The Early Days of id Software
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2016
- 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.
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Thank you for this. Such a fan of old ID.
- "How would you do Doom 4?"
- "I wouldn't"
fuck yeah
Coincidentally doom4 is the best ID game since quake1.
brummii agreed, but that's not saying much tbh
That's a negative. New DOOM "4" is rehashed DOOM 3 with ripped game-play features from indie modders like SGTMarkIV.
I don't see how it is a rehashed of Doom3...
And for the gameplay, it'sd more a Painkiller game than a brutal Doom. Glory kills does not equal Brutal Doom... if you take a look at the video made by NOCLIP on Doom 4 development, glory kills where here since the early alphas, before Brutal Doom was ever realeased.
Quake 2 was not a good game at all. Have you ever played Q2 ? The engine is a good but after the first hub, levels are only brown corridors after corridors. The elvel design is horendous.
And Quake 3 ? Don't you remember that game ? It is still one of the best multiplayer fps ever made.
Doom 3 is not a masterpiece but it is still a good game, far better than Quake 2.
Rage is good if you strip a third of the game. It is a waste, an unfinished product, but it's still far more entertaining than Quake 2.
So yeah... What the fuck... Quake 2 ? Realy ? Quake 1 is far more superior than Quake 2, even on the aestetic.
"They had a John, a Carmack, and a John Carmack."
Did he actually say this in the video?
Al1987ac A yes
@@Al1987ac this is a reference to the "all your history are belong to us" video series on iD software. It uses to be a big series for machinima on UA-cam and it was one of the first video Chronicles of game history
It’s funny the people that John Carmack decided to work with
key points:
You need a small team that has the following attributes:
1. Everyone is a well experienced game developer (A lot of people forget that Carmack got his first game published in 1989 and Romero a few years before that)
2. Everyone understands each other
3. Super passionate
4. Young and without a family
Romero actually had a wife and kids very early
@@DOSRetroGamer His wife, new born, and one year old son left him before he had been married two years. Raising a family doesn't consume all of your time when you're not raising your family. One CANNOT commit 90+ hours a week developing and ALSO 90+ hours a week taking care of your kids.
@@ARCSYS4049 so he probably used his work to distract from personal problems, right
@@DOSRetroGamer he actually divorced because chose game dev path.
The basic points that you need if you want to start a rock band, enterprise or whatever and success. Passionate people with ideas and good chemistry
I love how he explains it so clearly when he talks about programming. He's proud of his work but feels no need to show how smart he is by bamboozling us.
"polish as you go. dont depend on polish happening later" can they just staple that to every major game company, like ubisoft, or EA
Blizzard is starting to join those two with the help of activision....
Hey it works. Looks how well their games sell despite how many bugs there are on release
@@RemoteSynergy Diminishing returns. We're seeing that with the Battlefield franchise. Yeah it worked in the short term, but now people have caught on. They're driving franchises into the ground because consumer awareness of how many glitches are slipping in is too high.
Bethesda
Not only game companies
Brilliant! Locked in a room listening to metal, coding for 16 hours a day and sleeping 8, no facebook, twitter.
Lessons to be learnt there :)
Yeah, not forgetting to paint your nails just like Mr Romero!
Only history lessons. We do have APIs now, we do have oodles of ways to stay connected to family. Nice how you forgot he mentioned burn-out being a thing. Also, you should go protect your lawn, I hear the uppity kids were thinking of loitering upon your precious precious lawn.
@@DeepPastry Why so defensive? His comment was completely in line. People DO spend far too much time on facebook, twitter, and on other social media, and you know damn well that Facebook has become more than just a way to connect with your family. Hell, i'm a victim of it too, I can't take a dump without bringing my phone with me. I constantly feel like I need to be stimulated and it's clearly an unhealthy way of life. I know it pains you to hear your father bitch and moan about things that you think he's completely out of touch with, but maybe there's some merit to what he's saying even if it hurts you to admit it.
@@Siraj75 he has his many concubines paint his nails for him lol. Jk i think hes married
@@DeepPastry lol you would think this was one of the people sitting in the crowd silent as a churchmouse, but you do have a point with the burnout, but people were more connected emotionally just 25 years ago.
Me: "How did you manage to crunch so many games out so quickly back when there were no game engines at all?"
JR: "We were batshit crazy ppl with ideas, knowledge and time."
