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Jon:This is our 11th episode on Masters of Doom by David Kushner.
Matt:Hey, John. How are you doing?
Jon:Hey Matt, I'm doing pretty darn well. How are you doing?
Matt:I'm doing okay. Love skiing. I'm a big fan. Just, we just went on a ski trip and uh, I don't know. There's nothing quite like it. Although, dude, I'm getting old. I was like just obliterated that night. I was just so exhausted.
Jon:Oh Dude, you think you're getting old? Like I was, I like went to bed at 7. 30pm after that. I also love the way we do ski trips. I feel like it's a testament to who we are, but It's like we wake up ultra early, we drive to the mountain, we ski for like 5 hours straight, and then we drive back. we don't do overnights.
Matt:we get on the ski lift as soon as it opens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon:and we do it on a Wednesday so that there's just zero people there and we can just ski straight for five hours. It's awesome.
Matt:It's a beautiful thing.
Jon:It indeed is.
Matt:So, uh, We're talking chapter 11. Masters of Doom. This is where we first hear about Quake.
Jon:Oh
Matt:The first two years of Quake. And, and this was I don't know what part of Quake. It's kind of hard, I feel like it's hard to know. There's so many different, like, there's Quake and Quake 2 and what have you. I had some demo that was associated with Quake on my computer. Like, it was just the first, like, level or two when I was, I don't know, like 10. It was terrifying. But this was like my first touchpoint, like, that I remember from an id game.
Jon:this is the first, Quake is the first id game that I was just fully immersed in. Like this is the point where I was like completely hooked. Uh, I did play Doom 2. I don't think I played it when it came out, but I mean, we discussed this in the last episode. My dad actually, like, bought a copy of Doom II. Uh, and I did play it. But, yeah, Quake was definitely the first one. And I was modding Quake, I was playing multiplayer with friends, so This is the point in the, in the book where, you know, I became a true believer.
Matt:That's awesome. Yeah. Um, and they talk about, they introduced this idea of like this new engine. I mean, this has kind of been the pattern where, Carmack comes up with some, a new idea for the next generation of the engine. You know, it started with dangerous Dave and copyright infringement where they were just doing a 2d Scott side scroller. You know, then they had the Doom engine. And now, this was where I got a little bit confused. They were like, oh, like, full 3D.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:it wasn't clear to me. It wasn't, like, I was like, wasn't Doom already full 3D? Like, in what way was it not full 3D?
Jon:I do think, I mean, this is definitely an unclear I mean, for one thing, Doom appeared to have a lot of, like, limitations in its 3D. Like, they barely used the Z axis. I mean, they would. Like, there would be enemies up on a pedestal or something, and they had pedestals that you could click a button and they would come down. But it did seem like, There was engine limitations that prevented them from exploring certain designs. This is just my sort of outsider looking intake. Quake, on the other hand, was like full 3D. Like, the enemies were 3D. The enemies in Doom were billboarded. Like, they were, you know, they were 3D? in the world, but they were kind of painted on a quad. Uh, whereas Quake had actual, you know, 3D everything.
Matt:Right, so they were basically like, sprites in the world. When you had an enemy. It was still just like a 2D pixel art, uh,
Jon:Basically, yeah, and you could even play with their corpses. Like you could kind of walk around an enemy corpse and it would do this funny thing where it sort of, like, appeared to track you.
Matt:and yeah, yeah. It's like that, that, uh, you know, those like haunted house eyes where it's like, it doesn't, you know, no matter what angle you're looking at it from, like it faces towards you.
Jon:Exactly, exactly.
Matt:Um, but I actually, um, I did just this morning. I downloaded doom like just because I was like, let me get like a real, like understanding of the difference. And like, uh, and yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things and you call this out is like in the original doom. And I don't think I really realized this. Like you can't, you can't look up or down. Like you're always just pointing in the one direction. And so, um. That was, that was one of the biggest things. And then all of your enemies are like fully 3d geometry models, which I guess like, there's a kind of a lot of additional complexity with that because you have, now you need to figure out, okay, how do I animate a, you know, a 3d mesh because all the meshes in, uh, doom would have been static aside from maybe like offsetting like this Z axis of some, you know, platform. Um,
Jon:No, and I think, I think you're hitting on the, the differences, you know, Quake was just truly 3d, whereas Doom was kind of like, took some shortcuts, probably because of engine limitations or hardware limitations.
Matt:Yeah.
Jon:Uh, let me ask you a question. So we've collaborated on a lot of projects. What if I took your head and put it on a stake and hit it somewhere in one of our projects? How would you feel about that?
