John Romero and John Carmack joined forces to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the game that revolutionized the FPS genre.

Romero and Carmack are two of the co-founders of id Software, and their conversation was moderated by David Craddock (best known for The FPS Documentary and Long Live Mortal Kombat). He and the chat also asked the duo a few questions. Both were happy to participate in the conversation, but were very self-critical about their work. Carmack would have liked to see more spectacular, and probably technically riskier, graphical effects in the game’s engine, and feels that the more grounded, military sci-fi style of the first episode has held up much better over the years than the visuals of the later, more hellish episodes.

Romero said that technically DOOM was a good transition between their earlier games and Quake. The latter had already gone to full 3D acceleration, which made development much more complex and limited the number of enemies on screen at any one time, but he was happy that they were able to create more complex maps than Wolfenstein 3D, as he said that map design in Wolfenstein must have been one of the most boring jobs of all. The two also recalled the technical limitations. Although Carmack thought they could have sold DOOM in a brown paper bag, he was glad they didn’t because the game had an iconic box image and good marketing. Both were happy with the big box PC games and extras (maps on canvas, for example) that were still common in the ’90s.

Romero explained that it was not long before DOOM’s release that he got the multiplayer element working: “I went into my office – I was making E1M7 at the time – and I look out the window and I see two characters fighting, rockets going off at a high window, and somebody’s shooting plasma at the other guy. And I’m like, this is going to be the coolest fucking game the planet’s ever seen, I can’t wait to play this. I want to thank everybody in the Doom community for keeping this game alive. And really, thank you all for playing our games. Carmack was also grateful: “I’ve said before that I’m not a very sentimental person, that I don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing about the good old days, but they were really quite good. I’m very proud of the things that we built back then and that they have this legacy that has lasted to this day.

Speaking of DOOM, Romero has a new megawad release, Sigil II, available for free download.

Source: PCGamer