Primagames.com is proud to continue this exclusive three-part discussion with Stevie "KillCreek" Case and John Romero. We present part two here today, with part three to follow soon:
PC: What led to the founding of id software?
JR: We had a group of guys, Lane, Adrian, John, Tom, and me, who loved doing games. Tom was actually in a different department, but he loved making games and was helping us out a lot. At that point, we were doing games that took two months, but that wasn't enough time to do something cool. We were frustrated doing the games in Gamer's Edge because SoftDisk's primary market was four-color CGA users. That meant our games had to be four-color CGA, not 16-color EGA. At that time 256-color VGA was even out. We had to feed the bottom of the market.
This was in the middle of 1990. We were also frustrated with the fact that we were doing these games, but no one was seeing them because they were all going in this little limited-exposure disk magazine. The stuff we were making was really cool! Carmack was working on this scrolling engine, an EGA-panning engine. The first demo that blew me away was made one night when Carmack stayed up until 5 a.m. with Tom Hall. John had just finished the panning code to move things smoothly across the screen.
Tom was there when he finished, and Tom said "Wouldn't it be cool if we did the first level of Super Mario 3?" John said, "Yeah, lets do it!" So they worked on it all night. Tom did all the graphics for the first level of the game, and John did all the coding for jumping and moving in a tile-based world. They used the main character from my PC game, Dangerous Dave. They put together this demo called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement because it was a rip-off of Super Mario 3's first level.
When I came in at 10:00 the next morning, I saw this disk that they'd left on my keyboard. So I ran this little program, and I started watching the demo with smooth panning and everything and I was like, "Oh my god. This has never been done on the PC before in a game." I was just blown away.
By the time they came in that morning, I'd shown it to almost everyone in the company who was interested. As soon as I saw it, I knew we were out of there. That was our ticket out. I told the guys that SoftDisk couldn't do anything with what we were creating because of the market, and that we needed to create our own company and make games that take longer. Since we had this cool Mario-like engine and we already had a start on the graphics, we wanted to see if we could do a demo of Super Mario 3 to send to Nintendo in hopes that they would want us to do the PC port of the entire game.
We spent a week and most of one weekend, with Tom making the graphics, me coding stuff like the game's world map, and Carmack coding the game physics, jumping, and other details. We got the demo together and sent it to Nintendo. Eventually it got to Nintendo Japan and to Shigeru (Miyamoto, creator of the Mario games). We got a letter back saying how awesome this demo was, but that unfortunately Nintendo would never do anything on the PC because they own their own hardware. They also informed us that we could not publish the demo because it used Mario, their trademarked character. So even though it was useless for us to do that, it was a boost for us that it got to Japan.
At the same time that this was happening, Scott Miller, the owner of Apogee, was writing me letters at SoftDisk under several different names hoping that I would get in contact with him. He'd seen the games I'd done on the PC before I started Gamer's Edge, and he wanted me to do shareware games for him at Apogee. So he was writing me all these letters under different names, and I had them all on my wall like they were fan mail.
One day I was reading a "PC Games" article about The Kingdom of Kroz, a series of PC text games Scott Miller had written. At the end of the article, there was an address given to contact Scott at Apogee. When I read that address, I knew I'd seen it somewhere previously. I looked over at my wall, and I realized that every letter on the wall came from that address and I'd never noticed it before. I was so mad! I realized that Scott was the mental guy who apparently had been trying to contact me. I wrote this super-mean letter to him, mainly, I think, because my pride was wounded because I had no fans, I just had a wacko trying to contact me. I gave him my direct phone number so he could call me at SoftDisk.
When he called, I told him how mad I was, and he didn't even care. He said, "I think the stuff you did is really cool, and I want you to do games for Apogee! You don't understand how much money there is in shareware!" I told him I wanted to send him some of the stuff we were working on at that time. He said, "No, no, that stuff you did before was really cool. Just do more of that and we can put it out, and we'll make tons of money."
I told him, "Dude, that stuff sucked! You need to see the stuff we're doing now. This has never been done before."
We sent him the Super Mario 3 demo, and he just couldn't believe it. I told him he needed to give us $2,000 up front to show us he was really serious. If he'd do that, I said we would do a game for him. He said, "Sure, no problem!"
Back then Scott only had $5,000 in his bank account, but he knew what he saw was "it." He took a big chance and sent the $2,000. When we got it we realized he was serious and we split the money among those of us who'd be working on the game, Tom, Adrian, John, and me.
Scott said that, since he'd given us that money, he at least needed to know what we were going to make. John Carmack came up with the idea of a kid of saving the universe, and Tom offered to write it up. Tom instantly created Commander Keen, and Scott said, "OK, go! Do it!"
It took us three months in our spare time while we still worked at SoftDisk to do the Keen stuff. We would even take our computers home from work on the weekends because we were so poor we had no computers of our own. We did the games in three months, and the entire trilogy came out on December 14, 1990.
