple two GS.
I couldn't. I had an Apple two E and that just had to suffice. Well.
John Carmack came originally from Kansas City, and he had a bit of a past, which he has talked about publicly. So I'm not really spreading dirty laundry here. But John Carmack said that when he was a kid, he was really interested in how stuff works, which I can easily relate to. But Carmack would push and prod around the edges of what is consideredly legal. You know, maybe maybe he wanted to see how stuff worked a little bit beyond what is legally allowed. Sometimes he leapt right over those limitations. He was really interested in things like computer hacking and freaking phone freaking. That's where you're hacking the telephone system. I did a whole episode of tech stuff about phone freaking. You can find that in my archives. He experimented with stuff like thermite and explosives. Now, while a teenager, he took part in what was supposed to be an Apple to heist, And I am not making this up. John Carmack was part of an elite group of teenagers who had determined that they wanted to take possession of some apple to computers that were residing in their local school. So his part was mixing up a miasma of stuff that included thermite in order to melt through the windows of the school without setting off the alarm system. However, during their robbery attempt, they triggered the alarms somehow anyway, and the police showed up and Carmack was arrested and after a psychological evaluation, he was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. A lot of kids were there for drugs. John Carmack was there for the apple too. He described his younger self as being an a moral little jerk, and that is a direct quote by John Carmack himself. He attended a couple of semesters of college once he got out of juvenile the juvenile home. He finished high school went on to college at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, but he didn't complete his studies there. He dropped out when he found the classes to be boring. He later said that he probably would have found the classes to be helpful if he had stuck around, but his attitude was what made it challenging. So he fully admits that as an individual, he had not yet matured enough to benefit from a college education, that it wasn't necessarily the fault of the college. However, he credits his employment at soft Disk for really opening up his realization and helping him mature as a person, because he was doing what he loved, which was programming, and he was making enough money to do it to afford a place to live and food to eat, and that was all that was important to him. So once he started doing that, he started to realize, you know, kind of how his attitude had gotten in his own way, and so he really matured quite a bit while working at soft Disk, and that ended up benefiting him more than a college education.
In the long run.
Now, along with those two Carmacs, Romero enlisted the help of a guy named Lane Roath. Roath had been a programmer throughout the nineteen eighties and he had joined soft Disk in nineteen eighty nine.
He had known.
Romero before they worked at soft Disc. Romero had co founded a company called Capital Ideas, and both had founded a company called Blue Mountain Micro. Eventually, they decided they wanted to work together and they wanted to create a new company and merge the names of their old organizations together to create a company called Ideas from the Deep. This would later serve as the inspiration for ID Software's name ID because Ideas from.
The Deep is just too long to say.
But by the time ID software became an official thing, Growth was no longer part of the equation. He did not go on to join the others when they founded ID Software.
Now.
The last piece of the Gamer's Edge puzzle was a guy named Tom Hall. Hall had a degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Hall was another programmer and editor over at soft Disk. He wasn't officially part of the gamers Edge project, so his work was mainly done after hours because he had an interest in games, but he wasn't officially on the projects for gamers Edge, so any work he did had to be off the books. Gamer's Edge gave the developers a chance to try new things, and one of the things that John Carmac was really interested in was designing game engines. He really wanted to create something that would allow PCs to create a smooth scrolling method similar to what you would find in video game console games. Now, this was huge because video game consoles are dedicated machines.
That means every.
Element inside of video game console, everything that you put in there, is meant to make the games work. At least in the earlier video game consoles. You could argue that today they're more media centers than they were before, but at that time, video game consoles that's all they did. They just made games work. That's what all the horsepower in.
The machine was focused on.
Whereas PC's are general purpose devices and they have to be able to do lots of stuff, not just play games. That means they're not nearly as good at performing video game console functions the way a console could back in these days. Anyway, today it's a different story. PCs are so powerful and video game consoles are essentially proprietary PCs that the differences are much less apparent than they were back in the day. At that time, video game consoles had the edge over PCs, and so what CARMAC wanted to do was find a way to let PCs play games that were similar in in scale and in play to video game console games.
So how do you do that?
