The Icon of Sin
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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!
Here in Galway, Ireland we have game jams. I did a 10-hour game jam with Ian Dunbar and we made a creepy little game called July 4, 1976. The game is on the iOS App Store now (free). You can read about it here.
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.
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.
Man, 26 years. Seriously? Ok, well, I better deal with it. I've told the story several times before about how much fun we three had making the first Keen games (me, Tom and John). Here's something that I've never talked about before.
In early January 1992, before we decided to make Wolfenstein 3D, we planned on making the third Commander Keen trilogy, "The Universe Is Toast!". This is the VGA parallaxing technology demo that used VGA versions of Keen 4's background texture. The project was actually seriously underway with entire directory hierarchy and 230 files in it before we decided to make Wolfenstein 3D instead.
The demo only shows one level that we made with parallaxing graphics. We only worked on this project for a couple weeks before switching to Wolfenstein 3D.
