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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/in-first-person-john-romero-reflects-on-over-three-decades-as-the-doom-guy/ [arstechnica.com]

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored [shikadi.net] first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series [arstechnica.com] of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

"Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I'm just like, 'Guys we need to not make this game [Keen],'" he said. "'This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.' ... And everyone was immediately was like, 'Yeah, you know, you're right. That is the new thing, and we haven't seen it, and we can do it, so why aren't we doing it?'"

The team started working on Wolfenstein 3D that very night, Romero said. And the rest is history.
[...]
The early id designers didn't even use basic development tools like version control systems, Romero said. Instead, development was highly compartmentalized between different developers; "the files that I'm going to work on, he doesn't touch, and I don't touch his files," Romero remembered of programming games alongside John Carmack [arstechnica.com]. "I only put the files on my transfer floppy disk that he needs, and it's OK for him to copy everything off of there and overwrite what he has because it's only my files, and vice versa. If for some reason the hard drive crashed, we could rebuild the source from anyone's copies of what they've got."
[...]
The formation of id Software in 1991 meant that Wolfenstein 3D "was the first time where we felt we had no limit on time," Romero said. That meant the team could experiment with adding in features drawn from the original 2D Castle Wolfenstein, things like "searching dead soldiers, trying to search in open boxes and drag the soldiers out of visibility from other soldiers, and other stuff that was not just 'mow it down.'"

But Romero says those features were quickly removed since they got in the way of "this high-speed run-and-gun gameplay" that was emerging as the core of the game's appeal.
[...]
One of the last steps necessary to get Wolfenstein 3D out quickly, Romero said, was ignoring the publisher's suggestion that they double the game's size from 30 to 60 levels. But Romero said the publisher did give them the smart advice to ditch the aging EGA graphics standard in favor of much more colorful VGA monitors. "You're a marketing guy, you know what's going on, we trust you, we will do that immediately," Romero recalled saying.
[...]
"We were making games that we wanted to play," he said. "We weren't worried about audience. We were the audience. We played every game on all the systems back then. We were consumers, and we knew what we wanted to make. We made so many games that we were past our learning years of how to make game designs. We were at the point where the 10,000 hours was over. Way, way over."
[...]
"But when we saw the lengths people had to go to just to get access and make levels, it was like, we need to completely open the next game," Romero continued. "That's why Doom's WAD file formats were put out there, and our level formats were out there. That's what let people generate tons of content for Doom."

Romero said that looking back, he thinks Doom hit that sweet spot where players could create robust maps and content without getting bogged down in too many time-consuming details.
[...]
Beyond quick WAD file creation, though, Romero expressed awe at what dedicated modders have been able to build on top of the now open source Doom engine [arstechnica.com] over the decades. He specifically pointed to Selaco as a game that shows off just how far the updated GZDoom engine [zdoom.org] can be taken.
[...]
Romero said he admires how the battle royale genre has made the shooter more accessible for players who weren't raised on the tight corridors of Doom and its ilk.

"If someone who's not good at a shooter jumps into [a game like Counter-Strike], they're dead, mercilessly," Romero said. "It's not fun. But what is fun is 'I'm not that good, I'm gonna jump into a game that is a battle royale, and I get to play with other people who are really good, but I actually survive for five minutes. I find some stuff; maybe I shoot somebody and take them out. You're gonna get shot, but you had an experience; you learn something, and you jump in and do it again."

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