On the day of Doom Eternal, we recall those who had a hand in creating the very first parts of the series.
First two parts Doom – Timeless shooter classics, ingenious games that remain relevant to this day. However, almost none of their authors are working on modern issues of the series. Where are they now? Let’s get it right.
The most famous id photo before working on Doom. From left to right: John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, half Adrian Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall
John Carmack, programmer
Let’s start with the four founders id Software. The first on their list is John Carmack, a crazy genius without whom nothing would have been possible. It was he who wrote the engines and Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake – the very first, by the way, a truly three-dimensional engine in the world. In the 90s Carmack made one technological revolution after another – for id Software it was indispensable.
Therefore, it was he who ultimately survived from the company of almost all the other Doom authors. Carmack continued to determine the direction of id for many years – and no one dared to argue with him. Doom has become the simplest, most plotless shooter because of Carmack. IN Quake iii there was only multiplayer because of Carmack. Doom 3 was born instead of the new IP studio because of Carmack. When Carmack says, “We do Doom, or I’m leaving,” everyone shrugs and do Doom.
Surely Doom 3 became a slow horror also because of Carmack, who created an outstanding lighting system and really wanted to get around it. And after him Rage was born, where Carmack showed the world the technology of “megatexture”. Only she was no longer surprised. Revolution is a thing of the past.
Rage was Carmack’s last game. In the 2000s, in his idle time free from work, he, as expected by a crazy genius, built rockets unsuccessfully, but by 2010 he was tired of it, and he sold his aerospace company. And at the same time left id in Oculus, where he worked for several years as a chief technology officer. At the end of 2019 and VR bored him. Now Carmack remotely consults Oculus, and devotes most of his time to researching artificial intelligence. So if robots take over the world, we know who to blame.
John Romero, programmer and designer
“Second John” from id Software is equally important for Doom: if Carmack laid the technological foundation, then Romero is the one who should say thanks for the design. He set the rules for creating levels for Doom and himself made the first – and best – episode of the game. It was he who gave us the multiplayer mode and the word deathmatch itself. It was Romero who was the first professional cyber-sportsman in the world – and he is still happy to beat lovers at Doom.
Alas, Romero’s hobby cost him a lot. During the development of Quake, he began to live like a rock star, spending a lot of time talking and playing with fans – and in the end, Carmack dismissed him “for doing nothing.” After that, the design in id games got worse and worse. Romero received a huge credit of trust from the publisher Eidos and opened a studio Ion stormwho has released many games. Among them, for example, the legendary Deus ex from Warren Spector’s team. But Romero himself was waiting for a fiasco of epic proportions: his own game, Daikatanacame out absolutely terrible. And since then he has been remembered with irony, quoting her ad saying: “John Romero will make you his bitch.” Everything turned out the other way around.
After the failure of Daikatana and the closure of Ion Storm, Romero never created a single full game for fans of his early work. He was involved in mobile and browser projects, and only at the beginning of 2016 did he go on Kickstarter with a shooter Blackroom. But he quickly closed the fundraising, allegedly before the demo was released. It never came out. But in 2019, he released Sigil – An unofficial fifth episode of the original Doom. It was he who showed that Romero is still can. We hope that he will return with his idea of a classic shooter: after all, “Duma” does not happen much.
Tom Hall, designer
The third co-founder of id Software, Tom Hall, had big plans for Doom. He thought through the setting in detail, drew a map and wrote the whole Doom Bible, according to which the game was to be created. Hall was the creative director of Doom and saw her not as a simple shooter, but as a game with a deeper story and deeper, with elements of puzzles, hero skills and interaction with the environment. “I wanted the player to have a reason to go through all these levels – more than just pull the switch,” said Hall. “The plot in the game is like the plot in a porn film. It should be, but absolutely not important, ”said Carmack, whose word is law. Carmack wanted to make a game with a single seamless world, but did not grow together – and Hall spent a month’s work in the trash. As a result, he was tired of enduring all this, and in the middle of Doom development, Hall left id Software. Drafts of a dozen maps and the Bible, which became a guideline not for the game itself, but for its soundtrack, got from the game to him.
Subsequently, Hall released two highly rated games – a shooter Rise of the triad and RPG Anachronox. And together with Romero, he disappeared into obscurity. In the 2010s, he tried twice to return to Kickstarter: first with the classic RPG, then with the platform designer in the spirit Commander keen. But both times the public did not vote in dollars for his undertakings. So he continues to engage in mobile releases – for example, the game about Gordon Ramsay.
Adrian Carmack, artist
The last of the founders of id Software is Adrian Carmack, who always immediately makes a reservation that he is not a relative of John. Adrian should say thanks for how Doom looks: he came up with the designs of monsters, and he even molded some of them from plasticine to make sprites look more realistic.
