Latest / Never Post / Why Does Everything Run Doom?

Transcript

Why Does Everything Run Doom? · Never Post

0:05
Mike Rugnetta: I could not tell you where I got it nor really
0:10
when. Possibly on a floppy disk from a friend around 1994, it
0:15
might have been around 1995 at the grocery store on a CD sold
0:21
with a magazine that I somehow convinced my mother to buy me.
0:26
In any event, I would have been 10, maybe 11 years old. I do
0:32
remember starting it up for the first time, being met almost
0:37
jarringly with the image of a muscled man wearing a gray
0:42
porcine visored helmet and green armor. His fatigues are torn.
0:47
He's covered in claw marks. The huge blue and gold letters
0:53
behind him look like a combination of super future
0:56
technology and impossibly ancient artifact and they spell
1:01
out a single word, doom. A menu pops up. New game. Definitely
1:09
enter.
1:09
Which episode? Knee deep in Dead, Shores of Hell or Inferno?
1:15
My adolescent brain barely knows what to make of this. Best to
1:19
start at the start, I guess. Knee deep in Dead sounds sick.
1:24
Enter. Choose skill level. I'm too young to die. Hey, not too
1:28
rough. Hurt me plenty.
1:30
Ultra violence and nightmare. Hurt me plenty? I guess. Enter.
1:39
What happens next determines to some not insignificant degree
1:43
the course of my life.
1:45
People talk about experiences that change their brain
1:48
chemistry. This was one of those. Beginning with the sound
1:53
that you hear immediately upon requesting to be hurt plenty. To
2:05
modern adolescent ears, I imagine this sounds anemic, but
2:08
to me, in the mid nineties, it was cool as hell. Somewhat
2:13
literally, I guess.
2:15
Over the next single minute of gameplay, I'm appraised of a set
2:18
of actualities I'd not previously even considered
2:21
possibilities. All of them, Doom's now well known hallmarks.
2:27
First person combat of which it was an early standout, a
2:30
combination of mythic and technological story elements,
2:33
you're a futuristic space marine fighting demons from hell on
2:36
Mars, a fast pace, this game rips. And also, of course,
2:43
tears. In the coming months afflicted with doom fever, I
2:47
would learn also of the game's vibrant community of modders
2:50
supported in no small part by its developer id Software's
2:55
generosity or perhaps in another view ruthlessness.
3:00
Id's permissive attitude is reflected in a number of their
3:03
decisions. The first episode of Doom was released as shareware,
3:07
software that's free but often limited or incomplete. The rest
3:11
of the game's episodes could be purchased only direct from id
3:15
who enabled, encouraged, and celebrated modifications of
3:20
their game as long as they weren't sold. They decided to
3:23
open source the game's engine making it available under a non
3:27
commercial license. And they did so basically at the height of
3:31
their game's popularity.
3:33
And so an inventive game that could render fan made
3:37
contributions led to a flourishing community of artists
3:41
and technologists which has persisted for thirty years.
3:46
People are still actively porting and modifying Doom,
3:50
updating it to run as efficiently as ever on modern
3:54
systems, and making those ports do all kinds of crazy things.
3:59
John Matter: The most recent, like, kind of mod thing I can
4:01
think of is I wrote a simulation of something called the icing
4:07
model, which is a model of ferromagnetism. It's kind of a
4:13
canonical thing that you learn in an undergrad statistical
4:16
mechanics class.
4:17
Mike Rugnetta: And like the meme of dinosaurs turning from
4:19
fossils to petroleum to plastic models of dinosaurs, Doom is
4:26
used to produce whole new games in which a trace of the true
4:31
self persists.
4:32
Xaser Acheron: Over decades of development has literally gotten
4:36
to the point where you can ship a Theseus the entire game and
4:39
create entirely brand new games that if you think about it, of
4:44
technically share code with Doom, but it's transformed so
4:46
much over over the decades that you wouldn't recognize it if you
4:51
weren't looking for it. And so it's nuts that we've gotten to
4:54
this point.
4:54
Mike Rugnetta: Many of you will probably also know that folks
4:57
out here aren't just porting Doom to run clever mods on
5:00
modern systems, they're porting it to run on everything.
5:05
Pregnancy tests, ATMs, soda machines, spreadsheets, vehicle
5:08
dashboard displays, PDFs, graphing calculators, air
5:11
fryers, alarm clocks, DNS records, e coli, MS Paint, the
5:15
Kindle earbuds, a vet grown human brain, and even somehow
5:19
Doom itself have all been hacked apart and made to run Doom.
5:24
Bijan Stephen: That's what Doom is. They gave us some they gave
5:28
us the tools and people used the tools and then it became funny
5:31
to use the tools in a way like that they weren't intended to be
5:34
used. But also that was the whole intention the entire time
5:36
like, again, like if you go back to even the the par system, like
5:39
why does Doom have par? That doesn't make any sense.
5:42
Mike Rugnetta: It's become a part of the software's promise,
5:45
its purpose, that it become integrated into all sorts of
5:49
wildly bespoke systems, that it be used in ways that make you
5:53
ask, Doom? Like the video game.
5:58
Matthew Gantt: A lot of my own practice, know, I I kind of came
6:00
from experimental music, you know, synthesizers, generative
6:02
music, different spatial things. And I've been doing a lot of
6:07
work kind of connecting that to game engines, you know. It's the
6:09
same way you might patch a modular synthesizer. Here's a,
6:12
you know, a generator manifesting something. I've been
6:15
really interested in game engines, game simulations.
6:19
It's kind of like a almost like a cybernetic system
6:21
conceptualized as a patchable environment, you know, rather
6:24
than an LFO into a sound, you know. Maybe you know,
6:28
projectile, maybe player depth, maybe the speed of a three d
6:32
object could be could be mapped into something.
