Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics
This is our seventh episode in our series on Masters of Doom by David Kushner.
Matt:Hey John, how's it going?
jon_raw:Hi, Matt, happy holidays
Matt:Thank you. Yeah. Uh, happy holidays to you as well. Um,
jon_raw:Yep,
Matt:Year's resolutions in order. You have to lock, lock those, lock those down. No, I, I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. If you haven't, if you can come up with a resolution, you just start doing it immediately, that instant.
jon_raw:absolutely. Yeah. You shouldn't be dependent on waiting for the new year in order to turn your life around.
Matt:I think it just maximizes the likelihood. You put too much pressure on yourself to achieve it. And if you slip at all, then you're like, well, I guess I'll start next year.
jon_raw:Yeah, not only
Matt:got to start.
jon_raw:but I think you also like release pressure at the end of the year, let's say you make a resolution to eat healthy in the new year. My guess would be that your December is going to be a very unhealthy month. And then January isn't actually going to be that healthy.
Matt:Well, cause you're already giving yourself credit for how healthy you're going to be at the beginning of the year. And then you're like, I can eat all times, all types of shit. I'm going to be so good
jon_raw:Yeah, I gotta have the last hurrah. I need to like, eat cheesecakes.
Matt:Yeah, I guess that's the other side. It's like, oh, like I'm not going to be able to eat anything. So I got to really hunker down. It's a bad way to think about it.
jon_raw:Exactly.
Matt:But what are the resolutions for, for our friends here at id Software?
jon_raw:More death cams.
Matt:Oh, gross. Yeah, death cams. Although it's funny because I guess death cams is kind of like a big thing in video games now. Especially multiplayer games.
jon_raw:Yet another massive, massive video game innovation that it sounds like it either came up with or were one of the pioneers of.
Matt:Yeah, no. And, and I didn't, like, did they have a death cam in Doom?
jon_raw:Not that I remember. I don't remember death cams in Doom or Quake. I mean, Quake Quake had the thing where when you died, your camera was just sort of like on the ground and you could sort of see enemies scuttling around.
Matt:Yeah. Which, that was, that was kind of cool.
jon_raw:Yeah, that was awesome. I mean, it definitely gave a sense of like, wow, I'm dead, like a corpse on the ground and I'm like looking through my dead eyes. So it was very immersive. Uh, I don't recall Doom having that though. I feel like Doom, the screen just kind of goes red and you start over.
Matt:Yeah, yeah, yeah. but, yeah, so they're now in Dallas. And, um, one of the big things they do here is they decide that, like, they're all just a bunch of man children who can't run a business. So, they need an adult in the room. Which definitely is true. They'd come, go to a business meeting, like, apparently, like, unshowered, essentially, um,
jon_raw:they had to really drive the point home.
Matt:Yeah, I, they probably, he probably, uh, built up how ragged they looked. But he said he, they had, like, holes in their shirts and stuff like that. They looked like street hobos, but, um, but no, uh, but so they, they look to Jay. And apparently their star is so Bright at this point that they can say, alright, Jay, the 5 percent of our company, will you move you and your family and come to Dallas and work for us? And he said, Yes. So it's kind of what I was teasing, or what I was alluding to in the last episode. But
jon_raw:Not a bad deal for Jay.
Matt:I mean, yeah, I mean, it turned out, but it's like, You really have to have achieved something if like for 5 percent of your company. Like what do you, like matchups, like what do you think we could do with 5 percent matchups?
jon_raw:Yeah, we certainly could not attract Sundar away from Google. Um, we might
Matt:you think we could attract any, anyone away, like any of our former coworkers?
jon_raw:maybe, like, a college student from, like, a C tier, uh, university just coming off. Not to, uh, denigrate C tier universities, which I went to one, so, uh.
Matt:Um, yeah, but you're saying we could get them to like quit their, So, uh, I mean, I think their, uh, their studies
jon_raw:No, they would still finish. They would get their diploma and then they would come work for MathChops for both a salary and 5 percent of the company.
