Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 143: Doom

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

Doom is back in the public consciousness thanks to the stellar 2016 reboot, but when was the last time you thought back to the 1993 original that changed the face of PC gaming? From the fascinating behind-the-scenes development stories of plucky computer geniuses/Diet Coke addicts, to the sheer impact it had on the gaming landscape, there's enough going on with Doom to fill an entire podcast series—yet we tried to fit everything into a single episode. On this installment of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Jeff Green and Gary Butterfield as the crew rips and tears their way through a discussion of a game that truly launched a genre.

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And right now, Retronauts listeners will get a $200 welcome bonus when refinancing through credible.com slash retro. So don't wait. Go to credible.com slash retro and click find my rate to see if you could save by refinancing. That's C-R-E-I-B-L-E dot com slash R-E-T-R-O. Credible.com slash retro. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackey. And today's episode is all about the game, Doom. But before I go on, let's see who else is here today in the room. As always, we have. Jeremy, Mistress of Doom Parish. See? And who else do we have here? I'm a man and a half, a man and a half, a berserker-packing man-and-a-half. I am Gary Butterfield. And Gary, where does that come from?

Doom Comic. Oh, that makes me sad that you haven't read it. I don't know all the quotes from the Doom comic. I just know the most notorious ones. And who else is here today? I didn't come equipped with a Doom quote. Jeff, please don't hurt me, Greene. Yay. Jeff Green is here. I want to thank Jeff for being here. I have to say that Jeff is a huge inspiration to me in terms of podcasting. I love GFW Radio. I love CdewW Radio. Thank you. And I think back when there weren't a million podcasts to listen to, I probably heard every episode at least three times just because I had nothing better to do while grinding in an RPG, yes. Clearly you had nothing better to do. But I think any podcast, any fan of us should like those old

podcast you did. I mean, you and Jeremy were pioneers. And by that I meant you eat a lot of beef jerky and part of tech. I died of dysentery a lot time ago. What is on Jeremy's tomb? We'll find out another episode. Pepperoni and cheese, man. Yes. But today's episode is all about Doom. I want to say that Retronauts did do a Doom episode in 2006. It was, I think, the third episode of Retronauts. So we're going to cover a lot more ground in this one, and hopefully we're more mature and more studied, and we know the ins and outs of Doom a lot more. That's a good episode, though, but this is one of our HD remakes like we like to do with this new production of Retronauts. But I do want to say before I go on.

I will say at least I do now understand how to podcast, which is more than I can say for episode three. I wasn't trying to put you down, Jeremy. No, I've learned a lot since then. It's been 10 years. I hope I've learned a lot. So I want to say if you want, if you want to learn more about Doom, this is my LeVar Burton moment, but if you want to learn more about Doom, here are my resources I use. Number one, read the bookmasters of Doom, 2003 by David Kushner. We're going to be pulling a lot from this book. It's a 300-page book that might sound like a lot just based on one game, but it actually

spawns the history of ID software at their most productive. It's a great read. It's very enthralling. It doesn't talk down to you like a lot of these video game books do. And there's also a 2011 GDC Doom post-mortem given by Tom Hall and John Romero. And there's a 2016 GDC Europe presentation called the Early Days of Id Software. Those are all great. And I'll have links to those videos in the blog post for this episode. To put a quick asterisk next to Masters of Doom, if you do the audiobook version of it, it's read by Will Wheaton. And mostly it's fine. And then they have characters doing the We're Not Worthy thing from Wainsworld. And he luxuriates that so much. It feels

like it lasts 20 seconds of him doing this were not worthy voice. So you want to skip past that part. Yeah, it's what the 15 second fast forward is for on your audible app. We call it the Wheaton button. Yeah. You got wheatened. Yes. So before I go on, I want to talk about the main

players in its software and who they are. More than these four guys worked on the game, but these are the four main people at the very heart of its software. And you might know a lot of these people from the jokes made about them. But after reading Masters of Doom, I have a lot more respect for these guys, who I would make fun of as well, because there are a lot of jokes being made, and especially

the things they did after Doom. But let's talk about John Romero, born in 1967. For Masters of Doom, we learned that he was interested in games from a very early age. Like, Pac-Man was a major inspiration. He would play games on the, God, what is the word I'm looking for, Jeremy? The big room-filling computers, I keep forgetting. Mainframe. Mainframe. He would go up to a local university and play RPGs on the mainframe. He was like, as soon as he discovered what video games were, he was, he wanted to be part of them. And the story of all these Doom guys is basically they all found each other in, oddly enough, Shreveport, Louisiana,

working for a soft disc magazine, or sorry, the soft disc company. And I believe John Romero started by making Apple II games, but he knew that, like, the Apple II was on the way out and PC games were on the way in. And he wanted to make PC games. And that's how he formed the development group gamers edge with the rest of the guys I'll talk about. out in a second, but that is sort of the very root of its software, basically making games for a magazine with a pack-in disc, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, they were doing games every month. Yes, yes.

Multiple games sometimes. So you just think of this very, very quick schedule when they go to that early days. And if you go to that history early as a good software presentation, he tells you how long they spent on games. It's astounding. It's just like, this could only have been done by these extremely young men fueled by pizza and Diet Coke at this time in their lives. There's a reason they're not as productive anymore.

They destroyed themselves making these games. And also, I mean, Romero, he gets made fun of a lot. He's got beautiful hair, of course. But lots of ups and downs after it's software. We're way past the Dicatana days, of course. But he's sort of a more chill guy now, more down-to-earth, a guy. And what he does now is basically just mobile development, along with some other people. This is moving really far ahead.

Oh, don't worry about it. Yeah, please. One of the things about John Romero and what I got from the book and one of the kind of insights I put together is that, you know, I would think, you know, oh, John Carmack, the, you know, I think in the note you have him as a human computer. Yeah, he's a computer man. He was the impressive one. But if you go and you play the whole series and you play something like Doom 3, I think that illustrates like, oh, this is Doom without John Romero. Yeah. Like, this is a tech showcase that is very slowly paced and wants you to see all of its things.

And there's none of that, like, dorky, D&D high school, late night fuel soul to it. People will tell you that Romero's levels are the best levels in Doom. Exactly. The best strongest levels in Doom, for sure. Yeah, I mean, he's no slouch, and he never was. And he got kind of a bad rap over the years. And certainly, our magazine at the time did not help. We piled on with everybody else around the Dicatana era.

But, you know, he really was kind of the first rock star gamer. It didn't help, and he had the beautiful hair, and all the rest of us were, like, total dork. So I think there was probably an element of jealousy in there a little bit. Also, probably didn't help that Dai Katana is terrible. It was terrible. It's a bad game. Right. But it was dead before it even came out because of the hype, right?

I mean, it had no chance. It turns out it didn't deserve a chance because, in fact, it was bad. But, you know, it was a victim of all the marketing hype, which really wasn't him. I mean, I don't, John Romero does not need an apologist on this podcast. But I do know from knowing the guy that he, you know, he did not really like that marketing campaign either. None of them did. It was a very cringeworthy marketing campaign. Very, very of that era, like super in your face, staggered font, actually threatening you in the ad itself.

It's amazing. We're talking about Iron Storm, by the time. Yes, I am. Yeah, I feel like he kind of was basically put in as a symbol, like what do you call it? Cinectodome or what a synecomy? Cynic. Yeah. I never know how to put it.

Yeah, I can't remember the word. Cynectady. Yes. That city of New York. For all the excesses of ion storm as a corporation, they're like gorgeous skyscraper office with the sculptures and the expensive cars and stuff. Did you visit that place? Did you ever go there?

I did, and it was so offensive. Yeah. It was so ridiculous. He was part of that, but he wasn't his sole idea. He wasn't the one. Not at all. I am the architect of this madness. It is all me.

Right. Was this their studio in Dallas you're talking about? about? Yes. Okay, yeah. And I wanted to ask Jeff, like, because you've been in the games press, you were in the games press starting in what 96 you said? Yeah, that's right. And have you, have you interviewed Romero? Did you have experience with him? I'm just curious, like, your perspective because Jeremy and I, especially me, I was not in the games press. I started in, like, 2007, so I don't have any exposure to this era. I'm just curious, like, what were your, what was your interactions with him? And, like, what did you think of him? Right. At the time, we liked

him, and, you know, I think we went in thinking we weren't going to like him. Like, this guy's kind of a douche. You know, I don't think we use that word back then, but I, but that's, he was like the classic definition, just, if he didn't know him and you just looked at him and you just read the press and you saw that John, you know, you're going to be John Amaro's bitch ad, that was the, that was the notorious

ad. Right. We just expected this sort of, you know, Fabio looking guy, you know, but he was, he was so humble and he was so down the earth and he was, you know, almost like shy, right? And he wanted the, I remember that he

wanted us to like the game, you know? He wasn't, he wasn't so full of himself at all. It's really a bad rap he got. So, I mean, the short answer is he was a super nice guy and he was, and he was a good interview and he was always very forthcoming with what he was doing. So, you know, really, and I think, you know, over the years he has gotten older and meld out and age, you know, and just gotten, you know, I think he's an even better interview now. But the point is, he's a good guy. Yeah, his presentations are really fun to watch. I've read recent interviews and he's really insightful. So moving on, we have John Carman. born in 1970, as Gary's pointed out in my notes,

I have a super genius and living computer man. He is really more interested in the tech side of things. He's not necessarily a game player, even when he was running their Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, which play a lot into their game design. I should point out that all these guys I'm mentioning, they all basically live together, and when they weren't making games for 18 hours a day,

they were playing Dungeons and Dragons. And John Carmack was the Dungeon Master. He loved designing games even outside of the computer and video game context. And he mostly was the guy who was like, I will build the engine, and then you build the game that goes into it. And that's sort of where, that's where Wolfenstein came from and Doom and Quake until he left the company. So I'm sorry, not until he left the company. But, yeah, he is the tech guy. And if you read Masters of Doom, you have an affection for him as a sort of very socially awkward man.

And I was listening to your Doom 2 episode of Watch Out for Fireballs, Gary. He basically, like, had a camelback full of Diet Coke with him at all times. Like, he's never not drinking Diet Coke. He always orders the same medium pizza from Domino's pizza, just like a very, a very guy who's very set in his ways in a kind of a train man-esque. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, if you ever read the book Microsurfs, there's a character who, like, always just eats, like, he goes into this obsession with flat food. Like, you have to be able to fit it under a door. So, like, fruit roll-ups and stuff. Like, that's kind of what I, yeah, sort of envision.

