To bad Deus Ex was a flash in the pan, and nothing good game after it.

@@ValdVincent What a shame.

Well... I liked daikatana too, when it came out... it was a trip lol

I would strongly disagree with that. Carmack was and is exponentially more talented than Romero. Id have continued to release phenomenal games post their split while Romero has done precisely fuckall except sully his reputation with mindless dreck.

@@thesprawl2361 I think he's getting at the old Steve Jobs/Wozniak partnership where one individual is obviously vastly more talented from a technical perspective (Carmack/Wozniak) whereas the other individual possesses the overall project design/vision. Personally I think you're probably right as Steve Jobs & Romero are overrated in general and their technical counterparts did a fuck-ton more to advance their respective industries but the "face of the company" always gets the credit.

LOOOOOOOOOOL!!! SKADOOBY!....that was a bloopdooby on Carmack, LOOOOOOOOOOOOL!

​@@jonathanjimmyshearman2500I expected the reply to this comment to be about how left and right brain doesn't actually exist, not .... that. Edit: I'm so glad someone liked this comment so that I could be reminded of this.

Nicely put, andrew.

@@adamnielson42 Yeah, I looked at that comment and was ..."startled " I guess is the word. But I'm getting old, and many comments I see on the internet just don't make sense to me anymore.

Right Brain: "I LIKE OEROS & PUSSY... And I cried for at least an hour after watching Toy Story 3!"

I know exactly what you're talking about. Working with people like that is a nightmare. They either don't realize or don't care that they create a terrible and unfulfilling working environment for other people. In my opinion they are very selfish and self-centered. They never mentor or share knowledge directly. They don't care about making other people look bad or overwriting their own. Eventually an unpleasant atmosphere forms on the team and developers either leave or there are constant conflicts, reducing the output of the team. People like that are useful, but they never change, and if they aren't managed properly, they can destroy cultures and teams. That's why it's very important to have a good manager who sees and understands what is going on and most importantly takes action and puts this special developer on more isolated work.

Carmack reminds me of exactly that type of person. Romero has spoken in multiple interviews about this split, and I believe his version: - Romero and everyone else on the team WANTED to work on games, but Carmack just nerded away at the engine and rewrote it over and over (over 8 times) which meant throwing away all level design work and art over and over again. And game scripts had to be deleted because Carmack kept rewriting the scripting language. - Furthermore, since the engine wasn't done, they had no idea what they really can design or what will be too heavy for the machines, so they had no way to design great levels in case they would run too slowly. - And lastly he mentioned that the level design tools were absolute torture to work with and had very convoluted workflows that involved some kind of slow, backwards modeling. - They wanted to expand the team to speed up engine progress but Carmack refused, believing that a larger company is worse. - All of this contributed to everyone else burning out due to Carmack's years of delays and constant rewrites. - When the engine was finally complete, every art/level creator on the team were completely burned out and didn't even want to make a game anymore. All because of Carmack's torturous rewrites of the engine having broken their inspiration. - Several people left during development. Half the team left after Quake was done. This is why I believe Romero. Carmack was simply a tech guy with perfectionism. He was not a team player. And due to Carmack being on the spectrum, he saw everyone else as "not working" even though they were all held up by him and his constant rewrites. - After the split, we can clearly see what each brought to Id: Carmack's newer games are boring engine tech demos. Romero's newer games are artistic visions with bad engines. Both of them needed each other.

TLDR get gud scrub.

@@MyAmazingUsername couldn't say it better myself, it's such a waste of a pair that changed a part of the world, Lennon and McCartney if both asked today if they could work together right now they'd probably say YES if Lennon was still able to speak now

Yep, met them also in that they believe the whole world revolves around truth and competence with zero understanding of social and political politics.

yes exactly. A lot of people tend to give way too much credit to autore types like John Carmack and hideyokojima who seem like they do a lot more for a project than they actually do there are dozens or sometimes hundreds of people working at these companies designing programming writing and creating sometimes even more than the kojima's of their team and I think those people deserve a lot more of our respect than the John CarMax and hideo kojimas of the world even though they do still deserve our respect they are merely the face of the group not the entire body.

