YouSaid · the spoken record

John Romero

lines on the record: 84
first: 2023-07-12
most recent: 2023-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I mean, I'm really grateful to have had a really fun career making games. It's been a blast from the early days of learning how to program a computer all the way to today using really advanced technology to make shooters with bigger teams. I've seen everything that's happened during that huge span of time. And it's been just a really, really, really great, a really great time overall. So I'm just really just happy to have had that kind of a life and that's all of that is basically in this book.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes like, wow, that's a really great name. We haven't heard of a game called Doom before, so he said, how about Doom? And it was like, that is awesome. Yeah.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The name for Doom came from John Carmack. He was watching Tom Cruise's The Color of Money movie. And when he was watching it and he saw the guy walk up to Tom Cruise as he's got his cue stick inside of his case on his lap and the guy's like, what's in there? And Tom Cruise looks down at it and looks up at the guy and goes, it's doom.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be a good idea. In fact, because I haven't seen anything out there that really documents the id softwares, you know, ludography, what game started on what date, when did that game ship, what's the authoritative book on the development of all of its software stuff? I could actually put that in this history as well. So it was kind of a two-fold reason for writing the book was to get the whole story out there from when I was born until today and to also be a really good chronicle for everything that happened during those years and when those things happened in a bunch of the cool stories that people had heard before and just put a lot of really good stuff in there as well. There was a game that I was working on called Black Room and every once in a while I get people asking so what's up with Blackroom and I always tell them I can't talk about Blackroom. Well, Black Room's”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, several years ago, I went to do a speaking engagement in Canada. Basically, had heard the story of Doom's development and kind of already knew some of the stuff I talked about. So they said, can you do something different? Can you tell us about your early life and what made you the person that would make Doom? Instead of talking about Doom, talk about how you became the person to make Doom. So it was like, oh, kind of like my life in game, you know, early games. So it's like, all right, I'll write that talk. So I borrowed a talk that had a lot of the stuff that happened in my early childhood with all of the exciting things that had to do with drugs and murders and just the low income stuff, which kind of shocked people. They had never heard any of that before. And hearing the audience and the questions later was just like, people saying you should put that in a book. Like nobody knows about that information. I was like, yeah, I didn't really ever talk about it before. And yeah, that would.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And starting another company, I was very excited about it. I was excited because I was going to be doing this with Tom, who's a really great friend, amazing creative force, someone super fun to work with. And we both had tons and tons of experience. So I was really excited about that. But I really liked working with the other people at it as well. So it was really like, it sucked, but it was also exciting. Like at the same time, it was like that was a lot of really great work there, but I'm also excited about what I can possibly do without limitations on what, say, design could do. It was negatives and positives, but I think that it was mostly positive because we're starting to do something new. And that was really, really fun to do with Tom. And we spent about half a year building relationships with different publishers to start Ion Storm. And finally, after six months, figure.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't want to work with me anymore, so they asked for my resignation. I was like, well, I'm going anyway, so let's sign it. It was a very tough game to get through.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And it was really hard. And after the game was released, it was like a month and a half before I quit because there was still some work for me to do to get the game mastered and created to go into stores and be shipped to customers, that kind of thing. I took a vacation. I came back. I mastered all this stuff. And I was already planning for half a year to leave because if we're not going to commit ourselves to furthering design, it's just going to become a technology company. then I want to leave and go create a design company. And so I already planned after that big meeting about a month later, two months later, already planned to leave and start another company with Tom Hall. And he agreed that he would love to do that. So I said after shipping Quake, then I'll start doing that. So that's what happened. After shipping, I started getting in touch with publishers and they also, John Carmacle.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The team. So I basically just kind of gave in and said, I will design a first person shooter that will use all of this stuff. And what we've done to date to the best that we can and then release it as fast as we possibly can. So we started doing that from the middle of November. We basically went into crunch mode at that time. Even though everyone's burned out, they're mostly burned out because they weren't making something that they could see what it was going to be used for. because we wanted to get it done as fast as possible. We went into what's called crunch mode, which at that time was seven days a week, all the hours that you can, which is at least 10 a day. And we did that for seven months, seven days a week.