Like that's sort of very meticulous, like, I have to have even my food, like, filed and organized to perfection. There are great stories. Yeah, he's so smart. Yeah, he's extremely smart. He, like, whips out video games over a weekend. Like, was it Doom for iPhone that he just threw together back in the early days of iPhone gaming? Because he was like, yeah, I think I can do that. So he ported the Doom Engine to iPhone.

Yeah, I was reading something about, like, the game Orcs and Elves, I think is his two, where he just, like, made it in a weekend. He is, he's, like, such a brilliant mind. And I believe he's into rocketry now. I'm not sure what his game, where he's in the game scape right now. Well, there's the whole VR thing. That thing, too. Yeah, I don't know enough about that, but I know it's kind of a sticky situation for a lot of people. It was really fascinating to read about the relationship where he's at now with the VR stuff.

And that being always what, that's what he thought he was getting out of Doom. You know, like when he did Quake and he's like, this is a fully 3D space. He's like, this is the closest we can get to VR. That's always been the prize that he's had his eyes on. Yeah, yeah. especially with his original idea for Doom, which was an open world with no levels. And we'll get to that soon. I want to know, have you talked to Carmack, too?

Not since back in the day, but I know that even back then, I mean, I think the way that he hears us talk is like the way we hear dogs bark. You know, like we're just like some lower life for him just like, those dumb bastards. He's just, you know, you say something and then he has to translate it into his alien language, you know, and then try to dumb it down for his answer for us. I have trouble lowering myself to three dimensions. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. And he was a tougher. And he was shy, too. I can definitely see that. And the book definitely paints these guys as, they're from the opposite side of the tracks. John Romero from a broken home, a very lower class guy, a lower class upbringing, rather. And John Carmack, from a very well-to-do family that basically would give him all the things he wanted and he made the best of that. But a lot of pressure, too.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And together through their, you know, things they had in common, they found a common ground in gaming. So up next we have Adrian Carmack. I don't have a lot on this guy. He really just drove the art at Id Software. He, I believe he was a photographer of trauma victims for medical journals. So a lot of the things we see in Doom are...

I never knew that. Yeah, yeah. They basically, the reflections of his dark mind, the horrible things he's seen. So I don't think he did a lot after the mega-id period. But he left it in 2005 to pursue art, but now he is apparently an owner of a five-star resort in Ireland. So very different from painting, exploding, end trails, and, you know, Hitler coming after you.

You assume, have you ever actually been to this resort? Oh, whoa. Everything is a theme. We put the I in Ireland. Wow, a Zoom-themed five-star resort. I would go to that. I don't know what the appeal of that would be. So five-stars like sleeping.

That's like five-star difficulty. Yeah. So the last guy is Tom Hall, and he's a director and designer on many early at games, but he left during development of Doom because he had a different idea of what the game should be. But he and Romero become friends again or rekindle their friendship, and they would form ionstorm, which would end in tragedy outside of Deos X. But that's a story for another podcast. I mean, another, like, just, again, just kind of side note, though.

And I understand, like, games are made by lots of people, so you can't boil them down. But I love how when you look at these people and they're individual games, So you have, like, Doom 3, where you look at it with Carmack. With Tom Hall, I don't know if anybody here has played Anachronix. Yep, that's his baby. And that's very, like, of, you know, that's what he wanted to do with Doom. Is this kind of goofy, like the tone, you know, the set of the world? And you can kind of see those constituent parts.

Yeah, yeah. He was the goofball of the four. He was a great interview. And he was always reminded me of Robin Williams. He just had that kind of mind where he would just, like, go off. you could just, like, wind him up, sorry, you could just wind him up, and he would just, like, be funny for half an hour uninterrupted. Yeah, it's interesting that Commander Keen is also his baby, and that is, like, the more playful side of Doom, the more thoughtful side of Doom. One of his things was, I want enemy corpses to stay on the screen to let kids know, like, you just killed something.

And eventually, they phase those out of Commander Keene games because parents would complain, but if you play Wolfenstein, if you play Doom, if you play Quake, if you play Quake, the enemy corpses will stay on the screen. I think that was his trademark. Like, in every video game, the corpses disappear, I want them to stay on the screen. He's also, you know, in the development of Doom, and again, this is getting a little bit far ahead of it. So very much a Tom Hall thing is, I don't know if either of you guys have seen the Doom Bible, like the thing that he, his original plans for it. I haven't actually seen. Is it online? Can you?

Yeah, you could get it. I didn't find it until pretty later I would have popped in the notes. But it's, it's pretty bonkers because it is very much like a story-driven, open kind of campaign, very character-based, lots of cinematic moments. It is pretty much like the anti-Dom. Yeah. It's really interesting, though. I feel like these guys were huge D&D nuts, huge RPG nuts, and they wanted that to

be communicated through their games, but the technology wasn't there, and they would get frustrated by how slow the games would be when they incorporated these elements. So it was just nothing but speed until they could get to this mythical part of their lives where they could make this ultimate RPG. They never did, but that was something that was always something that was burning in the back of their brains. There is doom roguelike. That is true.

That was a much later, though, right? Well, I remember when Tom Haw was making an Akronauts, his main inspiration at that time was chrono-triggered. Yeah, yeah. It's right there in the name. So before forming ion storm, Tom went to Apogee and worked on Duke Nukem 2, a very Commander Keem-like game. And Rise of the Triad, a very Wolfenstein 3-D like game. And Duke Nukem 3D, a very doom-like game. So you can see they were drawing upon his unique set of skills to make very similar games.

But all of those games are great, especially Duke Nukem 3D. that's, I actually have played that more than Doom. It's the game I'm more familiar with. But as I said earlier, what united all of these guys, they met each other in Shreveport at this softest company making games. They formed their own gaming division. And they prove that stealing from work will help you in your career because every weekend they would steal their computers from work to bring home

to work on games to publish outside of the company. Very covertly. They got away with it. And that's sort of how Id formed an identity outside of the softest. this company. And more than anything, I want to impart this for sure, is that these guys were fans of Nintendo games and arcade games more than they ever cared about PC games. They were frustrated with the fact that PC games and Mac games did not have the speed, the accessibility, just that certain pizzazz that NES games would have. If you remasters of Doom, they're obsessed

with Mario, you know, John Romero loves Pac-Man. And I feel like it's software, their sort of unspoken mission statement was, like, we want PC games to be on par with the games we love on console. Right. And they signaled a great divide in the PC gaming community that I remember very well. And even on our own magazine at the time where action games, you know, they were kind of a new paradigm. There's no hex in this. There's the hex grid. Exactly. I mean, we had hours and hours of arguments over whether we should even cover games like Doom at the beginning. Yeah, I remember on your podcast, Jeff, you talked about just the utter revulsion people had towards Diablo. Like, that is not a real game. Absolutely. It's not a real RPG, right. And that kind of attitude happened a lot with a lot of different games like that. If it was action-y, if it was Twitch-oriented. I mean, gosh, even real-time strategy games were not real strategy games because it's just who clicks the fastest. That was the typical rap against games like the original Warcraft and Dune. So, yeah, so Doom came along and really upset the PC gaming scene. And what's really interesting about that is if they had that affection for Nintendo and arcade games, I think it kind of speaks to, to the quality that they were able to put together that, as far as that kind of fast action

or kind of pace, they outpaced it, right? So, like, if the idea was, you know, maybe not so much with Commander Keen, but Doom doesn't play, like, anything on a console. No, no, yeah. Doom is quicker and twitchier than anything in a console up to that point by, like, I feel like an order of magnitude. Yes, yes. You know, it is much more intense.

So they actually hit that goal so well. Faster than Sonic the Hedgehog, I think. Yeah. Blast processing times. And with a keyboard, no less. Yeah, because that was pre-mouse. Didn't Commander Kean emerge out of their pitch to Nintendo to remake Mario 3 for a PC? Yes. Actually, the Road to Doom begins with Commander Keen because they love Mario 3.

And I believe Carmack, John Carmack, he was the guy that developed smooth scrolling on the PC. I think it's called Adaptive Tile Refresh. So before this, I know some games did have smooth scrolling, but the technology they were working with, things would refresh a tile at a time. So it was very chunky refresh on the screen. It was not as convincing as running across the screen of Mario. But they developed a remake of the first stage of Mario 3 called, I think it was called Dangerous Dave in the Land of Copyright Infringement.

Yeah, with a judge on the cover. Yes. It's pretty cute. But they sent that to Nintendo, you know, like, we want to make a PC port of Mario 3. Of course, Nintendo said no, but they developed that idea into Commander Keen. That is the first step on their path to let's make a computer game like a console game. And their first step to Independence. Yeah.

So, you know, when John Romero saw that, it was like, this is, literally next level shit. And that's kind of, you know, John Romero's, like, strength is like, no, this is, this means something. Like, let's go, we're going to poach some people from soft disk. Let's go start our own company. Yeah. And this also brought forth the idea of the shareware.

Like, thanks to Apogee who distributed the game, they started their shareware initiative where it's like, you will get part of this game, maybe for free, maybe for nine bucks, who knows, whatever the retailer wants to charge. And then you can send away for the rest of the game. It was like the very beginning of this idea, or at least, their first flirtation with it, which we would see throughout. Oh, yeah. Like Apoche did it.

And one of the things I appreciated about that book as well as it kind of explained how shareware is a good idea. Yeah. Because I always thought it was crazy, right? Like I was just, oh, you would get most of this game for free. You know, I'm used to PlayStation demo discs, you know, at the time when I went back and played more PC games. But it just cuts distribution.

Like, it just handles all of that. And they kept so much, you know, money on the dollar that these guys really, really early on were fabulously well to do. Yeah, yeah. just because they made very smart economic decisions like that. And even if 5% of the people would buy the original game, that's still a lot of money. And you're still putting it on a ton of computers, so more people will see it, too. Yeah, and you say most of the game, but shareware done well is not most of the game.

Like episode, episode one, I thought episode one was much shorter than the other episode. No, shareware for Doom is one-third of the game. Same thing with Wolfensile, yeah. Okay. They gave away a lot, a lot of their game for free. But it's still not a full game experience. Like, it's enough to tantalize you. Right.

Like, after five hours, you're like, no, I need more. Yeah, but compared to other shareware games I played back in the day, I think they were way more generous than other shareware, you know, initiatives. They were quite generous, and I'm sure you're going to get to this later. But, you know, the fact that they supported all the user, you know, the user levels and all that was another ingenious thing that they did as well as being very generous. It could have been an IP nightmare, but they embrace people messaging. with their game, which is great.

So moving on from Commander Kean, we're getting into the early 3D games that are basically building towards Doom. So Commander Kean was basically like, here is our 2D console game on the PC. Hover Tank 1, 1991, is basically kind of proto-Wolfenstein 3D. You're going through these very, very simple, flat-shaded mazes. There's no texture maps on anything. You are fighting floating tanks and rescuing children. and it doesn't get more complicated than that. I mean, it's pretty much faceball or Spectre VR.

