John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale

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I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” is that teams enter into making huge, overly ambitious projects that take years to release before they are ready. Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects. 

I know it seems like the modern games-industry ecosystem is unique and there is no one who can understand our plight, but indie game studios have faced similar problems for decades and they have been able to ship creative, profitable games under those conditions. It’s critical that we learn the history of our business so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes they did. 

While reading John Romero’s new book Doom Guy: Life in First Person it occurred to me that at the start, he and the founders of id Software were facing many of the same issues modern indies are. 

It seemed so relevant that I reached out to John Romero for an interview to see what it was like releasing indie games back in the early 1990s. The following is a transcription of the interview I did with John.

When appropriate, I added a bit of historical context which you can see prefaced as HISTORY. In fact, let me set the scene right now:

HISTORY: In the early 1990s, John Romero worked full time at Softdisk which was a monthly subscription service where every month they would ship you a floppy disk full of PC games called Gamer’s Edge (think of it as an ancient Xbox Games Pass). While making games for Softdisk, his team innovated a technique that could make games on PC side scroll smoothly like the NES and formed id Software to release games that exploited this new technology. Their games they made under id Software were published by Apogee. When John quit Softdisk, the Softdisk CEO realized how much talent he was losing so he negotiated a deal with id Software where id Software would make 6-more games for Softdisk to be delivered in 1991.

The confluence of working full time at Softdisk, then quitting and publishing games under Apogee, and then closing out on a contract for Softdisk meant that John and his team released 27 games in 1990 and 1991. For the full list of games see the table in Appendix.

Chris Zukowski (CZ): Why did you make so many games in 1990 and 1991?

John Romero (JR): When we were working at Gamer’s Edge, every two months we had to ship a game. That’s only six games in a year. 

But we also wanted to make more Commander Keen games. And we also made games outside of work. So the first half of 1991, John Carmack and I made about three games outside of the normal work hours.

And then during the second half of 1991, all of our hours, once again, were spent on two games at a time. It resulted in 13 games that we made in 1991 alone. 

From July of 1991, it took us three months to do the first Commander Keen 4 episode that was shareware. We felt like that was kind of a disaster. Like it took too long, it’s a game that everybody remembers from the Keen series, but to us it was like that was a bad, bad, bad, that it took three months, that’s nuts! We knew we had to go faster if we’re going to ship by Christmas.

So what we did was make Keen 5 right after 4, but then we got a deal to make a Keen for Christmas. And it had to be done before Christmas, way before Christmas, to get in boxes and in stores. So we had to do Keen 4 and then Keen 6 and then Keen 5. For Keen 5 to even make it for shareware to make it out into the market.

At the same time we’re trying to ship these games, we were making the first texture map 3d shooter game. Called Catacomb 3D.  And that took two months as well to get that done. 

It was so busy. 

CZ: How did you manage to do it that fast?

JR: There were just four of us. We’d been making games every day for 10 years. So we had so much experience making games, especially small games. We knew how to scope. We knew what felt like a good size, so when we scoped it out, it was 16 levels made with a level editor, which I already had made.

CZ: How did you scope it?

JR: The scoping on our very first game, Slordax: The Unknown Enemy, was really us deciding how many levels we can make and how long it take us to make these levels. At the time, we didn’t know how long it take Adrian to do varieties of textures, tiles (with scrolling), characters, the ship, shooting, sound effects. You’ve got to create levels, you’ve got to write an editor for that. We saw how many levels we could make, and that kind of showed us what our velocity was.

The second game was a totally different game. It was a side scrolling ninja game called Shadow Knights. We could see how many levels we could make before we hit our two month goal. And so we could tell that we’re getting faster. The art was going at a good speed so we could determine how much data we can create for these games.

The same time that we’re doing that, we’re actually scoping out Commander Keen and we scoped out 48 levels to get done in these three months that we were trying to fit in.

CZ: How were you disciplined to keep your ideas small enough to produce so fast? 

JR: I had made big games before, and it was really fun making big games [Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World and Journey: The Quest Begins]. But they were too big for one person to make. So as a team, we knew not to scope beyond the time that we knew that we had. 

