Doom and keeping company with skilled professionals

Capturing a Twitter thread I wrote on the 25^th anniversary of the release of the computer game Doom.

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25 years ago today, a colleague of mine interrupted people at their desks. “You have to come see this.” I was working at a little shop of about a dozen people making computer games. And one of the programmers had just downloaded the first level of Doom.

Computer programmers use fast computers (to save compile time, and because they are demanding prima donnas) but this was 1993 and Doom did not seem possible. Guys would look at the screen and 30 seconds later ask, “This is … realtime … ?”

Baffled amazement.

The guy who had downloaded Doom explained that the game’s designers had planned for people with slower computers. It was easy to re-size the display down so there were less pixels to render. On his machine, though, we got realtime 3D at fullscreen, as smooth as Frogger.

After a couple of minutes, the programmers started making little observations.

“You can’t tilt your head, can you?” “Yeah. There’s yaw, but no roll and no pitch.”

“The monsters always face you. The room is 3D but they are pre-rendered sprites.”

“That texture repeats. There’s actually only a few textures visible at any one time.”

“We go up and down stairs but I don’t think the map ever overlaps, vertically.”

My colleagues were finding little coding hacks that made Doom possible, by watching the gameplay.

The first time we racked the shotgun on Doom there was a wicked Cheer Of Awesome from a dozen professional computer game nerds. But by then we had already lost our innocence.

Baffled awe had given way to a rueful but delighted awe. My colleagues had reverse-engineered the fundamentals of Doom together watching fifteen minutes of gameplay. Computers had been ready for us to make Doom, if we were sly enough. Nobody had realized it.

One of the great pleasures of life is seeing skilled professionals work a hard problem together.

I was blessed to see Doom for the first time that way, in a room full of computer game programmers seeing Doom for the first time.

That year at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, the guys from id Software all wore jeans with T-shirts that said “DOOM” on the front … and “wrote it” on the back.

Everybody there allowed them a little swagger.