Matt:Um, I mean, that would mean that you could do that. Like you, like, I mean, maybe you could hide my head on a stake in that chops. Um, but
Jon:because I think both of us, you know, we're just, we just look at commit logs. So
Matt:yeah, like did. So obviously referencing Romero Romero's head being.
Jon:in the icon of sin. Yeah. Which, you know, this is so funny because as a kid, You don't even know that that's there, but then, you know, you're reading some magazine that like, Hey, if you use ID clip, which is the thing that lets you float through walls, you can actually go through the, icon of sin's face and see Romero's head, head on a stake. And I just remember as a kid, like, you just thought it was kind of like funny, like they were just goofing around. But the way the book tells the story is it's almost like an expression of their growing tension. You know, amongst the ranks like Carmack and Romero starting to, to their relationship crumbling, basically. Um, and I just found that to be so intriguing where it's like, you know, you just thought it was a goofy thing as the, as the gamer, but in actuality there was real meaning to it. Like it was an expression of they were becoming fed up with Romero, like not pulling his weight.
Matt:I mean, talk about, uh, yeah, putting a lot of effort into,
Jon:Passive aggressive
Matt:spat, yeah. Which is like, he, was he even sure that Romero was ever going to see that? Like that's what I, what's unclear to me. Like was that just, just something, I don't know, where you like scribble, like, die Romero, like on your notebook or something.
Jon:Yeah, exactly. That's how It struck me. So
Matt:of, of that, like cursing someone's name.
Jon:yeah,
Matt:To add to your point about trolling Romero. There was They didn't mess around with his computer. They just gave a person he was playing Deathmatch with, like, super abilities,
Jon:Yeah, yeah. That was funny.
Matt:Yeah, I guess. And this is just again, more, it's like, I guess Carmack is just getting increasingly frustrated with Romero just spending too much time playing a death match. So,
Jon:And I would not want to be on Carmack's bad side, because he's very indirect. Like the way he, he will express his disdain for you is by like sabotaging you and like treachery and all these weird, you know, weird passive aggressive attacks. It just sounds very, I just wouldn't want to have any part of that.
Matt:I did get the sense that he was saying these things directly to them as well, but he also like had to come up with something that was like a little bit. More, like, directly negatively impacting the person as, cause like, I guess, just saying it to them didn't seem to necessarily have the effect, especially in Romero's case.
Jon:Yeah, yeah. They talk about Carmack's hours. Dude worked 4pm to 4am. So he would just come into work at 4pm. It's just absurd. But, it's
Matt:which as far as I know, like, as long as your hours are consistent, like, you know, that's, that's not crazy to do, you know, or at least it's not like, unhealthy to do as far as I'm aware.
Jon:Yeah, I mean, as long as he was getting sleep, which, you know, I hope he was. I mean, he had to be, because his brain was clearly working very well.
Matt:apparently, although this did seem, you know, Carmack up until this point has been depicted and we ourselves have kind of contributed to this mythos of Carmack as the programmer whose ability knows no bounds and he can do everything that you know, he just sets his mind to seemingly effortlessly and this is kind of the first time where we see some chinks in that armor where it's like, oh no like, this is way more difficult than he had anticipated
Jon:Yeah. Although I also felt like he was just stumbling upon, like, there's a point in the chapter where they mentioned that six months for an engine seemed like a long time, like six months to develop an engine.
Matt:yeah
Jon:And I kind of laughed at that because I feel like this day and age, six months for an engine would be an absurdly short amount of time. You know, you'd, you'd like invest, like there's engines that have been built over the course of years and years and years. Um, and yeah, so I, I feel like they were just stumbling into modern day triple A development where I think when they first started these engineering projects and the software that was being developed for games was just very unsophisticated and building something in six months was super reasonable. But the way that they were approaching software. advanced, everything was more complicated, you know, they had layer upon layer of infrastructure and networking and, and so they were just getting into more sophisticated projects. And so they kind of had to redefine what it meant to like be efficient and how much time projects would take. And, uh, yeah,
Matt:I think it's a generality thing where they're getting into an engine that can represent anything. It's like where, in the Doom engine, you could represent, like, some, a camera who can, you know, who can just move 360 degrees. And like, that simplifies things tremendously. You can make all of these assumptions. It's like, okay, well, you take one step in what seems to be like, or a little step in A direction of more generality, like, Oh, like they can point up, okay. You throw away all of these assumptions that you were able to make optimizations against. And like, yeah, I think that,
Jon:This is something that a lot of people who don't. I don't know software, probably don't realize, but you know, each new mechanic you add to a thing creates like a combinatorial explosion of complexity in the software. And I think that that's just what they were hitting up against. They mentioned in this chapter also that at one point, Quake was meant to be a persistent online world. Like can you imagine,
Matt:I'm really glad that you brought this up. Cause I actually like, didn't realize that that's what Romero was trying to tease in the beginning. Um, uh.