We knew that we were under constraints and that those constraints are finite. So we didn’t whine or complain that we weren’t making big games because we said let’s just get done with our current games and then we’ll think about what’s next. So when we got to the point where we were done with obligations to Softdisk Publishing and we can actually just be 100 percent id Software.

CZ: Weren’t all games small at that time? 

JR: Back in the 80s, there were massive games. So if you talk about, say, Ultima V, you’re looking at several years of a team of people, maybe 10 people working on it. Programming in an assembly language, making a lot of data as compressed as possible to fit on probably 10 disk sides. These projects were really big. I think they had a producer on board to handle all the tasks. And this is in the 80s.

So when we started making our games, especially with Keen, it was September. You have to ship for Christmas and we had to ship three games. We knew, “Okay, these are going to be fast, these won’t be really huge games, but we’ll do the best that we can.” 

We mapped out an initial 16 levels per game. So that’s like 48 levels. So we decided, we can do 48 levels and two and a half months plus all the code and all the art and animations.

CZ: There were a lot of Keen sequels in a short period of time. Were you worried they would cannibalize each other? 

JR: No, because people just wanted more, more and more and more. 

History Lesson: In 1991, John Carmack began research on a 3D-real-time game engine that was the predecessor of every First Person Shooter (FPS) we have today. Carmack was doing things that had never before thought possible with a consumer-grade home computer. It was revolutionary. But, instead of just holding the tech until it was perfect, id Software published 2 smaller, more experimental games under their contract with Softdisk. Those prototype games were Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D. You can actually play these foundational FPS games in your browser by clicking the following links

Play Hovertank 3D

Play Catacombs 3D

If you love FPS games, are making one, or just interested in games history, it is required that you try out the games just so you understand how industry-redefining games actually involve many many evolutionary baby steps that are largely forgotten. Know your gaming history. 

CZ: You all released the first smooth scrolling 3D game with the game Hovertank, but you published it under Gamer’s Edge, not under your studio id Software. Why reveal your hand with such revolutionary technology?

JR: We were basically getting paid to experiment and do R&D (Research and Development) and create a 3D engine. We made it and sold it to them. And then later we could take another chance six months later with Catacomb 3D doing texture mapping for the first time. And so it was another experiment that they’re paying us for.

And then with Wolfenstein 3D, we were on our own at that point. We had done 3D twice, we knew how to do it, and we’re going to do our own game this time. We didn’t need advances or anything like that kind of stuff. We already had money coming in every month (from the Keen series).

CZ: When did you know you were ready to move from Keen games to make Wolfenstein and Doom?

JR: I knew that we’re wasting our time with Keen because 3D was really where it’s going to be. It’s not going to be with this 2D stuff. We need to get out of the 2D stuff. We’d spent two weeks already making a really cool demo of Keen 7. It had VGA parallax scrolling, all this stuff that was going to be a big jump in 2D.

And… at one in the morning, I said “Guys, we should not be doing this game. We have this cool technology that we’re not using, that we’re not taking advantage of to make a better version of that game going forward.” And so everyone immediately went, ‘Yep, you’re right.’

That’s where Castle Wolfenstein was kind of born, was right then. We knew this is the first game that we’re going to make that does not have a time constraint on it. And, uh, and so this is, this is let’s make a really good game and put everything that we feel belongs in it and just do it right.

And that’s what we did. And it took us four months to get the shareware version out, which for us four months is crazy. We spent a month and a half getting the five episodes of maps and bosses done. And so it was a total of five and a half months with the hint book and like everything.

So it felt like that was great. We weren’t time-constrained. We could make a really great game and we did and really liked it.

CZ: In the early days of id Software, you guys were making decent money but not Ferrari money yet. Were you upset by that? Did you know how much money the big studios were making in the 1990s?

JR: When I was working at Origin Systems, they would have a company meeting and they would talk about sales and everything. And they were making amazing money, like $3,000,000 profit in 1987 (side note that is $7,605,928.98 in 2023 money.)