6:34
Mike Rugnetta: In this episode of Never Post, we're gonna talk
6:37
about why the hell this all happened. How did this game come
6:41
to be used this way over any other for this long? It turns
6:47
out the answer is in part circumstance, but also
6:50
significantly because the people who made Doom wanted this to
6:55
happen to some degree. And then the Internet kind of did the
6:59
rest. In the first half of this episode, we're gonna talk about
7:02
the five years id software took to arrive at Doom, and then
7:07
about how Doom works as a piece of technology.
7:10
In the second half of this episode, we're gonna talk about
7:12
why that piece of technology can run on almost any system, and
7:16
then we're gonna hear from some artists who use Doom to make
7:20
things. They're gonna tell us why you might muck around in a
7:23
game about Mars and demons to make, you know, like a string
7:26
quartet or jokes about a dead British prime minister overdoing
7:31
those things literally anywhere else. I hope by the end to have
7:36
shown how we can use Doom to think broadly about using
7:40
technology to make things, especially older technology,
7:44
which in some ways requires more of us, but in other ways less. I
7:50
think Doom as it exists now can help us see what it takes to be
7:55
creative at a time when most technology seems to want us more
8:00
than anything to be consumptive. Doom was far from id Software's
8:18
first game.
8:19
The original founders, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom
8:22
Hall, eventually joined by Adrian Carmack, no relation, met
8:26
as coworkers several years prior to Doom's release. They called
8:30
themselves IFD for ideas from the deep, and they were
8:34
employees of Louisiana based SoftDisc. Softdisk put out
8:39
regular Megazets, a snail mailed publication of personal PC
8:43
software in floppy disk format. One of the group's early
8:48
contributions was nineteen eighty eight's side scroller
8:51
Dangerous Dave. John Romero very explicitly admits that dangerous
8:56
Dave was a rip off of Mario.
9:03
Except the first dangerous Dave title didn't actually scroll but
9:07
paged. When the player reached the screen's edge, the whole
9:11
frame would redraw to show the next area. Carmack later devised
9:16
a technique where only the edge of the screen is redrawn,
9:20
allowing the background to scroll smoothly with the
9:23
player's movement. This was something that at the time only
9:27
consoles could do, but Carmack built a workaround for the PC.
9:32
The team used his technique to fully recreate the first portion
9:38
of Super Mario Brothers three on PC with dangerous Dave in
9:43
Mario's place.
9:44
In his book, masters of doom, David Kushner writes, by the
9:48
time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the best
9:52
selling hit in the world. They then sent it to Nintendo. They
9:59
included a letter explaining their interest in licensing the
10:03
rights to Super Mario for the PC. Nintendo wrote back in short
10:08
order telling them, this is nice work, but no thank you. We have
10:12
no interest in the PC market.
10:15
The never released game was titled dangerous Dave in
10:19
copyright infringement. The technological achievement was
10:25
undeniable though. Their manager at SoftDisc said Carmack should
10:29
patent this development, and he refused on principle, saying,
10:34
apparently, if you ever ask me to patent anything again, I'll
10:38
quit. Kushner explains that, quote, patents were jeopardizing
10:42
the very thing that was central to John Carmack's life, writing
10:46
code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he
10:51
couldn't solve a problem without infringing on someone's patent,
10:54
he would be very unhappy to live there, end quote.
10:58
While they were developing dangerous Dave for soft disc,
11:01
the team also picked up a somewhat shady side gig with
11:05
Apogee software. They would simultaneously develop the
11:09
similarly Mario inspired side scroller, Commander Keen, about
11:14
an eight year old defending Earth from aliens. In his book
11:19
Doom Guy, John Romero writes that Keen is the first game for
11:23
which he and Carmack had the idea to write a game engine.
11:28
Something Romero takes credit for naming if not
11:31
conceptualizing altogether. Though he does admit that's the
11:35
kind of thing that might be impossible to prove.
11:40
Very briefly, if you're unfamiliar, a game engine is a
11:44
base layer of reusable code to manage assets and to make game
11:48
development more consistent. So they develop the Keen engine and
11:52
then the Keen games which Apogee releases as shareware. Apogee
11:58
would upload early episodes to a BBS or an FTP and then they
12:02
would sell the complete games direct via mail. The IFD team
12:07
eventually has a falling out with Apogee in part because they
12:11
may have used their Keen engine to make other games without
12:15
paying a licensing fee. And Romero seems to suggest it's not
12:20
so big a deal that Apogee may have used their code, it's more
12:24
so that they just weren't cool about it.
12:27
He describes himself and Carmack as, quote, programming
12:30
evangelists. We had no problem with anyone using our work, he
12:35
writes, but in the spirit of shareware, if a company is using
12:39
our engine to make money, they should share the wealth. After
12:43
the first royalty check for Keene hits, they quit SoftDesk
12:46
and formed their own company, id Software. At first, standing for
12:51
in demand, but later retconned to sort of maybe be a reference
12:56
to Sigmund Freud, but mostly it seems like they just thought it
12:59
sounded cool. The final commander keen game is released
13:03
in 1991, and then they begin work on Wolfenstein three d.
13:12
Wolfenstein three d is a major turning point for id in both,
13:17
business and technical senses. It has its own mini history that
13:21
we're gonna look at really briefly in a second, but first,
13:24
I think it's worth considering what we've seen up until this
13:27
point. Looking at the early days of id, Carmack and Romero settle
13:32
into two distinct roles. Carmack makes a significant
13:36
technological development and then Romero uses it to create
13:40
what's essentially an homage. He takes and in a lot of ways
13:45
improves upon preexisting often very popular games.
13:50
We also see, amongst the early id crew, early hostility towards
13:56
gatekeeping and the desire to share not just as a business
14:00
model, but as a kind of technological principle as well.