Me "That explains it." :D
Lol fuxk yeah bro
Simple. They did nothing but work on their games. Total dedication and relentless work ethic.
Id software was an inspiration for millions of programmers back then, one man can change the history
Tough crowd.
I noticed that through the entire talk. I was actually cracking up a bit, but the harsh silence from the crowd made John seem like he was being cringey even when he wasn't. Then again, though, I love listening to this stuff.
Yeah not a great crowd, made it seem as if nobody even wanted to be there. Loved the talk myself, spent so much of my childhood playing id's games and always been interested in getting into game development so I could listen to this dude waffle on forever.
maybe we're getting mostly direct microphone input
I think this conference took place in Germany, and maybe they didn't catch the subtle humor because English isn't their first language.
I know right, what the hell? The art and photos from the 80s and 90s were ridiculous and the jokes as well, oh man. "Does anyone remember Heretic?" I was expecting applause and whistling. John Romero is a legend and deserved so much more than this reception.
"It was called TED for Tile EDitor...", I fucking lost it haha.
Yep, I remember typing games in from magazines. When you didn't have the Internet, and no one near you had something, you would type it in (or take turns typing it in). It was a great way to learn.
These guys are geniuses & they will always be remembered for their work.
John Romero and John Carmack are one hundred percent certified geniuses indeed.
I think I've listened to John give this talk many times at many different events. Still never gets old.
I'm 28 and I've lived my entire life in northern Wisconsin, and it's hilarious to hear that John and the team spent ONE winter here, and then decided "fuck this" and moved somewhere warmer haha. But I suppose when you're from the south, having to deal with seven months of winter where the temperature frequently dips to 30-40 below farenheit is probably a huge shock
I dont know how you'd get things done in the cold, man. I'd be just in bed and sedentary all day, not wanting to work. ID guys prob thought same.
@Poole I feel like we appreciate summer more because of our brutal winters
@@alsat8931 that's what heaters were invented for
What an awesome throwback and presentation, even though I'm not into programming anymore. Great stuff by John.
sleep for 8 hours and use the rest of the time coding while listening to heavy metal... sounds like an awesome job :-)
You can do that today too. Hell.. I would say it's even easier today than it was when they did it. They were pioneers and laid groundworks for any of us today to comfortably live a dream they had to "suffer" for. Just need a kind of drive like they had and a good game idea.
Smart man. Useful presentation.
Yeah, the presentation was top notch.
Wow, that's a tough crowd.
You know what you are for us gamer Worldwide a Gameproducer Legend
I play All the games From ID Software
Doom,Wolfenstein,Commander Keen Quake in the 90's, it was all for free or Shareware
Young guys dont know what shareware so long time its going on and i want too say thank you too you and your ID Team
I made it a point to save screenshots of all the design principle slides as reminders in case I get into programming; my dream used to be wanting to make video games and it slipped away when college didn't work out. I'd like to reclaim that dream someday.
Kmkimjhjbjn in m bj
Un bon
It was nice to see the lake house after reading about it back in the day, legendary.
Thanks John. So many GREAT memories from id shooters and DOOM II is still my all time favorite FPS. Hell my first pc in 1994 came with DOOM shareware. I was in love.
Lots of interesting factoids that weren't in Masters of Doom (highly recommended read). Appreciate the upload!
Best attitude in id Software. I am doing some art work and level designing and I have to say those alone eats my brains out, much stressful work for me. Even after this much technological improvements. And imagine making games by doing every single work by yourself like doing the work of an API, creating game engines, tools etc. Besides art work. Now I am just wanting to know more about how games were made back in the 80s and 90s. As well as keep making game levels.
Solid advice. Just the other day I caught myself trying to add a TODO and move on but I have learned TODOs tend to stay around for a long long time. It's better to take care of what is needed when it is needed before moving on.
I only use TODO comments when I need to build some other feature first. So it's basically there as a sign post when I'm done with that other feature and can complete the code.
He's glad no one had asked him about Daikatana. Amazing talk by the way!
Happy as well that the audience knows that its an uncomfortable topic
In another talk, someone asked him why Daikatana failed. John: "It was no good of a game!" xD He's great.
These guys were superstars!
Amazing video, i enjoyed throughly, thank you!
Love those old side-scrollers.