Matt:unacceptable. I need them to quit right now. Um, I think that would probably be bad though, right? Like I would have a, uh, like a partial C tier college educated, uh, student, but see, this is the thing. It's like the university doesn't, you know, this could be a John Carmack cause that's like, that's apparently what John Carmack was doing and he left early and it's like if Because I'm kind of, I'm kind of saying that this person would be a better programmer if they went through all of their, uh, college studies than if they just came to work for us. And I'm not sure that that would be true because I feel like there's just so much real world knowledge that they would get from
jon_raw:I also think a lot of what people are capable of only really comes out when people put faith in them. And I think, you know, if we just put our full Uh, like if we just fully invested in some college kid, we might be able to like have them realize their full, full potential because they would just be so, filled with the spirit.
Matt:Wow. I'm really attached to this kind of nameless faceless college student that
jon_raw:I know me too.
Matt:We don't have.
jon_raw:This is like a real lesson though. One thing that I just want to get in before I forget, and you bring up matchups too. So that made me think of this. This is a real lesson for anyone starting a business like you can be the most skilled programmers, designers, video game creators in the world, but you still need to be able to identify the weakness in your own business and fill the gap. And I think that's, you know, I was actually pretty impressed with it that they realize like, Hey, we need a suit. Like we are just not capable or competent at this sort of thing. And because it's a form of humility at the end of the day, you're basically saying like, you're not, you're not able to handle this task. And so we need to bring in someone to do it. Um, and I think it's actually kind of an important lesson in business. Like you need to be real with yourself, realize that you lack certain capabilities and find people who have those capabilities.
Matt:And this is the thing, it's like, it's the problem of evaluating a skill that you yourself lack.
jon_raw:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Which is
Matt:I think the thing that always, that always, I want to, I want to have some semblance of certainty. And I think you can't when you're hiring someone. It's like, you just have to, there's a part where you just have to have like a leap of faith. You have to just like say like, well, I know that I get into this circumstance and I don't know what to do, so I need to come up with some evaluation criteria and then move forward, like find a person who meets that criteria and then move forward because being paralyzed by like not being sure that this person is the right person, is worse, like, you know, and then just not doing anything about it because of that is worse than potentially picking a bad person. Um,
jon_raw:And this is why you should get into an occupation that's extremely hard to evaluate, uh, because then you'll make a lot of money. I think this is why CEOs make so much money is like, no one really knows what they do. And so they can't put a real money value on it. So they just pay them exorbitant sums.
Matt:I was thinking about this, it's like, um, executive compensation is like a really hard thing to reason about. And I think it's, like I think in any, when you construct any system, you're gonna have these like, weird like, wrinkles to it. And I think in capitalism, like, executive compensation is one of those weird wrinkles that just like, It starts to get strange and then like there's no me real good mechanism to like correct it.
jon_raw-1:Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's like a athlete compensation where you have a system that has so much money in it. So there's all this kind of extra money lying around and the system sort of doesn't know where to put it. And so it just gives a bunch of it to like CEOs.
Matt:well, you have, you know, I, I, I think, I don't know if I referenced Nortel on the podcast, but I watched this long like documentary about Nortel, which is this Canadian telecommunications company, and you had like the CEO who was. You know, when the company went, went on to go bankrupt and then he was requesting like a billion dollars from the company and it's like, how do you want, like is that just like this guy trying to like come up with the biggest number he can imagine and then asking for that? Or is there some lens, like rational lens where someone is a billion dollars from a bankrupted company when you have all of the employees with their pensions,
jon_raw-1:Yeah. It's, it's crazy. It sounds like narcissism to me, but.
Matt:yeah. But anyway, back to back to the book. So they got, they nabbed Jay, and so now he's, he's riding, not, I wouldn't say riding the ship, but he's, you know, kind of pulling, pulling things into better shape, balancing their checkbooks.
jon_raw-1:yeah, Yeah. one of the things, Uh, yeah, this is a slight change of topic, but one of the things I think this book does super well is sort of capture the vibe of the 90s. It's kind of like what Stranger Things did with the 80s where everything about, or there's so many little details thrown into the book that is It's kind of a little nostalgia bomb. And the thing from this chapter was recording goofy answering machine messages. They talk about one of the first things they did when they got into their, uh, Texas apartment is they're like recording some crazy answering machine message. And I just remember like spending, you know, hours with my family or friends just trying to come up with like goofy answering machine things. Cause there was like this period where that was the, that was the thing. Like you had to have a weird answering machine message.