@@wearecoterminousID Software had around 5 programmers during the development of Doom. John Carmack was like a human coding machine. If it wouldn't have been for him, the games would not be nearly as efficient as they were accessible, which helped alot with briniging the games to the masses. That's the true genius of a great coder. This is why I understand the appeal of giving John Carmack a great amount of credit but at the end of the day, everyone has their place as cogs in a wheel.

i love sandy i watch his cool cthulu videos

@@synthguy7774 it's no denying that carmack is an absolute monster, but everyone else had significant and undeniable contributions without which idSoft just wouldn't have been the same (or as successful imo).

@@mgk-metalgearkelly5054 I wasn't denying that at all. I was just giving an explanation as to to why John Carmack gets so much credit even though everyone else at ID Software played just as much of an important role within the team. I think we are in agreement.

And Tom Hall too 😊

@@KaiElan I was actually gonna edit that into my comment! So true! Makes me really happy.

It was so good to hear Carmack talk about Romero.

Shortly after Romero left, Carmack posted to Slashdot that "a properly focused Romero is an asset to any team", and it was just hard for him to keep his focus on what needed to be done at Id. So there never really was any bad blood, it was a matter of differences in opinion that made it difficult to work with Romero in the direction Id was going. Carmack is a typical nerd -- he wants to keep all his long-time friends. Kinda like Steve Wozniak who still speaks highly of Jobs, even though Jobs was a jerk to him.

@@bitwize There was definitely bad blood and Carmack did say negative things about him at the time, as Romero did about him. It just wasn't as bad or as bitter or as long lasting as people wanted to make it out to be. It's interesting to hear Carmack admit that he was in the wrong, though. He's expressed vague regret about things in the past, but I don't think I've ever heard him flatout admit to mishandling things before.

Stuff like that's still core in some of my fave games of all time

Without Tom Hall, Doom probably would have never happened. That game was his idea originally. He's the one who wrote the "Doom Bible" after all. Of course, the final game was a massive departure from what was laid out in the Doom Bible. The released game is massively different from what was originally envisioned. But the truth still stands: Doom was originally Tom Hall's baby.

@@DeadPixel1105I love Tom Hall but the idea for Doom came from their dnd campaign where they flooded their world with demons, Tom of course added to it but it was a lot of Carmack as well.

Maybe one day they'll get back together and make once last game.

If that were true, there wouldn't be such a HUGE pool of A++ 3rd party stuff for the game though.

That's exactly what happens here - two great men working together despite the fact they had different approach to a work process. It's such a rare situation when two big talents work hand in hand to give us a timeless masterpiece.

I enjoyed Doom 3 quite a bit. It's enormously more sophisticated in terms of level and art design than Quake or Doom, even taking into account that it came out much later. Doom and Quake are iconic and have excellent level design, but they were crammed with the tropes of previous games. I'd say they crystalised the general conventions that were floating around at that time in first person shooters and solidified the genre into something tangible, but they didn't do anything revolutionary in terms of level design. For that you'd look at Half Life or maybe Deus Ex. So I think you're downplaying Carmack's talent a little. I've enjoyed almost everything Id have come out with since the split between these two, whereas Romero's work has been uniformly pretty bad.

@@thesprawl2361 Quake and Doom were crammed with tropes of previous games? There were no previous games of that calibre before Doom and Quake. Doom is the standard WAD from which a thousand others sprang (Hexen, Blood, Ion Fury, etc..) And Quake is the grandfather of all 3D fps games, and was the origin of CounterStrike (Action Quake) and Team Fortress and far more. They *are* the trope. That makes Mecha's point more valid, not less.

@@Shamino1 Of course they were crammed with tropes. The fact that you don't remember the games that preceded them and influenced them doesn't make it any less true. Doom and Quake crystalised the disparate elements that already existed in various games that came before into one genre whole. They didn't do anything that revolutionary, what made them iconic is that they simultaneously did a whole bunch of things phenomenally well.

@@thesprawl2361 Go ahead and list me 3 FPS games before Doom that had its tropes directly imported into Doom. I'll wait.

@@thesprawl2361 Name some... You keep talking of these 'tropes' yet name none...