14:03
Id gives away portions of their games. They also license their
14:07
game engines, albeit with mixed results early on. We see an
14:12
early fascination with Mars in Commander Keen and in Dangerous
14:15
Dave, both gore and shotguns. Id's first first person shooter
14:27
is a game called Hovertank one, released on 05/31/1991.
14:32
For Hovertank, John Carmack wrote id's first three d
14:36
rendering game engine in only two months. They'd refine their
14:42
first person and three d rendering approach over the next
14:45
six months in Catacombs three d, in which Carmack would implement
14:50
texture mapping, a technique where the game engine maps the
14:53
three d level model with two d images. In catacombs three d, id
14:58
also introduces a hand, bottom center screen to represent the
15:04
player character. Id's first significant FPS is Wolfenstein
15:10
three d, an homage to nineteen eighty one's Nazi infiltration
15:15
classic Castle Wolfenstein. They bought the IP rights for Castle
15:19
Wolfenstein for $5,000 after Carmack had already started work
15:24
on a revamped engine.
15:25
And this engine had two notable additions, the ability to add
15:29
secret areas and an emphasis on speed. Id wanted this game to be
15:36
fast. They released the first episode of Wolfenstein three d
15:41
as shareware in May 1992. It was a smash. They did nearly a
15:47
quarter of $1,000,000 in sales on the commercial episodes in
15:51
the first month.
15:53
All in, the engine and shareware episodes took four months to
15:57
develop and the remaining five commercial episodes took a month
16:02
and a half. Not a terrible outcome for six months of work.
16:08
By the fall, around the time an additional retail episode of
16:11
Wolfenstein three d is about to launch, John Romero notices
16:15
something. He writes, we soon found out that some rather
16:18
enterprising hackers had figured out how to extract and
16:22
decompress the levels from Wolfenstein three d and modify
16:26
them. This was a big surprise to us.
16:29
Not only was it a lot of work, but it required a high degree of
16:33
technical expertise to hack the Wolfenstein three d executable
16:37
and get the maps decompressed. Soon after, several map editors
16:41
appeared on the Internet and people were busy making levels
16:45
and expanding the base game. The era of modding our games had
16:51
begun. Kushner writes that while Carmack and Romero did worry
16:56
about the possibility someone may use their game engine to
16:59
sell modifications, they tabled the issue. They were hard at
17:03
work on the final episodes of Wolfenstein three d and in early
17:07
development for the engine of their next title, a military
17:11
themed demon slaying action game.
17:16
Doom comes together as a culmination of everything id has
17:21
learned up until this point. CarMax engine makes use of more
17:25
advanced three d rendering techniques built upon what he
17:28
learned with catacombs and hover tank one. He improves upon his
17:32
texture mapping techniques. He focuses on the speed and feel of
17:36
the game and provides the ability to hide things within
17:40
maps. Romero builds a level editor called DoomEd that allows
17:45
him to quickly design levels for CarMax engine as well as place
17:49
enemies and things inside those levels.
17:52
The whole team sought to make a visceral experience. Romero
17:57
claims that levels were subject to thousands of playthroughs
18:00
during design. With designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack,
18:04
they all pulled together themes, objects, and ideas from all of
18:07
their previous games, shotguns, ghosts, demons, gore, aliens, a
18:12
first person perspective, and they develop a master design
18:15
document called the Doom Bible. And then they decided early on
18:21
that since people would modify this game, no question, why not
18:26
just let them? Romero writes that amongst all of the
18:31
features, Doom being an open game was the most important to
18:37
them.
18:38
It was, in a way, an homage to homages, itself built to
18:43
encourage the creation of further derivative works. And of
18:47
course, the first episode of Doom would be distributed as
18:50
shareware. Hell came to Earth via FTP on 12/10/1993. So many
19:00
people were waiting to download the game that the sysadmins
19:04
needed to reconfigure the server. Id had to demand that
19:08
fans log off in order to reliably upload the installer.
19:14
Thousands of people downloaded it. In the following weeks, id
19:17
would make $50,000 a day in direct sales. Game press reviews
19:23
were glowing. Compute Magazine called it a quote graphic
19:27
extravaganza that's completely free of the kinds of redeeming
19:31
societal values found in sim health. Computer Gaming World
19:35
wrote that quote, Doom represents a huge technical
19:39
improvement over id's earlier titles, giving the gamers what
19:43
they asked for and the industry a new benchmark.
19:48
In PC Gamer, what makes Doom so special? Simplicity, realism,
19:53
and profound carnage. Doom unseated Myst as the number one
19:59
worldwide game on Usenet, Posts on alt.games.doom, the freshly
20:05
minted news group for Doom players, read things like Doom
20:09
is thoroughly excellent. I've tried Doom at a local computer
20:13
store, and I find myself nearly addicted. Oh, wow.
20:17
Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam?
20:22
What a great freaking game. I cannot wait to play deathmatch.
20:26
TM question mark? Players were having all kinds of new
20:31
experiences. Sawing through a demon torso with a chainsaw,
20:35
yes.
20:35
But also a number of things that would go on to become major
20:39
pillars of gaming. Doom was one of the first early broadly
20:44
popular games to support both co op and versus multiplayer at
20:49
first via a LAN and then via dial up. As such, many people
20:53
draw a line directly from Doom to esports today. Doom also
20:58
included a par time for each level suggesting that players
21:02
could race the clock to finish each area as quickly as
21:06
possible, an early precursor to speedruns. Doom also allows
21:10
players to record keystrokes and share their playthroughs.