Pretty much, yeah. Like the same kind of mold, but more competent. Not that those games are incompetent, just like we're talking about John Carmack here. Right, and I think this was a soft disk that was published in a magazine. So it was one of the many free games you get on a disc. So the technology was building towards, you know, Doom, but it was just them, you know, putting basically prototypes on a disc for people to play. And what would come next is Catacomb 3D, which,

was, again, building towards Doom. This, instead of the simple, flat-shaded, you know, walls of Huppertank 1, we have texture maps now. And this actually released six months before Ultima Underworld. So there was some lateral thinking there. But this game, more than anything they worked on afterwards, would have that more of a D&D vibe. Even though it was a very simple shooter,

it had more of a, you know, dungeon-crawling idea behind it with magic and swords and sorcery and things like that. So I had never played this, But what made this really interesting was it would pioneer the arm reaching into the screen aesthetic of the FPS. That is something that I don't think was done before. At least Masters of Doom says this is the game that invented it. And that was sort of the way to immerse the player in the experience. Like, no, this is your arm reaching into the screen.

Take care of it. Yes. Shave your arm. It's very hairy. Innovated here and mastered in trespasser. That is a game where you look down in your boobs to see your health, correct? Okay. That was a UI system that did not catch on.

Yes. So, of course, Wolfenstein 3D, we can do another podcast on this, of course, but this is an unofficial remake of the 1981 Game Castle, Wolfenstein for the Apple 2. Thankfully, the copyright had expired, and the original creator was not mad at them for doing this. But they would basically bring the play of Catacomb 3D much closer to what we would see in Doom. And this has texture map, you know, ceilings. I'm sorry, texture map walls, no floors and ceilings yet. And it was going to be much more similar to the mechanics of the original Wolfenstein.

They wanted to put in, you know, like, loofermings. looting soldiers corpses and moving soldiers. But again, the technology would chug when they wanted to do that. So they decided just make it a shooting game. Yeah. And one of the major... So when you say it slowed the game down too much, you don't mean the pace. You mean the actual rendering.

Yeah, both. Because the original Wolfenstein, I don't know if it's a stealth game. Yeah, it's very much so. Like, it's a very early, complicated stealth game that's very hard to play now, but really admirable. Yeah. Like, really neat. And they wanted to do something much closer in that to that.

And then just, again, it's very similar to the doom thing. right, like rejecting the Doom Bible and just saying like, no, let's move really fast and shoot shit and like it'll be good. Wolfensign 3D, Doom, and Quake were all started with much different ideas that were much more involved in fantasy and role playing and more involved mechanics, but

it just slowed things down way too much in terms of tech and in terms of game pace. So they just decided to go with the simplest idea for these games. It's funny when I talk about just the tech they were working with. The biggest challenge on this game for John Carmack was, I believe the publisher wanted secrets in the game

because, you know, secrets bring people back to games. They give games replayability. And the biggest challenge for John Carmack, and this sounds hilarious today, is building those sliding walls in Wolfenstein to find the treasures behind. So that was the biggest challenge on this game. And he made it work because he is a computer man. But that was how rudimentary this technology was. It could barely depict a 3D environment, and you could barely move walls, you know.

And every map in Wolfenstein is just very boxy, very gray. but it was an important step towards Doom. I don't know if you guys have any strong feelings for this game, but I definitely played this before Doom, for sure. Oh, I did for sure. And about the secrets, what I remember, my indelible memory of Wolfenstein is just running along and hitting the space, spamming the space bar,

hoping that a wall would open. Would it make a noise like, mm-mm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I think Duke Newcomb would. Maybe Wolfensine 3D didn't. I hate that noise, though. Duke Nucum enjoys thrusting in the direction of things, though. He's pretty much, deaf man.

but in shooter form. He really is tough, man. And, of course, they proved for the first time the indelible, you know, the never-old thing of shooting Nazis is fun. Yeah, yeah. They proved that concept. I remained unchallenged for years. It's true then and it's true now. So let's move on to our main topic, Doom.

So before I get into Doom, I always like to ask people for any topic on Retronauts what their first experience with the game was. For me, I did not get a computer in my home until 1996, and I believe I did play the shareware of Doom, but by then Quake was out and things like that. But I played Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES, of course, the best port of that game, the most faithful port. You know, rats and no Nazis or anything like that. But I distinctly remember playing this game, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D without using the mouse, because that was not a concept I thought of when playing these games. I don't think anybody did. play with a mouse in the original version? No.

I don't think so. The original marathon, dark forces, like all the games back then. Yeah, it was really quake is when like circle strafing started to be a thing. Yeah, so I didn't know why I was so bad at these games until I go back with a mouse and keep on, like, oh yeah, the mouse adds a lot. The mouse is very important. I think Half-Life taught me you need the mouse because things are happening all around you, but that's not as true in Doom.

But Jeff, you're a bit older than me. Where were you when Doom came out? What were you doing? What was the reaction amongst you and your friends and everything like that? Yeah, I was already in Berkeley, and I was kind of a grown-up. I was a young, young man, and I had a computer at home, and I played the shareware when it came out. And, I mean, I'll never forget, because it's definitely one of the highlights of my gaming experience was putting on headphones. My girlfriend at the time had gone to bed.

It was like 10 at night. I put it on, and I was terrified. And blown away. too. I mean, you know, now you look at it and you see the blocky graphics but at the time it seemed like the most immersive possible, you know, nothing could be more real. It's crazy how our brains

adjust that way. It really is. Yeah, I remember setting my, I think as a joke we sat my mom down with Doom for a level to see what happened. She was like... You're ahead of your time. She was like scream laughing, you know, just like frightened by everything, but I guess yeah, our brains do adapt. Yeah, I mean, the notion of these monsters, you know, just rushing

at you and the music was so important to that game. I remember the music almost even more before we turned it on, Jeremy sang the... That's the most memorable doom song. And it brought me back. And then also, I mean, the monster design, the design of those monsters was so brilliant. You know, to this day, we can picture most of them and how they looked. And I just remember, you know, opening up certain doors and just seeing how many of them were in there and just being utterly terrified.

Yeah, it likes to send a lot of monsters to you at once. And the level design, too, was so superior to Wolfenstein. I mean, it was really a great leap forward for it. Yeah, getting away from those like orthogonal hallways made a huge difference. And then adding the levels even though it was an illusion. Right, right. There was no verticality in the shooting, but there was verticality in the, you know, where the monsters were placed in the visuals, right?

And you had the diagonals and that very kind of hellish look. I mean, they really, it was so atmospheric. I just never played anything like it at that time and really to the stay. So, Gary, how about you? Yeah, I had mostly played Wolfenstein 3D over my cousins. I hadn't played Doom when it came out. But I really liked Wolfenstein 3D. And then, much like you, that's around when I got a computer as well,

when, you know, around 95, 96. And had kind of a similar experience. You know, downloaded the share where I had no money so I couldn't buy the actual version of it. But I played through episode one dozens of times. Like, I really like it. And it was very revelatory because I was a console kid and that was in my teenage year. So I was very much into, you know, GRPGs and slower-paced things,

like something like ActRaser or SimCity came out roughly around there. And it was like, oh, this is great. I want to, I want to slow down. But then it was a really good release valve, you know. And it is just, it's like the fastest thing. You don't need that run button. You don't like to hit it. Yeah, there's no reason to run button.

And the sound, in addition to the music, just to want that, the monster noises are really great. Yeah. And I remember being scared of doom as well. Yeah, and it's those, it's that crunching sound and kind of moaning that would be kind of ambiently around you. It was very nightmarish. Yeah. I mean, I do recall it being scared of Doom to the point where, uh, before, at, and not until

half-life did I play a FPS without God mode on. I believe I didn't play Doom legitimately until this week for the first time because I would just be like, oh, there's a God mode. Why wouldn't I not use this? I can have all the powers I want. I've had a lot more self-control since then, but, uh, yeah. Jeremy, how about you? Um, let's see, Doom came out, December 9th.

was that it? Summer 93. So I was just in college, and I had committed to being a Macintosh user. And the Mac port of Doom did not appear until after the Mac port of Doom 2. So I didn't play it until many years after it was a viable thing. But I remember seeing it in a friend's dorm room and thinking, that is not for me. Around the same time, I rented Secret of Mana over Christmas break until I could beat it. Like, I rented the game so many times in the space of two weeks that I might as well have just bought it.

And I was, like, like Gary, I was getting into slower games, JRPGs, Final Fantasy 3, Secret of Mata. Like, that was the stuff I was playing. And, yeah, the idea of Doom did not appeal to me. And I didn't really think I would like first-person shooters until I saw someone playing marathon and was like, whoa, there's narrative here. Right. There's story. There's, like, complicated mazes and puzzles and switches to solve. that's interesting.

So, you know, from there, and of course, Dark Forces had a big part to play in that because I was like, Star Wars, I remember Star Wars, it's so cool, wow, I can be like killing Stormtroopers, that's cool. So that was kind of my entree into the first-person shooter, and I've never really played all the way through Doom, as you can tell

by the fact that I didn't know that knee-deep in the dead is, in fact, a third of the game. But I have, you know, I have played parts of Doom and Doom 2. Like the Xbox 360 ports of the game are great. and I'm very happy that they're Xbox 1 backward compatible. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

So, like, basically those are, you know, like games like that are why I keep an Xbox 1 because I don't really have any interest in playing the new stuff on it, but there's so much good backward compatible stuff, like legendary games like that that I'm just like, I've got to keep that system. I'm still waiting for Milo, so. But, I mean, dual stick Doom. That's great. Yeah. It works pretty well. So we've all talked about our experience with Doom.

I want to talk about some basic details of this game. before we get into the more specific details. So this game released on December 10th, 1993. As we talked about, it originally shipped with three nine mission episodes, and the Ultimate Doom, which came out in 1995, would add a fourth set of episodes. Sorry, fourth set of missions. So eventually...

Oh, wait, was Knee Deep in the Dead the fourth episode? I think the fourth episode is, like, flesh consumed. Okay. So the original game was three episodes of nine missions each, and the shareware was the first mission with nine... So the first episode with nine missions. And basically what they did was they gave that out to retailers. And they said, this is yours for free.

Charge whatever you want for it. And that was not the case for their previous share where I think they sold it to retailers. But with Doom, it was like, no, you can charge whatever you want for this. This will send people to us. So just do whatever you want. One of the details I love about that. And something I watched with John Romero at his house, he showed his collection of retailer-specific box art. I've seen that, yeah.