Love these talks. They inspire me to get into coding and game development
John Ramero and the ID team were a huge influence for me back in the day, and still today. I became who I am today because of these guys.
Who are you?
He’s Kynan Milo obviously
It’s kinda funny he makes modern rendering sound easier because of APIs, but I’d say there’s way more of a barrier to just putting a pixel on the screen in modern operating systems. I think that’s a big part of the reason everyone just uses engines and graphics libraries.
I remember being at a friends house when he fired up Hexen or Hexen II (been a while lol) on his 3DFX voodoo 4mb equipped pc...
When I saw the graphics... my jaw literally dropped. Back in a day where 3D graphics were blocky and pixelated (like the original playstation) Here is a game that has ZERO pixels showing with everything nice and smooth! Needless to say... been a PC gamer ever since that day... & had my shares of all night Quake / Quake II lan parties :D
Advection. Hexen 2 looked amazing on the Voodoo graphics card. The first Hexen used the Doom engine.
There is a need to remaster the sound by removing the humming nose at the background. But other then this it was an informative talk by Romero.
Commander Keen is the game of my childhood.
Even after working in the industry for several years, I still have difficulties calling myself a programmer. With guys like Romero and Carmack, who made awesome stuff without even something (which we call low-level nowadays Q_Q) like opengl or dx.
Might just call myself 'ScriptKiddie extraordinaire' on my cv.
Like he said they were pushing the envelope of technology in their time, obsessing over smooth scrolling pixels today would be like putting wooden wheels on cars again... makes no damn sense.
If you want to be like them then push the envelope of technology today.
FOUR MONTHS? For Wolfenstein 3-D? Awesome.
Alexis Wilmot Porter 4 months @ 16 hour days
Those guys worked hardcore back then when they had smaller teams and a much less mature industry.
5:33 what is the game on the top right? This was my first game ever, right before I played Commander Keen 1.
According to google thats the adventures of captain comic.
Pro tip for the future. If you see a game you dont know the name of, press WIN + SHIFT + S, save that screenshot, then reverse image search in google.
A lot of User Experience on the game creation process 🙌🏽
His principles of how to develop bring echoes of both XP (like incremental developing, TDD, etc.) and a bit of Charles Moore's philosophy (throwing away the code and make it again specifically for the problem).
Only with C instead of Smalltalk/Forth. And focused on rushing games instead of producing quality utility software, I guess.
I remember the PC port of GODS was unbelievable for back in the time.. These PC things that were designed for spreadsheets and word processors, might actually be a viable gaming platform with these newfangled things called VGA cards and Soundblaster cards! I actually get Apogee games confused with ID software.. come to find they are two totally unique companies
Yea! In the 90's, they were like the two top dogs! Everyone was playing games made by either of the two companies!
The made Doom and Wolfenstein in my hometown Mesquite, Texas!
What's that game on the top right at 5:30 ? Remember loving it but no recollection of what it is :P
Adventures of captain comic.
For future questions like that, i suggest you WIN + SHIFT + S, save the screenshot, and paste that into google reverse image search
41:58 Quake walkaway in 91 and started designing in 95
39:19 tips for new programmers 40:22
Great talk and advice, thanks Romero :)
How to flex for 56 minutes straight
John Romero Rock !!
I want to play all these games he made.
Can someone explain about the smooth scrolling? Why wasn't it possible? What did they do to fix it?
IIRC the computers weren't powerful enough to redraw the whole frame every 1/60 of a second, so John Carmack came up with a trick where it would only redraw the parts of the frame that were necessary to give the impression of movement.
The trick is called interpolation ;-) He didn't invent the idea.. but he did come up with a way to implement it in the game... which is no small feat
Advection357 but if Mario did it first, why is carmack credited with pioneering it?
@Cheappy V Carmack was the first to do it on PC which required a different technique.
Bear in mind, the NES was a machine dedicated to playing games. All of its hardware was designed and built exclusively for gaming. The PC was a tool that was designed primarily for office work.
The reason Mario could scroll pixel by pixel was because it had hardware explicitly designed to do exactly that. In the system's memory, there was actually a table of map data that was actually twice as big as the screen itself, and when it drew the background on the screen it would simply draw horizontal lines from this table from arbitrary positions. However, when it updated this table it had to make these changes in 8x8 pixel chunks, just the same as a PC game would. But because it had a table size that was double the size of the screen, it could always make sure those changes were off-screen.