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do it, we can nail it. This is brand new tech that's awesome already. If we just do a shooter, we can all just like ship a game and take a rest kind of thing, you know. And I was just like, no, we need to do this. The whole world knows what this game is. It's in magazines. Like everybody knows what Quake is. And this is what I'm all about is we're pushing our technology to limit. Let's push design to the limit too. Let's go beyond what we've done before and make something new people haven't seen. I wanted to make this 3D game experience something no one had seen before that goes beyond our first person shooter. And so they just really didn't want to do another unknowable mountain to climb. Like, when is it going to be defined? You know, like we don't have a scope that has an end on it now. Like we didn't either with the engine and we didn't change course while we're doing it either, which is what really harmed.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that what they made was too primitive. The engine could do more than what they had created, because every time we were making stuff for the game, the engine would be at a certain point of speed and were modifying our levels to make it run well at that speed. But that means it's a little too primitive because the engine got faster and faster and faster. And by the time we reached November, we could render much more interesting views in the world, but we didn't build those worlds yet. We were slowly inching towards them. So it was a lot of like, wow, all the stuff I worked on, can't really use it. So people were burned out from that. And the team did not feel like they were up to the task of doing research on a new style of game, which is what Quake was going to be. It was not going to be a first-person shooter. They basically suggested that we should just make a shooter because we know how to.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's called an engine, and we pioneered the idea of an engine in 1990 with our original commander Keane game. We started calling it an engine even before we launched Keane. So we started that idea in 1990. Now we're talking about 1995, which we'd made a lot of games since then, since 1990, 20-something games. So with Quake, we're creating a new engine, one that can do full 3D, one that has a completely different look to it, has more advanced gameplay code. Everything about it was different. When we got to November of that year, the engine was finally ready, but the team was burnt out because of the massive effort that it took to create the technology and the fact that they'd been making a lot of data that couldn't be used because the engine changed so much.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at this point in our game development, we had created this term called engine. And the engine is what drives the game. And that is the thing that puts the images up on the screen. It's the thing that loads files and saves files. It's a thing that takes input in and makes gameplay happen. It's what makes sound come out and music come out of the game. And so the core functionality that is needed for a game to run without any of the graphics and any of the actual sound effects themselves, the core technology is called an engine because you can put the data in and it will come out. It will play. You put sound effects in and then use in gameplay code. You define when those will play and they come out. And so it's an entire set of code that any game can be”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the game because the engine wasn't ready. Like we're waiting for that engine to actually happen so we can start using it.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sandy, Peterson, and American McGee. So it was still pretty small. We still had more people eventually to hire onto the team to get us to 10 by the time Quake was shipped. But at this time, there was probably seven of us. It was pretty small. During that time, the design of that medieval game just kept getting stronger and stronger. It was getting reinforced with more things that could be done to reinforce the feeling of that medieval world and do new things that we hadn't seen a game do at that time in lots of different ways. So it was becoming a really strong design, really strong, really cool. And the problem was that we were spending all of that year kind of spinning our wheels doing 3D levels, little pieces of levels and stuff, but we didn't have the gameplay programmer that could actually do anything.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a very small company and working on Quake, we gotten our team up to 10 eventually to make Quake. And still with the other three people, I think on top of that, the company was 13 people when Quake launched. So we had like a very small team and we had the world coming at us. And there was so much to deal with Doom's impact. the articles, the Kent guides, the strategy guides, the other projects that we had going, that it took up a lot of time, which wasn't bad because at that time, there was a lot of technology creation for Quake going on. And I was creating the level editor for the level design team to start experimenting with. And it was really just two other people on the team doing level design in full 3D for the first time. And that was...”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medieval 3D adventure with combat. It wasn't a first person shooter because that never existed at that time. It was going to be a 3D action medieval. We're going to recreate our D&D adventures that we had and put it in full 3D in a real full 3D game. So that was the design. As I'm making the level editor and kind of experimenting with 3D, there's a lot of other stuff going on at the company because Doom changed the planet and then Doom 2 again was even better than the original Doom. It was crazy because we only had at the time when we shipped Doom, there was only six of us that shipped Doom. And on top of that, we had three other people in the company to handle business. All of the managerial type stuff and all of the technical support type stuff. What's going to happen”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started making the last game that I had worked on at its software was named Quake. And we started working on Quake in 1995 as a team. John had already kind of started planning the technology at the end of 94 when we were finishing Doom 2. He was exploring the technology for the next game, which was going to be a massive, massive jump in technology. And so when we started as a team in 1995 to make Quake, it was like making Doom, right? It was like here's this giant mountain we got to climb again. There's a lot of tools, there's a lot of foundational work that has to get done. And let's do it. So we just started working on it. And the design of the game also was like we started making Quake and we couldn't because the tech wasn't going to be there. But this now was going to be the tech that we could use to make Quake, which is why we named it Quake. So it's like, we're going to do that game. That game was a...”