21:14
A predecessor in some views to let's plays and modern game
21:18
streaming. And finally, within two weeks of release, id had
21:25
also published details about how their game design or WAD for
21:30
where's all the data files were structured. The first complete
21:35
fan made level editor, Doom Editing Utilities or DEU, is
21:40
released on 01/26/1994, only forty seven days after Doom
21:47
itself. You can even go to a Usenet archive and pull up
21:50
threads of people talking about building editors and what to use
21:54
them for. A Hunt on 01/12/1994 writes, I think the Doom engine
22:02
could be used very effectively for things other than the maze
22:05
shoot them ups, which I love.
22:07
How about football first person? The Doom engine limitations
22:11
should not be a problem, vertical views, etcetera. The
22:15
mountains could be a stadium. Replace the multitude of
22:19
monsters with more views of teammates. Hockey too.
22:24
The rollerblade feel of the movements on a fast machine
22:28
already show the graphics speed wouldn't be a problem. Just you
22:34
wait a hunt. Just you wait. Then in only the amount of time it
22:42
takes to get to Mars using the Hohmann maneuver, Doom two Hell
22:46
on Earth is released. Doom two is retail only and it hits the
22:51
shelves 10/10/1994.
22:54
It was developed in much the same manner and with many of the
22:57
same tools as the first Doom, but it's bigger with more guns
23:01
and more demons. And I can tell you exactly where I got this
23:04
one. Babbage's in the Natick Mall with a paper gift
23:08
certificate I got for my birthday. In early nineteen
23:13
ninety five, the source code for both Doom games is released
23:17
under a noncommercial Doom license. These were Linux
23:21
versions of the code given the use of proprietary audio
23:24
software in the MS DOS versions.
23:27
On 10/03/1999, the licenses for each are converted to full new
23:33
general public licenses, which requires all work made using the
23:37
code to be released under the same license. It's at this
23:42
point, all of the technical pieces are in the world,
23:47
available by design for anyone to use, and it was required that
23:52
if you did so, you also share your work. Hundreds, maybe
24:02
thousands of pieces of software using Doom's code have followed
24:06
since. Mods, user made levels, total conversions, where it
24:11
sorta seems like you're playing a whole different game, source
24:14
ports, and more. It's a branching rhizome of projects
24:18
that assure that no matter what your system, it can run Doom,
24:23
often with more features and greater fidelity than the
24:27
original.
24:28
A vibrant community of hackers, modders, and artists are doing
24:32
exactly what id designed their game to do, run well and be
24:37
shared. We're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to
24:44
some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
24:47
we're gonna talk to two game designers, a nuclear physicist,
24:51
and a composer about what people are making with Doom and why
24:57
exactly they're making it with Doom. Doom is small.
25:12
Like, the actual size of the game. It's tiny. I'm looking at
25:15
the files for both Doom and Doom two right now, and they're 11
25:18
megs and 16 megs respectively. That's smaller than some photos
25:23
I've taken with my phone. So before you even get started
25:27
making things with it, Doom itself is very portable, and
25:32
boy, howdy, has it been ported.
25:35
Xaser Acheron: Back whenever Doom source code was released,
25:38
like, we're talking the nineties. Right? A lot of people
25:40
were just like, oh my gosh. This is the coolest thing ever.
25:42
Let's, like, update the game.
25:43
Mike Rugnetta: That's Zazer with an x, Acheron.
25:46
Xaser Acheron: I currently work at Nightdive Studios as a game
25:48
developer, but I've basically been plugged into the Doom
25:51
community for twenty plus years, which is crazy, doing
25:55
programming, level design, art, music, all sorts of Doom mod
26:00
stuff.
26:01
Mike Rugnetta: Zayzer is thanked by name at the end of John
26:03
Romero's book. And though I know it will slightly embarrass him,
26:06
I am going to mention that the Doom Wiki describes him as,
26:09
quote, the Doom community's truest polymath. He really has
26:14
done a bit of everything. So I wanted to ask him to help me
26:18
understand the finer details of why Doom will run on a Sony
26:23
PocketStation memory card. The explanation begins with one of
26:27
Doom's early source ports.
26:29
Meaning, someone takes the engine source code and modifies
26:33
it to run on a different type of system. Crucially, this isn't
26:38
necessarily the game itself, but the software that runs the game.
26:42
So a source port can run Doom, but it can also run
26:45
modifications of Doom.
26:47
Xaser Acheron: And one of the earlier ports that ended up
26:50
sticking around for a long, long, long, long, long time was
26:52
called ZDoom, And it was just done by someone named Marissa
26:56
Hite. She just was like, hey. I wanna make a Doom source port
26:58
and did it for years. And the thing that drew people to it was
27:04
it started adding a ton and ton a ton of modding features. Like,
27:07
the earlier Doom source ports, a lot of them started focusing on,
27:11
like, visual fidelity.
27:13
So, like, earlier versions of Edge, which also had a lot of
27:16
modding features, JDom, Doomsday, and ZDoom, they all
27:21
had things like, hey. You could play it at high resolution, and,
27:23
oh, we're adding a couple little features like jumping and
27:25
things, and there's glowy lights and dynamic stuff. There are
27:29
some early OpenGL ports.
27:30
Mike Rugnetta: This continues until today, literally. Since
27:34
the mid nineties, there have been legions of people, Zazer
27:37
included, who exert Olympus Mons amounts of effort to ensure that
27:43
Doom runs and runs well. It would be a project all its own
27:49
to recount the history and lineage of every Doom source
27:52
port. There have been many. They are constantly being improved
27:57
and extended.
27:58
And in fact, the newest major source port called u z Doom was
28:03
updated eleven hours ago at time of writing. So running Doom,
28:09
very easy, which is to say nothing of the fact that
28:13
Xaser Acheron: Doom is incredibly easy to make content
28:16
for. Like, you can have zero experience doing anything in
28:20
resembling game design, and you can install Ultimate Doom
28:24
Builder and make a Doom map and test it and do that within ten
28:28
or fifteen minutes. I literally tell people, hey. If you wanna
28:31
get into game design and you're brand new to it, install a Doom
28:36
editor. Like, that's that sounds weird.
