Doom origin story | John Carmack and Lex Fridman
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • John Carmack: Doom, Qu...
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GUEST BIO:
John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR.
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I have listened to Carmack talk about various programming, coding and engineering things for about 30 years or so and it never gets old. He's such a fascinating individual to me.
that's hilarious. most people say that they _could_ listen to someone talk for an excessive amount of time and it wouldn't get old, but you already _did._
i hear you, i love carmack too.
same here amazing stuff
Same here. I love listening John Carmack. I feel smarter just listening to him. :D
He remembers every bit of his coding struggles from 30 years ago, and talks about it with the ease of an AI that can immediately tap into those memories like a book he has been obsessed about for the last couple weeks.
His memory his probably more file based
“Benevolent hyper intelligent architect of the post singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack” - Civvie 11
The only thing better than his Carmacks is his legendary Randy Rant:
"Thanks Randy, you barely-legal, squirty magic trick on a USB drive, in Medieval Times, profiteer off the backs of hardworking game-devs, not noticing ten-grand of your credit card, lying, low rent, party magician, Penn Jillette fellating, back-stabbing, mall-narcing, SEGA-cheating greasy bastard"
Yes yes yes yss
I understood everything he said while simultaneously understanding nothing he said.
Same
😅🤷♂️
That's called "überstunding" in a language I just made up.
I completely checked out 😹
I kinda feel same .
"I'm not a math wizard"
~John Carmack, Math Wizard
He didn't finish his sentence:
"I'm not a math wizard... I'm a 666th level High Priest of Mathematics"
Yeah he obviously is very knowledgeable and autodidactic; he said he wasn't past a math/trig/physics background in high school, but at least he remembered everything and was able to use it
It's hard to state the fundamental impact this man has had on the modern world.
it’s a great American contribution
Wow I didn't know id Software created Commander Keen. That game is associated with one of my favorite memories as a kid - when I was maybe 10 or 11 my mom dropped me off at a school friend's house. He asked me what I wanted to do and I asked if he had any video games, he said his brother had a computer with some games on it and he fired up Commander Keen. Played it for a bit then he said everyone was gonna go offroading on their property, I said no thanks gonna stay here and play the game instead. He shrugged and left and everyone in the house ended up going offroading except for me, so it was like Home Alone where I had this big house all to myself... and everyone ended up being gone for like 5 hours so I got really far in Commander Keen (but never beat it). Finally his mom reappeared in the house and said "You're still up here!?" To this day I'm glad that I chose playing Commander Keen alone in their big house instead of going offroading with my school friend who was never a real friend anyway. Now I just need to beat the game... and I will.
a binary space partition breaks the 2d shape that is the doom level, into a set of connected 2d convex shapes. then for each convex shape, whether you can see each other convex shape in the level is calculated and stored in the level file. So when in game, the game can just look at the list of shapes to know what it needs to render, instead of calculating that information anew every frame that the player moves. You get a bit of overrendering, but not much, and you save a lot of computation effort.
Thank you!!!
Thank you for finishing the thought that he abandoned for other thoughts that he also abandoned.
Lex always coming in clutch with redirecting Carmack and asking the questions I'm yelling at the screen.
When Lex asked "What were those Epsilon Problems?" I literally said 'Thank you' out loud lol
Now, can you explain it to me?
5:30 "And I wound up taking a break at that point...and I did two ports of our games..it was a crazy difficult thing to do, it was an even slower processor...so that was where I started using BSP trees.." First thought: his definition of "taking a break" is different from the rest of us and (2) that was some fortuitous break. (off to read about BSP trees...)
Thinking about this "good enough" approach: it's actually funny that most source ports just resolved those issues he mentioned where bridges were possible even in vanilla doom with some trickery and limitation (basically it's just that terrain that represents a bridge changes his height when you approach it from different angle). So, it's not always what you can create, sometimes it's also what people can do with it after, very inspiring.
I’ll never forget when doom came out my uncle was the only person I knew with a pc. He asked if I wanted to sleep over and check it out. It was so far beyond anything I saw at home before. Hell if was beyond what was in the arcade. Never forget that weekend.