But to make all of that possible (and still be cheap enough to sell to most consumers) the NES was constricted to one table of 256 8x8 tiles for the background (thus it is not storing two full-screen images in its memory, but an array of single bytes.) So if your NES game wanted to have a full set of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and some basic punctuation, that would take up almost half of your tile data just for that. Restrictions like that wouldn't cut it for a business computer.
So many reports about Romero focus on his Daikatana/Ion Storm boondoggle. I'm glad that it wasn't discussed here. He seems surprisingly charismatic and approachable. I had thought that his design work was his claim to fame but clearly he has serious programming chops as well. Good video.
he is a really nice and smart guy
A concept where they give you an ENTIRE working game for free and hope that you will buy the subsequent extra levels once you are done playing it. unheard of today!
not a fair comparison. Games today are built by hundreds over years vs 10 guys in a few months back then. It costs way more today than it did then
8:50 Is he just going to gloss over that Les Paul chillin' on the couch?
My thoughts exactly!
Thank you, Icon of Sin.
Wait, I'm confused. He said that the reason they were able to pop games out so quickly during the Commander Keen days was because they reused their engine. But at 20:25 he basically says to make new code for each game. Is the exception if you don't plan on the game having sequels?
Edit: Oh, looks like someone else had the same exact question at 33:00 haha.
Commander Keen games are all Commander Keen games. They just released different episodes. It is the same damned game though. They just charged for it again. Well, what id did is they introduced the concept of data being the game.
The same engine but they had to make new levels
18:58 As a programmer, this cliffhanger is really urking me.
Since it was implied the anomaly occurred after the game was running for many hours, perhaps a time-related variable wrapped around. (For instance, at a 1Hz tick rate, an unsigned 16-bit variable would wrap after 18 hours; or signed 16-bit variable after 9 hours.)
Game clock reached max integer.
He solved it by resetting the value once high enough.
this is talked about in other videos. IIRC it was some overflow error with a timer.
So many great practices!
So smart man.
This presentation and questions had to fit within an hour, so unfortunately there are lots of anecdotes and small details about the early days at id that had to be dropped. For example, they were asked to make Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES so they hired a guy to do it, but he vanished mysteriously, so they had to stop work on Doom in order to finish the W3D port. For another example, Doom was originally an Aliens game, but they found out how much Fox wanted in royalties, so they decided to do something original. Hexen being a hub game was almost penitence for getting rid of the hub system for the original Doom.
I'll always remember how id's games changed my life, even more than other milestones in video gaming like Pac-Man or Super Mario.
It would be great if modern DOOM had John Carmack in the Comander Keen Outfit as an Unlockable Character in the Game that would be cool.
21 yo, 76 games, and 3 companies.
Fuck my life.
Ah - Europe. That must be why they are so quiet.
fun fact: Wolfenstein and DOOM share code, John Carmacks random number table. Both of which (since they're the same) are actually not correctly random at all and it affects ingame weapon hit RNG. But it actually proves his point more, in a way, because the flaw in one game was brought over to the next.
Mike Acton has a different but similar philosophy. He abhors "generic code" and is proven right with dozens of AAA shipped titles on notoriously difficult-to-program consoles (like the Playstation Cell CPU). People are taught in school to "abstract" everything to make it for the most general possible theoretical future case and it makes everything slow and terrible. The code should reflect what you're trying to accomplish NOW, and reflect the most COMMON case, not the most general what-if case. Make your engine for the game you want now, not every game you may ever make. Keen 1-3 were very similar and played identically, so they shared an engine. But there's no way they'd know what they were going to do with Keen 4+ when they just started Keen 1. So they didn't worry about that. Any decisions you make now may be thrown out in the future when you learn more about your artform. Just make sure the current game you're making is cleanly written for its own specific purpose.
Incredible hair.
maybe he's born with it. maybe it's maybelline
Write a new engine for the new game? Ahh, yes, the exact opposite of the Bethesda approach.
The Bethesda approach: Reuse the engine, don't fix any old bugs despite them being known and fixed by the community for years.
Three commander keen games in three months? Awesome. I remember the first Duke Nukem game, even if the senile audience don't - even Dangerous Dave. In those days, the first thing you did at any friend's house was: a) have you got a PC, b) let me use it, c) dir c: /p to see what games were on the hard drive. More than likely at least one ID software game was there - otherwise, the friend would likely be "unfriended".
They did the Jaguar port of Doom themselves...did they not realize that all the game's music tracks only played during the intermissions?
maybe they had to cut it because of space dunno
48:30 Fun to see that not even Romero realizes Doom 2016 takes place after Doom 2 (actually Doom 64).
Because it doesn't.
Yours sincerely,
Somebody who has completed Doom 2016 six times and read every single codex entry back to front.
@@novaseer how's it like being a dipshit after doom eternal proved yo dumb ass wrond
@@kuzregoistgold2544 I wouldn't know, but question to you: how's it like being a dipshit and saying somebody's wrong when it wasn't wrong at the time they said it? You could've just said "erm, not quite right now" and left it at that but no, you had to be a twat about it.
Take notes Bethesda!!! 20:18
Wolfentein 3d was the first real great game. Worked on the earliest PC computers.
Doom was so much greater. And was a game changer. Doom II was and upgraded version and was also great.
Easy of game play.
Heretic, Hexen and Quake were also great but more complicated. Which is why I love Doom overall. Ease of play.
I also have the first episode of Doom as my ringtone on my phone.
Love it.
Even the new Wolfinstien and new Doom, even though graphics look better, doesn't make it better than the original.
>Is that David Foster Wallace?
My older brother, passing by as I watched this
best comment xD
though not related to the content, I lost it ahaha!
What did you answer?
these guys are legendary!
15:36 "We are our own best testing team and should never allow anyone else to experience bugs or see the game crash."
*cough *cough Daikatana. Joking. As bad as it was, Daikatana did not once crash in my playthrough. Infamous Digital Homicide could learn a thing or two about bugs and coding from this video.
Digital Homicide can suck a fat one and take a long walk of a short pier....they'd need 10 lifetimes to learn even 5% of what Romero knows LMAO all of the Steam asset flippers are the same....no talent bottom feeders....ugh
I got no respect for that crap, Romero might have frakked up with Diakatana but I still think he's the real deal...the diakatana advert though was actually all marketing and not Romero himself, he said a few times he'd never say that or use that terminology....
I remember Catacombs; a nice doom-style shooter. Really fun game.
Never played it, but I remember the title
Times back then were so different. Good programmers were more rare though because without the internet learning things was so much harder. All the tools and systems so much less mature and slower.
Frankly most of his "principles" are batshit insane. I guess they'd make sense for super-geniuses in the 90's but mere mortals should probably prototype and get some testers.
Scumm was before the id engine right? So it wasn't the first cross platform engine...
cool. and some good questions.
had all those games Doom still rules.
I don't see any new "Carmack" or "Romero" in the audience.
You have the best possible host out there (as John Carmack is consumed by tech aspect too much). You have a room full of people that want to develop games ...... and almost noone have a question. And if he does, it's not about game design ... something John Romero is best at .... why ask about prototyping? If you need it, do it, if you don't, then don't.
El Shuwix because Romero hasn't made a decent game in at least 20 years. But he's a good speaker
I remember that Pentium bug... wow...
F00F
Who knew Nathan Explosion got his start in game development???
47:10 !
Fuck yeah, I downloaded all the Shareware versions of those games. Bulletin Board Systems -- woot! I didn't even know the word internet yet, but I was just a dumb kid. I loved all those old games. They were mindblowing at the time though. Before that I had a commodore 64 and a vic 20 -- anyone remember Pirates Cove? Daaaaaaamn, before anyone gave a crap about games. I didn't know anyone that had a computer until 1995 and then everyone suddenly had one. I remember a buddy of mine invited me over to help him with Myst because no one could figure out what the hell it was all about. When I was solving puzzles they thought I was a damn wizard, his whole family crowded around me like we were D&D dungeoneers. That old time gamer feeling was good.
43:50...Blake Stone?
Half Life perhaps? But BS came to my mind too, but was John apart of making BS though? Even though it is run on the Wolf 3D engine
Great talk and really interesting, particularly for us old farts who were around since day one. The only mistake he makes is saying there was no online then when there was. As a co-sysop for a BBS I can attest to that. BITNET was around in the early 80s and FIDONET came right on its heels. It wasn't fast, it wasn't sexy, but it was online and it was networked dammit! :} And who could forget all those wicked BBS Door Games like LORD, BRE, et al. And MUDs, I was MUDding online back in the late 80s on a 286 with a 2400 baud modem! If that's not real geek cred I don't know what is.
