When John Romero is ordained Pope, people will still ask him at Mass about Id Software and the early days of "Doom". One of the most notorious and outspoken of the key figures in early FPS history, Romero's hirsute and gruff mannerisms worked for a very simple reason.

These days Romero is the head of Romero Games, currently working on an unreleased FPS, and in an interview with Ars Technica he responded to what he has been known for for over 30 years, "Doom." Of course, "Doom" was the culmination of id's work up to that point, but it stood on the shoulders of the successful "Wolfenstein 3D," and "Wolfenstein 3D" itself had been around since the earlier id titles "Hovertank One" and "Catacomb 3-D" had followed.

It was the latter title that opened Romero's eyes. At the time, id was famous for "Commander Keen" and was in the early stages of making another 2D side-scroller in the same series, and within two weeks, I woke up at 1 a.m. and thought, "Guys, let's not make this game [Keen]." I said, "This is not the future; this is not the future. The future is to do what we did with 'Catacomb' better. And everyone immediately said, 'Yes, that's right. That's what's new, we haven't seen it yet, and we can do it, so why aren't we doing it?'"

[6

Romero claims that the team began work on "Wolfenstein 3D" that night, but the principles id had followed in representing 3D space in their previous titles would work in their favor. what set id's game apart was "our speed,"

Romero says. Everyone else was trying to create a proper 3D world, with six degrees of freedom and a lot of detail. What we were going for was fast, simple rendering and great gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck to them.

I don't think anyone around id talked about the pillars of the game in "Wolfenstein," and interestingly, Romero said that the team preferred to share some rough ideas without bothering with things like design documents, and "after that everyone just worked on their own thing. It was just a matter of working on it," he continues.

For more information on the organization of the project, see ...... Well, John had his computer and the other John had his computer. Romero recalls programming with John Carmack, "The files I work on, [Carmack] doesn't touch and I don't touch his files. I put only the files he needs on my transfer floppy disk, and he copies everything from there, and since it's only my files, I don't mind overwriting what he has." If for some reason the hard disk crashes, we can rebuild the source from anyone's copy.

But one of the things Ido got with "Wolfenstein" was time. Prior to this title, the company had produced games for publisher Softdisk and Apogee, most of which were distributed in magazines and as shareware, with very tight turnaround times of two months. But "Wolfenstein 3D" was "the first time we felt we had no time limit," Romero said. So the team played with the original 2D features, such as finding dead enemies and dragging corpses out of sight.

However, "I wasn't comfortable with this high-speed run-and-gun gameplay. As I was making it, I could see the game. We have a plan, but the game itself comes out of what we are making. We can keep shaping it, we can force it in a certain direction, or we can let it go that way."

Where "Wolfenstein 3D" ended up was a huge success, with its new style of fast, brutal FPS combat, something players had never seen before. But the sheer popularity of Wolfenstein taught the studio another lesson.

"People were trying to mod Wolfenstein, but we had no idea until we saw people modding it," says Romero. The game's compression made this "really difficult" for id, which was focused solely on reducing the file size on the disk. But when we saw how much trouble people were going through just to access and create levels, we knew we needed to be completely open with the next game."

Romero credits the WAD file format that resulted from Doom with "allowing us to generate large amounts of content for Doom" to this day, again emphasizing its speed.

"Content creators want to create something and see it within seconds, and Doom has made that possible; in 10 seconds, you can create a room in Doom and have it up and running."

"Doom" has had a thriving community from its initial release to today, and Romero himself has returned to the game and its sequels over the years. Late last year saw the release of "Sigil 2," which designer Robert Jones praised as "the closest experience to time travel in a real PC game."

Doom will celebrate its 30th anniversary in December 2023 and is arguably as popular as ever. In one of those moments that warms even the hearts of zombie soldiers, Romero and Carmack had a small reunion to mark the occasion.

.