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be living actively for 30 years, which is this year. It'll be 30 years old. Stuff is being made for the game on a daily basis all the time. In one of the greatest mods that has been created was released not that long ago this year. Incredible. It's called My House. People are still making insane stuff for the game, but we never thought that was going to happen. We just thought we're going to make a really great game and the next game's going to wipe it out. You know, like that was it. That was a goal.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coming up with these weird subcultures going on in Usenet around Doom and people creating games based on Doom being the best game that could ever be made and then them creating a really crude version of that and calling it smashing pumpkins into small piles of future debris because that was such a funny thing. We put it as a cheat code in Doom. Just there was a lot of internet activity around the fact that we're about to release the game and we never said anything. So it was really weird that the world was starting to go nuts before we launched the game. And that was the third like, okay, but up until that point, every game that we made, we would put it out and then our plan is to just wipe that game out with the next one. Like the next game is going to just destroy that thing. So it's like, boom, games out next. So we never thought that Doom was.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go back into my office and I get that code running on my machine and we just start shooting each other. It's like, this is not, oh my God. And then I'm imagining the level I'm currently working on in seeing two people fighting in another room from my viewpoint. And I'm just like, there's nothing like this on earth. Oh my God. This is changing everything. So I got so excited at that point. So that was another, holy shit, this is going to be so different and blow everybody away to change everything. So multiplayer was when I saw that, I mean, and this is October. And so that was really amazing. And then the lead up to when we're about to release the game, we're not online talking to anybody, but somehow people knew we're getting close. We were starting to get random phone calls at the office. We have people online.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it just took him a few hours. He just needed to learn how to get network packets going between computers over our network and then how to get the game, like what data does he send between computers. He's trying to minimize the amount of data so it's fast. And he learned within just hours the techniques that he needed to do. And it took a couple days to hammer out some of the speed issues. It was pretty fast before I had seen him shoot a character. He had two computers going and he's moving a character on one screen. The other one, you see the guy running around inside the level. It's like, oh my God, like we've never seen this before in any game. And then you shoot him and the guy dies. And it's like, oh my God, this is going to be the most...”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no multiplayer. So you go and I tell John, I'm like, you will not believe this. There's no multiplayer. Remember, we're going to do that? And he's like, oh, yeah. So John's a genius. And so John figured out kind of immediately in his brain was like, oh, I'll just solve it with a peer-to-peer networking model. So he figured out how he's going to bolt multiplayer onto the game and make it feel like it's been there the whole time.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's like whatever, even though it changed everything, like no one had seen a screen that looked this way. For us, it was just like another day at work, whatever. So I was just focused on the experience part of it. So that to me was really fun to play a level I didn't make and experience in a little way what people were going to feel like. And then we got to a point where it's like early October and I for some reason look at that press release again and look at the bullet points because I'm like as a producer type person, I need to make sure we're putting everything in the game. We didn't promise stuff that we didn't deliver on and we need to mostly get that bullet point list done. And I saw that we were missing multiplayer. Like we didn't even think about it. We thought about it in January. But we get to the point of the game where like the game is mostly done now and it's early October. And I'm like, whoa.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not mine because when I make my own levels, I know everything that's in it. So I'm just like testing to make sure it looks good, it's working well, the enemies are doing what I want them to do, the pacing is correct when combat happens is when I want it to happen, when exploration happens, I have the area cleared for the player to do that. All of these things. But when I play Sandy's levels for the first time, I know nothing about it. And I remember the first time when I started playing his levels, I knew what people were going to feel like finally, right? Right. And it was like, wow, this is scary, you know. I'm going through this level and I'm hearing these monsters moving around. I don't know where they're at, but I don't like that they're coming for me somehow. And it was great because I finally got to kind of feel in a game experience way what people would feel when they're playing it. Now, at that point, I'm so used to the technology.