Matt:Do we have, do we have something like that these days? Like, I feel like when in the AIM era, I don't know if you like this, you saw this. You could have this, you have this little like text box where you could put like up to 5, 000 characters for your profile those got crazy. I remember spending a tremendous amount of time really curating this little text box. I think you could set there is like rich. I think it was rich text so you could like set the background color would have you,
jon_raw-1:like this is how people know you're who you are. You have to define your whole person in this
Matt:It's like a my space. MySpace page, but do they have, like, I guess, you know, you have your own website that could be, but I feel like there's not that same thing. I feel like you don't really have that as much where you have like a true blank canvas.
jon_raw-1:yeah,
Matt:You're like squished into this like Instagram thing and you can post content, but it's not really the same thing as like having a Profile. Like, you know, when you have an answering machine, this is like 30 seconds where you can just, that, that's your defining is you.
jon_raw-1:yeah, it's, it's both a, it's like a literal and figurative bandwidth constraint where. You have to take all of your expressive power and put it into this, you know, little tiny artifact. Whereas today it's like you can literally put your whole life online and a lot of people do. And there's just, there's zero bandwidth constraint. You can, you know, you can either like pretend you're someone you're not, or you can show everyone the gritty details of your life. But yeah, back in the day, if, if you wanted to let people know who you were, it was through a goofy answering machine message.
Matt:Nice. yeah. I don't know. What was your, what did you guys wind up with? Uh, did you have any good ones?
jon_raw-1:You know, the Bedard family was not very creative. I do remember, so one of my best friends, uh, his last name is Sturgeon, which is a prehistoric fish. And I remember their message talking about how they were the fish family. And they did it in like a very kind of, uh, you know, they weren't like, they weren't, you know, being fun about it at all. They were just like very matter of factly, like we are the fish family. Please leave a message. It was great.
Matt:That's funny because I feel like that would, I would, that would just be more confusing. And in a way, I mean, maybe that was what they were intending. Like if someone was, if someone didn't know that they were the sturgeon or like that they had this funny message, they might be like, Oh, called the wrong number.
jon_raw-1:Yeah, no, I think it was Because everyone knew that you know the quote unquote fish family were them But it was sort of like a security through obscurity type of thing
Matt:yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
jon_raw-1:One of the things they mentioned in this chapter we already talked about the death cam which is a hugely pioneering move They also talk about the very very beginnings of mod culture Which I thought was an amazing mention because to this day, mod culture for Quake and Doom is alive and well, like there are many, many people who speed run Quake and Doom, play mods, uh, there's new mods coming out today that are like amazing and people, you know, pouring their heart and soul out into them and basically creating all new games based on the Quake engine that are. Beautiful and have new graphics and updated textures and things like that. So I just thought it was, like, I feel like that's something id did incredibly well. Like they have those wad files that you can basically just edit and kind of change the game completely. Uh, and I think it was just a great move on their part and really turned out well to sort of keep the game alive.
Matt:the idea of building of like building a, like designing for. Mods or like designing for extensibility is a very interesting one. It just feels like, every piece of software I've ever built, like user input is so like constrained. It's like, okay, you have these like seven buttons that you can push and that's it. But it's like, as soon as you open up, it's like, okay, like here's, here's a big port where you can just like cram code, like go, go wild.
jon_raw-1:Yeah. And I wonder if it's like, cause this is an amazing point you're bringing up and I wonder if it has to do with the dynamic of their team where, you know, John Romero who did a lot of the design and probably configuration of the game for instance, how much damage does a shotgun deal? You know, I'm sure John Romero spent a ton of time working on that number. And I think that when you have a team like that, where. The designer is sort of like constantly modifying the game and wants these like, you know, tools to basically build the game himself and also the team is creating those tools, you know, from scratch. I think that you end up with a game where, you know, the game itself is kind of a reflection of the configuration. Whereas everything, you know, as opposed to sort of everything being compiled into the game and, You know, you don't have a lot of bells and whistles, or I should say knobs, to turn to like, manipulate the gameplay. I, I think that because of the dynamic of their team, they sort of came up with a different model. Where, you know, John Romero could go in and tweak the shotgun damage and maybe the timings and all sorts of different values at any point in time.
