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The Early Days of id Software

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 54 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by John Romero, co-founder of id Software
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 10 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

165K views10 years ago1 recommendation

Game developmentHistory and cultureGame programmingHistory of computingRetro games and consoles

John Romero discusses the early days of id Software and the programming principles that enabled the creation of Doom and Quake.

In this 2016 GDC Europe talk, id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator John Romero discusses the company's early days and the programming principles that gave birth to games like Doom and Quake. GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/Official_GDC Check out our Facebook page for GDC exclusives facebook.com/GameDevelopersConference Visit our site: ubm.io/2ctNvqZ

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Highly recommended for its inspiring look at id Software's rapid iteration, development principles, and game history.

hyperpalliumon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Id Software Programming Principles”

This is first class post-hoc bullshit. They weren't making prototypes or reusing code, they sure as hell weren't composing high-sounding principles. They just got on with it because they were talented experienced and motivated. For that reason, the rest of the talk is very inspiring - so listen to the hour-long video (half talk, half questions), and not the article which only has the post-hoc bits. link to this video
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tvararuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Linting HTML using CSS”

John Romero learned this in his early days at ID Software: it's crucial that you can still boot the game even when things are missing, but make them very apparent. Source: somewhere in this video link to this video
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kudokatzon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)”

…-ends where it isn't until after I've tried using a technique with real data that I realize it has weaknesses the researchers didn't point out and which can't easily be fixed If you listen to John Romero himself telling the story of id and the fast iteration, it was "due to having, basically, 10 years of intense game development experience prior": link to this video ("it's also due to the first principle we had - no prototypes") A theme I tend to see is that a lot of folks with super output appear to others like icebergs - a LOT of effort that nobody can see, and a tiny peak at which everyone marvels.…
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tcmbon Hacker News • Mentions

On “John Carmack and John Romero reunited to talk DOOM on its 30th Anniversary”

It's also worthwhile to remember where the team honed their craft, as was also mentioned in this session: The early id team worked for a publisher called Softdisk that provided a game subscription where customers received a new game every month. This was basically a way to iterate on the practice and process of game development in one month cycles. The shareware relase of Doom had four months of development, which sounds crazy short by today's standards, but for them it was unusual to have so much time. There's several talks on Youtube by John Romero where he tells the story of the early id software, e.g. link to this video
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