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point the design language for the level creation was figured out because I needed to solve that problem with what are our levels going to look like that maximizes the use of our technology that no one has seen and creates spaces no one has ever experienced before in a way that is kind of drastic and not a little bit better than Wolfenstein 3D. It needed to be drastically better than Wolfenstein 3D. So that took some work to kind of come up with this abstract level design style when that happened and we started to make stuff. It's like, okay, this is looking really great. Sandy Peterson immediately started picking up that style because I would sit and talk to him at the very beginning about like here's what is important about using this technology that makes us stand out. And so he started putting those elements in his levels. And when I got to run Sandy's level,”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several things happened during the development that were interesting in that respect. We knew at the very beginning of making the game that it was going to be the greatest game that we've ever played because that was our focus of, you know, like why we're making the game. So we already knew it was going to be awesome and the best game that we had ever played. That was already a given. But while we're making the game, we got to a point where Tom Hall left the team in August of 1993 and we brought in Sandy Peterson to replace him doing level design work. I basically took over as the game designer of the game. And that's how we started stripping a lot of stuff out of the game, like lives and score and getting rid of items that didn't matter. Really streamlining the design. Sandy was making levels and at this point.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we were in sync at the same time when we shifted projects, we didn't get creative block with something. It's like, I can't even figure out what I'm going to do at this level. I'm going to just make a level for the other game. We would help each other if anyone got stuck. It's like, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do for this one section. And I'd like, well, put a meat grinder in there or something. And it's like, oh, yeah, good idea. You know, we would help each other. But most of the time, we already knew what we're doing. I mean, we kind of pre-thought everything out before we started working on these games and we could do it at really high speed. So we just executed because that was the really important part. We got the ideas and we have lots of experience. It was all about the execution of our ideas and in sync. And luckily because we had such a small team of four people, that could happen very fast. The bigger the team gets, the harder and longer it takes to make one vision come out the right way. But with four people that have very...”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask questions or whatever, we were all on a project. And it wasn't like, oh, you're just making a level for the other game. Well, I guess I can't ask you. You know, it was like we were always in sync. So we would shift to the next game and start working on that. And then the next day we start back on the other game. And the reason why we're doing eight hours and eight hours or seven and seven was because we loved making games. We wanted to get these games done. We're learning a ton. It was super fun being together and making these games. We'd be laughing. It would be new things that were inventing. It was just like it was like being in a lab where things are going right all the time. So it was super fun and we could do those hours without a problem. And we did it for a whole year. All of 1991 was spent with all the hours that we were awake working on games, two games at a time at least.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that having two games at a time it did not impact really anything because we knew what we were doing on both those games. One of those games came out a month before the other game, right? So that was like the priority. But what we did was kind of we divided our time into two roughly eight hour days or seven hour days. So we would go from 10 to 6 on one game.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really because I think the most helpful part of that is just knowing. What has been made before? Like what games and game design techniques? Programming techniques, approaches to certain control issues like that stuff. Luckily, just having played so many games over so long a time, that has been really helpful to be able to recall solutions or other approaches people have taken that we don't need to research and figure it out again, like reinvent the wheel. It's like this game in 1984 did this on an Atari 800, and we might be able to do that on the PC or something like that. So it was more helpful to solving issues or being able to make sure that we're not replicating Failed designs of the past, and that we were always creating new things I hadn't seen before, which is really helpful.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so it's like not knowing, well, say for this book, what's important, what isn't important. But it was really important that I went to the heavy metal concert with this person.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say that's totally true for a lot of people that have that. For me, say, negative slash hindrance would be that I think a lot of things are similar in importance, even if they aren't. So I would think that this. Possibly insignificant detail is more important than anyone else would think. And the reason why I think it is because the way it's connected to other things. It's like that didn't happen, then these other things wouldn't have happened as well, you know? Yeah.