How do you make a game engine that can allow this to happen. You see, the real problem was that a side scrolling game, or really any game where the image is the backgrounds scrolling across, whether it's up and down or left and right or whatever, that means the computer has to constantly redraw the screen as you move around, so elements that are changing have to be redrawn. You can't just have a static image there. Older computer games usually did have those static environments. You could move a character around within an environment, and the character might be animated a little bit, but the environment itself would stay pretty much exactly the way it is. Think of like an old school game like pac Man, where you've got the full maze on the screen at one time. The characters move around, but the screen remains static throughout that level. It might change from level to level, but during a level it stays the same. So what could Karmac do to simplify this Well, he realized that if he developed a game engine where only the parts of the screen that change are animated are redrawn, he could cut down on the amount of processing power required for a side scroller. So if you have a side scroller type game like Double Dragon that's a classic, and your characters are walking across a background that isn't changing, Like there's a blue sky in the background, you don't have to redraw the blue sky every time the character moves. You just have to redraw the stuff that actually does change. So maybe it's buildings or trees or bushes or something like that. That saves processing time and made side scrolling on PCs possible. This sounds incredibly basic, and by today's standards, it is, but at the time it was a monumental innovation. It really got the wheels turning, and he showed it to his coworker Tom Hall, and Hall was really excited by this. He says, this is incredible, and he began immediately to start working on a game that could show off this side scrolling capability on the PC, and they together decided that what they would do is build a replica the first level for Super Mario Brothers three, and they used assets from an existing game that John Romero had created before he joined Soft Disc. It was a game called Dangerous Dave. So their original rough version of this was the first level of Super Mario Brothers three, but using the Dangerous Dave character, and it was all done without the authorization of Soft Disc. Or even John Romero. He didn't know about it either, and so it took them one night to recreate that first level. They then saved it to a disc and they titled it Dangerous Dave in copyright infringement, very tongue in cheek, and they put the disc on John Romero's desk.
So John Romero gets to work.
He has this disc sitting there and he puts it in this computer and he sees this title screen of Dangerous Dave and copyright infringement. He's thinking, what the heck because he made Dangerous Dave. And he starts the program and he suddenly sees the side scrolling game on PC and he goes bonkers. He loves it because it's something that had not been achievable in PC games up to this point. He unofficially authorizes work on a full replica of Super Mario Brothers III. They recreate the game, They do every level exactly the way it is in the Super Nintendo system, but on PC they had to do all of this work off hours. They couldn't officially do it as Gamer's Edge employees or soft Disk in the case of Tom Hall. They did, however, use soft disk computers. At the end of the week, they would take their computers home. I'm talking desktops here. These aren't like laptops or anything. They would pack them up, they would take them home and over the weekend they would work on this game, and then on Monday morning they would bring the computer back, hook it back and hope nobody noticed. After a few weeks, they had built a full PC version of the game, and the three of them brought this replica of the game to Nintendo and they wanted to tell Nintendo, Hey, you can reach a much larger audience by releasing your game for PC, and we can do it. See, we know the secret to making a side scrolling game on the personal computer. If you partner with us, we can be the solution and we can end up opening up your game to an entirely new audience. And Nintendo said no, thanks, not a big surprise. If you know how Nintendo works, everyone would imagine that they would turn down such an offer. For one thing, Nintendo relies on titles like Mario to sell Nintendo consoles. If they were to offer those games on other platforms, there'd be very little incentive to buy a Nintendo entertainment system. And they'd be undercutting themselves, so they decided they did not want to go in that direction. But other people began to take notice of Romero's work and have some interest in perhaps talking with them, And one of those people was a guy named Scott Miller, who had founded a software developer and publishing company called Apagee Software. I'll talk more about what Scott Miller got up to with John Romero in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
All Right, I mentioned.
Apagee just before the break. They got their start in Texas back in nineteen eighty seven. Now, the company relied on a pretty interesting business model. They would publish the beginning of a game for free that allowed players to download the game and try it out, and if they wanted to continue the game, they'd have to purchase the subsequent episodes over the phone, and then the company would ship the rest of the game a physical copy of the game to the player. This model became known as shareware.
You could share the first part.
Of the game freely with anyone you liked.
After that you had to pay.
Now, keep in mind, this is before the World Wide Web was a thing that really got started back in nineteen ninety two. This was nineteen eighty seven, so in those days, you had to call up a server using a dial up modem. It might be a bulletin board system or something along those lines. It might be something more like a an online service provider, but that's how you would first get connected to the internet, and then you could download a file like the shareware version of the game, and then you would have to call up the company, give them your information, order it, and then they would ship you the rest of the game via snail mail. It was pretty primitive back in the those days. I don't miss it. Apage was pretty successful with this approach it. The reason was that they were able to take advantage of not having a marketing department or a real sales department or having to worry about securing shelf space at brick and mortar stores. It cut down a lot of costs, so it ended up bringing the overhead down and they were able to take advantage of that. They also originally intended to create sub brands for each of the genres of games that the company produced, so they would have maybe one for adventure games, one for you know, fighting games, one for flight simulators, that kind of thing. That was the idea. It never really worked out that way. Only one sub brand really stood out, but it was a doozy because that one was three D Realms. Now, three D Realms created games like the Max Pain franchise and Pray, and probably most famously was Duke Newcomb three D. I did a whole episode about Duke nukeomb or at least I talked about a lot in our episode on vaporware, so I won't really go into it here. Plus it doesn't really tie into ID software deeply enough to warrant it. But that's a heck of a story anyway. Scott Miller over at Apagee had noticed Romero's work on a game called Pyramids of Egypt, and Miller thought Pyramids of Egypt was the perfect style of game to sell in this shareware business. He thought, this is a way to really get a game that is a fun and an interesting If Romero can make more games like that, I can sell them this way, was what he was thinking. But he was also sneaky.
Scott Miller was.
He knew that if he sent correspondence directly to John Romero over at soft Disk, they might intercept the message. Because software companies had to fight tooth and nail for their talent, it was always possible that some other company would offer employees more money and more benefits to jump ship. So in order to get his message to Romero without being detected, he sent Romero a series of fan letters, each with a different name attached, but all of them having the same contact information the same address enclosed.
In the letter.
Romero didn't catch on right away. It wasn't until he was reading an article about Scott Miller's company that he noticed the address in the article was really familiar. And then he looked at his fan mail and saw that the same address was on three different letters from three supposedly different people. And then Romero got angry. He was angry because he thought that the letters were genuine fan mail, so he felt betrayed that this fan mail wasn't really fan mail, it was someone who wanted something from him. So he sent an angry letter to Scott Miller. But he did leave a callback number in that letter, and Scott Miller called Romero and immediately apologized for the whole misunderstanding in his mind, and then made Romero an offer. He couldn't refuse, so Miller sent a letter that was dated on August twenty third, nineteen ninety, which was not long after Gamer's Edge had launched, and said, I really did like Pyramids of Egypt. That wasn't a lie. I enjoyed that game very much. He also described his company. He described the shareware model, and he pointed out that his most popular title could pull in anywhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars in sales every week. So he proposed to Romero, why don't you make games. We'll publish the games, and in return, you'll get a substantial percentage.
Of the profits.
And because we don't have these overhead costs, we can maximize those profits. It's not like you're taking a tiny percentage of the net. I mean, gross is pretty much the same as net in our business. And Romero thought this sounded like a really good idea, and he had an ace in the hole as well, that new side scrolling technique would give apagee a crazy advantage over other publishers in the PC gaming space. No one else had developed a game engine that could do this, so apage ended up commissioning a game essentially and the group ended up developing it, and they called it Commander Keene, a very cute side scrolling game, a little cartoonish, very lighthearted, and the shareware portion of the game launched in December nineteen ninety and it caught on like Gangbusters. Scott Miller had been making about seven thousand dollars a month with his old library of games. Within ten days of it launching, Commander Keene had already earned thirty thousand dollars, so I was leaving everything else behind. In February nine, nineteen ninety one, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and John Carmack all resigned from Soft Disc in order for them to go off and form their own company. Tom Hall stayed on at Soft Disk for a couple more months in order to finish up some projects, but then he followed suit, and together they created id Software. In order to keep good relations with their old employer and not get sued, they agreed to make a new game for Soft Disc every two months for all of nineteen ninety one at five thousand dollars a pop. And again they did that because they had developed that side scrolling graphics engine while working at Soft Disk, and they had developed the games that got them the gig on soft disc equipment, so rather than court a lawsuit, they decided to be a little proactive and smooth things out. One of the games ID Software created for soft disk was called Hover Tank, soeten ninety Origin Systems released Wing Commander, and that was a really impressive title at the time. The gameplay of Wing Commander has the player take on the role of a spaceship pilot fighting off aliens in various star battles. It's a three D perspective, but it required a pretty powerful computer, and even then it ran a little slow and janky, and a lot of the field of view is cut off by the cockpit of your spacecraft, so you have a little window that you can see the actual view of the other spacecraft in it. That ended up limiting the amount of stuff the computer had to redraw. Well. It definitely got John Carmack's attention, and he got to work and created a new three D engine for computer games and incorporated it into this title called Hovertank, which wasn't nearly as graphically breathtaking as Wing Commander was at the time, but the game mechanics were much more smooth than what was in Wing Commander and was a full field of view for you didn't have a cockpit obstructing your view. Carmac would incorporate this same approach again in a title called Catacomb three D, which was a dungeon crawling game in which you play a powerful wizard blasting enemies with fireballs and other stuff, and when you used a spell, a hand would appear as if it was being held out by the player. Otherwise, you just saw whatever was in front of you, but there was no component of the player character in your view until you cast a spell. Then a hand would pop up and a fireball would shoot out. This gave the player a first person perspective within a game, not inside a vehicle of any type, but rather just the player's representation alone. This sounds incredibly basic today, but at the time was an innovative approach. No one had done it before, so this was brand new. And this was again for soft Disk, which in some ways the company viewed as being a bit of a waste because the most they would get for it is five thousand dollars. It didn't matter if the game caught on or didn't catch on. That's what the deal was. For it also meant that a very narrow audience would get hold of the game, because it was only the people who were subscribing to Soft Discs Gamer's Edge service. However, it gave them the experience they needed to develop their own games. By the way, in case you're wondering, Gamer's Edge survived for a while without the ID Software team there once the team left in nineteen ninety one and agreed to supply a game every two months for the rest of that year. The folks still with Soft Disc took their time learning how John Carmack's engine worked, and they started developing their own games. The agreement with ID meant that the team had some leeway to learn the ropes because they could use that time where the games coming from ID Software could be put out under the Gamer's Edge brand, and ideally it would mean that the team could go on to build up a collection of titles of their own and always stay ahead of the publication schedule. Mike Maynard and Jim Rowe led the department until they too decided to leave Soft Disc in late nineteen ninety two. They went on to form their own game company called Jam Productions, and I'll mention Jam Productions a little bit later. Gamer's Edge at that time just faded into obscurity.
All right, now, let's.
Get back to ID Software. The guys at ID decided to move away from Shreveport. Tom Hall was originally from Wisconsin, and he convinced his new coworkers that they should move there, so they did in September. For a while, they worked out of their apartments building games for Soft Disc while trying to decide on what to make for their own titles, apart from more Commander Keen games, which had proven as a success. So Tom Hall was very fond of Commander Keen. In fact, it was mostly his ideas in that game, so he was really advocating for more Commander Keen titles.
But some of the rest of the.
Team, actually all the rest of the team were hoping to do something new. John Romero suggested that they make a game similar to an old PC title called Castle Wolfenstein. Now, this was a game that came out for the Apple two in nineteen eighty one, and it is not like the famous Castle Wolfenstein that most of my listeners are familiar with.
If you are familiar with it at all.
The nineteen eighty one game was a stealth based game, and it was a top down perspective, meaning you were looking down on the field of play and your character was just represented by a little kind of almost like a stick figure. But you were playing as a prisoner of war attempting to escape a Nazi prison camp during World War Two. So very different in many ways from the game that ID Software would later produce. The guy who programmed the original Castle Wolfenstein as a fellow by the name of Silas Warner Romero, thought that the concept of escaping a prison while fighting bad guys was the perfect concept to put this new three D engine to use, and it didn't hurt that the publishing company that put out Castle Wolfenstein Muse had ceased to be several years earlier. The company had gone out of business, it didn't exist at all, and no one had scooped up its intellectual property, so the copyright had entered the public domain, and Castle Wolfenstein's intellectual property was fair game, so that the team decided to make a new version of the game, putting the player in the role of the hero and calling it Wolfenstein three D. Not everyone was so happy about this direction. Tom Hall felt that Commander Keene which was much more playful and lighthearted, was a better direction for the company. He was not so happy about the idea of doing a gritty, grim, bloody, violent game.
Like Wolfenstein three D.
Now, if you look at footage of the original Wolfenstein three D game today, you'd say it's very cartoony. But at the time, again, that bloody display you see whenever you shoot a bad guy, that was new at the time. It was not something you typically saw in video games at that time, so it was causing a bit.
Of a stir.
Now, Romero was more about taking on this game designer role within the company, but that meant that it was sort of pushing Tom Hall a bit to the side, because Tom Hall was supposed to be the lead game designer, And this was sort of the beginning of Tom Hall's realization that perhaps this company wasn't the right place for him, but he'd still stick around for a bit longer. The team started work on Wolfenstein three D.
They had it ready to go.
To release in the spring of nineteen nine. They used the shareware model under apagee. They released the first set of levels for free. If you completed those levels, you've got a message saying that if you wanted the rest of the game, you had to purchase it, and it would give you essentially two more sets of levels and some bonus material, including the final battle with Hitler or essentially Mecha Hitler. I remember this game fondly. This was the game that introduced me to ID Software. I actually played Wolfenstein three D before I ever played any of the Commander Keen games, although I eventually played those two and Wolfenstein three D was a game I played in high school. Both during that time and literally in high school, I had a word processing class that I finished all the class work for the year in the first month, and so then I spent the rest of the year playing Wolfenstein three D.
True story, Dylan, absolutely true.
The second year I was there, I taught the IBM class, and once I gave them an assignment, I played more Wolfenstein three D. I played a lot of Wolfenstein three D is what I'm getting at.
I thought it was great.
It was unlike other games I had played on PCs, which at that time were mostly computer role playing games, and even earlier ones which were text adventure style games, so.
This was a new thing for me.
Around the same time, ID Software hired a person named Kevin Cloud as an assistant to Adrian Carmack, and Kevin would end up being an important part of id's Software's team. Whenever the question came up whether to focus on a new intellectual property or create a sequel or remake, Kevin's inclination was to go with the new, and sometimes that meant going against the prevailing opinion. More on that, especially in the second part. I've got more to say in this first part about ID Software, but before I continue, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, Wolfenstein was an enormous success. Game sales reached two hundred thousand dollars a month and stayed that way for more than a year. This made even Commander Keene's success look tiny by comparison, and Keen had been a huge hit for Apagee.
It was such a big hit that.
Another company called form Gen asked the asked ID Software to make a copy of the game that could be sold in brick and mortar stores. In other words, make a game with box art and all of that stuff that we can put on store shelves, because it's it's too good to just have it in this shareware format.
So id Software did. They created a new.
Version of Wolfenstein called Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny, and that launched in December in nineteen ninety two. Nintendo even called them up and said, hey, we would like a version of this for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It's kind of funny because, of course, the company originally started as trying to convince Nintendo to allow them to port games to the PC, and now their Nintendo was saying, hey, can you port this PC game to the Nintendo. The Nintendo version's a bit different from the original PC version. All the blood has been removed from the game, so when you shoot Nazis, they still die, but they don't bleed everywhere. And while in the PC version you would run into guard dogs and have to kill them, that's not cricket on the SNES, so instead you run into enormous rats. Maybe they're rous's give me a shout if you get that reference.
Now.
The one place in software was seeing some trouble was Germany. Wolfenstein three D is all about escaping a Nazi prison, which meant there were plenty of depictions of Nazis in the game, including images bearing the swastika symbol, but it's illegal in Germany to have that image in entertainment, particularly in games, so the German government banned the sale of Wolfenstein in Germany.
Only this game wasn't.
Distributed the way your traditional games were on store shelves, which meant players could go online and download the game anyway, because the Internet doesn't obey the traditional national boundaries, at least not without some hardware restricting communications like the Great Firewall of China. So Wolfenstein three D played a part in those early days of the Internet and making some people very nervous about the information super Highway and what it might be able to do. It actually prompted quite a few serious discussions across country borders and how can we manage the Internet in such a way that obeys the law within certain jurisdictions while remaining an international communication protocol. It's a question we still ask ourselves today. It's tough.
Well.