Jon:totally. It seems like the game that actually ended up coming out. was not at all what they originally were thinking for Quake. Um, it was a much more kind of curtailed ambitions version
Matt:I mean, it sounds like they were just trying to make an MMO, like, straight out of the gate. Which is crazy, because this is literally like 10 years before that they actually get to pull that off. there were probably MMOs before World of Warcraft, but I feel like that was like, I mean, you had, you had, I mean, Ultima,
Jon:Ultima Online, yeah,
Matt:online was,
Jon:That was some, I feel like that was in the 90s, and yeah, my brother and I played the crap out of Ultima Online. That was an amazing game.
Matt:But that was like a sprite based, like, tile game, right?
Jon:yes. Yeah. Tile based, uh, kind of isometric view. Similar to some of the Ultima, like, I wanna say, Ultima seven, maybe like just very similar graphical style to the other Ultima games of that era. Right?
Matt:but so, like, I think, I mean, to my recollection, uh, World of Warcraft was kind of like the first thing that had, like, a graphical fidelity kind of like Doom, and then this persistent, uh, world, and that was 2004, so, uh, I believe.
Jon:I, I think there might've been some, maybe you're right. Maybe you're right. The World of Warcraft was the first M-M-O-R-P-G that had that level of. Like Fidelity or whatever. I think there were some other games that were just not nearly as popular that came out Before that. I just can't remember Like I don't know when Baldur's Gate came out. That wasn't really an MMORPG But that was something that you could play. I think like Networked.
Matt:this is a criticism I would level at this book, which is sometimes I don't think, and I don't know, I want a tremendous amount of detail. I think about like the specifics of the game,
Jon:Yeah
Matt:but it's not always clear to me. You know, he, he talks in these kind of like grandiose terms about how this is going to be game changing. This is going to be like next level. It's going to be a movement, you know, Romero saying these things, but like he doesn't really get into the specifics of what the game is going to be like. And I mean, we get these hints that, that make me realize like, Oh, I really had no idea what, what he was talking about in terms of what Quake was going to be like. Um, I mean, and then I'm not sure if it was in this chapter, but they also talk about how was supposed to be this fantasy, setting
Jon:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you were meant to be this medieval knight type guy with a huge hammer.
Matt:which is crazy because I've played Quake and that's like very much so not what, uh, what Quake is like.
Jon:Although it's, you know, it's funny because this is like getting into the next chapter a little bit, but they mentioned how the design sensibilities of a lot of the levels were just totally different. So they kind of had to, they had to like come up with a premise of the game that would like, Make that feel more cohesive. Some of the levels in Quake do feel like these medieval castles. And they even have like sword wielding, you know, knight type enemies. So I feel like some of that original design and sensibilities did carry over. But yeah, the game definitely feels more along the like futuristic marine type thing. Not, not so much medieval knight type thing.
Matt:Well, that's actually a good segue, uh, to something else that gets introduced in this chapter. Uh, American McGee really becomes a first, class citizen of the id team in this chapter. Um, he's, I guess he's kind of like CarMax, BFF, and he gets onboarded as like someone who's into cars and has a really good, I guess, level design sensibility.
Jon:Yeah, yeah, which, which definitely carried through in American's career, because I know he left it and maybe they'll, I think they discuss this in the book, but he left it and he formed, I don't know if it was like his own game company, but he kind of became a designer of renown. You know, like kids who played games would know American McGee's name, you know, I, I think I mentioned in another podcast, he made a game called Alice that was pretty big, had really, really amazing character and level design.
Matt:it's, it's funny cause it, it seems like the aid team just collects these people from broken homes. Like here's another, another person with a, with a backstory that is very similar to Romero and Carmack where it's like, or especially Romero, like that he just, he's just out on his own, his, his mother. Disappears. Sells the house to to get a, uh, to get a plane ticket and leave with her, uh, romantic partner. Only to leave American just to fend for himself.
Jon:Very tragic backstory. I mean, Guy was basically an orphan in his, like. Do you remember how old he was? I want to say like early teens, he was made an
Matt:Yeah, I mean, he had to
Jon:mom just left.
