Review: John Romero’s Definitive History of Wolfenstein 3-D, DOOM, and Quake

I recently finished reading John Romero’s autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, and want to make sure this book is on your radar. Yes, the story of Id Software, whose co-founders pioneered the still-dominant 3D first-person shooter video game genre, has been told before. And it’s even been told well, with Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture being the obvious example. But Romero’s version of this history is definitive, not just because he actually experienced it, but because he has hyperthymesia, a condition that allows him to clearly remember nearly every detail of his life.

Helping matters, Romero is brutally honest about himself and the mistakes he’s made. And while it is easy, too easy, to reduce his post-Id career as a series of failures and a steady fading from the spotlight, that version of events also doesn’t track with what really happened. And so I found this book to be a fascinating refashioning of the history I thought I already knew with the additional bonus of learning what happened since then and how he’s grown as a result.

Here, I’m going to focus on the Id Software content from the book, though this is a topic that will inevitably come up later in this series due to its importance. Many are familiar with the fact that Romero co-founded Id with programming legend John Carmack, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian (no relation) Carmack in 1991, and that this small company essentially invented what we now call the 3D first-person shooter (FPS). But as is always the case, there is so much more to it than that. Especially in Romero’s case.

John Romero’s role at Id is often reduced to that of a game level designer, but he was an accomplished developer in his own right who immediately connected with John Carmack on a technical level that few others understood. Self-taught, Romero got his start on an Apple II and moved quickly between different programming languages, a skill that impressively continued throughout his life. He was also a prolific, independent game maker who entered the scene much earlier than you might expect: his first published game, called Scout Search, appeared in the June 1984 issue of InCider Magazine, and he went on to write dozens of published games for the Apple II.

Romero was also unique in his ability to move between platforms, and I suspect his hyperthymesia helped him do such things as memorize 6502 processor opcodes and other Apple II internals, knowledge that landed him his first job, at Origin in 1987, where he was tasked with porting Apple games to the Commodore 64 (which used the same 6502 chipset). This skill likewise helped him when he finally learned and then mastered PC assembly language programming after moving to Softdisk in 1989. There, he hired John Carmack after convincing the company, which had a successful monthly disk-by-subscription offering, to branch out into games: Carmack, though normally a loner, was instantly attracted to the idea of working with someone with the same technical expertise and interests.

Carmack’s genius led to technical breakthroughs previously thought impossible on the PC platform. First, smooth 2D side-scrolling and then, even more impressively, 2D side-scrolling with parallax effects where different parts of the background move at different speeds than the foreground, creating the illusion of depth. But it was Romero who seized on the business opportunities of these breakthroughs, first by sending a demo of Carmack’s PC version of Super Mario Bros. 3 to Nintendo in the hopes of being contracted to make the port (Nintendo was not interested).

And when Apogee’s Scott Miller came calling, offering Romero an interesting opportunity in the newly emerging market for shareware games, Romero pounced on the idea with Carmack and two other Softdisk employees, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack. And the resulting 2D side-scrolling game series, Commander Keen, proved so popular that they left and co-founded Id Software. Keen, of course, was based on the techniques they had previously developed for the Nintendo port that never was, and that they had used at Softdisk for games like the Dangerous Dave series.

During Id’s 2D era, Romero and Carmack divvied up the programming duties, with Carmack focused on what we now call core engine work and Romero working on additional programming, game design, and level editors and other tools. For example, his Tile EDitor (TED) was used to create the levels for Dangerous Dave and then the Keen games, and it was refined over time. He also created a MUSE (MUsic Sound Editor) tool and IGRAB, a utility for fitting games on a single floppy, early on.

With the success of Keen, Romero realized that its core engine could be used to make other games, and as the company’s de-facto business guy at the time, he suggested that they license it to other game makers, and then orchestrated a live coding event in front of potential licensees in which he and the three other co-founders created a Pac-Man clone in front of a live audience in less than two hours.

This amazing feat resulted in just a single license sold, to Jim Norwood, who used the engine to create Bio Menace. But it was a learning experience, as the team realized that one could license the engine once, get the source code, and then never pay Id again. And so Id would figure out a way to license future game engines without giving away the source code.

From there, Id moved to 3D games, starting with Hovertank One and Catacomb 3D. But while Carmack was innovating with the technology, Romero was busy trying to drum up new business in addition to his normal work. Among the key relationships he made was with Raven, a company he first approached in 1991 to license the Keen engine. That ended up not working out, but Raven later licensed the DOOM engine and created Heretic and then Hexen, both classics, the latter of which brought in some necessary income when Carmack was bogged down creating the real 3D engine for Quake.

It was Romero who recommended that Id make the classic Apple II Castle Wolfenstein games in 3D using Carmack’s rapidly evolving 3D skills. (The name, Wolfenstein 3-D, is a riff on 3D and the fact that this game was the third in a series, following the first two Apple II titles.) And he created tools called Installation Creation Editor (ICE) and DEICE to create the game’s needed multi-disk setup, as the shareware version of Wolf3D was ten times as big as those for the Keen games.

Wolfenstein 3-D was a technical tour-de-force: this game ran fast even on my wife’s lowly 286 at the time, displaying 3D graphics and performance that embarrassed my gaming class Amiga 500. It led to mega-success for Id, too, with the company being offered a $100,000 advance to port Wolf3D to the Super Nintendo and the game heading to retail via a prequel called Spear of Destiny.

But it was DOOM­—and later DOOM II—that cemented Id as leaders in 3D gaming, thanks to its technical advances—more textures, diminished lighting with light sourcing and shadows, non-orthogonal walls, and variable height walls and ceilings—incredible speed, and perhaps most crucially, multiplayer gaming, a feature that is now common in all FPS games today. Romero’s key contributions, as always, were in the form of level design and his new level editor, DoomEd, but he also coined the term deathmatch for multiplayer, a term that remains in use today as well. And he created a keyboard control scheme that’s still in use by most FPS games on the PC today, with just minor changes.

DOOM was open, and Id documented how others could “mod” the game using its WAD (“Where’s the data?”) file system, and anyone could make new levels, new episodes of multiple levels, create new editors, sound effects, textures, monsters, and everything else, all without needing the source code.  And it was followed up by Raven’s Heretic, which used the DOOM engine, thanks to Romero, and then DOOM II, a retail release. Romero also orchestrated Id’s relationship with DWANGO (Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation), a service that let gamers compete in LAN deathmatches over the Internet.

Things got dark when the creation of the engine for Id’s next game, Quake, took Carmack much longer than expected. Granted, it was a huge technical leap over DOOM. The first-ever fully 3D game engine, it was based on a client-server architecture and provided environments in which all game entities and objects existed within a 3D space. These advances took Carmack years to create, and by the time he was done, Quake included the first implementations of such things as mouse look and, eventually, hardware-rendered graphics support, plus native Internet deathmatch and a QuakeC language for easier modding. It was an even bigger technical leap over DOOM than DOOM was over Wolf3D.

But Romero wouldn’t be around to enjoy the success of Quake: frustrated with his own slow progress, Carmack accused Romero of not spending enough time on the game, leading to infighting among the co-founders. Romero couldn’t work on Quake until the engine was done, however, and he had kept himself busy, and Id afloat, by drumming up other business, including the Heretic sequel Hexen, the Windows ports of DOOM and DOOM II, which Microsoft paid for, and The Ultimate DOOM, a new retail release with a fourth episode of levels. Romero also created QuakeEd and many of the game’s best levels, and he saw Quake through to completion—indeed, he uploaded the shareware release online alone at the office alone on June 22, 1996. And then he left Id less than two weeks later.

Romero never saw a dime from Quake, though he was paid a co-founder’s severance over five years. He and the team at Id had created an astonishing 32 games in six years, becoming multi-millionaires in the process and, more importantly, industry pioneers. His post-Id work was mostly unsuccessful—his next company, Ion Storm, crashed and burned and he moved from project to project, and from company to company for years afterward. But he has endeared himself to the gaming community again in recent years by creating DOOM levels and episodes decades after the game’s initial release, one of which, SIGIL, was accepted by Id Software as the unofficial fifth episode of the game in 2019. And he’s still friends with all the original co-founders.

Despite his transparency, there are some curious omissions from the book. Chief among them is any discussion of Killcreek.

Romero had hooked up with Stevie “Killcreek” Case, one of the earliest notable female gamers, after leaving Id, and she followed him from Ion Storm to Monkeystone Games. She was famous for beating Romero in Quake deathmatch, then infamous for her subsequent physical transformation, as a sort of female version of Microsoft’s J Allard, and she even appeared nude in Playboy. But despite living with Romero for over four years and partnering with him in two companies, she is mentioned in the book only twice, on the same page, and in passing.

“Tom and I founded Monkeystone Games along with Stevie Case, a level designer from Ion Storm,” he writes. “Tom handled design, I handled code, and Stevie handled business.” That’s it.

But that doesn’t diminish the book, and there is so much more to the history than is even hinted at here. I strongly recommend you check it out for yourself.

Doom Guy: Life in First Person is available for Kindle and on Audible.