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had to stop myself from learning for a day or two before I could jump back in and fill my head full of stuff again. And due to the nature of what I was learning in the early 80s, which is learning every bite of memory in an entire computer, the knowledge of language wasn't as important as the knowledge of hardware at that time. So I needed to learn all of the hardware of the computer that I was programming and then the languages on top of that and then start creating off of the top of that information. So that was also a forcing function to induce memory of everything basically that was happening.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've had it mostly since birth, but it got stronger when I started to learn how to code at really high speed after getting the computer in the house. I was learning so much so fast I actually had to take breaks from learning because my head was just packed full of stuff and it needed to settle.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of that stuff. So I would remember everything. So it makes it a lot easier to just say, hey, what happened in 1983 when you were doing blah blah blah? And it's like, well, I was actually programming this stuff, but I didn't have my computer yet. So I had to do it on paper in the kitchen. And, you know, it was a soybean-sea or I could tell people what I did whenever.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they have every second of their life, which gets to be kind of insane because everything that you've ever done is always present in your brain. And having all of these thoughts, like all of these memories constantly, it's a big hindrance, I guess, in just normal operation, like just living. My hypothymesia is I remember basically everything that has happened to me mostly, all the significant stuff in things that are connected to it. So like music and movies and programming and games and that kind of stuff, I would remember basically all of that stuff through all the years. And I would, you know, things that I cared about, I would remember those things. I would remember the names of people who wrote games when those games were published, the year that they were published.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hyperthymesia is like a memory disorder where the person with hyperthymesia has a superior autobiographical recall and it ranges from really good recall of significant events and things that have happened in your life that most people would forget over time. With hyperthymesia, you never forget those things. They just don't go away. You wouldn't know it if you're young. But as you get older and you start to lose decades of memories because you don't use them and they're not significant anymore, hyperthymesia, you don't lose them. They're always there. And the extreme end of hyperthymesia is where you remember every second of your life since you got hyperthymesia. And that could be born with, but sometimes it is an induced memory disorder. So people have been hitting the head with a baseball and boom, they have hyperthymes.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And no one had heard anything from us in three months, which back then with these accelerated schedules and people wanting to know what we're doing, like we're finally now doing interviews with places. We're doing radio interviews. We have the local TV station in our office interviewing us and recording our screens. We have them interviewing our publishers. Like people wanted all kinds of information about what we were doing. So I think at that time it was like, let's put out a press release telling people what we're going to start working on because everyone is asking us constantly what we're doing next. So let's just do a press release and just like it's equal information for everyone. It's not like there's an exclusive with this one computer magazine, you know, computer gaming world or something. There's no exclusive. It was hear everybody. This is what we're working on. And now we have to dive back down in the ocean and start making it. Like don't bug us, you know?”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it released in May the shareware. So we had the rest of 1992 just building up this world domination of Wolfenstein. There was an internet top 100 list of games every week. When Wolfenstein was at the top for the entire year after it came out, it was huge. We were just on top of the world, but after we released Spear of Destiny, it came out, I believe, in September of 1992.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know why we would have put out a crush race. It doesn't make any sense, but I think that what happened is Wolfenstein 3D came out. Remember, at this point, we were so used to making games extremely fast. With Wolfenstein, that was the very first game that we could make in any amount of time that we wanted. There was no deadline on Wolfenstein. We made the shareware version of Wolfenstein in four months and uploaded it. So there was four of us making Wolfenstein. We had Kevin Cloud in there for the very last month to add graphics and do a bunch of other cool stuff. But we were very fast and we didn't have a deadline on that game.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the Spear of Destiny. And so we're just like invincible feeling. So, what we did was we took our two-week vacation at the end of 1992, and we came back in January of 1993, right at the beginning of the year, and we're going to start working on this new game that we called Doom. And we decided for some reason that we were going to put out a press release and tell everybody what's going to be in this game and it will be the greatest game that Earth has seen. And we did, we put a press release out before we even start writing the game, we put a press release out saying this will be the best game anyone has ever played on a PC and this is what's going to be in it and it's a breakthrough in game technology and all this crazy stuff So we needed to fulfill that and so we started working on it”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we would also make the game open so people could change the game to do whatever they wanted and make it their own, basically. They could make levels. They could make new sounds, new graphics. They could change the whole game, basically, and modded. It's called mods, modification. So we would open it up to modders who wanted to create a new experience using the tech that we created. And we would also give away the first piece of this game for free into the world, and you don't have to pay for it. You just get it. And if you like it, you had fun. If you want more, then you buy it from us. That's called shareware. We had this whole list of everything we're going to do. And we were very confident that we could do it because we already, John was already planning the architecture of the engine. He already was very confident in how he was going to be able to do that. And at that point, we were just on top of the world. Like we had just conquered everything with Wolfenstein 3D.