Matt:I think, high school,
Jon:Which, yeah. I mean, just like you're saying, like Sim very similar to Carmack and Romero and that he had kind of a troubled childhood. I would, I would even say more troubled. I mean, can you imagine being made an orphan in that way? Like you just come home and it's like, you're, it's not even your home. Like it's been sold and you have to like literally figure out how to live. You know, couch surf on your friend's couches, like it, I don't know, it just
Matt:I just like when I survive, I would just die. Like I would just, yeah,
Jon:so the next note I have is Duango Bob, which this was just a tiny interlude, but I thought it was very interesting, mainly because I didn't fully understand what was happening. So my understanding, and maybe you can check me on this, is like Doom had local LAN multiplayer. Like there was some sort of networked multiplayer. Duango Bob set up a mechanism, like he was, he basically was running servers where you could connect to his server and, and play multiplayer with other people on the internet and Duango Bob actually made a business out of selling server time, which I just thought this was fascinating. Like, I, I guess this was an era where you could do that type of thing. And, uh, yeah, it was very lucrative.
Matt:it seemed like there needed to be some integration with doom, right? Because like they, you know, Cause basically this guy, Duango Bob, and I guess this, his partner, Key, um, they worked on this thing, Duango, uh, which I don't know, it stands for something, um,
Jon:Yeah, I can't remember what it stands for.
Matt:um, but then they basically like sneak their way into this id conference and find Romero and they just like hand him a disc and be like, Take this back to your home base and like, talk to me and they played a game or so, but then they, they, like, it sounds like there was some agreement between Duango and it, it wasn't like some fly by night. Well, that's, that's also the funny thing is they also talk about this in this chapter where people were making a bunch of money just like selling user generated mods. Uh, so like. It does seem like the kind of atmosphere where someone could just make a bunch of money hacking into doom providing this internet Service, but I do think it was like blessed by by Ed
Jon:Yeah, definitely blessed by id, at least, at least Romero. And they talk about how they would like set up franchises. I don't know. I just thought that was hilarious. They'd be like people running servers in their house. And it's like, this is my Duango Bob server. It makes 10, 000 a month. People play Doom on it. I don't know. Just an interesting time in, in our history. another thing this chapter mentions, and, and this has been a thread throughout the, the book, I guess, but other companies, which basically just copied off of id's games. They mentioned a couple of games that I actually played, Heretic and Hexen. I know I played Hexen, there was like a really, really hilariously bad port for Hexen, I wanna say to the Nintendo 64 that I played, and I don't know, it was just this like complete rip off of Doom, at least stylistically, where, you know, you have your hand in front of your face and you're like casting spells and stuff, like it had an interesting element where you were a wizard, but uh, it just. It was kind of like an uninspiring game,
Matt:speaking of clones, I just looked up the Duke Nukem gameplay, and it's just so funny. How just a shameless ripoff it was of of Doom. I
Jon:And yeah, we still played these games. I mean, I remember playing Duke Nukem and I think that the main appeal of Duke Nukem is the main character was like funny. Um, and yeah, we would be playing those and kind of quoting the main character. We also played, they mentioned in the next chapter, Strife. I remember playing a lot of Strife, uh, we actually really liked that game, but looking at a video of it today, it just, it's like a complete ripoff of, of Doom or Quake.
Matt:mean, this is the thing and they talk about this how Obviously Carmack is just pushing the boundaries. He's just Always trying to make the next thing but there's something to be said for leveraging the tools you already have to make a new, you know, it's like you don't need to make a new tool to make another compelling and valuable experience. so in a way, I almost think that was their down part of their downfall where it's like, well, sure. Like have Carmack, you know, working on the next thing, but why are you like trying to rush this thing? And like, creating so much pressure for yourself
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:you still, basically have the most cutting edge engine in the world. And it's like, everybody's still loving it. Like you can just spend your time like exploring what is possible with it.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:And then, but, but no, you need to like. put a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself, say that doom is going to look like crap compared to the next thing.
Jon:I mean, that's so true because that's what I would do. I would be like, Hey, this is a great piece of IP. Like, let's just continue to explore it. But I guess it's a testament to their ambition. They just really wanted to keep redefining the industry. Um, and actually that the chapter sort of ends with them feeling a little bereft, like they've been working on this project for months and months and months and they kind of feel like nothing's coming of it. This is where they mentioned that it's been, it's taken six months to make the engine and really there's nothing to show for it. Um, and so the chapter kind of ends on like a little bit of a downer note.
Matt:yeah, no. And I mean, like maybe we can wrap up here. So basically they say that on the online forums, they've stopped making any promises about when this thing is going to come out. And he said, like, you know, Romero says, It's going to be done when it's done, you know, so, um, all right, well, let's, uh, let's leave it there unless you had anything else you wanted to say.
Jon:No, that's, that's it for my notes.
Matt:All right. Well, uh, I will see you next time for judgment day, chapter 12.