Because the retailer just had to make their own. So they were just kind of taking some stills from the game or it reminded me a lot of like mom and pop video rental things having to do our new cover for Super Mario Bros. Yeah, and writing their own instructions. Yeah, just drawing a demon on the cover and being like, it's Doom, and it was Doom, it just there wasn't an official kind of face to it.

What I didn't know about Doom is the name comes from a quote in The Color of Money, the Scorsese movie from 1986, and I'm going to play the clip. It's a very slow-paced clip, but Tom Cruise is a pool hustler. He's carrying a pool cue case in with him and someone asks him what's in the case.

So I will play this clip for us. What you got in there? In here? So Tom Cruise has Doom in his pool cue case. I don't know why it came from that movie specifically. It has nothing to do with demons or hell or a Doom guy shooting them. But there you go. That's where it comes from.

I had no idea before that. So just some anecdotes. on Doom's development. Again, please go, if you, this is interesting to you, go out and read Masters of Doom, watch those presentations because there's more to this than what I pulled out of it, Jeremy. You skip the breaking news. What's that? Oh, you're right. John Romero.

Okay, this is so... This is a Doom Guy news flash. John Romero is the Doom Guy. Thanks to whoever broke that. I forget who actually broke the story because then... It was John. Oh, really? John Romero broke it. On his blog. Oh, on his blog. Okay. More hype. Well, the way the Games Press works is one person writes a story

and then 50 people write the same story and then no one knows where it came from. But in this case, John Romero broke the story that they hired a model to be the model for the Doom guy, to take a picture of him to be the reference. And I guess he wasn't getting it. So basically, John Romero tears his shirt off and it's just like, this is how you're supposed to stay. And I guess his girlfriend grabbed his arm, like one of the demons. So the image you see of Doom, that iconic box cover is basically John Romero being pulled down by his demon girlfriend. So there you go. Little known, that's also how Phil Collins got the gig singing lead.

for Genesis to replace Peter Gabriel. That's what I heard, Jeremy. I'm sure it's true. I read on the internet. Yeah, it's so weird. Like, when I was doing research for Doom all this week, that story broke. There was a waypoint story about how the Doom multiplayer didn't happen.

And I was in my pizza joint writing notes. I look over, there's a teenager wearing a Doom t-shirt with the original boxer. I'm like, oh, my God, this is all supposed to happen. I was supposed to make this Doom episode. So, okay, some anecdotes on Doom's development. We talked about this previously, but more info on it is that John Carmack wanted Doom to be one big level, but it was impossible given the tech at the time and also the other guys thought that feeling of accomplishment you get when you finish a level was instrumental to why their

previous games were a success. That was a necessary factor. And I think they were right. Also, there's no way they could create a game of that scope with that ambition on the technology at the time. And I love big worlds, like big continuous game worlds, but they slow the pace down and they would have killed the pacing for Doom. If you had to backtrack across, you know, like half a mile of corpses to get to another level, that's not fun. I think things like prey, like the modern prey,

are more of what they might have wanted Doom to be. But again, that's a more slow-paced game. It's more of a Deo-S-style game. And one of the side effects of that level-based structure, and we talk about that, the Watchout for Fireball's episode you mentioned, but like Doom was one of the first games, and same thing with Wolfenstein,

but the kind of I'd presentation, was right out of the box made for speed, running. Yes. At the end, you would get your score and you would get a time. And people would play to see how fast they can get through the levels. Whenever I see that time, I'm like, are you crazy? Yeah.

What's happening? That's Romero time. That's not human time. No. I'm going to be able to be. So another thing I found out is that enemies were meant to be digitized clay models. They really wanted this game to be a very advanced, super modern game. But doing that was too inefficient based on the just insane speed they worked at in development.

To build an individual clay model and animate it for all the monsters in this game would have taken way too much time, given the basically one-year development cycle of Doom. And the fact that they lost an entire month this open world concept didn't help either. And this could have easily been an aliens game. 20th Century Fox approached John Romero and Id, and they wanted to know, can you make an aliens game for us?

And Doom could have just turned into an aliens game, but ultimately and smartly, they wanted to retain creative control. And then we would eventually get aliens versus predator, I think, a year later for Jaguar. So eventually it happened. It's not nearly as good of a game, but it's great that Doom has its own identity.

And 20 years later, alien isolation, which is the correct way to turn alien into a video game. It finally happened. Also, during the development of Doom, the person they hired to create the port of Wolfenstein 3D dropped off the map. So basically, they had to drop everything they were doing for three weeks and program

the port for the SNEAS. So the port you're playing is its software. As kind of crummy as it is, that's the best they could do with the technology and all the censorship and stuff. And in that version of the game, I think one of the biggest downfalls of it is Like, they didn't have the memory to have characters facing any way but towards you,

so you couldn't sneak up on anyone. So everyone is always facing you throughout the entire game. Of course, in Doom, they're always facing you because they can't not run at you. There's no stealth involved there. I never got to that part because I couldn't get off Noah's Ark. Super 3D Noah's Ark. That game is hard, actually. It's ridiculous.

I live streamed. I'm like, why is this game so hard? This Bible game for children? I don't get it. So Doom, the actual game. I do want to talk about what a huge upgrade this is to Olfenstein 3D. The improvements are, we have textured walls and ceilings, also just a greater variance in geometry in the rooms. Tom Hall is the dude who wanted things to be more realistic.

He studied actual military structures. And when the other guys looked at his levels, his designs are like, this is so boring looking. I think Romero went in and went like, this is how a level should look. Like, you know, ceilings and windows and skyboxes and things like that. He wanted more variation and more ambition in terms of what they were doing. outdoor areas with skyboxes. Not super convincing, but they work. Less boxy layouts, as I said.

Environmental damage, which Wolfensstein 3D did not have. And also, a big thing I forget about is there's no lives in Doom. Wolfensign 3D has lives, which I totally forget about. Yeah, first person shooters with lives feel really weird now. Like dark forces. It's really weird, especially because there's like persistence between lives. Like you die and enemies that you've been attacking will still have some damage to them. That is bizarre.

Yeah. This doesn't actually make sense. It's much better the way that the FPS has evolved where, you know, Lives is an archaic concept. Just go back to the checkpoint or start the level all over again. Yeah, and Romero was basically like, this is going to be a very modern game, and Lives are not a modern concept, so get rid of them. And it's funny that Mario Odyssey, which might be out by the time this podcast comes out,

that is finally getting rid of Lives. Thank God. They've been a burden to Mario Games for so long, unnecessary, completely unnecessary. They got rid of them. So I do want to say The best way to play Doom is I don't know if you guys agree with me Maybe Gary can tell me

What he played it through Z Doom I feel like it's the best way to play it It is free of course Of course you need to buy Doom To access the non-chairware levels But when I bought it off of Steam I opened it And I couldn't figure out a way to maximize the window

And even with Doc box commands But I downloaded Z Doom It knew where the Wad files were And I just instantly could start playing it So that is the best way to play it And Z Doom is free, like I said. Yeah, it's definitely really friendly. For this revisit, I actually played through with the keyboard

because I was like, what does this feel like? And there's an adjustment period. But once you get to it, it actually controls pretty well. And that precision is actually very useful that you get with digital. You know, you can't overslide or it's harder to kind of overslide and mess. And it lets you add a lot of effects to things. I mean, you can't only dress up Doom so much, but it also adds a mouse look on the X axis, which will make you throw up.

Yeah. I recommend not using that on the x-axis. But it's useless. I'm sorry, is X up and then? Y is up and up again. It's useless, too. Like, you just don't need it. And I'm going to look at an untextured ceiling for...

You never need to look up to shoot guys that are above you. Yeah, you just shoot straight. Yeah. You have magic bullets, so it works out. Yeah, I'll go to bat for the Xbox 360, XBLA version of this and Doom 2. They're really well done. Yeah. And the games feel really good with twin stick approach.

I mean, obviously, you don't need to look up and down. Right, right. But, like, you know, moving around that way, It just, it really works with such a fast-paced game. I'm all for it. So what little story exists outside of the unused Doom Bible is sort of just retroactively applied to the game. So you are, you are a Doom guy, and basically you are you.

There is no character you're playing as. You are into this virtual world. And apparently, you assaulted your commanding officer who wanted you to fire upon civilians. And you're basically sent to this outpost on, I think, Mars. And something happens on Phobos. they ask you to guard the ship and everyone dies and you've got to figure out what happened

and so the first two episodes take place on the two moons of Mars and the third one takes place in hell itself and then I believe the fourth episode takes place on Earth after the aliens demons invades that's all the story you get there's I mean there's very little

environmental storytelling the only environmental storytelling I could find is things gradually get worse and more demonic as you play more like the first set of levels is fairly you know industrial areas and military installations. But when you start that third chapter,

you hit a button and, like, hell reveals itself. And that's basically, you're in hell now. Enjoy, have fun in hell. But, yeah. Yeah, there's basically no story. Yeah, I mean, you're just shooting things. That's what you do. It's the reason why the comic is just 16 pages of finding guns.

Yeah. Romero said at the time, a story in a game is like story in porn. Like, you don't need it. You're not there for that part of it. So, and just real quick, when you said how the levels are very, basic, just kind of suggest this industrial design. Like it makes an interesting kind of parody

when you look at Doom, which is just the wireframe, super fast, like real focus on game feel kind of arcade action. And then take something like Duke Nukem 3D, which Tom Hall worked on, that's more what he wanted naturalistic environments, kind of this like open area. And that's a simulation kind of thing. And that's got its appeal. Yeah. And then look at something like Marathon, which I've never played by I've only read about, which is more kind of focusing on that narrative. So all the elements of Doom were taken out, not specifically by people, but like, you know, they form this trident of, you know, they could be found elsewhere.

Of game values, you know, so you can kind of get a game that does any of those things the best of the three. And of the three, you know, Marathon really was the one that got the shortest shrift, of course, because it was on the Mac first, right? So it was actually doing some pretty amazing things concurrently with Doom, as Jeremy was saying earlier. I mean, it really did have a deep narrative of sort of the beginning of Bungie's whole, you know, mythology.

And it really never got the credit it deserved for doing what it did. Yeah, we just did a Retronauts episode on Marathon. Nice. Retronauts East. So I highly recommend anyone who's curious to know more about that. Check out that episode. I'm really looking forward to that. They also had great game boxes, those marathon boxes.