John Carmac's engine for Wolfenstein was getting a lot of attention in the computer game world, and other publishers wanted to be able to make first par and shooter style games as well. But reinventing something that someone else has already made is a lot of work, so it's easier, although sometimes expensive, to just license software that powers another game, and that's how ID Software got into the game engine licensing business. They began to sell licenses to the underlying engine powering Wolfenstein three D, and other publishers began to make games using that engine, and those games ran the gamut of genres. The one of them was blake Stone, which was a science fiction game that had a cover art that looked a lot like Buck Rogers, and blake Stone came from Jam Productions, that company I mentioned earlier. They made the game, an Apagee published the title. There was also a game from Capstone Software called Corridor seven Alien Invasion, which added a bit of horror to the science fiction mix. I think it owed a lot to Alien honestly. That game was by Intracore and game Tech.
It didn't do so well because by the time it came.
Out, it was already a little dated and the engine of Wolfenstein was not quite as robust as some of the newer engines, and a planned sequel of Corridor eight never came to pass. Then there was an Snees game that used the Wolfenstein engine, and I mean it makes perfect sense that game.
Was super three D.
Noah's Arc YEP, a game about Noah using sleep darts to pacify goats, use the Wolfenstein game engine.
It's all true Dylan.
Goats and ostriches. By the way, goats couldn't open doors. Ostriches could totally open a door and come after you. Yeah, it's a real thing that really existed, and it used the Wolfenstein three D engine. Although the game wasn't really violent, it involved knocking animals out with sleep darts, which is perfectly fun. Don't do it for real, zies though, that's just mean. On April first, nineteen ninety two, in Software relocated again.
So moving to Wisconsin.
Might not have been the best idea. A lot of the team wasn't really happy with how winters turn out in Wisconsin, particularly the people who had grown up in Louisiana. They did not imagine it getting that cold and that snowy, and I imagine Tom Hall didn't really talk up the whole winter wonderland of Wisconsin either when he convinced everyone to move their base of operations up there, So instead they moved to Texas. Scott Miller was in Dallas, so they moved to Mesquite, which is a region on the east side of Dallas. It's just a short six and a half hour drive away from Shreveport, Louisiana, so if they really felt like it, they could do a long road trip back to where they started. John Carmack was hard at work designing a new game engine. This will become a familiar thread for the rest of these two episodes. He was wanting to improve upon the one he had already built for Wolfenstein three D, and he even had a name for the next game, but he didn't have any idea of what the game would be about. He just knew the name he wanted the games titled to be Doom.
He thought it sounded.
Cool, but what would it actually be about.
He had no idea.
The name, by the way, didn't just occur to Carmak. He didn't just say, oh, we should call it Doom. Apparently it was actually taken as an inspiration from a quote. A quote from the nineteen eighty seven film The Color of Money, which is a sequel to a nineteen sixty one movie called The Hustler. So in The Color of Money, a character named Vincent Lauria played by Tom Cruise, is carrying a case and the case holds his poolque but another character asks him what's in the case, and he just kind of smiles as he opens it up, and he says Doom. And thus the name of the next huge game was born. And they had the name, but they didn't have a game, and they were talking pretty big at the time. In January nineteen ninety three, the company announced in a press release that their next title would become the biggest Times Suck in all of history, and that productivity would plummet as a result. The idea for the game itself emerged, as all great ideas do, in a totally different game. Yes, just like every idea of massive consequence in human history, the idea for Doom came out of a rousing Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game. Yes, indeed, D and D is the reason Doom exists. John Carmack had taken on the role of dungeon Master, and John Romero says that his own character was trying to get hold of a magic sword and through a series of somewhat hasty decisions acts identally unleashed a legion of demons which quickly overran the world. And then they realized what Doom should be about In Doom, you would play a hero in a science fiction setting facing off against monstrous enemies. Only these enemies wouldn't be aliens, they would be demons. The science facility where it all takes place would have accidentally opened up a portal to Hell. That's when development of Doom really got underway. That is it for the ID Software story, Part one, which originally published on April fifth, twenty seventeen. Like I said, next week, we will conclude that with part two. So if you're waiting on the edge of your seat, you got seven days to wait, unless you're binging this in the future, in which case you can just skip right ahead to that one if you like, and then go back and listen to the other ones as many times as you like. That's my motto. Wait No, my motto is I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