We put it in shareware and it just exploded. We were getting one-third of the profit back then, and after the first month it was out, without any announcement or publicity, we got a royalty check for $10,500. We knew we didn't need to work at SoftDisk anymore, because that was enough money for four guys to live on. I felt bad about leaving SoftDisk since I'd started that whole division, but we just couldn't turn this down.
We told Al, SoftDisk's president, that we were going to leave. He wanted to try and find a way for us to continue working with him. He offered to start a division of SoftDisk outside the company that the four of us could own, but not as id Software. We were all ready to do it because it seemed like a cool plan. It was easier to go into something that already existed, because we just wanted to make games, not deal with business stuff.
The other editors at the company got wind of the plan and were very upset because we were being treated differently. They were all threatening to quit and Al just couldn't go through with it, so we told him we were going to leave. He started threatening to sue us, so we made a deal with him that we would supply the company with games until the internal team came up to speed with our game engine.
We started id Software on February 1, 1991, and for half a year our whole job was to continue programming games for SoftDisk until they got their team in place. After those six months, we got to start on the next Commander Keen project as id Software.
SC: What was id like in the days before Doom?
JR: We did our second set of Commander Keen games, but it didn't do really well because it wasn't sold as a trilogy. One game, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter, was released into retail by FormGen, and the other two were released into shareware. In the shareware market, people would only buy a product if there were three games, so sales suffered. However, Carmack had an idea for a really cool new 3-D technology that used texture mapping.
By the beginning of 1992, he started working on the Wolfenstein 3D engine. It took us six months to do Wolfenstein 3D. I wanted to do Wolfenstein 3D because we'd all played and loved the Apple II Castle Wolfenstein in our younger years. Everyone else agreed, so we started working on it. Tom designed it, and six months later it came out, on May 5, 1992, with no public announcement beforehand. When it came out, it did better than anything we'd ever seen. It was selling 4,000 copies a month just though mail order at $60 a pop. We were selling the game, the three-pack of Nocturnal Missions, and the hint book all together for $60.
We'd moved to Wisconsin at the end of 1991, and it was really miserable and cold there, so we decided to move somewhere hot. We moved down to Texas on April 1, 1992—the same day we hired Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud. We were still working on Wolfenstein 3D down in Texas, and it was nice and warm and everyone was happy. We released the game and we were doing interviews and all kinds of neat stuff. We were still in our first office in Dallas then, which was just a one-bedroom loft apartment at the La Prada Club apartments.
Tom and I used to play around with Robert's audio stuff and record lots of stuff on tape, just playing around and making all kinds of answering-machine messages, and that was really fun! The whole company took a vacation together to Disney World (on the Grand Plan) after Wolfenstein 3D was finished, and that was a blast. When we got back we had to do Spear of Destiny, which was our second obligation to FormGen. It took us two months, and we delivered it to FormGen on September 18, 1992. While we were working on Spear of Destiny, John was working on a "better than Wolfenstein"—type engine which Raven used for Shadowcaster. Then he started working on the Doom engine.
In January of 1993 we had a good sense of what the technology would be for the next game, so we put out a press release that month describing what Doom would be, including the background story. Tom had come up with lots of cool stuff. We said we were going to have multiplayer, among other things, so people were going nuts!
It was really fun working on Doom, coming up with all the ideas and getting new engine architecture. Tom left to go to Apogee because he just wasn't enthused about all the blood and guts and violence. He was into fun, colorful, character-based games like the Commander Keen stuff, and that's what he wanted to do. We hired Sandy Petersen in his place, who was a game designer for Microprose back then. He helped us design the rest of Doom, which came out on December 10, 1993.
SC: What made you want to leave id and start your own company?
JR: I decided to leave id because the design of Quake didn't turn out the way we originally wanted. The final game wasn't at all representative of the original design. It was going to be like a Virtua Fighter-type game, which would be in third-person side view for combat, and exploration in first-person for the rest of the game. The story line was much deeper than Quake's, which wasn't deep at all. It had lots of cool, evil stuff in it like sacrificial altars and power spheres. That design never happened. There was a rift in the company about how we should finish designing Quake.
We'd spent so much time creating the engine technology, and not enough time creating a game. It had been about a year since the game was started, and the engine was almost finished. We just didn't have enough of a game.
Half of the company wanted to do something more like Doom, just throw some first-person weapons in there and call it a game. Some others, and me, wanted to do the original design, something new. I mean, we had new technology, why not do a new game design, too?
I made the decision to go because to me it was a big problem that half the company wanted to do something new and the other half didn't. It wasn't the same place it had been. Too many people had a voice in changing the direction of the game. I was going to finish Quake, and then I was going to leave. That was in November of 1995. Then in January of '96 I started talking to Tom (then at 3D Realms working on Prey) about starting our own company again after Quake was finished. I left on August 6, 1996, and at that time Tom and I came up with the plan for Ion Storm, and were really looking forward to starting it.