The kind of trapezoids. Yeah, they were one of those companies that was doing boxes that just did not fit on any shelf. Yeah, like, Team Raider and Day the tentacle had weird boxes. Just like, you try putting this on a shelf. They'll fall off into someone's shopping cart. Bingo. So the last thing I'll say before our break is that one of the interesting things, John Romero basically walks you through these early versions of Doom in that presentation,

and Doom used to have items to pick up and treasures to find. Wolfenstein 3D, part of your score was based on the treasures you would find. Those are all taken out of Doom just to, you know, whittle it down to its most essential elements. You find secrets, but all the things that exist in those secrets are, you know, weapons and power-ups. There's nothing to find outside of that. And also the secrets sort of are traps, too. It's like you open a wall, there's a rocket launcher, you grab it, and then other walls drop down, and there's a bunch of things.

things to kill with that rocket launcher. They're sort of like many challenges in a way, not necessarily a reward. I guess the reward itself is these cool things you can do, not, you know, a score thing to just find. And there were also weapons or I think there was armor too, right? Yeah. Armour. Right.

And that's the first game I can remember where you could see it but didn't know how to I was just about to say that. So the secrets are much better hidden than they are in Wolfenstein where it's literally hump every wall to see if they'll open up a thing. In Doom, they're more fairly presented. Like right away, first episode, if you look out to your words, right, you look outside, there's a power up there. And there's an obvious way to get there. So they're much more fair and kind of inventive about how they present those.

One of the big innovations in Doom's level design was Windows, having a window into another room and being able to attack through the windows and see things through the windows and think, how do I get there? That was not in Wolfenstein, but that was a Romero touch, and I guess that was not in the original plan for Doom. If you're looking to buy a car, you're probably familiar with terms like MSRP. You might even know what it stands for, but what does it actually mean? The same goes for invoice, list price, and dealer price. It's enough to confuse anybody.

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Oh, Oh, I'm Oh, Oh, Oh. And So we're back from our break.

want to talk about the selection of weapons from Doom because they're all great. Of course, Doom borrows the standardized FPS weapon hierarchy that was introduced in Wolfenstein 3D. I don't think that's a radical idea. Like, Wolf 3D is sort of like, here are the order in which you get weapons. And that is sort of

what every FPS has done since then. But I find they are much more interesting in Doom because Doom is not a game that takes place in reality, unlike Wolfenstein, which is semi-real, outside of the Mecca Hitler, I guess. There are more weapons as well. It's kind of like it's, I think it's almost double the count, because there's not a lot to Wolf 3D, pistol, you know,

machine gun, chain gun. Is there a rocket launcher? So it's like it's the final weapon. It happens way late in the game. I guess maybe Doom would expand upon that and then become like the sort of new hierarchy in a way. It's also, I mean, yes, it wasn't unique to Doom, but it was an ID thing, right? So that's such a standard thing in gaming that we have, like these are the guys who kind

of codified that FPS progression. You know, that's one of the really impressive things about specifically doing. but also that these early FPSs is how many things that just became elemental and kind of like, spoon barrels, you know, these things that are just video gaming. We take for granted, yeah, yeah, just like they introduced this grammar to the genre. Yeah, yeah. But let's go over then real quick. So fists are the first one.

That's your melee weapon, and it is sort of just a joke. Like, if you have, if you're down to your fist, you are going to die. That was an intentional thing they did because a Molfonsign 3D you had a knife that had some utility, but the fists are bad. I mean, you just reload your game if you're down to your fist. Unless you're in the berserker mode when you pick up the berserk power up. But even then, I don't like that power up. I find it just like, oh, you just want me to take more damage,

even though not everything can get killed in one hit if you've got the berser mode on. So not a fan of that. Pistol, also very useless. I was going into this game thinking of regular FPSs and be like, oh, I'll just use my pistol until I run out of bullets. No, shotgun. That should be your main weapon for everything. There's no, like, precision headshots in the game this way.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But shotgun, I feel like it's so satisfying. We don't have the super shotgun yet, but there's always enough bullets for the shotgun. I feel like they intend for that to be your main weapon. Even the pistol really sucks. Like, you'll just be backing away, shooting something over and over and over again until it eventually explodes. And they give you the shotgun on the first level. It's a secret in the first level. It's out in the open and the second level. They want you to have it for most of the game. Not to backseat edit, but can I convince you to put in the shotgun noise somewhere around here? Right now. Because people will like it. I'll do it. It's a real good sound. Yeah, it really is almost like the first example of like weapon porn in a game. Yeah. It just felt so good, you know.

It's true. And I read, the fifth member of the development team, Bill Foley. And I read that all of these weapons are basically toys that they photographed and then scan into a paint program where they would modify them. And some were toys that were modified with parts of other toys. So outside of the chainsaw, everything you're looking at is just a reformatted toy from the 90s. So really interesting stuff. The chain gun, good for mobs or, you know, to stagger powerful enemies.

And one thing that I found astounding about this game, going into it thinking, like, it'll just be like, it'll be a fun but also rock stupid, you know, shoot him up game. There's like enemies can be staggered in this game. There's a lot of strategy. Like, you're taking cover. You're hiding behind things. It's really impressive. And unlike the new Doom, there's kind of like a situational use for every weapon, which I feel like I love the new Doom, the 2016 reboot, but that's the one thing that is not Doom-like in which it's. It's sort of like, and I'm borrowing this argument from a great YouTuber named Aaron Signal.

He made a great video on Zoom. But after he said this, I was like, oh, you're right. In the Doom reboot, it's just like, pick a weapon you like and use it. That's your weapon. In this game, it's just like, oh, there's imps. I'll use my shotgun. Oh, this floating head guy's coming at me. I'll pull out my chain gun and take them out.

Like, you have very situational use, but not limited use. You can survive with a lot of these weapons, but you sort of have an idea of what you want to use against which enemy. It also impacts the level design a lot. So level designers were able to say, like, hey, in this level, you're just going to get chain gun ammo. You're not going to be able to rely on your plasma gun or your shotgun. So they could kind of reduce your options. Or you see an enemy in the level and you're like,

I have to find the rocket launcher before I come back here. You don't want to mess with it because it will just destroy you. Rocket launcher is great. Really cool effect for the time. This thing will kill you though if it used them properly, especially when you're moving around so fast, you can easily clip a wall and explode. There would not be rocket jumping in this game like in Quake.

You just die. that's what the rocket launcher will do to you. One of the things that introduces to you, and if I'm getting ahead of ourselves, I apologize. But like something we were talking about it on the hallway is how important it is that there are projectile and hit scan weapons. And this applies that to you as well. Can you explain hit scan in case anyone doesn't know what that means? Yeah, so a hit scan, if the weapon is pointed at an enemy or at you, once the trigger is pulled, you just take damage. There's nothing traveling.

And you're saying that's how it works in Wolfensstein 3D. That's how Wolfensai and 3D works. That's how like any World War II game works. That's how a lot of modern shooters work as well. Projectile things, though. So you have a rocket launcher. The Imps projectiles are slow. You can dodge them.

So there's a point to moving 5,000 miles an hour because you can actually defend yourself. That's a great point. I think every projectile in this game, you can conceivably dodge and see on the screen. Even the hit scan weapons, even the commanders with the chain gun, which end up being the most annoying enemy

because they ambush you and you can't dodge. But the regular soldiers kind of take a moment to wind up. You can see when they travel, you can see when they stop to shoot. Right, right. You can still kind of dodge. And it becomes about skill as opposed to just kind of balancing your progress versus how many health items you pick up. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Doom is tactical retreating.

Like brief seconds of tactical retreating. And thankfully, I went into this game with a modern FPS context in mind. I was like, oh, wait, you don't have to reload. That's great. I don't even know if there was reloading in FBSs at this point, but I was like, that was a great choice. There's no reloading. It's like tactical treats and also tactical kind of pushing forward. Yeah.

You can rush into a room and know that there's going to be ammo and health on the ground, pick it up and take out everything that's in the room. Right. You know, so you can't play safe. All these mechanics kind of work together to enforce the pace of the game. Let's talk about the enemies. And they all have bizarre names because I think they're just named after the fact. Did you skip the BFG?

The BFG? Oh, you're right. The big fucking gun. That's like the trademark, man. I forget about that. I mean, we all remember the scene in the due movie with The Rock, of course, that classic. But yeah, the BFG, they made it. hard to use, but it will destroy most

things in one hit. It's very hard to find. But I just as a kid, I like that the F word was secretly in a game. That really tickled me. Like, yes, ha ha ha, swear. Thank you, I'd software. But yeah, the BFG 9,000 is... I actually don't know what the BFG, like, how it works. What's

unique about this weapon? Go ahead, sorry. It's a projectile, and then once it hits an enemy or a wall, it kind of expands on a horizontal plane. Yeah. And hits everything within a distance. So it's, it's functionally, like, a big rocket. Yeah, it's like horizontally shaped.

The muzzle is kind of horizontal. Yeah, and it kind of spreads out that way. So in a small room, it will take out everything in the room. So these are all, I think every player had their own name for these, because I don't remember seeing these names. These are the official names for all of these enemies.

I believe, you know, Imp, those are all familiar, but Zombie Man, those are your standard grunts. Easy to kill, not a threat. I find these are just sort of the fodder in the game, the things are just fun to explode. You can take them out with a pistol. I like the shotgun.

Imps, of course, are the guys who throw fireballs. I think one of the more iconic enemies from this game and it's required a bit more strategy, but it's just like if you're paying attention, you can always dodge their fireballs. They're pretty slow in terms of how faster character moves and they're easy to dodge out of the way. This is a bizarre name for this thing, the demon.

Oh, you mean the demon in doom? Yes, the only demon in doom. He is like the big pink gorilla guy, and those are just basically, They're kind of easy, but you have to keep your distance. So as long as you've got a ground behind you, you can continually retreating and firing because they only have melee attacks. And they make a pretty great grunting noise.

Well, there's the Predator Vision versions as well. Yeah, yeah, which that was awesome when I first saw that. They have a different name, too. They're not even demons. It's like specter. Something like that. I don't know if it's Spector, but. Yeah.

The Kaku demon, of course, is the beholder. But I think, Gary, there's another. Astral Dreadnoddnot. Yeah, from the manual of the planes. Is that like Planescape? No, it's like early D&D, kind of like gods and demigods and demons source book from probably like first edition. Yeah. But yeah, it is exactly that.

If you just cut its head off of. Thankfully, T.S.R. did not sue. Although they could sue so many companies right now. Oh, yeah. If they wanted to. If mind flares flew in Final Fantasy, then, you know, this could be here. I think they lost the copyright on the beholder based on how many games I've seen it in. Final Fantasy lucked out because of the mistransation.

They were Mind Flares. Yeah. players. God. So we also have the Lost Souls, which I find are kind of like the Medusa heads of Doom. They just, they're fast, they're cheap, they rush at you, but they're not a huge threat. They just kind of chip away at you and are annoying if they're in a room with other enemies

because they kind of get the first hits in and you have to think about them first before you tackle other people. Or, sorry, demons. And I love, this is just such a product of its time, the cyber demon. Because I don't know what makes them cyber, but. I guess his bionic parts. This is one of those enemies that basically kind of it hits you once you die. And your first fight with this guy is an arena where you're hiding. You're basically getting more rockets than you can ever use in your life.