28:37
Right? Like, wait. I wanna make a game. I wanna make my own
28:40
game. Why would I want to make a mod for something else?
28:42
Right? Well, the reason why is because if you want to make a
28:45
game, what you actually need to do is, like, 20 different
28:49
things. Like, oh, you gotta pick an engine, and you maybe have to
28:52
be a programmer, and you gotta figure out what things to
28:54
install if you're using Unity. And then you have to figure out,
28:55
oh, am I a level designer now? Am I an artist?
28:57
What am I doing for? Okay. If you wanna make a doom app,
29:00
here's what you do. Draw some lines in an editor and play
29:02
around, and then hit the test button. It works.
29:06
Mike Rugnetta: I don't know if you've ever opened Unity or
29:09
Unreal Engine. I've spent a fair amount of time in each just as a
29:13
hobbyist. And for beginner, the experience is not unlike looking
29:17
into the cockpit of an airplane through a kaleidoscope. It's
29:21
tough to even get started and getting to a point where you can
29:24
play around represents a kind of opportunity cost. There's an
29:29
inherent risk assumed until you're well versed in the
29:33
software.
29:34
And Zazer's conjecture is, this is not the case with Doom. You
29:38
wanna try something out? Go to hell. I took his advice, and I
29:43
thought, okay. Let's say I wanna make a version of this episode
29:47
that's playable as a level of doom.
29:51
How long would it take to get on my way? Not faffing about with
29:55
files or menus, but actually making and testing something. So
30:00
I downloaded u z doom and a level editor, and I timed
30:03
myself. It took six minutes before I was pushing Doomguy
30:10
around inside a map that I designed. I mean, it was a very
30:13
simple map, but I I made it.
30:18
Doom, the set of tools for building games, exhibits the
30:21
same kind of speed and responsiveness as Doom the game.
30:27
Its lack of fussiness verges on almost magical in 2026. The
30:33
first time I sat down to make something in Doom felt so
30:38
similar to the first time I sat down to play Doom. A few menu
30:43
clicks and suddenly, oh my god. Is this for real?
30:49
My brain chemistry forever altered.
30:52
Bijan Stephen: Again, I do think this is tied to early computing
30:55
and early internet culture. Like, are these are very, like,
30:58
specific times and places with very specific culture.
31:02
Mike Rugnetta: This is Bijan Steven. You may remember him
31:04
from the first episode of Never Post. He's a video game writer
31:07
at Compulsion Games and a music critic for the nation.
31:11
Bijan Stephen: And a player on Fun City Ventures, the best
31:13
tabletop role playing game podcast that you've never heard
31:16
of.
31:18
Mike Rugnetta: Cesar told us how. Bijan is gonna tell us why.
31:23
What about Doom inspires all this experimentation and
31:27
extension? All the technological factors stipulated why this game
31:32
in particular.
31:34
Bijan Stephen: Doom became part of the culture because it was
31:36
something that everyone was playing, and it was something
31:39
that everyone had access to, and it was something that you could
31:42
mess with, like, very easily. So it became this natural fit. And
31:46
then those those, you know, those forums and videos and
31:49
whatever, all of that stuff, like, filtered in like, filtered
31:53
down to the next generation online. And it's like the the
31:56
designers are daring you to break it. They're daring you to
32:00
do stuff with it that they didn't expect.
32:02
Why else would they open source the engine? Why else would they
32:05
ship it with demos? They gave us the tools and they they gave us,
32:08
like, the tool the paints and the brushes and the easel and
32:12
the canvas, and they expected us to get get to work. That's what
32:15
it was. But video games are interesting because again, they
32:19
are prescribed experiences.
32:21
They they are there is a beginning, middle, and an end
32:25
that has been set down and thought about by the designers.
32:27
Right? But the thing that Doom sort of posited in a very early
32:33
stage in this development of games was, like, what if that
32:36
wasn't the end? What if what if we our vision for this wasn't
32:40
actually what this game is? And if the further we get from its
32:43
origins, the funnier it gets.
32:44
Like, what do you like, why are you still doing this? But I
32:47
think I mean, it's it's it's not because it's like the designers
32:51
and developers sort of intended for you to fuck with it, but,
32:53
like, did they mean did did they really think that you were gonna
32:56
do this with it? I don't know. It's it's I I think it's really
32:59
hard to say. This is like it's like you're you're asking
33:01
questions about the human spirit, and I don't know how to
33:03
answer them.
33:05
Mike Rugnetta: Bijan posits, I think, a kind of doom, a
33:09
metagame, which doesn't involve military bases on Mars,
33:13
cacademons, chainsaws as much as it involves an IDE, GitHub, and
33:18
Discord. Urdoom has one goal, the creation of more doom, and
33:24
there's no win condition because there is always more doom to be
33:27
made. It would again be a project all its own to list even
33:32
1% of the incredible mods and conversions of Doom, but we will
33:37
at least fulfill some of a hunt's wishes. Z football is a
33:44
2,004 mod build as, quote, the first complete soccer themed
33:50
total conversion for z doom. Doom hockey is, exactly what it
33:56
sounds like and multiplayer.
33:58
Hellshots is a game where in place of a gun, Doomguy holds a
34:02
putter or a wedge or an iron. That's right. It's Doom Golf.
34:07
Doom the gallery experience trades the plasma rifle for a
34:11
red wine glass and the armor power ups for cheese. And yes,
34:15
you do exit through the gift shop.
