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Interview With John Romero
spensdawg writes "Here is an interesting interview with John Romero on Games.net. He gets into the original design philosophy for the first Doom games, what he would have done differently, and his plans for the future. Worth watching if you want to know a little more about the mad scientist behind Doom." A warning: this is a video interview
This article is not going to be much use for Linux users, as it requires Flash 8.
Two points:
- Why does a text article require flashplayer 8 to view it? It's a waste of bandwidth, waste of CPU and cutting down on this site's potential market.
- Why has Macromedia has only released a (very buggy) flashplayer 7 for linux x86, and no flashplayer at all for amd64? The selling point of Flash is that it's multi-platform but that's not really the case.
I look forward to the day when SVG and other standard technologies becomes more prevalent and Flash is relegated to the technology graveyard.
This guy been around longer than Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana 2 is still not out.
He designed some levels, he did a little game design, he was not by any stretch the main creative force behind Doom.
Apparently it's not only games that aren't realeased for Linux. Neither are articles about them.
John Romero will make you his bitch.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Asked questions about what he would have done about Doom differently (he would've hired a great level designer), what was wrong with Doom (nothing, talked about how the game was designed), how he would do if he would make another Doom (pitch black, something new like stuff from HL 2), when he knew he hit it big (after seeing the numbers), what he thought of sequels (would only do one), what other projects he did and what he learned (he likes creation, and not so much cleanup), what he is doing (his new company, that he's working on something new that so far hasn't been done).
Strange thing to me was that I saw mostly DOOM III video gameplay (no DOOM I or II gameplay video - difficult to find?), and there was HL 2 showed for a quick bit.
In fact, fans are still recreating Doom levels for other games as homages, which isn't to say those levels were stunningly brilliant. No, they were all they had to be--because the gameplay was so great. And the great fun rubbed off on the levels.
By contrast, Daikatana's levels were built and rebuilt, polished and repolished. Fat lot of good it did. Design is law, of course, as the Ion Storm mantra went; but Daikatana is $0.99 in the bargain bin, too.
Romero's on better ground when knocking Doom 3 for being dark, repetitive and predictable. Although he doesn't realize it, this argument bears on his earlier misguided comment. D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.
Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated. Sure, it can be an art form (see, for instance, old custom Quake levels built by geniuses such as Headshot or Mr. Fribbles). But most games look alike today; no matter how technically sound their appearance, few do more than go for realism or ape genre cliches. This even as hyper-realistic design means longer development times and higher costs. And nobody thinks games are more fun than their blockier predecessors--no, quite the opposite.
So where Romero talks about level design as a virtue and even dreams about going back in time to revisualize Doom, the truth is something different. Level design is becoming little more than a clonable commodity.
The solution is to outsource it. Set up companies that do nothing but build cities, dungeons, jungles, etc. to some standard, scriptable world-building spec. Devs can then buy chunks of these "places" and build their games in them--for much less than the cost of paying salaries for asset creation. This would liberate game companies to pour their energies into gameplay before it becomes a lost art.
I think I read this on his site quite a while ago... Then again I may have been playing Duke Nukem 3D at the time or just downloading the Prey Demo... ahh well nevermind...
LifeTime Gamer
Well, at least now we know that Romero's still alive...
B$
Did anyone find it strange that the interview was mixed with videos of doom3 and half-life2? Two games that he had nothing to do with?
I started to make a transcript of the video. I don't know the games, and I'm not a sectery either (plus hugely hungover), so I got bored quickly. Mananged to do half of it before I reached for the wrist-slitting knife - hopefully someone who can't view the flash will find it helpful:
games.net Presents Behind The Screens John Romero.
What would you change about Doom?
So the thing I would have changed about the original Doom, erm, is to have a better design for all the levels in eposide 2 and eposide 3, and to probably hire someone who was a really great level designer, erm, because, er, Sandy Peterson, hes a, hes a, hes definitely a great game designer [clip of some Doom game I guess], but having that, having somebody who's whole job is placing textures, making sure that levels are, are not just 'hey, I'm just gonna make a level today, see what it turns out to be'. That's kind of what we were doing anyway, so it turned out kind of haphazard, which is kinda Doom 2 [too?] also turned out, that way with the levels, was like 'hey, let's make a buncha cool levels, we'll have [them?] put in the game.'
