Quake 1's Player Speed

I've been playing some Quake lately. Our lead programmer was a top-ranked Quaker back in the day and it's a blast playing deathmatch 1-on-1 with him. I did a twitter poll recently asking people which game they'd like to see trivia about and Quake won this time.

DOOM had such a fast player speed. It's still so much fun deathmatching in DOOM with that speed. Quake was way slower than DOOM, and I'm sure people wondered why. So this time I'm going to explain how Quake 1 got its player speed.

Doomguy's Identity – Revealed!

It was going to happen sometime. Recently on Twitter I ran a poll asking people what game they'd like to see a piece of trivia about. I had Wolf, DOOM, Keen, and Quake listed. DOOM won handily with 40% of the votes.

I thought about all the trivia that I know about DOOM. I thought,"Hmmm – I wonder if people know who the Doomguy is modeled after? On the cover of the box." Well, I decided to reveal how the cover composition process happened one day in 1993. Click the button and let it be known!

Nasir Gebelli Interview on YouTube

I just uploaded the interview that I did with Nasir Gebelli in 1998 at my company, Ion Storm, during an Apple II Reunion that I hosted. There's a lot of great information about his history in the industry and how he got started.

Nasir wrote games entirely in assembly language and did not save source code. He didn't even have a printer to look at his code! He wrote all his NES games on an Apple II and cross-developed them to the NES hardware. Even the SNES game, Secret of Mana, was coded on an Apple II, in 65816 assembly with no source.

I've been talking to Nasir recently about doing an in-depth interview. If you have any particular questions you'd like answered, please put them in the comments or email me at john at romero dot com.

Site Updating

I just got some stub pages up for the bigger games like Wolf 3D, DOOM, Quake, etc. I rescued a few of my oldest game entries from the Wayback Machine, too: Crazy Climber, Alien Attack, and Bongo's Bash.

I decided to update the game pages and put gameplay video of the games on them (as well as download links for emulators). It's crazy to think that I can play a game I wrote in 1982 in an Apple II emulator, inside a Windows 10 emulator, on my macOS (Mac Pro), and record video of that from a macOS app. Gotta love it!

I figured the gameplay videos are nice for people wondering what my oldest games looked like in case downloading and setting up an emulator is a hassle.