34:17
Doctor Robotnik's ring racers is, get ready, a Sonic themed
34:21
tournament tuned Mario Kart style racing game built on Doom
34:27
Legacy. Its website reads, quote, Ring Racers is not a
34:32
pickup and play experience. If you aren't already a racing
34:35
fanatic, the learning curve will be quite steep, end quote. And
34:42
perhaps the most famous is a surreal survival horror maze
34:46
discovery game called my house dot wad, which Bijan describes
34:51
as
34:51
Bijan Stephen: One of the best Doom things I've ever seen. It's
34:56
unbelievable. Somebody tried to do House of Leaves with Doom.
34:59
What? Like and then they succeeded.
35:02
That's the crazier part. It it it is genuinely unnerving. It is
35:06
so strange. Because again, Doom, the way Doom looks is very
35:10
specific. And the way that the person making my house dot wad
35:13
understood they they understood how Doom looked and how Doom
35:16
felt and they made it feel eerie if you've ever played Doom,
35:19
which I think again, it feels like a love letter to a
35:22
community.
35:22
It feels like very specific to a very time and place and specific
35:26
to a certain group of people who like are very aware of this
35:30
thing that they're doing and this thing that they're playing.
35:32
Mike Rugnetta: The way Doom looks is very specific, but so
35:36
is the way Doom runs. Doom does not require a GPU. It runs
35:41
entirely on the processor. Meaning, unlike many modern
35:44
games, it doesn't need specialized hardware. The code
35:49
is also, as discussed, very well optimized.
35:52
It's also written in c, which while sort of old fashioned, is
35:56
straightforward for most systems to compile or interpret. So,
36:01
basically, what this all means is that when you ask a computer,
36:04
whatever computer, to run Doom, you're only giving it one job,
36:09
run Doom. And it doesn't really take much of a computer to do
36:13
that. Embedded software,
36:17
Xaser Acheron: you're gonna you're gonna program and see.
36:19
Like, that's that is the root foundation that almost every
36:21
device ever that isn't a desktop PC is gonna use. So that by
36:26
itself is already a massive chunk that allows you to take
36:29
Doom and compile it for your thing of choice. And and the
36:33
fact that it's, you know, was designed to run on what a three
36:37
eighty six well, four eighty six if you had infinite money back
36:41
in the early nineties means that you could run it on a potato
36:45
because your your modern embedded device probably is
36:47
gonna be a little bit more powerful than what they had back
36:49
then. So, yeah, you're gonna be fine.
36:51
Bijan Stephen: The the history of doom is also is also the
36:53
history of technology because it is everywhere we go. Somebody's
36:57
putting Doom on it no matter what, like, whatever we make. It
37:00
also, I think, has sort of become like a minimal like, the
37:02
the minimum viable computer can run Doom, which is how it was
37:06
designed. And I think that's sort of like it's almost like
37:09
proving that it's a computer.
37:10
Mike Rugnetta: Doom has more or less grown up in the myriad ways
37:14
it has alongside computing as a commercial enterprise and
37:19
computers as consumer products and the Internet as social
37:23
infrastructure and communities of people using all of those
37:26
things to make media and art and jokes. So why Doom? It was
37:34
popular. It was available. It was made to be shared.
37:38
Homage is in its guts, which are also maybe splattered on a
37:43
nearby wall. Its usage as raw material was not only
37:47
encouraged, but supported by its authors and the community of
37:52
people who grew around their work. Going back to the Usenet,
37:55
there are countless discussions like with many games at the time
37:59
asking, does Doom run on this system or this system or this
38:05
configuration? And people working to discover that the
38:08
answer, unlike with many games at the time, was often yes, if
38:14
with a little bit of tinkering. It's very easy to imagine then
38:18
how someone might eventually stand in front of a GE vivid s
38:24
five ultrasound scanning machine and think, I bet I can get that
38:31
to play doom.
38:33
As an aside, though, that is maybe not something that you
38:35
should voice aloud while standing in front of a GE vivid
38:41
s five ultrasound scanning machine. In the last and final
38:46
act of this episode, we're gonna talk to two people who make
38:49
things professionally and occasionally do so with Doom.
38:55
Throughout all of this, I've not stopped wondering, don't the
38:59
guns and gore and demons make it harder to use Doom, why not
39:06
start from scratch or with something that has less
39:11
significance or meaning? Why choose to engage with Doom's
39:17
baggage?
39:41
John Matter: There's a WAD where if I remember correctly, the big
39:45
bad is Margaret Thatcher. Yeah. Makes me think of that clip. I
39:52
don't know. Have have you seen that clip of this this old
39:54
British woman at Thatcher's funeral?
39:57
Matthew Gantt: Not a bit of good. Not a bit. I put a stick
40:00
through her heart and garlic around her neck to make sure she
40:03
never come back.
40:07
John Matter: Hello. My name is John Matter. I'm a nuclear
40:10
physicist turned software developer.
40:12
Mike Rugnetta: I know John from Weird Music Internet and from
40:15
their string of public experimentations with Doom.
40:18
John Matter: I think the most recent thing I did was playing
40:22
Doom on a monom grid, which isn't really Doom modding
40:26
itself, but it is part of this like, can it play Doom thing. So
40:31
I wrote a max patch that takes video, massages it so that it
40:37
displays on a grid. This, you know, matrix of LEDs with
40:42
variable brightness.
40:44
Mike Rugnetta: I wanted to chat with a couple people who use
40:46
Doom not just as a game or a development environment, but as
40:50
a kind of medium for weirder ideas. Ones that might involve
40:55
say, Maggie, no such thing as society thatcher. John likens
41:00
Doom to a performance practice or a genre almost.
41:04
John Matter: I think it kind of fits into a similar, I don't
41:07
know, heritage as like jazz or folk. You know, it's this kind
41:12
of shared context where people can play with existing tools or
41:17
idioms or memes, whatever. There's just this shared
41:22
material that you can borrow from and build on and just do
41:25
something with.