What was missing from Doom?
Well, I don't think there was anything missing from the original Doom. I mean it was, was, we pulled stuff out of the original Doom because it kind of violated the purpose that we had started to change the game [another clip of presumably Doom], which was kinda what we did with Wolfenstein. With Wolfenstein , we'd added a bunch of cool stuff in there, and it slowed the gameplay down, the pace down, and we didn't want that. So we pulled that out, and what you got was just some crazy running at somebody brings [might have been 'for instance'] a second game [didn't hear this well enough]. And so, with Doom we wanted, erm, a game that was the same kind of Wolfenstein feeling, but looked cooler and [had?] cooler monsters, but still had that super speed.
What if you were to make another Doom?
If I was going to do another Doom today, I would [possibly wouldn't] do a game that's like Pitch Black for sure. Erm, I wouldn't have predictable situations happening constantly every few seconds, and er, you know, I'd, I'd have something that, er, was kind of pushing the limits, [clip of some game starts here] that would be, I'd definitely take some cues from Half life 2 but, erm, also add in some cool ideas that, that, no one else is doing.
When did you know you hit it big?
It was, it was insane with Doom. When we put out Doom and it just, it went all over the place. The internet really helped. Erm, people have tp net [might been 'had the internet'?] and the software creations Bolternborg [didn't get this word] was awsome. When we saw the numbers that were coming in off, off of, Doom it, it was crazy. Erm, that's when I just, just, brought the test release [might have got this bit wrong]. I was just, that's it [laugh]. I'm buying it now.
What do you think about sequels?
In Return of Wolfenstein and Comandeer Keen, and, you know [laugh] [some clip starts here of unknown game]. Erm, if I was there those games wouldn't have come out, because I don't do like.. I do a sequel, then it's time to move on.
Dude talks like a stoned hippy anyway.. I got time to waste on other things that don't include translating a zillion 'erms' to a text file.
Doom was not just a game, it was a whole new genre. While it wasn't quite the first first-person-shooter, it was the first one to do 3D reasonably well. When it came out, no one had seen anything like it. The game design was OK, the plot was basically non-existent, but it had no FPS competition because no one else had written one that even approached Doom. Considering that 3D accelerator cards didn't exist, and this all had to be done in software, there weren't too many people at the time who could write a competing FPS engine even if they had thought of it. So the lack of fancy levels and other aspects of the game design didn't matter much; the only thing the level design needed to do was showcase all the cool engine features.
If there is any doubt as to whether it was the FPS concept and engine or the details of the game, consider what happened next. Other FPSs were released -- licensing the Doom and then the Quake engines, not the Doom and the Quake levels.
There were games with much better levels and gameplay long before Doom, or even Wolfenstein 3D, they just weren't textured. E.g., Bethesda had a Terminator game that featured walking or _driving_ (yes, driving) around a town, with cars, pedestrians (yep, you could run them over), etc, years before Doom. It took the textured FPS genre almost a decade to get back to that point.
Or Ultima Underworld? It was a complex RPG and had a much more complex 3D engine too. It came out around the same time as Wolfenstein 3D and it still allowed far more complex and, well, "more 3D" maps than Doom would much later. E.g., the UU engine allowed bridges and tunnels under other tunnels, while Doom was still a 2D map with terrain elevation.
What Doom had was simply a more vocal gang of willy-wavers. The kind of personalities that just had to willy-wave about their deathmatch score were suddenly all over the place, making 10 times more noise than the peaceful SP RPG players, and acting as if they're speaking for some absolute majority. Doom was being proclaimed all over the place as the genre of the future, and indeed the only genre that anyone plays any more, at a time where SP console RPGs routinely out-sold it 10 to 1. Heck, even adventures were outselling Doom.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is what Carmack said about him right here on Slashdot.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Funny, what engine do all these new great games use? Often as not, something Carmack makes. He's an engine designer, and he's damned good at it.
Romero is a useless turd though.
Well, not contradicting what you wrote, but more as a reminder to everyone else: Daikatana was a complex phenomenon, at no number of designers could have saved it past a certain point.
For starters, it was largely a management failure, rather than a game design failure. The game design wasn't particularly bad, and in some ways it was ahead of its time. E.g., Daikatana tried to have a story in a FPS long before Half-Life, for example. In fact, it tried to have a story at a point in time where everyone else was churning mindless Wolfenstein 3D clones. And by comparison, once John Romero was gone, Id reverted to John Carmack's view that a plot is as needed for a game as for a porno movie.
What killed most of that design for Daikatana was simply being released so late as to not matter any more. Story in a FPS was no longer unheard of, the game engine was outdated, and some of the artwork looked like classic ass by sheer virtue of being old by now.
And that, in turn, could be traced to just bad management of the project and the company as a whole. John Romero wasn't necessarily bad at game design, but he was useless as a manager. All I'm saying is: let's not confuse the two issues, because they're different skills.
Plus, let's not underestimate the effect of Ion Storm's being the "victim" of a massive hype backlash. Partially because of its own PR blunders, that's for sure. (E.g., the "bitch" ad.) But also partially because a few idiots started screaming that Ion Storm killed Looking Glass, when Eidos let Looking Glass die. Suddenly it was _fashionable_ to be against John Romero and mourning Looking Glass, and a lot of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) joined in the chorus without even having a fucking clue what they're pro or against in that campaign.
So me say just one thing: if a _quarter_ of the people posting all "Daikatana sucks!!!" all over the place had actually played the fucking game, it would have been a major commercial success. It would have probably outsold The Sims. No, that's not saying it was that good, it's just saying how many SFVs were posting about it without even having seen it. Just because it was fashionable to be against it. It was instant karma to bitch about how much Daikatana sucks.
A lot of people still bitching about how bad Daikatana's design or gameplay supposedly was, still haven't actually even _seen_ that design or gameplay.
No, I'm not saying that it was great, but it was's as bad as people love to post all over the place either. It was just a mediocre FPS with a story. No more, no less. I _am_ however, saying, that the world would be a better place if people refrained from talking about stuff they have no clue about. I wish that everyone who hasn't actually played Daikatana (or whatever other game) just freakin' gave it a break already and talked about things they've actually experienced, instead of rehashing the same old canned hype they've read on some site.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Rumors of his success have been greatly exaggerated...
I worked, for a time near the end, at Ion Dallas. While I didn't work directly with Romero's team on what they were doing at the time (I worked for Tom Hall on Anarchonox), I can safely say that the bashers need to just shut the fuck up at this point. The guy didn't kill your first born. He didn't even want to "make you his bitch". That was a "joke". You know, something intended to get you "laughing", which a lot of you fail to do WITH him. You can only laugh at him, and you've never even met him. Real mature fellas. Good call. He's actually a fairly cool guy to sit around and shoot the shit with, always brimming with ideas and thoughts about things. (Though this interview strikes me really as quite absurd for a lot of reasons I won't go in to...)
His big problem wasn't the ads, the hype, or the lack of John Carmack. His biggest failure was that he had nobody there to keep him going forward on projects. That's what he needed to keep his projects focused towards a goal, and it's what he failed to find at Ion at any point. This isn't something he said to anyone, or something said to me or anything like that. It's just what I picked up on because I have the same issue when I direct projects. If you're an easily distracted director, you should have an assistant director or producer that's really good at putting their foot down when it's time to start work, and you should listen to them.
Romero didn't have that.
If Daikatana had released on time and not been mediocre (yes, I played a good part of it. My feeling was that it was hopelessly mediocre for the time it was supposed to have released at originally. Not bad, just nothing amazing.) everybody would have laughed with him about the ad, the hype, and there would have been peace and love in the world.