I love this story... Reminds me of something similar in my childhood
The fact that I still play Doom (originals) to this day says a lot about what an amazing game it is. I played the shareware version back when it first came out and when I play it now (through GZ Doom with PSX music) it hasn't lost anything at all. It still draws me in until an hour will pass and I'm totally immersed in the game world.
If it wasnt for this man I would never have ever gotten into programming or game development if it wasnt for this man and his engine, me making levels during online class and learning c and c++ and starting game development I am basically forever grateful for him
Same except I never pursued it as a career and was only a hobby of sorts.
Wolfenstein. I remember begging my mom to buy me all 6 chapters for our PC back in the early 90s. Such a great game!
Those mutant levels tho...
It's such a throwback to hear all of these about such a legendary game 🐼
i had the honor of playing romero on doom 2. He loved using rockets. If anyone remembers any of the doom god.. i played against Noskill, Thresh, Chunkk many times, among others. good times
Hey. Were you pro? I remember Thresh and his dominance at Quake. Me and my bro used to play Q2CTF for BYC and I think we played against Thresh's team a few times and got destroyed
I played against most the Id developers, but Romero I remember specifically. I made him my bitch.
@@chrishoward3733 haha. i played romero in doom II map 7. he forbid me from using the bfg
The nostalgia. I was just a little fella sitting on my dad's lap watching him play THE shooter
I could listen to anyone talk about the technology behind Doom forever. Especially when it's coming straight from Carmack.
Those childhood memories playing DOOM!
Literally my first game, until now i'm basically a FPS player only...
So good
I played it for the first time a couple years ago (my childhood memories are of Wolfenstein 3D) in the most vanilla version possible, I couldn't believe how absolutely modern it is!
I still play Doom today ;) Pretty much only game I play those days. People can hate Brutal Doom all they want, but it caused the whole Doom renesaince IMHO.
I play vanilla with new wads mostly, but there are some cool mods out there or total conversions like incredible Ashes 2063!
@@podfukI've never heard of anyone hating BD?
I always appreciated the performance of id software games. Had some lower end hardware back in the day and pretty much could always play quake or doom.
I think one of their core philosophies with their shooters was speed. You look at all the games of the time back then, none of them were as fast gameplay or performance wise as ID games. I remember watching my dad play doom on the sega genesis for years. Finally I got old enough to play quake on a computer and I will never forget at how blown away I was on the speed of the game. Everything happens so fast. The game play even to this day is still pretty fast. And this just got carried on and on until today, where we have Doom Eternal. I think DE (i understand carmack didn't make it, but hugo weaving seems to understand the core philosophies very well) is one of the best FPS' ever. One of the only games to legitimately get my heart pumping and get me screaming at the top of my lungs from the split second reactions and actions. But it's all speed baby. Gotta go faste.
@@TheSickjits *Hugo Martin
Weaving is V/Elrond/Agent Smith :D
Luckily I had a well off friend in 93 who had a computer with doom. I was 7 and only had a Genesis with Sonic and Mortal Kombat. Seeing Doom at his house was surreal. Finally got PC in 2000 and even though it was an old game by this point I couldnt wait to play Doom.
In like 3rd grade in like '03, our teacher gave the class floppies to do PowerPoint presentations on (like that was never going to be dated when we got old enough to use it 😂), some kid put brutal doom on his floppy and passed it around class a few days later. We would play it when the teacher wasn't looking during computer lab. Needless to say she was not happy when she caught one of us playing it.. 😂😂😂
Even in '03 to a kid who had a PS2 at home with Vice City, something hits different with shooting demons with a BFG in doom. Then Doom 3 came out, and I was pissed because I didn't have a Xbox or a PC...
@@Clos93 Haha good stuff. Got a PS2 at launch. That also gives me some nostalgia. I was playing Vice City on my CRT drinking beer the other night. Still prefer old hardware and TV's. Plus it still has the full soundtrack. Take care.
@@stephenschenider4007 Vice City is the best
"It was a different world back then. There was a small integer number of books." Loving the nerd side of John 😆
**Lex chuckles** a small integer number... **John, completely serious** Yes.
Yep, I think we used Foley & Van Dam in our final year of undergraduate computer science, 1990. But even that didn't have a complete 3D engine. There were no books back then that did. You had to work it out yourself, standing on the shoulders of the giants that wrote these academic texts and papers. I was privileged to work with someone who wrote a 3D engine in 1993.