Disagreements make good content.

Ron De'Santis is the best fucking thing to have happened to the sorry excuse of a nation called USA since Ronald Reagan.

Sort of owns. He never really owns it

True, if Carmack hadn't kicked him, we never would have gotten DX

Turns out, John Romero didn't make *anyone* his bitch with Daikatana

@@cr4zyg047 I remember reading in a magazine that had an interview with member(s) of Ion Storm, and it just sounded like they were spending excessively, and I was like WHO is funding this? I mean I remember they had a movie theater built into the office, there were beds for employees to sleep in. They hadn't made a game yet, it seemed like people were just throwing money at them because they had PAST successes with other people. I can't remember if it was in the same magazine, or a later one that had the Daikatana ad, but I just remember feeling sick, like could a guy be any more narcissistic?

he kinda indirectly made deus ex happen, so it was all worth it really

Daikatana is a hidden gem. It’s exhausting towards the end but it’s so diverse and fun to play through

Taking good care of yourself helps a lot too!

@@bradley3549 money helps alot too!

​@@dfghj241it wont help if your sleep schedule is bad.

He is very typical of his archetype. Gifted intellectually but cannot understand people-- for instance he married Anna Kang from id software, the first woman who ever showed him attention in his life. She basically just "took" him, sensing his social weakness.

@@1lapmagic There are accounts of Carmack dating before he met Anna Kang and she only worked at id because he asked her to because he wanted her to move to Dallas. Weird little narrative you've developed in your head, there.

@@Allen.Christian An empowered rich man marrying an ugly, nasty woman who offers nothing is a story of domination

@@1lapmagic I think I sense he’s understanding people under his intellect more and more from these interviews

@@demonface2712 As someone who has personally interacted with John as well as various other gifted nerds...he doesn't. Let me be plain about that.

yo civvie chill

That was quite the string of adjectives. One day I hope people refer to me that way. Space Wizard sounds neato.

Civvie 11 is that you???

The gameplay definitely suffered. You can really tell how important John Romero was for that aspect.

Romero hasn't produced anything relevant since, to me it really shows he needs the drive of someone like Carmack to produce good games without it he's a shell

I can see where you're coming from, but I still believe that Quake 2, Doom 3, and Rage had unique atmospheres to them that feel uniquely "them."

When Romero's Daikatana finally came out, i was shocked. It looked like a piece of s!it. Its a little bit sad, Romero and Carmack could have made amazing games together for a longer time.

And the younger folks that dont olay games much or havent played doom, they love it. They feel its super intuitive and easy to read

Yeah have a friend who lets his 9 year old play Classic Doom Co-op with him and he says he’s getting pretty good

@@demonface2712 The leap from Wolf 3D to Doom was HUGE, so was the leap from Doom to Quake. I mean I can play Doom now and have fun, Wolf 3D just feels boring/samey. I mean I've played Hovertank and Catacomb 3-D too, and I'd rather play those again over Wolf 3D.

Not really. Neither of these guys have been meaningful to video games for well over 20 years. I feel like your comparison is very boomery and getting stuck in the past of personalities like this is boomery too.

Not dinging on Ringo, a much better comparison would be Lennon-McCartney, given the rep.

@@1lapmagic it's still possible.

@@Shad0wN1ck I was thinking more in terms of being alive, but I see what you're saying.

@@M.W.H. comment has nothing to do about whether it's possible and everything to do with whether it'd be some humongous story. Read for comprehension or don't bother typing. Not everyone needs your insipid input.

John*

you forgot sandy

and Adrian...

Romero, to this day, says every word of Masters Of Doom is true

The amount of work and detail that went into this book is unbelievable

Check out "Prepare to Meet Thy Doom and More True Gaming Stories" - which is sort of a follow up.

According to Romero every word of the book is truth, so one of them must be lying, but regardless of who it is, its clear the book makes romero look like the victim and carmack like an egomaniac, so take from that what you will.

Every chapter ends with "EDIT: Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well"

Just like pizza is stroyent, 😀 tickles.

Carmack doesn't care about making games anymore.

