Doom Guy: Life in First Person

by John Romero

American drove the nail in the coffin. “We’re just burned out, John. We want to make this game and get it over with. We should just put DOOM weapons in the game and call it done.” The design team and art department had spun their wheels for the better part of a year. We had designed about fifty R&D levels during that time, and while the experience was critical toward building our understanding of crafting play in a 3D space, the levels themselves were essentially experiments that lacked the necessary gameplay code to make them useable in the version of Quake we envisioned. That work would need to be remade or abandoned since the engine had been under development and changing constantly. The code team was worse for wear, too. Michael Abrash had had to rewrite his highly optimized renderer eight times. John Cash had written a bunch of network code, some of which Carmack didn’t like, and so Carmack rewrote it over a weekend. The team was brittle. It wasn’t a team that was ready. It was a team that was done. At the same time, I wasn’t done, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was opposite of the innovation that had defined us. I’d discussed necessary explorations once the tech was ready: We had opportunities for characters to engage in melee combat, possibly in third-person perspective. I planned to explore using a first-person perspective for aiming and shooting a crossbow. I wanted to experiment with new ways of playing in a true 3D world. Perhaps American, Sandy, ...