For anyone who is interested, check out Dread for the amiga, its a new doom clone being made to run on an Amiga 500. It is extremely impressive considering the limitations of the Amiga.
7:00 - Lot people seem to forget or not know about that (anecdote)... Much people get amazed by the final product and think things are unreachable...
Barely they know most things they claim to be "genius" was just a creativity from necessity which in some cases used simple tools... Appearance fools us!
It's very telling that to this day, levels and mods for Doom are still being made. There's literally thousands out there. I can't think of many other 25+ year old games with that sort of mod/map support
Can't believe John's 52nd birthday is a couple of weeks away.
He looks like he's in his 30's.
Looks extremely young for his age. His voice doesn't help ether. First I was like "did this guy code in his diapers".
@@jasonkillsformomy His voice is oddly soothing but also annoying lol... he constantly sounds like someone is pinching his nose while he speaks/like he needs to clear his throat.
@@0rnery0verwatch I didn't find him annoying, but I understand what you mean. To me his voice sounds more closer to a teenagers voice than a middle aged mans. I wonder how old he got until they stop asking him to verify his age at bars, liquor stores and so on.
Blonde/Red hair doesn't really grey.
I still think of Doom as one of the best examples of a game that came out and advanced the field by so much. So many games come out that are considered revolutionary, but are merely just like another game, but a bit better. The difference of all games before Doom, to Doom, is so immense that I can't think of any modern equivalent. And really only a handful over the last 30 years comes close.
I was lucky to have a 486x66 in 1993, so I was ready for it. But so many other PC game players were woefully lacking in hardware to make the game playable.
It wasn't just insane experience with mindblowing visuals, it also had multiplayer and COOP which most of the FPS games don't have even today! Mouse support too. Revolution in all aspects.
I remember playing deathmatch with my 2 cousins - every other game on the market including console ones felt like a history. Running around and seeing other people from your own perspective was ubelievable, truly a revolution.
A game that made Amiga, SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis suddenly feel obsolete and made this boring office PC computer a best gaming machine on the market that suddenly everybody wanted to have. It was running fine on 386, a bit slow but playable, good enough to make a huge impression. What other games would you consider a technical masterpiece of it's time?
Hey, John, i was the dude that made, Protonwar in VR, movement code is based off what you shared, mash of a bunch of things and ported to to c++, you c code,
I love these talks, do more :P
"I'm not really a math guy"
-Creator of the mathematic realization of 3D graphics John Carmack
He implementated the BSP math, he did'nt invent it, so in this respect he's correct.
He ported Wolf3D to SNES in order to learn what he needed, and then took what he learned to DOOM.
Pretty nice trick, getting paid to learn something that then paid off even moreso.
90s - 00s were the best.
What helps keep classic Doom alive is the modding Community as well with how easy it is to make your own maps with doom builder. Quake is great as well but it's a little bit more complicated to mod.
I was deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1995 and one of the computers in the power plant I ran had Doom on it and that was the only time I played it.
I have no idea what this man's talking about but it's still so compelling
John Carmack is my childhood hero and idol. I love him so much. He is a genius indeed.
Thank you for creating a masterpiece of my youth. Doom and times I spent playing expanded my mind and are core memories
I’m not into current video games but when I was like 8 in 1993, I hung out with this dork who had doom on his computer ,I still remember some of the cheat codes from like 30 years ago, IDKFA, IDDQD, and I think those made you invincible and unlimited ammo lol
You remember decently well
@@KaraokeNig am I off at all?
@@durawins No, i dont think so. . IDKFA stands for Keys, Full Ammo
@@KaraokeNig ahhh ok I wouldn’t mind playing some doom again for old times sake
@@durawins When you gonna have free time download it, it's everywhere like some kind of doom virus. Enjoy
I recall back then, when I too only had access to a small integer number of books. These days, even my to-read list is indexed with complex numbers.
I read Masters of Doom twice. Simply unputdownable...
Have a listen to the audio book. Just as great.
John Carmack is the most legendary game delevoper so far
I can't believe I was playing games as a kid that were designed by John Carmack, and all these years later Carmack somehow looks younger than I do.
I was thinking the same thing, guy has taken care of himself.
The Dominos-cheese-pizza-a-day diet works wonders!
The fact that he used high school math which may or may not involve some calculus is nothing short of impressive.
Unless of course he is being pathologically modest and taught himself linear algebra, graph theory, combinatorics etc. and just didn’t elaborate that he is self educated.
😂
Jk it is still incredibly impressive.
I think he learned what he had to in order to create, and possibly expanded on when more demanding games called for it
I played doom over dial up with my friend across town. It was a great time and mind blowing at the time.
print("hello world") the UA-cam algorithm: "here listen to John Carmack talk to Lex Fridman."
First computer game I ever played!! Awesome !
Mine was Keen 4! Love id
It sounds like Carmack's brilliant work with BSPs laid the foundation groundwork for modern LOD (Level of Detail) rendering in game engines today.
Dumbed down explanation for anyone not able to follow along.
In Wolf3d everything was a square because the whole world was on one plain like a sheet of graph paper. Doom had different plains and walls could be at angles other than 90 degrees so when you do the math calculated values are not whole counting numbers. 4/2 is 2 but 5/2 is 2.5 (floating point.) This math is a lot more complicated. Old computers actually had a Floating Point Unit that you could install after the fact. This was a big deal at the time.
In addition if you have walls drawing in front of other walls you can speed up the calculations by realizing that you don't have to draw a wall that exists in the field of view but is behind another wall. By realizing this it allowed things to run at a much faster speed because you don't have to draw everything. Just what can be seen by the player.
Hall of mirrors statement is cool, they had a cheat code back in the day which disabled clipping so you could fly through walls. If you went through a rat nest of walls you go into interstellar tesseract type stuff haha. My childhood man, Doom is why I do 3d.
I was just watching a 100% kill (Half-TAS) speedrun of the joke custom level "Nuts" yesterday that was just insane (It required something like 37,000 revenant homing missiles to follow the player to kill something like 800 cyberdemons due to lack of ammo on the map by runner god ZeroMaster) worth checking out on it's own, but was also watching "Runner" GrayFruit mess around and both brought back memories of when you would noclip and hit the boundary and the game would hiccup and the skybox would spaz out and "Smear" all over the screen. Don't think that's what you're referring to (I'm no programmer, just a 30+ year gamer) but I'm still finding interesting stuff 30 years later...DOOM was indeed quite an achievement...good times...
I would love for Carmack to speak with John Vervaeke. I heard a rhyme of "combinatorial explosion" in this clip. Man, I made so many levels for Doom 2. Loved stalling the engine by making entirely too complex structures for it to handle (blood fountains with like 16 tiers). Good times... good times.
WAD files were so awesome. I recall making my own maps in Win 3.1 with Doom Builder or something like that. I'd send the maps to my friends and we'd then play together in multiplayer.
It was a bit like Minecraft in that sense. If you set the damage of a gun to negative, and you shoot someone, their screen would go inverted in color -- I never understood that. I'm so glad that Carmack didn't decide to ASSERT negative health and just crash the game instead.
it makes me a bit sad that so few games since then provide such tooling so openly in the same way. Warcraft 3 had a map editor of course, which led to DoTA and Tower Defence genres existing.
Lex's accent makes this feel like an interrogation haha but its actually a super chill vibe
I remember playing Doom 3 in a dark room and it's scaring the hell out of me it was awesome
I was playing that game one bonfire night (November 5th) in the dark and some lil (censored) set off an air bomb outside my home as I was going through a door on one of the latter levels and I have to say that I was touching cloth! Not a good time I swear 😂😢😂
@@jaysparrow6631 that's hands down the cutest thing I've read all week
Was lucky enough to play Doom coop all the way through with a good friend using our US Robotics 57K modems. Unbelievably fun simpler times compared to today.
simpler except for the dial-up modem bit 😂
I remember the wad editor! My first introduction to game modding...and really cool to boot.
I build movie and tv sets, we shot a pilot called “masters of doom” which was an office style show about the creating of the game. It obviously didnt get picked up
Whenever I need some programming inspiration to work harder and learn more I just put on any talk by Carmack.
I remember 1st time seeing doom. I had played wolfenstein etc but doom was so atmospheric it blew us away. Remember kids we where playing text based games and isometric pixel 5.5" floppy games for days. Then win 3.1 doom doom 2. I just wish we hadnt got lost in the tech race, we need small indie game devs. We dont always need the best of best graphics and physics. We lost that in late 90s early 00s. We r slowly going back, but glad i lived it Carmack changed my life with keen and doom guy, yeah wasnt a slayer back then just doom guy
The games we play today are all thanks to this legend and the technology he created.
I like this guy, he's interviewing him exactly like I would, " ...so whatsthat thing about the... problem with "insert thing i remember mr. Carmack saying" "
We had doom and need for speed and the internet in 1994/95.. only one other friend had the internet and remember emailing him and thinking it was awesome..
I mean how the heck did he navigate a mental pathway to conceive an engine that could reliably process a world at high speed on such slow computers. And so much fun factor that dudes are STILL designing levels! DOOM will be analysed for centuries.
Still play it today!
7:04 everything that i did was really done with a solid high school math understanding
My first computer game was Oregon trail 😂
Same, my family drown in so many rivers man
My first was either Risk or Enchanted Scepters.
I wonder what Carmack would come up with if he returned to game programming.
He needs artistically creative people around him to make good games. Doom 3 was mainly just a tech demo
Thanks John and all the guys who worked at Id, Doom was amazing and it probably ruined by education but i had a lot of fun playing the game.
John Carmack is da man
Is that diet coke in that glass Mr. Carmack? I love and respect this man.
Carmack also invented backface culling.
(One sided polygons)
Making games run 80% faster because of it.
Came for the title ... left confused
I could listen to this guy talk about this stuff for 60hrs straight
You knew it was going to be good when the disk drive really had to work hard loading those 1.44 floppies.
Anybody remember Dwango? I racked up huge long distance phone bills because of that thing.. but then I also got to play against John Romero. That's when I met the "silent BFG". Good time.
Every Doom players should go watch the Ahoy retrospective. Best tribute so far.
I saw that and can only concur very well made DooM video.
Safe to say that I'm a huge gaming fan I actually wouldn't mind honest interviews of people that are streamlining the industry from augmented reality and virtual reality to the latest boundaries that are currently being pushed
Lol I was young when I rented Doom, had no idea what it was. It scared the fuck out of me I had to regroup to go back in.
Doom is fucking awesome.
Remember liking commander keen as a kid had no idea it was same creators as Doom.
Doom sold a LOT of sound cards. Before Doom, most of us were fine with the PC speaker. Quake did the same thing for graphics cards, mainly the 3dfx at the time.
Wait did i legitimately just find a flaw 9:30 in how Carmack failed to program Doom? He said you can't represent a rational number precisely. But of COURSE you can represent a rational number precisely; all you do is store the numerator, the denominator, and whether the number is negative in a struct
I bet he just didn't think of that because he didn't grow up learning Python and playing with the Fraction class
Wow, he has the quintessential abrasive nerd voice.
And jumps from one concept to another, without ever explaning to the audiance what any of it even means. Nerd power!
Dude is still almost as stoked as me about Doom!!! 🔥🤣🙏💃🏻🤘 Still such a rad game. Nothing like it.
Would be kool to take today's most graphically advanced game, go back in time and show him.
He could most likely have predicted it but his questions would have been fascinating
what an interesting an idea
1:15 SUS
what about ROTT ?
The only time I could play this game was when I was in school at computer class The teacher would let everyone play that wanted to Not many of us had computers at home to think the game was even on a school computer
You can be happy and accomplished and then you can be John Carmack. For the man who open the doors of virtual hell, he looks full of light and good.
Please get Romero now to talk about level design!
Happy birthday carmack.
I would like to know who is the author of Doom's story...
This guy is so smart that I can actually feel myself getting more stupid the more I listen to him.
LMFAO same brother
Then I'm not alone 😀
But yet I keep listening
‘Twas the early 90s-an age of doom and nirvana
Please interview John Romero next
I had a beta version of Doom in ‘93 out of Greeley Colorado, before the game was ever released. 👍🏻
No COD without Doom and Wolfenstein kids
So, Descent was the first 3D game?
Those are some cool insights, nowadays that game can run on even some calculators. This sounds way above my head but thanks for sharing!
Did i hear him say flux capacitor?
John, somewhat, cuts to the chase at 6:15