But just tactically retreating, firing your rockets, avoiding his, and following it from there. So the cyber demon is maybe the most iconic doom enemy. Like he's the most Satan-like of the enemies, I think. He's like a big pink Satan. It's him or the caco demon. Yeah, for sure. Like, I've seen a plush cacko demon and regret not buying it. I haven't seen a plush cyber demon, unfortunately.

Not yet. The Baron of Hell. They're the most powerful, normal enemy you see. And the end of episode one, you fight two of these guys. And apparently that is an homage to the Hammer Brothers. And again, these guys are big Mario fans. And none of these enemies are actually named their real names in the programming. I think these guys are named Brute.

So you can see all the working titles for these enemies. in the game themselves, but they never really cared about that aspect of their games. I mean, I feel like I didn't really know, like I, as a kid, I knew what a Gumba was, I knew what a Kupa was, but I never knew the names of these things. They weren't as, like, they weren't as explicitly told to you or made him as important, I think. Yeah, it kind of didn't matter, did it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter that a Gumba is a Gumba, but for some reason, it's like, that's a Gumba, that's a Guba, that's a Kupa.

I think this is that era of PC games as well, where, like, if you wait a moment on the, the title screen, I think it does switch over and shows these things. things, what they're named. I could be wrong about that, but I remember seeing something like that. So it might have told you, but you're just going to sit down and play, because to just play, like... How could you wait? Yeah, what's the point?

That awesome title screen. Yeah. So we have the Doom engine I do want to talk about. It is not really 3D. And that trick worked really well on my brain in 1994. If you go back to it now, you can see just like, yeah, this is all a trick. There's no actual 3D happening.

It's all fakery, and it's really good fakery, but in terms of what it can't do, rooms cannot exist on top of other rooms. No geometry can exist above you that's not a ceiling, I think. It's very, it's hard to explain, but it is a kind of 2.5D fakery of what a 3D environment would be. Quake would be the true 3D environment, but this is not like a polygonal game in the way we think of it. Yeah, we talked about this a bit in the moment. Macon, or the marathon episode that we did recently, but basically the way you need to think about

these levels is like a top-down map. Right. And then, like, drop yourself down so that you're standing on the top-down map and then pull up all the lines that people have drawn so that they are pretend walls surrounding. Yeah. Actually, I have too much experience with the build 3D engine, which is the Duke Nukem engine. And that's what you would do. You would draw the lines on the map and then you go to the first person view and pull the

geometry up out of the ground. It was really interesting. Well, you can see that, too. if you pull up the map of Doom. Like, that's essentially what it was. It brings up the wireframe maze version. Yeah. And there's Mouse look in the game that was hacked in later.

But if you fire it, if an enemy is at a higher altitude than you, if you fire at him, as long as you're facing that enemy, he will still get hit because they cannot possibly account for that. Everything is actually on the same level as you, but it's fake to make you think that it's not. And it works really well. I do want to talk about the controversy. We talk about this a bit out in the hallway during the break, but. Doom did escape controversy for the most part, and it was released one day after the Congressional, sorry, the Senate hearing on video game violence, that very monumental event that made every politician look incredibly stupid. When it's like, night trap is going to destroy us.

This neon blue menacer is going to cause our children to kill each other. And the hysteria about that was over the top. And that's from that, meaning we got the ESRB and productive things like that and the government did not step into censor things. But I feel like, and I want to hear what you guys have to say about this, that because it was a PC game, it avoided that kind of scrutiny because you had to have a lot of money to have a PC. It looked at it as a toy for children, and it was a different, I guess, eco-sphere for that kind of a game. Yeah, PC games weren't sold in the toy section, whereas console games were. Right, but they were still, you know, game, I think by then, games were considered for kids anyway. I mean, like, I remember having to deal at computer gaming world.

And, my God, sometimes Doom even comes up to this day by people, you know, old people who don't know anything about games. They're like, are they all violent games like Doom? It's still sort of the poster child for, you know, violence in video games all these years later. And just to clarify, so, you know, nobody, so Doom kind of escaped that. Doom 2 didn't. Okay, yeah. Because of Columbine. Yes.

So, like, that's where a lot of that attitude. So it's very easy for people to say Doom in general. Yeah. Doom 1 got through it. Doom 2, they dealt with it a lot. Retroactively, I think, retroactively, definitely, I remember I was in high school when the Columbine massacre happened and hearing this hysteria jinned up again about, but again violence, they're talking about Zoom. I'm like, Doom 2 is a five-year-old game. Also, everyone has played Doom. Yes. They didn't, I guess they didn't realize how ubiquitous doom was. Doom was on every PC, at least the shareware. Everyone has played it. Everyone had some experience with Doom with like, these crazy teenagers played Doom and listen to heavy metal. They made levels. And that was the thing that made, that was the sensationalist reporting was they made levels that simulate. you know, it's like a dry run for the incident. And like, that's not accurate or fair, but that stuck with a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah. I think anyone who messed around with the level editors and wads and things like that at the time are gobs in the case of... They were dangerous. No, I think everyone, like, said, oh, I want to take a real world location that I know and adapt that because it's a space I'm familiar with and it would be fun to turn it into a video game space. Not thinking I want to murder everyone. in the real space and need some practice.

It was just like, here's something familiar. Here's a way for me to turn my life into this video game simulation. That's interesting. That's fun. I always make my house in The Sims. I made my hometown in unlimited adventures and it looked nothing like it, but I knew what it was. Yeah, I mean, I brought the build 3D fact to school with me.

I printed it out and I was like, I did make part of my school before losing interest. But again, Jeremy said, it's where you are all day. As a teenager, of course you want to recreate it. But also, do it would be a bad school of shooting simulation? No one's going to be running towards you in that event. I mean, they didn't even look at the logic of it. The principal's a caco demon, and this is the teacher I don't like. It's just like, no, that's not how Doom works at all.

It would be a bad simulation for a real-life massacre. I've thought a lot about this, by the way. I don't build levels anymore, so everybody's safe in this room. The console ports would hit in a few years. So between one to two years later, there would be console ports for like Super Nintendo, 32X, things like that. But by that point, there could be no controversy because, as I pointed out, before everyone had played Doom.

Doom was so ubiquitous. Doom was on the cover of Wired. People knew who made Doom. It was just like the thing you played if you had a computer. And I feel like there was even the most clueless politician would not jump up Doom's butt because it was just this thing everyone knew about. It was just pretty harmless in the media landscape. So Gary, I think it will disagree with me on this, but I don't like the music in Doom.

Oh, no. I like some of it. But after a while, I was like, wow, this song and this level is maybe 10 seconds. loop and it's really there for atmosphere yeah but those instrument samples don't provide the kind of atmosphere they did in 1994 uh i could see that working differently i think you just need to get yourself an ad libid man is your sound card not good enough is that what we're talking about it's not blasting enough you guys my sound card is not blasting enough but please i want you to defend this gary i love that first song but it just gets really it gets really bizarre after that like there

are some droning songs some oddly odd instrumentation in these levels i just don't really get what they're going for. A lot of it's just like Pantera covers, things like that. There's lots of covers. So, like, part of my appreciation is that, is that they're literally just ripping off metal songs that they liked. So it's part of the charm of this whole thing. Like, we're just going to steal D&D monsters.

We're going to steal everything about our life and put it in this game. So I appreciate it. And then part of it is just, I like dorky sounds. Yeah, yeah. There's just the contrarian part of me that kind of likes, you know. I think they actually do work for that atmosphere. Yeah, yeah. Some of the levels do.

And one of the levels where it does get grading, I feel like, and I'm not putting this back on you, but I feel like some of those samples are short enough to where you're just not supposed to spend that much time in the level. Well, thinking about them, or you're just supposed to move through quicker. And I have the same thing when I go back to it.

I want to be a completionist because that's how I play games now or closer to. I want to explore a level fully. And really, it was more of an arcade kind of thing. So you're dealing with a shorter, you know, the longest doom level should take you five minutes, you know, and I feel it's kind of it's intended to be played. And as you mentioned before,

they're timing you, right? So you had the incentive to just want to do it as quickly as you could. So the music works for that, you know, in that sense. But some of them are like way too short of loops. Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to say it's not bad. I just it kind of I'm not into it, I guess. I can see why you would like it for sure.

Part of it is contrary. And like part of it is me liking things that are bad. Like I like the sounds that don't sound like instruments. That is very contrary. At the time, it was just kind of, I mean, I totally get what you're saying. But it was just so different. Yeah, nothing really sounded like it. You're right.

Right. Or look like it. I mean, that's why it was just so impactful, you know. It was such a pure adrenaline rush of a game. And especially on the PC, games just really didn't have that kind of pace. I mean, most PC gamers were playing, like, you know, turn-based strategy games. So to have something that just moved that fast. It had metal music. You know, it was just a very different paradigm for the PC. One of the big things that I respond to that kind of plays into your point, though, is the music's not dynamic. So a lot of the song, a song will either be. kind of toned for action or toned for exploration, but you'll do both in each level. So, like, if something's really high, you know, high octane, you know, it's like, well, I'm just kind of walking around through backtracking for secrets. This is very good.

And something can be very, like, low and moody. And it's like, well, I'm actually in a room full of demons fighting them. This doesn't really fit. I do think the Doom reboot is what they would have done if they had the technology, where it's like, when you were fighting enemies, it's just like ripping guitars and butt rock. And then when you're exploring, it's more like moody, somber music. I feel like if they had that sort of dynamic,

music system they would have made a big difference yeah but again they made this game extremely fast so it's a wonder it came out in this quality it just almost perfect um one other thing i wanted to cover and this could be not just one episode but an entire series is the doom modding community oh yeah it is incredible it's still happening and there is so much going on again i can i can bear i'm just going to mention it for like 10 minutes maybe in this episode but who wants to dig into this i mean gary uh do you have any experience with this jeff anybody let You know, because, I mean, I was looking at things like brutal Doom, which now I want to play that version of Doom, which is a total modification of the game, basically kind of what they would have made if they had that technology at the time, just like blood and guts and gushing parts everywhere, explosions, things like that. But there's like Beavis and Butthead Doom and Simpsons Doom and Star Trek Doom, just every kind of Doom.