This is such a specific analogy that only makes sense at the intersection of id nerds and goth kids but if you're in that part of the Venn diagram it's great.

@@princessmaly I can only talk for myself.

Time is a great healer; kinda what John alludes to here with his new views on things

While the gaming industry keeps on changing all the time, you can always count on gamers on turning every little thing into a gigantic drama.

Yeah, Carmack is a very complicated individual it seems. There are two passages of the book that stuck with me regarding this: One is where he takes his elderly cat to a shelter to be euthanized because the cat was sort of cranky and pissing on stuff, and he is very "don't know, don't care" about it. The other is how he gets very angry that the team was asking him to include secret rooms in moving walls, something that he felt like would make his code "dirty" or something. In all honesty he was probably a hard guy to work with

@@Illusionaire1 That's what it takes to be the best at what you do and alter the landscape of whatever you're trying to acomplish in an unprecedented way. Then again, they were kids

Romero has spoken in multiple interviews about this split, and I believe his version: - Romero and everyone else on the team WANTED to work on games, but Carmack just nerded away at the engine and rewrote it over and over (over 8 times) which meant throwing away all level design work and art over and over again. And game scripts had to be deleted because Carmack kept rewriting the scripting language. - Furthermore, since the engine wasn't done, they had no idea what they really can design or what will be too heavy for the machines, so they had no way to design great levels in case they would run too slowly. - And lastly he mentioned that the level design tools were absolute torture to work with and had very convoluted workflows that involved some kind of slow, backwards modeling. - They wanted to expand the team to speed up engine progress but Carmack refused, believing that a larger company is worse. - All of this contributed to everyone else burning out due to Carmack's years of delays and constant rewrites. - When the engine was finally complete, every art/level creator on the team were completely burned out and didn't even want to make a game anymore. All because of Carmack's torturous rewrites of the engine having broken their inspiration. - Several people left during development. Half the team left after Quake was done. This is why I believe Romero. Carmack was simply a tech guy with perfectionism. He was not a team player. And due to Carmack being on the spectrum, he saw everyone else as "not working" even though they were all held up by him and his constant rewrites. - After the split, we can clearly see what each brought to Id: Carmack's newer games are boring engine tech demos. Romero's newer games are artistic visions with bad engines. Both of them needed each other.

@@MyAmazingUsername On the book, they talk about how Carmack saw things like walls that would open up (for secrets) as being "code-hacks", so we can imagine that he probably had this idea of the "ideal, clean, perfect code" and anything else resonated very badly with him. As someone on the spectrum like myself, I can totally understand it... So Yeah, I can see how the constant rewrites would make people very mad, specially because I would guess most of it wasn't for any practical reason that would affect the final result, only carmack being perfectionist about the code, not the result.

​@@Illusionaire1 Well said. It's clear that Carmack enjoyed the process of creating super clean code and perfecting it and making very advanced technology. That's fun stuff to do in your spare time, but he did it on company time while everyone else was waiting on him, and it doesn't seem like he understood that the others can't work if the tools keep breaking/rewriting/changing. I can also understand his feelings that "he's the one with the super big brain, writing super advanced code", which led to him wishing that he didn't even share the company ownership with any of the others. He probably also felt that the artists/designers didn't even understand or appreciate how hard his engine work was. He's somewhat justified in both of those feelings. I can see why both sides began to resent each other. The team torturously waiting on him, and him thinking they're "doing nothing". It's no wonder why half of them quit and one didn't even show up to work at all for the final month before Quake launched. That was "American McGee", and Romero has often said that McGee "snapped" in the end with all the bad working conditions and bad atmosphere. Despite all of the conflicts, Quake's engine really was a masterpiece. High performance rendering even without 3D cards. Great features for its time. It even became the basis for the Half-Life Source engine. And Quake itself was a classic with its gritty artstyle and great level design (they were very memorable levels even though they rushed the design when the engine was finally done). So in the end, they all created something fantastic together. :D As a kid, I had no idea that Id was in so much trouble. All I saw was the masterpiece Quake, which me and my friends played and modded for years, and it was a staple at our LAN parties for 10 years after its release! I remember creating Quake texture WADs, to get better visibility for lootable items in multiplayer. One of the greatest games of all time.

i really liked how they show respect for each other

Downloading Doom in everyone's PC 🤣

What, did you carry a handful of floppy disks with you everywhere you went? Or is it that your Christian parents LEARNED of you playing Doom, and that was a paddlin'? :P

@@phattjohnson the old school games still hold up today so I could imagine people going crazy when it first came out

@@phattjohnson lol. No, My family was one of the poorer ones in town and did have a computer till I was 15 (1995). I played it any chance I got.