Matt:I mean, I guess, I guess we see that with, like Brain Explorer. So we have an app that is, is for, uh, doing brain experiments basically on the general populace, populace. Um, and you know, this isn't our, this isn't our idea for, for the record. It was built in collaboration with UCL, but, So much of those games is like completely configurable. So I guess in that world, like modding becomes, it doesn't feel like that major of a, you know, uh, of a departure because it's like, Oh, just, you just allow users to just upload their own configs. That's fine. You know, it's up to them if they want to create a config that is terrible or like those weird things, like. You know, they, they made their bed, you know, um, so, so maybe it doesn't seem as quite as, out there.
jon_raw-1:I do think that the way that Doom and Quake were designed, it gives you a lot more control as a modder. You know, you can straight up add new guns into the game that have like unique interactions. And so the level, cause other games definitely had configuration files that you could go in and modify, but you were just basically changing the values of, you know, numeric values, let's say, whereas in, you know, Quake and Doom, and I've actually never modded Quake and Doom, so I don't know what the tool chain looks like. But it's apparently much more rich.
Matt:I was thinking of something like Figma, you know, obviously this is like a completely different departure, but they have like a rich, like extension ecosystem. And like when you have a web app, that becomes a very interesting question. I think for me is like, how do you. How do you provide a surface that, allows people to do interesting things, but also, like, doesn't fundamentally break your, your app? because, because in a world where, like, you're serving the marketplace, I guess you need to make sure that you don't have stuff on there that's, like, gonna do malicious stuff. oh, there was this very interesting, uh, I mean, this little interaction that they had, which was hilarious, which, uh, to me, which was that, um, the, so in chapter six, we learned that, you know, we talked about how they tried out a bunch of different names because Wolfenstein was another game, you know, made by another developer. Um, eventually they learned that the company that had made Wolfenstein had collapsed and had allowed the, I don't know if it's the trademark to lapse, but, um, they actually meet the guy who made that game, who apparently is like this six foot seven, two, three hundred twenty pound guy. Um, I, they don't say his height actually, but, um, but I feel like, like they were building it up to be like this beat down or something like, oh, like, I know that I can't sue you, but. I can enforce my copyright with my fist. Yeah, um, but no, I guess he seemed like a gentle, gentle giant
jon_raw:Dude, Silas Warner has nothing to prove. He's an alpha.
Matt:I think, I don't know, I would like to think that that's how I would, how I would react in the same, it's like, I don't know, there's something like a little gross about Hyper aggressive defense of, of a copyright and like, I guess on one hand I can, I can understand it, but like you could totally see a world where this guy attempted to, to sue or like give him a hard time, uh, even if the copyright had collapsed. So, um, but like, I like the idea that he's just like, you know what you guys put in a bunch of work, like it's a good game. I'm not going to give you guys a hard time because you could wind up with a situation where they still wind up like settling and paying him money because it would just be more expensive to fight the, you know, fight the lawsuit,
jon_raw:totally. No, I mean, good on him for, you know, being awesome about the
Matt:being the bigger man.
jon_raw:And speaking of, uh, the Wolfenstein game. So they were talking about names and they mentioned Spear of Destiny, which I guess was one of the Wolfenstein games, I think, like it's, uh, you know, back when they used to come out with like 8, 000. Sort of like similar to DLC, they would just come out with like version after version of the same game and to have slightly different names. Uh, but man, I Googled the Spear of Destiny cover art. It's wild. I, I encourage listeners to Google this cover art. Cause it's just insane. Also, can I ask you a dumb question?
Matt:Yeah.
jon_raw:Is the Spear of Destiny the spear that stabbed Jesus on the cross? Is that what? Cause if you Google Spear of Destiny, you get all sorts of crazy results from Google. So it's evidently like some thing.
Matt:I have not, I have no idea. What Spear of Destiny is. I've never heard of that. Um, most of it seems to be either Wolfenstein or Indiana Jones.
jon_raw:Well, right. And yeah, cause I think the latest. Well, so the connection is Nazis were all into like artifact hunting, right? They just basically stole a bunch of artifacts from a bunch of different countries. And they were constantly looking for religious artifacts. And so I think the Spear of Destiny is the spear that stabbed Jesus on the cross. And so the Nazis were looking for this Spear of Destiny. And I think that might be a plot point in the new Indiana Jones movie, but I could
Matt:I guess that would track, yeah. Um, but yeah, dude, I mean, just to, uh, listeners should find this, uh, JPEG themselves, uh, of the, of the cover art, but there's a man with just infinity muscles. Smashing a glass case containing the, uh, the Spear of Destiny ostensibly, I guess. Um, which,
jon_raw:I enjoyed it.