Yeah, well, Doom was the first game that, that was the first time I had the experience of downloading levels. I used to do it through CompiServe 73060-557 I still remember my ID Yeah, still remember that was how you had names like CompiServe Wow, it's like an ICQ address or something Pretty much

And yeah, I remember going into the forums Into the Doom forums And there would be lists of levels that people had made and they would have ratings on them And I would just download it You know, just extra add-ons to the game It was so incredible at the time, you know. In addition to the shareware, you had all of this incredible value add from the community.

And some of the levels were just outstanding that people were making. I mean, in some cases, they would be better than stuff that was in the shipping game. A lot of them were terrible. It was kind of hit and miss. But they did have the voting system, and the community tended to have pretty decent taste. And this was an era in which a company could probably illegally just put like 600 maps on a CD-ROM and sell it. Those were unofficial level packs. I had one for Duke Nukem.

I would see them all the time for Doom. Just like, oh, look, all this free content. I'll just sell this. But it kind of, it's interesting, the point of the, it started that kind of pipeline from community to developer, the thing that you see with Valve a lot, because a lot of those people got hired who did, who did the good ones and would come on to, you know, Doom 2 and then move on to Ion Storm with its, like, ridiculously huge team and stuff, who were just like moders, who did that.

And the weirdest things about that, so I didn't play quality mods. I wasn't looking for the best ones. I was doing Simpsons. I was looking for, you know, goofy skins. Yeah, yeah. Which one, just as a side note, find whatever they're using for the chainsaw, and it's always the funniest.

Like, it was very funny to me. I remember playing a Sailor Moon one, and they use the Cat as the chainsaw. Oh, God. Luna up, and Luna just claws enemies. That is great. I like that. But the, all of this is still going on with as much,

like feeling like as much ferocity now. There are awards. There are people who are making very excellent doom levels. Wow. There is a winner from each year that has happened. year since Doom that are really good levels. When we did that episode, Watch Out for Fireballs, I played two or three of them. They're really good. Total conversions. Like, there is literally

unlimited content. Yeah. You could just play Doom for the rest of your life and never play another game with all the content out there. Like, right now, it's happening. Like, you can go and find the best Doom levels, like, from the community. What's interesting is this was a big deal at the time for its software because the publisher, GT Interactive, Good Times Interactive. I want to talk more about them on this episode for sure. But the publisher was worried, like, you released your game to the internet. People are hacking it apart, building tools. And John Carmack put his foot down. He said, no, we will let them. We will enable them to do this. He was from the hacker background where it's a very collaborative and competitive atmosphere. He did not want to shut people out of it.

In fact, when he was at its software, he was like, we will never patent our technology. It is, that is wrong. Like, he wanted people to share with each other information and make it a very, again, collaborative atmosphere. So it's thanks to him that this started a trend where it's like if you release a game like this, of course there's going to be mods. Of course there's going to be level packs and things like that. Really astute to you, like a really savvy business decision because it just got more value, more people were going to pick it up. And officially you weren't supposed to release a mod, like they didn't care if you made money out of it, but you had to make it so you had the full version of Doom. Right. Right. So incentivize people to upgrade their shareware

to play mods. Like you just got so much value. Yeah, I think like John Carmack wrote a big grudentially wrote a end user license agreement that you could tell he's just like, they're making me do this, please don't distribute this, blah, blah, blah. Own the full game. But yeah, it's because of him that this entire scene happened, Jeremy. I was just going to say even though I didn't play Doom back in the

day, this idea, this, you know, the collaborative effort the modding community expanded to other games in the same genre. So I played all kinds of Dark Forces mods. Yeah. And Marathon mods became a huge deal with some of those total, total

conversion packages where people would extend the story of the Marathon trilogy or, you know, come up with their own stories that were completely independent from Marathon, but they were always kind of immersed in that marathon narrative effort. And with the final game in the Marathon series, Bungi actually released the tools that they used, the Dev tools, Forge and Anvil, and used those, you know, gave them basically to the community and said, create levels forever. That's why it was called Marathon Infinity. It's funny that the, the, the, name of the map, which is WADW.A.D. WAD. The naming convention was basically, I forget who asked who, but somebody said, what would you call a cluster of data? And they said, I would call it a WOD.

And then retroactively, they made that stand for where's all the data. And that way, you are not modifying the game itself. You were just telling the game where to put things. That way, they made modding easier. And I believe, I don't know what the extension for Marathon Maps is, but I know the extension for Dark Forces maps is Gob. Yeah. So it's like Wad and Gobb. and, like, just different clusters of things. So I don't know what it is for a marathon. I don't know. Max didn't have to use extensions.

Right, right. I think they had them hidden, though. Yeah. That could be it. It was in the resource fork. As kind of a forward-thinking thing, just before we get off of it, how impactful this is. Yeah. So you look at things when this would happen with Valve.

So, like, born of this kind of ethos, you have Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, like, these huge franchises that were just born from these total conversion. of Quake, right? So, like, Team Fortress is a Quake mod that became Team Fortress 2 that is this huge thing that essentially is, you know. So much came out of just Quake alone in terms of what Bell made. So this philosophy that he had, like, just did so much good. And that's one of the things I love about reading that book is like, I felt good that

this was, there's not a cynical motivation behind this. Because from the outside in, it felt like, oh, this guy is, you know, a philanthropist. Like, he's doing good. And finding out, like, yeah, that is what he is. Like, you know, I don't need so many Ferraris. I can give away my work. I can literally give back. Yeah.

You know, I'm in it for the, for the technology. I made, you know, it was very visionary. Yeah. You know, and, you know, how many game developers came up because of that, you know. That's true, yeah. American McGee. Yeah, American McGee. American McGee.

Yeah, it's funny that we, so we talked about all of these notable, these notable, this is kind of off topic where we're going with this, but all of these, all of these people that came out of Doom, the rock star developers and stuff. And what introduced me to them was the website something awful, which I write for now. It just like, nothing was funnier than all of these game developers in the year 2000. Like American McGee, Cliff Blasinski, John Romero, Carmack. Like, that was how I was introduced to them, which I'm glad I read Masters of Doom because I'm like, oh, they're not cartoon characters. They're actual people who had big egos at a time, but now they've settled down and they're fine.

A lot of them were just really young. Yeah, that too. It's just like very young and very successful at a very young age. If you are 23 with no life experience and are suddenly a millionaire, you're not going to be. be a cool guy. Right, but none of them bought Candy Mansions. That's right. They went rocket cars instead. Yeah. So I take the candy, I know, I'll take the rocket car

of the Candy Mansion. 100%. That's shorthand for good or bad billionaire. Yes. You know, millionaire. And I want to talk about the wake of Doom clones. Oh, you skipped a very important bullet point. What are we doing? What are we doing? You skipped multiplayer. Oh, multiplayer. That's like the most important thing. Well, no.

There's so many most important things about this game. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it would invent the term death match, but multiplayer would not be a bigger deal until Doom 2, because that's when networks like Duango and I'm drawing a blank on other networks. Duongo's such an early.com type name. Yes, it is. Like, I have this Duango keychain that gave me for free at a, you know.

At DuangoCon 97. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was a bigger deal. No, it's cool that it existed. And why they had to make it was Romero never did it again, but they were so excited about Doom.

They had a press release, like, here are all the things all be in Doom. And then two months before release, they're like, oh, shit, we said there'd be multiplayer in this game, so they had to make it work in a month. And they did. But it was basically modem to modem over the phone line. And it would not be until networks like Duango would come up that you could actually connect to a network that would then connect you to another player. You would have to know someone was home and awake and would connect to Doom at the same time as you to play Doom multiplayer. And I guess there was co-op, but no one ever talks about Doom co-op. It's kind of fun. Like you have to bring a lot of your own fun to it. Otherwise, it's just, I mean,

I guess it's Robotron, third person with, you know, with a person with another player, which is fun. But you can do a lot of kind of neat things. Like, I remember my friends talking about it when I was growing up, like playing with, you know, hierarchies. Like, so someone would be kind of the military commander in this case. And someone would be the lieutenant. Were they R peeing Doom? Yeah. Like, go clear that room.

I'm going to go take care of this, you know, that kind of thing, which is pretty fun. I like that. The Deathmatch thing, like, I feel like for Id led to a period where I kind of lost interest because the death matching in Doom, which led to, led to Doom 2 having really huge death matching, which led to Quake, which was 16 players, which led eventually to Quake 3, which is multiplayer only. Yeah, just multiplayer. It's that continuum of being this exercising kind of like aesthetic and level design to being multiplayer arenas, which is just never going to be my interest necessarily.

Yeah, yeah, I can get that. I mean, I do like a good single player campaign on top of that. But yeah, this is definitely, again, creating the death match and then building off of that with Doom 2, which we become the, the, I think, multiplayer game. of its time before quake, of course. Yeah. So I do want to talk about the wake of what we used to call Doom clones before it was like, oh, wait, this is just a genre. So there were a lot of Doom clones spun out of Doom.

A lot of them were good, like Duke Nukem 3D, Alien Trilogy, Dark Forces. I want to ask if any of us have a one that we like a lot. I love Duke 3D. I played this way more than Doom. Some of the humor does not age well, of course. But I just love the interactivity and the environmental storytelling and just the amount of variety in the game itself. I really love Duke 3D. Rise of the Triad, which was the Tom Hall.

That's a cool game. It's weird. Like we have different characters who all play like just a little bit different. That's right. Yeah. They do some interesting things with it. That's somehow tied to blood. One whole unit of blood.

Yes. And that's interesting too. in that Doom Clone. It's very much like Duke 3D. It's like this is edgy humor, but it's also like playing with the 2.5D technology to its full extent. And there's a little bit of that simulation.

Like you're in a place. Yeah. It's like you're in a church with a graveyard. Like you are in a real world kind of location. So there's a little bit of that sim element. Anyone else favorite Doom Clones? I mean, I've done a whole episode about Marathon.

So I'm not going to reiterate that. But I, you know, the thing that got me into FPS is was actually Dark Forces. Okay. And there's a lot that's kind of weird and, Like, you know, the genre hadn't quite come into its own, the concept of the FPS. So it borrows conventions that predate Doom, like the idea of lives. But, you know, it did have more complex levels. You could have sort of like layers and you had to build an auto map that was really elaborate and helpful.

And, you know, it was a game wherein you played as a Star Wars hero. was, you know, some side story, but you were the first person to go and find the Death Star plans, which everyone has done now. There's lots of Death Star plans being bandied about throughout the galaxy, but this was, to me, I can remember the first time I'd ever seen that idea where you were Kyle Katarne and you went to the, you know, some planet and stole the plans and zapped them from a rebel base or from an imperial base. This is the Rogue One.

