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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.
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.
Daikatana 2 is still not out.
And this alone is proof that God exists.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
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 $0.99 in the bargain bin, too.
Romero's on better ground when knocking Doom 3 for being dark, repetitive and predictable. Although he doesn't realize it, this argument bears on his earlier misguided comment. D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.
Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated. Sure, it can be an art form (see, for instance, old custom Quake levels built by geniuses such as Headshot or Mr. Fribbles). But most games look alike today; no matter how technically sound their appearance, few do more than go for realism or ape genre cliches. This even as hyper-realistic design means longer development times and higher costs. And nobody thinks games are more fun than their blockier predecessors--no, quite the opposite.
So where Romero talks about level design as a virtue and even dreams about going back in time to revisualize Doom, the truth is something different. Level design is becoming little more than a clonable commodity.
The solution is to outsource it. Set up companies that do nothing but build cities, dungeons, jungles, etc. to some standard, scriptable world-building spec. Devs can then buy chunks of these "places" and build their games in them--for much less than the cost of paying salaries for asset creation. This would liberate game companies to pour their energies into gameplay before it becomes a lost art.
Well, at least now we know that Romero's still alive...
B$
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.
Is what Carmack said about him right here on Slashdot.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.