I remember messing around with BBS's shortly before getting an internet subscription... was in 94" I think hah.. I had a 14.4 baud modem on an amd 386 DX 40mhz with 2mb ram, 256kbyte video card and an 80mb hard drive :P But you definitely beat me with the geek cred score lol
some of use do remember gopher, veronica and archie. So yeah, i'm old. :)
It was different, there was no distracting stuff like FB or Twitter.
Hydra
I believe what he said was there was no Internet like there is today. He was spot on with that assessment too. As your comment makes abundantly clear. The Internet with a capitol I is a lot different than all of those precursor networks were. Even the Internet in 1995 was but a pale shadow of what it is today.
They don't program like that any more now it takes a massive team all making different parts similar to how a movie is made using tools to then cross compile the game for different platforms
6:37 "Commander Keen pioneered the creation of game engines"
I assume he meant pioneered within ID software? Game engines existed way before Commander Keen; Sierra's AGI engine in 1984 (Kings Quest, Larry, Space Quest etc), the SCUMM engine (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Loom) and Freescape engine (Driller, Castle Master) both introduced in 1987. Possibly some more obscure ones I haven't heard of.
i think he meant the creation of engines that could be licensed to other developers. that wasn't done so much if at all.
LOL !!!!!!!!!!!
@@PsycosisIncarnated Nerd frenzy - lol. Should be a game, right? Inhalers... pocket protectors... robust comments history...
@@alexisp696 cracked me up
So wtf happened with Daikatana
"I waded through - with water snakes in Louisiana"... Did he forget about the existence of modern dinosauric water beasts called "alligators"???
John Carmack and Adrian Carmack are not related? I have heard so often they were brothers, lol.
u heard wrong
@@DeathAtYourDoorStep Really blew my mind.
What a legend!
How did he and John carmack fall out?
@@SufferDYT I've heard Romero was spending a lot of time playing deathmatch when he was supposed to be working, to the extent Carmack allegedly wrote a program to log how much time Romero was spending on different things on his computer.
Then he was talking to Tom Hall about starting Ion Storm while still working at Id and already being on bad terms with Carmack. Romero and Hall had aspirations for more story focused, ambitious games which went against the gameplay first approach of Id. Romero's vision conflicted with Carmack's and he wasn't happy with it, they weren't happy with how he was acting. Eventually they fired him.
Daikatana was the embodiement of what Romero wanted. A game that was story heavy and ambitious for the time. But it also showed why Id didn't let him do such things because his ambitious ideas were nothing special by the time they actually hit the market. Romero's vision just took too much time to achieve and the end product suffered for it exactly as he was repeatedly told at Id.
Too busy playing games to keep his own fresh. Diakatana was in development the entire history of the half life franchise.
Hey, I had a computer in my house in 1979. :)
You must be old....
Was it an Apple II?
In fact it was a TRS-80. :)
Not older than John. :)
feldhamer 47?
Nolan Bushnell... Time for HIS AWARD!!!!!!!!!
damn! homeboy is from my hometown!!!
Cmon Romero. If anyone from id programed for the usa military, everyone knows it would of been Carmack
Wth happened with Daikatana... he seems to be extremely nice and smart guy!
Things happen - they switched engines a few times, there was a cascade of development problems and sometimes not every idea a game developer puts together is a winner.
Possible, but even today there's a larger base for Doom and Quake modding than Daikatana. It's very possible that, in an attempt to innovate, John and his team broke what had made Quake work.
But it's always hard to tell exactly what had gone wrong.
Long story short: Romero is a great Game Designer, but he couldn't run a company for shit.
In case you mean the whole "John Romer's about to make you his bitch" thing, I think that he once stated that that was a decision made by the PR and marketing department, not his own.
Manulel
That ad was definitely a huge factor. However, he also made very poor business decisions when running Ion Storm as well. But you're right, the ad was not his idea and he always hated it.
John Romero sounds like Butthead when laughing - uh-huh-huh. Could it be that Mike Judge... oh, nevermind! Other than that, he is a true legend of our youth. He coded from 8 am to 2 am, we kind of did the same playing the same amount of time...
Don't let Romeo fool you, he spent most of that time playing deathmatches, too. Ion Storm didn't just found itself.