You wanna lump hate on somebody in the games industry? Smack Broussard around for his publically insulting other games and talking about how DNF will be better than them. Smack any jerk exec at EA (or any number of abusive publishers) around for raping their employees on hours and pay. Smack Ken Kutaragi around for being a fucktard. But c'mon guys, lay off Romero. He got over it and got on with work at Monkeystone and Midway, you asshats need to get over it too.
Be it VLC, Windows DRM Player, an iPod, a PalmOS device, or whatever else...
which is supported in recent version of the ff codecs, and thus in VLC version starting from 8.5.0.
and also which is supported by Wine-wrappers on Linux.
Which is only supported in Linux using "libcook.so" or "cook.dll"-with-wine-wrapper from Realplayer. This is the only one that sucks, because you need to have realplayer ported to you CPU architecture.
and sorenson happen to be supported since a few version of FF back. (and thus in VLC from 8.2? or 8.4 ? I don't remember). Before that, the wine-wrapped-DLL was available in player supporting this feature (MPlayer & Xine).
But the designer choosed suporting laziness : Flash is installed on most computers and can start autoplaying video, independently of what application is installed on the users' computers, as opposed to just put a file and let the software on the user's machine work.
This sucks because is closes possibility to anything that is not Windows 32-bit Intel based.
I really hope that Gnash will soon implement network streaming to stop this madness.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All I see there is Carmack being either (A) a complete nerd, for whom sticking to some rules is more important than his friends, or (B) being a dick willing to ruin everyone's campaign just to teach Romero a lesson.
It wasn't Romero that decided to introduce the devil into the game, and it wasn't Romero that made that NPC summon enough demons to destroy the world. It was the GM. Plain and simple. It was the kind of spiteful GM action that occasionally nukes everyone's characters to make a point, or as a quick "I've got the power" trip, or just being tired of the existing campaign. We've all run into moments like that.
The fact is, the game was at all times under the control of the GM. If you don't want your players to nuke the world, don't lead them to a room with big red button that launches the nukes. If you don't want them to bring forth the apocalypse, don't lead them to a room with a big pentagram and written instructions on how to summon the four horsemen. Etc. If you choose to "test" them with an event that may destroy the world, don't be surprised if they push the big red button just to see what happens.
And if you really want to save the world, you can always twist the rules as you like. That's why you're called a Game _Master_. Maybe decide that that big red button needed to first be activated by the Pentagon, or could be overriden by the Pentagon, so the missiles don't launch. Maybe a bunch of soldiers charge in and try to arrest the party, shooting the cable from that switch in the process. Etc.
Or in your example, maybe the devil can be toned down so the party can win. Maybe, I don't know, an archangel descends and blasts the book into oblivion. Whatever. If you're the GM, you have the power to pull that kind of shit.
Basically if you're the GM and (A) you've lead the players to a situation where they can destroy the world, and (B) you let them do that, then just accept the responsibility. _You_ ended the game, not the players. It's ok, if that's what you wanted to do. Start a new campaign or whatever. But don't be a prick and act as if some player is a great monster that deserves all the blame.
Plus, it's just a freakin' game. Acting like Romero is some monster that destroyed the whole world, strikes me as (A) taking it waaaay too seriously, and (B) pretty damn unimaginative and contrary to the whole spirit of the game.
I mean, have you actually played a tabletop RPG? That's exactly what the players are supposed to do. In a sense, it's sort of like playing chess against the GM. The whole fun is trying to (A) personally be creative and (B) to challenge others to be creative, in response to some unforeseen twist. That's a _two_ way street: the GM challenges the players and the players challenge the GM.
Heck, even that Demonicron episode's tame stuff. Look at some episodes on Full Frontal Nerdity (same site as Nodwick) for some stuff that good gamers can pull. Stuff like someone choosing the "royal blood" trait just so later they can usurp the new king of the realm, and turn the whole campaign on its head. Now that's the good stuff. That's what good players _do_.
As long as it's not deliberately trying to annoy someone or prevent them from achieving their goals, acting unpredictably in a creative way is what RP is all about. Just following the campaign and acting in a predictable way is _boring_.
From there it's the GM's job to react. It may be some equally surprising twist, or just proclaiming it to not be possible, or somewhere in between. That's what the game is all about.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.