Pretty much, yeah. But then there's other stuff like you go on and find this entire. uh kind of side story where the emperor is creating like force enhanced super stormtroopers and you have to put down that that whole thing and so uh you know like as you play through the game you find more and more advanced versions of these uh like robo force enhanced stormtroopers that start out looking like the terminator and then turn out and you know like the final version is these gigantic bulky things that are firing plasma beams at you uh there's a lot of progression in the game there's stuff that doesn't work like platforming.

Ooh, it's bad. It's like covered the same plot as Turok. But it also has inventory items. Like you go to an ice planet and you have to find snow cleats so that you don't slide around. Okay, yeah. You have like a light that you can switch on and off

and it recharges automatically when you're not using it. Of course, it has all the standard Star Wars weapons like the Storm Trooper gun and Han Solo's pistol and I don't know, other, like laser cutters and the super weapons and mines and, you know, some kind of atypical weapons. And it also had vertical aiming, like actual vertical aiming where, you know, in the first

stage you're like running around outside of this base and all of a sudden someone starts shooting at you. You're like, what the hell? And you look up. I have to look around. And there's a stormtrooper up there firing at you. And so all of a sudden, like the Y axis becomes important. Cut these mouse.

Yeah. So, well, no, it was before mouse loaded. Yeah, you had to look up at the. Yeah. Oh, God. What did we do with ourselves? They did, I think they did patch-in mouse control. Yeah, I remember playing it with a mouse. Jeff, do you have a favorite Doom clone?

It's actually the same. It's done forces. And then Jedi Night, too. I would love to play that. I never played it at the time, and I know it's really cool. I don't know if it holds up or not. Yeah, the Jedi Night series. I think it does hold up.

I know it's on Steam, and really for the same reason. And the verticality is what I remember the most. And also just the level design that used the verticality. I remember, like, having a sense of vertigo. on some of the levels. Yeah. You were, you know, had to, you know. Yeah, like you're down in the sewer.

Oh, no, there's the whole, like the, the mine shaft or something. And you're, like, kind of working your way around and there's this huge pit in the center. And then you have dark troopers at the bottom. Yeah. And that was another thing about the game is that a lot of the levels were puzzle-based or areas of it were puzzle-based, which would, you know, become such a major thing in half-life. Oh, you're right. Yeah. But early on, they were an early version of that, you know, where you weren't just shooting.

You had to solve. stuff. Yeah, and a big part of the impact was that this was 1994-95 when Star Wars had all of a sudden started to become an interesting thing again. You know, the Timothy Zon books had just come out and Dark Empire from Dark Horse Comics and all of a sudden there was like, oh, there's this Star Wars zeitgeist in the air. I hear they're making new movies. Yeah, well, this was kind of the buildup to that. Like Lucas started rebuilding this empire and building new interest and this was part of that

plan and it worked. We were suckers. Right. It was pre-episode one. Yeah, this was, yeah. We weren't, you know, disappointing. Right. But, yeah, it was a great way to kind of pull people back into this universe that had been forgotten for a decade. And it was a really compelling way to do it. And at the same time, it innovated a lot within the FPS space.

Yeah, I still think it's one of the best Star Wars games ever of any genre. We should do an episode on this at some point. I agree. A whole series. I need to play beyond the first. Have you guys done like a Star Wars games, just general episode? I feel like we have. Not really.

we did the importance of Star Wars on Day. But then we were like, we don't actually don't know. We came away going. Final Fantasy 12? That's basically it. So one of the reasons, one of the many reasons actually I wanted Jeff here is because he was in the press at this time, and after Quake, it sort of exploded

and I want to say John Carmack was probably the only guy to not publicly embarrass himself. There were a lot of ups and downs. A lot of bold ideas. I want Jeff to just spill all the beans on what it was like to cover life after doom. and quake for all of these people who went their own directions, made a lot of noise, made a lot

of stink, and then sort of kind of settled down in the 2000s. I really want to hear about this. Do you mean, Iron Storm, just everybody in general, I guess. I mean, Ion Storm was probably the poster child for the post-dome failure, but I don't think anyone was able to recapture the magic, and that's a tall order, but I feel like they sort of fizzled out a bit. Yeah, it was really kind of a, you know, a cluster F. I don't know what kind of language we use Oh, we can say fuck. I mean, we talked about the BFG. Right.

Okay. And it probably wasn't any of their faults. It was just, you know, success spoiled them all. Yeah, yeah. They had too much money and they were so, you know, I wouldn't say arrogance. Maybe they were. But, you know, they all had proven themselves. And don't forget, another person in the Iron Storm mix was Warren Specter.

That's right. Yeah, yeah. He was the... Doom is the reason why probably my favorite game came out, you know, in a lot of ways. That was like the sane uncle. Exactly. He was the adult in the room. And in fact, he wasn't in the room.

He didn't even work in the Dallas office. And from what I heard, that was the nightmare office that they put on a penthouse. And it's like, oh, we can't work for eight hours a day because of the sun blasting through. Yeah, we visited there as part of computer gaming world. And I remember getting off the elevator. And we weren't even off the elevator. And I was already, like, offended. Because it was so, it was opulent to the point of ridiculousness.

I mean, they had the money. It was, you know, it was Dallas at the time. You know, there was a lot of money there. And they, you know, whatever. I mean, but I don't think, I think that the opulence and the excess of ion storm is a different issue from just the fact that, you know, there were all sorts of problems when you put all these guys together and there were no adults in the room. They didn't have a good, like, management structure, you know, it was too many cooks in the kitchen. It was just kind of a doomed to, pardon the part in the pond, experiment. And there was just no discipline, you know, they just fucked around.

all day. You know, I think they were death matching probably more than we were at the time. I feel like, you know, a competitive ego-driven studio is okay, kind of toxic if it's six people, but when it's the size of ion storm, it doesn't work. And I feel like expanding the Doom philosophy of development to a bigger company is really what destroyed them in a way. Yeah. And then they just had these horrendous marketing campaigns, which again, you know, as I said earlier, I don't think it was necessarily their fault, but, you know, they didn't really, you It didn't help them. It didn't help.

And the expectations just became impossible because of that ad campaign. You know, the initial notorious ad, which was just all of their faces and just like how awesome each one of them was. This was before they had made any game. You know, it was such a cautionary tale. Like, don't start spending all the money on how awesome you are. Just let us discover that you're awesome. You know, so there was almost nothing that they could do. And then, of course, the most notorious ad probably of all time was that John Merrill is going to make you.

his bitch. Well, you know, no one wants to be told that. No, no. And also, and, you know, it became immediately, oh, yeah, well, let's see what you got. And then, you know, I still remember the headline for our review of Dykatana was because there had been so much build up and it was being made up, made fun of so much, the headline was just, yep, it stinks. That was a headline because we were just confirming and then, you know, they hated us forever because of that headline. But, yeah, it was just it was just a mess but there was good stuff

like anachronachs if you can seek it out there's some good stuff I always wanted to play that because the idea of an FPS that it was inspired by Kronotrigger like at the time I was I was like I need this

it's not first person yeah it's like it's an overhead it's very much like a JRPG but with a more kind of more open world and a really kind of unique sense of humor to it interesting

There's another game that has a similar name that is an FPS that I can't remember, but I think that's what you're confusing it with. It's from this era, and it's an RPG, and I just wasted all over time, because I don't know what it is. Artis Fatalus. That's probably, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's the arcane guys. Thank you. And what was Warren Spector's game?

System Shock, too. Like, I mean, that wasn't the Ironstorm game. Well, Ironstorm was Deerx. Yeah, so yeah, it was before that, yeah. Yeah, so, but. Right. How can I forget? Yeah.

And that's. He made the one legacy game. And he positioned it in opposite. opposition to Ironstorm. You know, they were talking about all of these things they were going to do at Dai Katana. And there's a quote in that book where he's like, yeah, no, we're going to be this, like, literally, we're going to be the intelligent side of this company. You know, and it sounds kind of arrogant retrospect, but like, DanSX is a masterpiece. So it's, you know, like it speaks for itself.

It really does. Yeah. Yeah. I remember at CGW, we did a cover that was, it was called Quake Killers. And it was just like a profile of all the upcoming FPSs. and, you know, and the cover image just, it had to be because it just made the most sense because it was the most hyped, was daikata. And in a sidebar that got the most, the littlest amount of ink was a game by a company that we had never heard of, and it was Half-Life. We gave that game no credit whatsoever.

Did it use the Viking art? We used Spaceola. Yeah, it was just a terrible cover. You could find it, I'm sure, online, but don't. Thank you so much. everybody. This has been our Doom episode. I'm super proud of how this turned out. Thank you so much, Jeff and Gary for being here.

And Jeremy has to be here, but he also helps. So thank you so much, Jeremy. This has been Retronauts. I've been your host, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons every Wednesday, a new episode about an episode of the Simpsons in chronological order. We also have a Patreon. That's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for $5. You will have access to all of our bonus shows.

At this point, we'll probably have like 30 bonus episodes. for you to download if you just sign up. But more importantly, is the Retronauts Patreon. Yes, we're asking for all of your money, but it's worth it. It's for a good cause. So if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts for just $3 a month, you will get every episode a week ahead of time

and ad free. I know some of you don't like ads, but basically for what amounts to you 50 cents per episode, you can get that taken out of your life completely. We're here to help you, and it's just three bucks a month. Thank you so much. Jeremy, please. Yeah, that's me, Retronauts. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite,

and I am writing and podcasting and creating videos for Retronuts.com, which is a really cool site now. It looks nice, has nice writers. It's great. Go check it out, please, and thanks. Cool. Gary, where can find you? You can find me on the Duck Feed TV podcast network.

Our flagship show is called Watch Out for Fireballs. It is a Games Club podcast. I've been going for about six years, almost on our six-year anniversary. Listeners to this podcast may enjoy our Doom 2 episode. You can also check us. out because reaching absolute Patreon saturation. How many Patrons can you possibly give to you? I say all of them. Yes. Well, again, though, a couple bucks a month, right? So you do 12 bucks a year and it does make a

difference. And that's at patreon.com slash Chuck Vee TV. I would love it. If you're listening to this, if you gave us a shot. I give to every Patreon in this room, actually, even though two of them are mine. It just makes things easier, right, Jeremy? It actually does. And Jeff, where can we find you? You could find me at Greenspeak on Twitter, and I've been taking a little bit of a break from Twitch, but I will be back to Twitch live streaming. I've live streamed all the Dark Souls games. Oh, cool. And I still have to finish three, and there's some people

waiting for me to finish it. I will go back. Jeff, I've been given a couple bucks a month to Patreon.com slash Jeff Green. Are you telling me that's not you? Oh, no. That's a different guy. Oh, no. He's an economist or something. We'll have to solve this on another episode. But thank you so much for listening, folks. We'll be back next Monday with a brand new episode.

See you then. And caller, for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus, get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Main Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners. attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.