41:27
Mike Rugnetta: Doom, in this view, isn't so much a game or a
41:30
program as it is charts, chord changes, or as Bijan said,
41:35
paints and brushes. The software doesn't represent the end of
41:38
some creative endeavor, but its beginning. Id has said, here's
41:43
the first thing we made with these tools. You use these
41:47
ideas. Use these materials.
41:49
You make the next thing. And that is just not how things are
41:55
usually done, especially not today and especially not in
41:59
media and technology.
42:01
John Matter: Doom is interesting to me because it's kind of the
42:03
opposite of an NFT. Like an NFT is a thing that encloses
42:08
artistic expression. It commodifies it. It takes this
42:11
thing that anybody could duplicate and play around with
42:14
and it just says, nope. Here it's this finite resource that
42:18
has to be exchanged for money.
42:21
But Doom kind of resists that because it plays on, you know,
42:27
so many pieces of hardware. Maybe some of the appeal of Doom
42:31
is that it's just focused on being this weird charming little
42:36
shooter as opposed to something that can expand and, you know,
42:42
get more and more bloated as we think of new ways to monetize
42:45
it. Like, maybe that's the appeal is that it's just a game
42:48
where you can do stupid stuff and have that be the end result.
42:53
Mike Rugnetta: I think that is also John subtly roasting me for
42:56
asking questions about the human spirit. But the point here is
42:59
that it's meaningful that this unenclosable territory exists.
43:05
Doom, unlike many of our beloved things, remains isolated from
43:10
private equity, from corporate control, from software as a
43:14
service, and planned obsolescence. It is subject to
43:18
the whims and drama of the open source community, which, you
43:23
know, is not nothing, but I will take that drama over
43:27
shareholders any day.
43:29
John Matter: Yeah. Nobody's doing microtransactions in doom.
43:33
And if they are, I'd plead look inward. What is yours? I I
43:37
you're concerned for the the the safety of your eternal soul.
43:46
Mike Rugnetta: What all of this adds up to, I think, is that
43:49
your various art and technology hooligans feel safe making
43:55
things for and in and with doom. There is good reason to believe
44:01
that the software will persist, be easy to get up and running,
44:06
support all kinds of weird ideas, and the opportunity cost
44:10
of experimentation will remain extremely low.
44:15
Matthew Gantt: I've been teaching myself to to make Doom
44:17
mods, rather than making new content or new levels, but
44:20
actually to modify the the audio functionality to send out MIDI
44:24
hooks to to a synthesizer, to MaximSP. And the idea then
44:28
recasting Doom as a kind of instrument or kinetic sound
44:32
sculpture environment. Yeah. That's Matthew Gant. I'm a
44:36
composer, dirtbag game scholar.
44:41
Let me try this again. I'm failing miserably. I'm a
44:45
composer, artist, faux game scholar, enthusiastic cave
44:50
person, doing a lot of work with experimental music, game
44:54
engines, and virtual reality.
44:55
Mike Rugnetta: I'm a big fan of Matthew's work. I have been for
44:57
a long time. And over the last number of years, he's
45:00
incorporated more and more video game technology into his
45:04
composition process. Unity, Unreal Engine, Doom. I was
45:09
curious to ask Matthew what he found meaningful about Doom in
45:14
particular, and specifically, how much it matters for him that
45:18
Doom is Doom.
45:21
Like, does it matter that this is a game about demons and hell
45:25
and guns and a marine and sick MIDI guitar riffs? It turns out
45:30
that the answer is, yeah, kinda.
45:33
Matthew Gantt: All of these things take on this associative
45:35
baggage. Now I don't wanna call it a whole Duchampian ready made
45:38
thing, but it's just nested layers of association. So the
45:42
fact that it is both very awesome and very iconic, but
45:46
also very derivative simultaneously, It it it feels
45:49
really interesting to me. You know, I guess this happens with
45:51
really any media or a medium of anything, you know, in the
45:55
world, you know, has both like a functional quality. You know,
45:57
what can it do?
45:58
What are the affordances? And and, you know, an associative
46:00
quality. You know, what does it signify, you know, culturally,
46:03
aesthetically, conceptually? And, you know, and Doom is kind
46:06
of like right there, you know, a great example, you know, very
46:08
very very aura heavy in both. Right?
46:11
You know, it's not you know, it wasn't the original FPS, you
46:14
know, but, you know, somehow it is just more iconic than, you
46:18
know, something like Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem. You know, may
46:20
maybe just because it did reach a larger audience, maybe because
46:23
it was just a little more polished, what have you.
46:25
Mike Rugnetta: The way it looks, the way it sounds, how playing
46:28
it feels, It is undeniably an old game, open parenthesis,
46:33
complimentary, close parenthesis. And this fact
46:36
becomes inseparable from the fundamental offering of whatever
46:40
you make using Doom. The work itself will always be in
46:45
conversation with everything everyone knows and thinks and
46:50
feels about doom. Matthew likened this to something his
46:55
composition professor, composer Morten Subotnick, said about the
46:59
structure of writing music.
47:01
Matthew Gantt: I remember he was telling me. He was like,
47:04
composition is like well, I think the comparison is like
47:06
telling a joke, essentially. And essentially, if the punch line
47:09
is or if the setup is so obvious that you already know the punch
47:12
line, you know, it doesn't work because, you know, who cares?
47:15
And if the setup is sort of so non sequitur that, you know, you
47:19
hear the punch line and there's no connection, you can't drive
47:22
meaning from it, you know, just as bad. So the key thing is
47:25
establishing some sort of legibility and then subverting
47:28
the legibility.
