doom history 1994

back in january 1994, one month after DOOM was released, Game Developer magazine ran an article, one which i've never seen before. Well, they republished the article today on gamasutra.com and it was great reading over it and going back in time. Something i thought would be most exciting is this screenshot here (scanned from the magazine page; i don't have the mag though) that shows the NeXTSTEP programming environment we used.

Here's as much information as I can glean from this scan:
* it's John Carmack's NeXTStation; we had a NeXTCUBE which was used to scan the videocam images we made of our monsters (clay and latex)
* the cookie monster icon is for John's app, Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop, which we ran on the Cube and processed the images that the videocam captured. The videocam was plugged directly into the Cube.
* the screen is mainly showing the debugging environment of SuperDebugger as DOOM is being debugged
* the DOOM app window has a black, draggable title bar with the 320x200 game screen rendered within it
* the Objective-C compiler is just under the game window
* at the bottom of the screen are icons representing the running apps; many are source files

About the article, here are my clarifications and bug fixes:
* the reason Scott Miller was trying to get in touch with me was because of my PC game (port) Pyramids of Egypt, a game i wrote originally in 1985 on the Apple II and ported to the PC in 1989. No one else was involved in making this game.
* John, Adrian and myself did NOT quit Softdisk after we started making Commander Keen; we did it all after work and on the weekends at the lakehouse
* Tom Hall was included in this group and it was mainly John C., Tom and myself that made Commander Keen 1-3. Adrian did a few graphics for Keen 3 at the very end of the project but he wasn't involved at the beginning
* One month after releasing Keen 1-3 we received our first royalty check and decided to quit Softdisk and form id Software on February 1, 1991
* id was located in Madison, Wisconsin between September 1991 and March 1992; this was when i started getting involved with Raven Software as they were local to the area
* id moved to Mesquite, Texas in March 1992; at this time, Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud joined the original team: John Carmack, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack and myself
* DOOM was never originally going to be "Green and Pissed"; that was a game idea Tom had before we made Wolfenstein 3D and i thought it was a hackneyed idea (science lab experiment goes bad and mutants run amok) so i came up with the idea of a Castle Wolfenstein remake
* when Tom left id he immediately started working on Wolfenstein II - we licensed Apogee the Wolfenstein name to make the sequel but later decided not to continue with it.....so Wolf II became Rise of the Triad
* id's taking over distribution for DOOM is described as a "staff split" but Apogee and id were always two seperate companies
* the "medium detail" mode mentioned in the article was called "high-color mode" and was only available in the first version or so of DOOM and was removed because of its incompatibility with some video adapters
* bullets aren't physical projectiles in the DOOM engine
* we only put in multiplayer near the very end of the game even though we announced the feature in our January 93 press release about DOOM
* the graphics for Wolfenstein were mostly drawn by Adrian Carmack but Kevin Cloud helped a lot after he came onboard on April 1, 1992
* when we did video capture of our latex and clay models, the video camera was pointed at the model and a live video feed was plugged into the NeXTCUBE which, at any time, we could click a button to take a frame grab. This frame was then fed into our program Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop which took it from 24-bit color down to a 256-color VGA paletted graphic. At that point it was saved on our network where Adrian and Kevin could load it into Deluxepaint II and clean it up.
* during Wolf3D's development we came up with the idea of a contest to find the hardest thing in the game; for beta, we drew a graphic that was NOT going to be the final code, so just before mastering we changed the graphic - we had never been "plagued by leaks"; an alpha version of DOOM *did* leak however
* Wolf3D was banned because of Nazi content in addition to violence; in Germany there is a sheet of banned imagery that will put you in jail if you are seen with it on - Wolf3D was full of this imagery (Nazi imagery)
* Cygnus Studios became Rogue Entertainment after an internal revolt; they were working on Strife for us
* a SNES version of DOOM *was* created in secrecy by Sculptured Software; they presented a final, finished SNES version of DOOM and sent it to us asking if we wanted to publish it; oh hell yeah! :)
* the Jaguar version of DOOM was done internally at id; it was very fun and challenging but the Jaguar died a slow death

Great article!