Rage is the one that people unfairly criticize. Like honestly, I couldn't care less that it's not fallout. I love the way its a lot simpler and more linear than something like that The gsmrplay was rock solid and it was a cool world. Plus it looked incredible for a ps3 360 game

Also if there is one member in a team doing all the dirty work taking most of the time - programming, new technologies - it doesn't mean other members who don't work that much are less valuable. There will be always that one guy who is overperforming and knows more than the others in crucial area of the business.

Kind of a middle finger to the internet warriors saying there's still beef between them. Comment sections are the best form of comedy these days.

That stream was awesome, was really great to see them together.

I'm curious how Daikatana would have been if those terrain-meshes were available - that's now relatively old tech, but much better than the previous node-based layout where ai ran in the exact middle of the hall, because that's where they were allowed to run)

Romero was always the creatively gifted one, his visions for games were just too ambitious for the time. Carmack on the other hand has always been pushing gaming technology forward, with the caveat of his ambition being that everything else is secondary.

YES!

That's not a talent, that's exploiting other people's talent.

@@m0rvidusm0rvidus18 if those people otherwise wouldn't get the chance to Make what they want, is it exploitation? Warren Spector was about to sign his life over to EA, which even then had a rep for shuttering great studios. How would that be better? Romero offering Warren his own studio and a chance to make the game of his dreams, while fighting to keep the publishers off Warren's back, seems pretty far from exploration to me.

Withouth Romero, Id software neither... Carmack was a freelancer. Romero did found Id catching all the team.

I think you're putting a little too much onus on Romero there. Spector was already well known by the time he got to Ion Storm. He was editor-in-chief at Steve Jackson Games during the 80s, then went to TSR and had a hand in the 2nd edition AD&D ruleset and Spelljammer, was at Origin for four years during their peak, consulted and managed the Looking Glass crew during the development of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief 1 before leaving and eventually choosing to join Romero instead of EA. Romero's big contribution was his promise of unlimited freedom for Spector to make the game he wanted with the team he wanted without pressure from clueless corporate suits and bankrolled it to make it a reality.

We already had 3D maze like games. They were slow, focused on exploration and were more popular as RPG games with stats and menus like the D&D games. Problem was RPG games were super niche back then and often seen as too nerdy for most people. ID's action games were completely different. Fast, visceral, loud, eerie and those great memorable soundtracks. No wonder they blew everyone away.

There are tangible ways to observe how hard everyone is working. It starts with the hours put in. Putting in less than 40hrs should he scrutinized. After that, it's more about results. Carmack was clearly not understanding the nuances of his teammates but most people can. I work on a small team of different roles and it's easy to see how we all pull our own weight, and when we get a new person who isn't.

Carmark has done a lot of games after Romero. But Romero peaked with Doom and now gives speeches for beer money. So, he turned to be least important person in the company.

Yeh, turned out Carmack was right. Romero was wrong, you can't work at a casual pace, because that leads to something like Duke Nukem Forever, "when its done" ... a huge lull in productivity causes the technology to outpace your game making it redundant and dated fast. To keep up with the changing technology, you have to get your game out while the tech is still relevant. Carmack was smart enough to understand this it seems, but not Romero.

@@Blake4014he was wrong about where game engines were heading and lost the gamble on Rage

One of the things I love about present-day Id is they're really trying to bring the metal back, at least for Doom. Their Doom Eternal team lead cut a promo for Doom Eternal at a con that called back to their pitch for "The Fight for Justice".

@@bitwize yeah ID are still doin themselves proud. Keep it up!

Quake II is where the games id put out became focused on being tech demos first and video games second.