The Tools that Built Doom

The MADE celebrates 30 years of Doom! With audio from an interview with legendary game developer John Romero, we discuss the incredible confluence of technologies, ideas, and processes that enabled the development of this landmark computer game. From the NeXT Station to file shares and sculpted clay, we discover the magic and joy of computer gaming as an art form. This video is heavily inspired by Fabien Sanglard’s amazing research into Doom’s development process: Images in this video used with his permission. Go buy his book! Audio from this video comes from our podcast interview with John Romero here: Finally, while we didn’t use this as source material, we highly recommend folks pick up this book from John Romero (you can also find it at a Barnes & Noble and/or Amazon): Corrections: 2:40 Smooth 4-way side scrollers were also present earlier in non-PC computers with the same chip architecture as the NES (6502) but without the additional MMC hardware. However, consoles such as NES and Sega provided developers with more headroom to achieve their goals, as can be seen by the breadth and complexity of games on both systems that take advantage of richer colors and smooth 4-way motion. 2:50 One of the first DOS games to attempt *texture-mapped* 3D graphics. Examples of attempts at 3D graphics existed on DOS at the time (id’s Hovertank), but very few demonstrated texture mapping at that time (id’s Catacomb 3-D and Ultima Underworld were early exceptions to this). 4:45 Objective-C was chosen as the standard programming language for development within the NeXTSTEP operating system. It was originally developed outside of NeXTSTEP as a result of the influence of the object-oriented language “Smalltalk“.