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That could create a space that no one had seen before. We were going to make this game multiplayer so people could play with each other and against each other for the first time because right then locality networks were just barely like they were just barely starting to sell network cards and the cables and all that stuff and all the computer retail stores. So we would make a game that would take advantage of a network if you ever had it and it would take advantage of the modem to play against or with your friends.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need height control. We need to be able to go up and down stairs. We need to have giant tall rooms, really cramped rooms. We need walls to be drawn at any angle which no game in history had ever done at that point where you can have a wall that's at an angle and like a wall that's jagged and all that every game before this next game was basically a maze game and when you look at a maze from above it's just 90 degree wall terms. It's like those classic mazes labyrinths, you know, where you're just like drawing a line through the maze. That's what every single game from the 70s until that point looked like. Wolfenstein 3D was a high speed maze game. It was the same thing 90 degree corners all over the place. So this next game would break that barrier. So we're going to have what we call non-thogonal walls.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For our fifth game, we needed a new architecture and to come up with a list of all of the things that this new game would do. And we were thinking like we need to go beyond anything we've ever seen this next game. And this was the only time we ever did this. The next game needs to be the best game we could imagine playing, that there can't be a better game in the world than this game. What would that game have? So we made a list, a bullet point list of all the things that this new game should have. Obviously, it needs to have light and dark. It has to have light levels. It needs to be spooky. It needs to have bright areas, which we had no lighting in Wolfenstein. It was just Fulbright, you know, like the lights were always on. So it's like we need lighting control.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The creation of the engine that was a Wolfenstein plus engine after Spirit of Destiny, it led to Shadowcaster, but that engine's architecture was too limiting for what we had in mind for our next game. So that's why we licensed that technology out and decided we're not using that 3D engine architecture anymore. And so at that point, we'd made four games in full 3D, high speed, all that.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the 3D let you turn your head and look up and down and all that stuff, which really slowed the game down. So it wasn't a high speed game. You would step slowly through a dungeon, but it was 3D. It was like the 3D is now happening at this point. If it's not ours, it's probably slow, but it is 3D because the world is now going to become 3D. But it's hard to get to that point. Our focus was speed. That was where we wanted to live. So with the next game, We had had such massive success with Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny that we jumped basically to the front of the industry with those games. Like immediately, bam, we are now in the lead because nobody was making this. And this was the new thing. High speed 3D is the future. We're there first.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made Wolfenstein 3D. For me personally, that was my 87th game that I'd made. Right after Wolfseign 3D, we made Spear of Destiny that took us two months. That was number eighty eight. There was a game called Shadowcaster that views our technology that we had made so all the tools that I wrote and the gameplay code, menu code, all the stuff, we license our technology and give it to another company and then they make a game. That's game number 89. It's called Shadow Caster. And then game number 90. Not that I even was counting back then. It was just like next game, you know, we're going to make the next game. At the time, at the very end of 1992, after making all of these games and really when Wolfenstein came out, everything changed because now we have high speed 3D. No one had ever seen this before. Ultima Underworld was out, and it was a really great role-playing game set in 3D.”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And very, very fast. And so when we started Focusing our design on that part of it, we started removing everything that took away from that speed. But there were some things that we had to leave in, like to open a door and wait for the door to open, that's actually suspense that we need in the game. If we didn't have any doorways, you're just running through a maze just like blowing everything away constantly non-stop and you have no suspense really. So those doors provided the suspense. One of the original games focuses was the suspense of wondering if you'd made a noise and alerted the guards to come after you or if they heard you trying to open a chest in the next room and you can seat them in the next room and you're just like trying to open a chest and if you shoot it then they're coming in the room and they're going to try and arrest you. of our design and that's why we start removing and changing it”
2023-07-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #681: Doom Legend John Romero — The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games, How to Find the Soul of the Work, Audacious Ambition, and Building in Monk Mode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT