John Romero Interview: Doom, Quake and His Career Either Side

Tell us a bit about young John Romero and early life for you.

I grew up largely in northern California in a little town called Rocklin, and I was totally addicted to arcade games, like pretty much everyone who was a kid back then. I moved to Rocklin in 1976, but even before then I was living in Tucson, Arizona, and I used to play pinball all the time before the pinball places changed into videogame arcades. I remember playing a lot of the electro-mechanical games like Dune Buggy. When I was in California I played every game that came out. As soon as something new arrived I played it because I was in the arcades almost every day. I can remember the first time I saw certain games, like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, or even Targ. Remember, as a 10 or 11-year-old kid you need quarters to play these games, [I didn’t] have a job or parents with tons of money, so I had a paper route I’d deliver every morning. I  was basically making $250 a month delivering papers, and using all that money on arcades.

 That’s a lot of quarters!

Yeah! That definitely fuelled some of the $1 billion worth of quarters that Pac-Man       made in 1980!

Was it all arcades? What about early computer gaming?

Well, in the summer of 1979 my friend and my brother rode their bikes to the house and told me ‘Oh my God, you won’t believe it – we found a way to play games that doesn’t cost any money!’ and I’m like ‘Where is this place?’ We all took our bikes and rode up to the college, which was about three miles away and went to the computer lab. Inside there were all these terminals connected to a giant machine in the next room, which was an HP9000 mainframe. The guys there said, ‘Yeah, we have different games here, but they’re free because you just run them and they’ll come up on the screen.’ They showed the games they had, including Adventure, which was the best one out of all the games there. They also had things like Poison Cookie, NIM and Hunt The Wumpus – but Adventure was the greatest. There was a book there called 101 BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl, and all of those games were on that mainframe. I played all of these games and found it very interesting how these were all very different to the arcade machines because they didn’t have graphics – they all used letters and there was no time pressure. To me this was a huge revelation, because I wasn’t pressured to hurry up and I could take my time, so that was a little bit of game design exposure that I found interesting.

And that is how you started out making your own games?

Yeah, for the next two years I was going to that college and trying to write little games and save them out on punch cards with paper tape and just learn more. I’d ask the college students, ‘What word is this?’ or ‘How do I do this thing?’ and so they would just tell me, and I built my vocabulary just from asking questions, because I didn’t have any of my own books on it. Then in the summer of 1980 the college filled a room with Apple IIs, and when I saw that I was like, ‘Whoa, colour and sound! I don’t care about any other computers now!’ I already knew a little bit about BASIC at that time, so now I was learning about the specifics of the Apple II, and if for some reason I couldn’t get to the college then I’d go to a computer store and play on an Apple II there, or go to Radio Shack and use a TRS-80. I was so interested in computers that I would sit at the Radio Shack for hours typing out a program from a type-in book just to see what would happen, and I’d start modifying it to see how it all worked. I spent so much time on this that my dad recognised that maybe I had something, so he got me my own Apple II, and that was like a rocket going off. As soon as I got that, that was it – I lived on that computer at home. Up until then I lived a normal kid’s life – you know, going outside, blowing things up, getting up to crazy stuff, until that computer came – then it was over. I was on that thing all the time, playing everything I could and making lots of games. By the end of 1982 I was halfway through my sophomore year at high school and had created my own little games company, Capitol Ideas Software.

Much of id Software’s popularity revolves around the company’s first-person shooters, but what can you tell us about developing the Commander Keen series?

Well, John Carmack had just started with Softdisk, and the first game we did was a vertical-scrolling Xevious clone called Slordax. When I saw he was doing this I could see it was great, even though I was not so excited about vertical scrolling. I was more excited about horizontal scrolling because that would let us do platform games. We got that first game done and he began experimenting with the more advanced stuff one could do with the graphics card, and he stayed up with Tom Hall until 5am one night, put together a demo and copied it on a disk and put it on my computer. I came in the next day, I think it was 18 September 1990. I put the disk in, thinking “Ah-ha, they must have done something cool last night!” I ran the demo, and it looked like a replicated Super Mario 3 level from the NES, but running on a PC. And it was on demo mode, so as soon as the character started running around and the screen scrolled it was perfectly smooth. I was like ‘Oh my god…’ I couldn’t work for the next three hours!

Now onto Wolfenstein 3D… When that came out it just blew everyone out of the water!

We were all brainstorming one day for the next game to make, and I said ‘Why don’t we just redo Castle Wolfenstein in 3D?’ Me, Carmack and Tom Hall were all major Castle Wolfenstein freaks, so that was it. We were going ‘Can you imagine killing Nazis in 3D? There’s no game like that!’ One thing people don’t really know is that the game ran at 70fps because the video controllers of the time ran at 70fps, unlike today, where they’re mostly working at 60. So all of the technology behind it was built in four months, from January to April 1992, it was released on 5 May 1992 and the response was just massive. Like, Commander Keen’s sales were a joke compared to Wolfenstein. That first month we sold 4,000 copies and were doing phone interviews, and the local news came over and videoed the team. We really knew we were onto something – this 3D, violent thing is huge! [laughs]

Quake was not only one of your greatest achievements, but it also shattered apart the team that had built all these great games. What can you say about that?

It’s pretty crazy. I guess it kind of goes to show that we were extremely intense in our efforts to make that game, and that intensity carried on for a year and a half. That was 50 per cent longer than we’d ever spent making a game before. It was very hard, working in the same room every day, seven days a week, and when the game came out, half the company left. Even towards the end of the game, American McGee didn’t even show up for work for the last month because he was just broken. Everybody was just done, and I was done too. The only friendship that got affected by that was between Carmack and myself. Everyone else, we’re all still friends, and whatever happened in the past is all forgiven, and I’d work with any of them again in an instant. Quake did not burn bridges between people other than between John and myself. Other than that, everyone else has gotten along pretty well.

What occurred with you and Carmack?

In 1995, when I wasn’t working directly on Quake, and John was working really hard on it, I was busy with all the other stuff in the company. Heretic had just come out, and I was dealing with that, as well as the development of Hexen with Raven. There was also the re-release of Doom to retail, the amount of things going on was huge, and I was the only one doing these things, and I think John didn’t feel like I put enough into Quake. I was building the level editor with John so that all of the level designers could build levels, and I kind of waited until the engine was ready to make the game. It took about a year to get to that point, and so I think that he was mad because I wasn’t on the game like he was on the game. I think that upset him, and it could have gotten fixed if we had reorganised the company into an engine development team and a game development team. If we could have carried on making games in the Doom engine and then when the Quake engine was ready switched over to that, that would have been an optimal strategy for the company, but we did not really analyse the problem back then. All we really knew was how to work on the game together. Looking back, I believe that was a mistake.

Is there one project that you look back on that you’re most proud of? Do you have a favourite child, so to speak?

Oh, Doom, definitely. It was so much fun to make. We were hitting on all cylinders and it just was the perfect game at the right time, and the right team working on it. It just all worked perfectly, and even though we worked really hard making it, it was the most fun hard work ever.