Adrian stayed with id for a long time – he left his mark in the three Quake and the third “Duma”. But after leaving the company, he never returned to the gaming industry. The only exception is the failed Romero Blackroom fundraising campaign.
Kevin Cloud, artist
Another id Software artist, Kevin Cloud, left a more personal mark on Doom: it is his hairy arms that we see in virtually every screenshot of the game. He also coined the word “frag” to denote the number of killings in a deathmatch.
Kevin is the only developer of the original “Duma” who has outlived everyone else and still works at id Software. He was the director of the canceled Doom 4 – the one that was nicknamed “Call of Doom” for its extreme linearity and cinematography. And in developing a restarted Doom 2016 he served as executive producer …. SnapMap map editor.
Sandy Petersen, Designer
Let’s move on to the authors of Doom levels. Sandy Petersen is one of the least well-known game developers, but his contribution is hard to overestimate. He joined id instead of the departed Tom Hall literally two and a half months before the release of the game – and in this short time he created two-thirds of the cards. I completed some for Hall, some I made from scratch myself. The second and third episodes of Doom are Petersen, more than half Doom ii – also.
Petersen quit id after Quake. He joined Ensemble software and until the end of the zero worked on strategies: three Age of empires and Halo wars. And then he returned to his other hobby – dashboards. Back in 1981, he released a board role-playing game based on the Call of Cthulhu, and in the mid-2010s he again returned to this topic with “The Wars of Cthulhu“. And he collected more than a million dollars on Kickstarter! Since then, he has launched many desktop projects on a crowdfunding platform – for the most part successful.
American McGee Designer
Unlike Petersen, the name of the American McGee gamer is well known. He began his career precisely in id Software – first a tester, and then a level designer Doom II and a late fourth episode of the first part. After Quake 2 Carmack drove American from id, and he went to Rogue Entertainment, where, at last, the game wasn’t about space marines. Any gamer can call her: American McGee’s Alice quickly became a cult. McGee himself wanted to name it simply Alice, but the publisher decided that the name of one of the Doom designers in the title would help sell the game. In fact, it turned out, it seems, quite the opposite: thanks to Alice, McGee became perhaps the third most famous person from id after Carmack and Romero.
And he did not fail to use his glory in the future. His name is in the names Scrapland, Bad Day L.A. and Grimm – True, it did not help them. All three games were a failure. But Alice: Madness Returns without mentioning McGee, the title was more fortunate: many fans consider her a worthy continuation of the original Alice.
Since the mid-2000s, McGee has been living in China, where he founded (and has already closed) a studio. Spicy horse. Now he is working on the third “Alice” – formally alone, in fact – with the participation of the fan community. So far, he has neither the rights to the franchise nor the approval of EA, but American does not lose hope.
Tim Willits, Designer
Tim Willits made a very small contribution to Doom: only two maps for 4 episodes Ultimate doom and two for Master Levels of Doom II. But then his career in id went uphill: during the Quake trilogy, he was still a designer, but in the nulls he became a creative director. True, under his leadership, games were created that someone is unlikely to call their favorite: Doom 3, Rage, Quake live. In the 2010s, Willits headed id, but in the 19th he left for Russian-American Saber interactive. You can read our separate material about his career.
And finally – a blitz! Sean Greene, a map designer, left id for Ion Storm, where he worked on Daikatana and Anachronox. Then he moved to Gearboxwhere I put my hand to the PC port Halo and series Brothers in arms. What he is doing now is unknown. Another designer, John Anderson, disappeared even earlier, in the early 2000s, after borrowing 10 thousand dollars from John Romero.
Dave Taylor, a programmer who made an autocard, cheats and a chat system, has been mainly porting various things to Linux for the past 25 years and lives as an ascetic. Composer Bobby Prince composed music for Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3Dbut ended his playing career in the late 90s. True, in 2014 he returned with a soundtrack for a shooter Wrackwhose exit went completely unnoticed.
Who is doing Doom now?
Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin
Doom 2016 and Doom eternal (and after the departure of Willits – and the whole id) was headed by Marty Stratton – producer and bizdev id Software since Quake 2. But almost all the other key people in the team are new. Thiago Sauce, previously one of the leading developers, replaced John Carmack as the chief technology officer. Cryengine. Fans of games could remember the composer Mick Gordon by Killer instinct and Wolfenstein: The New Order. Well, the creative director responsible for the vision of the two new Dooms was the artist Hugo Martin, who previously drew concept art for Uncharted, Dante’s Inferno and the film “Pacific Rim“.