Matt:um, yeah. No, and actually, that raised another point. They said that, um, in the last chapter, one of the games was selling really poorly because, like, the cover, the box art was just abysmal. It was made by the same company that made, like, designed the, like, Lipton Tea box.
jon_raw:Oh yeah, that's right.
Matt:And, and I, I looked at it and it did, I think, it's funny because there's so much charm in like the early Commander Keen box art, and then like this just looks so painfully generic and like 1950s like sci fi movie, like you, and, and it's all realistic, like, but it's like, the guy, the, you know, the Drawing of Commander Keen is realistic and hyper generic. And it's like, you could totally see why someone would just like What the hell is this? Like is this like just a You would think, I would think it was a knock off honestly, of the, of the game. Um,
jon_raw:I, think this is what got me on the whole cover art thing is I, I also Googled that cover art that you're referring to, to see what they were talking about in the book, but
Matt:that one as well. Um, but it's, it's, it's also raises an interesting point about how like I don't know, again it's some of the things that we have talked about before where Cover art is an example of one of those things where it's really important for the game, but like, it's not, it's not part of building the game itself. And it's something, as a result, at least for me, that I don't want to do. Like, I'm interested in the, building the game and like, making the cover art look nice. And I guess in this case it's like, making a, making the Steam page look really cool. You know, that's kind of like the 21st century version of box art, but, and, and maybe this is what you're talking about, like dovetails with what you were talking about before, how you need to find, if, if that's something you don't really want to do and you want to make games, you need to find someone who is passionate about that stuff, you know. Uh, so, so anyway, that's just my, my little soapbox about, uh, why making box art is hard.
jon_raw:no, absolutely. Don't skimp on your steam page people.
Matt:Yeah, and build, build a community while you're building your game.
jon_raw:Build a community, get a discord up and running, talk to your, talk to your fans. Uh, there was one last thing I wanted to mention in this chapter, which I think is, to me, this is the fact of this book. And we'll see if the subsequent chapters, you know, provide a new fact that overtakes this. But the name Doom, the name of the video game Doom, comes from the film The Color of Money, starring Tom Cruise. And I think maybe Paul Newman. But it's a Martin Scorsese film. A remake of an old movie called The Hustler. Which I want to say also had Paul Newman in it. Uh, amazing movie. You should definitely check it out if you're a Martin Scorsese fan. But the name Doom comes from a Tom Cruise quote in that film. Which I just thought was amazing.
Matt:Well, I don't know. I feel like you've set the scene. Like, let's, let's give the, like,
jon_raw:Oh man, I, so I almost want people to like, look at the YouTube clip themselves and see Tom Cruise deliver the line, uh, because yeah, the, the, you know, why they're talking about doom and the color of money. It's very interesting. recommend people check it out.
Matt:Okay, all right. So, what should they Google? They just say, Google like, like, Doom, uh, Color of Money,
jon_raw:Yeah. Go to YouTube. Yeah. And type in color of money, doom, and it'll pop up. Maybe, maybe type
Matt:Okay, and this is funny because this is the second time Tom Cruise is making an appearance in this. Because didn't, didn't one of the guys, I don't think, was it Jay? Jay taught Tom Cruise to
jon_raw:Cocktailing.
Matt:cocktail, like to make a cocktail or something?
jon_raw:Yeah. Well, I mean, dude, this is just a testament to the fact that you cannot talk about the eighties and nineties without talking about Tom Cruise.
Matt:exactly, exactly. Or even the 2000s or the 2010s.
jon_raw:talk about, this is why, this is why I call Tom Cruise an entity. Like I feel like certain human beings achieve this like entity status where they're not even a person anymore. They're just like a thing. And, you know, I think Paul McCartney's there, Tom Cruise, a couple other people.
Matt:He is just like energy at this point. He doesn't have a corporeal form.
jon_raw:He is Khufu from ancient Egypt. We need to build a huge pyramid and bury him in it.
Matt:Dude, I'd join that religion.
jon_raw:It's called Scientology.
Matt:oh Yeah. I guess, maybe not that, not that one. But, uh, if one, we could, we would create another religion of which, uh, Tom Cruise was not a member. Who uses Tom Cruise as our god.
jon_raw:Yep. I'm in a hundred percent.
Matt:Alright, love it. Alright, well, I will see you next time on Switch Statement for Chapter 8 of Masters of Doom.
jon_raw:See you next time, Matt.
Matt:Alright, bye.
jon_raw:Bye.