47:29
Mike Rugnetta: Doom is exceedingly legible, which makes
47:33
subverting it easy. It's also a game about demons, which makes
47:38
subverting it fun. Doom Golf? Incredible. Doom Modular
47:43
Synthesizer?
47:44
Hell yeah, brother. Pulling these things out of Doom's
47:51
source code is a punchline to the ultraviolet open source
47:56
setup. The impact of that punchline is often augmented by
48:01
Doom's limited nature. It's an old game and there's a lot it
48:05
can't do. And this might make you think as a tool, it's
48:10
restrictive.
48:11
But Matthew explains how it's actually quite freeing.
48:15
Matthew Gantt: You know, thinking about this kind of like
48:16
why doom? And and maybe this is a little bit left field, do you
48:20
know that composer Mark Fell by any chance? Are you Mark Fell
48:22
head?
48:23
Mike Rugnetta: I am, in fact, a huge Fell head. I just recently
48:26
reread Mark Fell's book, Structure and Synthesis. It's
48:30
one of my favorite treatises on the creative process. Fell
48:33
writes mostly about making music with computers, but much of
48:38
what's in the book could just as well be about making things with
48:42
doom.
48:43
Matthew Gantt: There's this great quote where he's talking
48:44
about, you know, the way artists tend to deal with technology,
48:47
and they think they say, you know, we we all want an open
48:50
system. Everyone says they want an open system, But what they
48:52
really want is they wanna use that open system to design a
48:55
closed system that just has the affordances that they need and
48:58
and play within that limited thing.
49:00
John Matter: You know,
49:00
Matthew Gantt: that it gives you a limitation to push against.
49:02
Mike Rugnetta: Thel takes issue with some artists' insistence
49:06
that technology not guide their creative process. But how else,
49:13
he argues, could it be guided? The tools at hand structure a
49:19
dialogue out of which is born the work. It's the technology
49:25
which enables and constrains and informs the creation of
49:31
artworks. And when those tools have no constraint, it becomes
49:37
that much harder to make something.
49:39
When one can make anything, it is often easier to just make
49:45
nothing, especially as a lone artist with an individual
49:49
practice. Doom is a bounded tool for the creation of games,
49:55
media, music, technology, and even Doom itself. Doom is almost
50:00
like Computation's Giant Steps, the jazz tune by John Coltrane.
50:05
It's a time tested standard, an instructive ledger of moves,
50:11
something to be referenced and recombined endlessly. And people
50:16
have been using it to do just that for decades with no sign of
50:20
slowing down, and it's all free.
50:24
You can go, you can download u z doom and the level editor right
50:29
now and make something that plugs directly into this massive
50:33
and massively participatory history today. You will not have
50:40
to spend a single dollar. You will not have to create an
50:43
account. You will not have to log in or even give your email
50:47
address. You will not have to disable AI features.
50:50
The software will not show you ads. You will not need to fill
50:55
out a survey about your experience. All you have to do
51:02
is share what you make with others. Thank you so much to
51:24
Zazer, Bijan, John, and Matthew. You can find links to all of
51:29
their work in the show notes, and
51:31
Matthew Gantt: I
51:31
Mike Rugnetta: highly highly highly recommend that you do.
51:35
Thanks also to Nash Muhandis, Lane Nooney, and Dominic
51:39
Torreson for their help with this episode. So I hinted at
51:42
this a couple times, throughout this piece, but everyone we
51:46
spoke to for this episode said at some point when I asked them
51:51
a question, well, jeez, you could write a whole book just
51:54
about that. And so I don't know. We might try.
51:59
So I'm curious. Hey. Would you read a short book about how Doom
52:07
became a piece of technology for experimentation in art and
52:12
media? Because, I mean, I would like to write that book, but
52:16
only if someone would read it. So I don't know.
52:18
Let let me know. I also, in this episode, did not get to talk
52:24
about Quake, which is arguably even more modifiable than Doom.
52:30
So I think what we're gonna do is schedule some streams so we
52:34
can see some of these modifications. You can watch me
52:36
play them. I can tell you how to get them up and running, and
52:38
we'll also talk a little bit more about Quake and how it,
52:42
both fits into and extends and in some ways is an alternative,
52:46
to some of the things that we talked about.
52:48
So, if you aren't already, make sure that you are subscribed to
52:53
the mailing list, because that is where, most likely we will,
52:57
first announce, when those things will be once we get them
53:00
scheduled. And hey, finally, perhaps most importantly, have
53:04
you made something in Doom? Because if so, I would love to
53:09
know about it. You can call us. You can leave us a voice memo.
53:12
You can leave us a voice mail. You can send us an email. You
53:15
can leave a comment on the website. Any of the ways that
53:18
you can get a hold of us, they're all in the show notes.
53:20
Tell me about the crazy things you've done in Doom.
53:23
I want to hear about them, please. That is the show I have
53:51
for you this week. We will be back here in the main feed on or
53:54
around Thursday, June 4. Did you enjoy this episode about Doom? I
54:01
enjoyed making it and I would love to make more heavily
54:04
researched segments like this one to help me and the rest of
54:07
the Never Post crew spend more time making more Never Post more
54:13
for just four dollars a month.
54:16
A wild deal for the stuff we're putting out, if I'm being
54:18
completely honest. You can head over to neverpo.st and become a
54:22
member today. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans,
54:26
Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name,
54:28
last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive
54:31
producer is Jason Oberholtzer.
54:33
The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. I got a tattoo of
54:40
God. You can't see it, but it's everywhere. If I seem out of it,
54:44
do the math. I was put on earth.
54:46
And then you were making up your feet as you went along. New thin
54:50
spoke clanks the spank bank. New emoticon makes a hollow scene.
54:55
Excerpt of Money Bin by Michael Robbins. Never Post is a
55:00
production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by
55:03
Radiotopia.