Doom: The Love Child Of D&D And NeXT


We here at CrunchGear love John Carmack. His Quakeworld 2010 keynote remains one of our favorite no-nonsense tech talks, up there with the unveiling of the iPhone. So when he speaks, we listen with interest. Unfortunately, he wasn’t at GDC to talk about the origins of Doom, everyone’s favorite mom-shocking FPS from the early 90s. Fortunately, John Romero and Tom Hall were. Man, I wish I was there!

I’ve always been interested in the development of Doom and Quake, since those games were a serious cut above the competition at the time, and have aged extremely well. Some stuff is known about the incubation process of the game, but Romero and Hall today talked about how they digitized clay models on their NeXT Cube, played and replayed levels, and how they basically were inspired by (read: ripped off) D&D for a lot of their levels and monsters.

1up has more info on the panel, but I’m hoping a full transcript or video will be available later, this super-early game development stuff is really interesting to me.