We wanted to be LucasArts and Origin in quality but make the kind of games at the size that we felt was appropriate. We don’t want to make these epic sagas. We just wanted to make really fun experiences.

CZ: But At the time, Softdisk paid you just $5000 ($11,405 in 2023 dollars) for every game you developed for them. Did that seem small compared to what you saw Origin was earning?

JR: No, we were blown away that it was that much. Back then rent was really cheap. It was in the hundreds of dollars per month. Our goal was to survive as a company and a team. So when we got the first check and the idea was to start the company, work full time, and there was four of us.

The first thing that we thought was “we need to hold on to as much money as we can in the company.” Each person at that point had a different situation with how much money they needed to spend to live every month because of their rent cost and their bills that they had. There might be a car payment or something.

Later, we were making $50,000 a month and, and we gave ourselves little raises, but we kept as much as we could in the bank because if, if the game didn’t sell well or we had a dry spell or took too long to make a game or whatever, we needed to be able to keep on going to finish the game and to be able to get it out.

So we had to be as conservative as we could possibly be. Yeah. We weren’t out buying anything. We were just working.

CZ: Today your first month of sales are a large proportion of how much your game will make. What was the revenue curve like for newly launched games in the 1990s?

JR: It was a very long tail. The spike wasn’t even at the beginning because BBSs (Bulletin board systems) were really limited in the amount of people that would be exposed to stuff. So, our initial spike actually went on for a long time. At minimum, it was half a year before it peaked, and then it went down.

Income stacking was critical. We needed to be getting income from multiple games at the same time. 

We made $10,500 ($23,846 in 2023 dollars) that first month of id Software. By the same time the next year, we were making $50,000 ($113,555.35) per month. And it’s because of income stacking.

At that point, we had the original Keen (which was still going really strong), we had the second set of Keens, and what that meant was we had a shareware version of Keen that had two pieces, which was a really bad idea, because it didn’t do as well as the first one because of that.

But we also had a retail Keen that was out as well, so we had three products that were out and we also had money coming in because we’re making these Gamer’s Edge games.

So we were just being real conservative and saving as much as we could. And then when Wolfenstein 3D hit, that changed the world basically. It was huge. 

CZ: How did you make money even after Wolfenstein and Doom hit it big?

JR: After Doom (during Quake’s development) was when I got Final Doom going. But I also had Heretic and Hexen. We did Master Levels for Doom 2. We were upgrading Doom to Ultimate Doom to go retail. It was just a lot of games. I think within the six years that I was there at id Software, we had published 35 Games or something like that.

CZ: If we were to transport 20-year-old John Romero to 2023, with today’s tools, and game environment, do you think you could replicate that productivity of the 1990s?

JR: I think so. When you look at the breadth of indie games and what they look like, if you go to itch. io and places where indies live, there’s such a wide range of art styles and games.  

Horror games are massive with indies and there’s a 1995, a PlayStation aesthetic of graphics. That’s really big. It takes less time to make that graphic quality than it does for a realistic or semi realistic full Unreal Engine.

So, you could do that if you were spending the most time that you can on the gameplay part because the engine’s done. Don’t think about the engine, you think about making. Figure out what you’re making, your experience. 

Let’s say if it’s Unreal, are you making blueprints that are really modular for the different rooms you’re going to go in if you’re making a horror game. You want it to feel like it’s a roller coaster ride to get through.

So how are you pacing it? How big is it? What’s the scope? 

I do game jams every once in a while. In 2017 I did a 10 hour game jam with a programmer that works at our company. In 10 hours we put together a horror adventure game, with about 13 different screens, creepy music, creepy dialogue, and it had a very weird vibe and published it.

If you want to check it out, it’s called July 4th, 1976. So it’s on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows done in, in 10 hours published on four platforms. 

There’s a really great company in Portugal that’s putting this game together with a bunch of other indie games and they’re going to be taking the Switch version of it and it’s going to actually appear on an indie compilation on Switch. 

But you can see, it’s a 10 hour game. If you’re asking, what games can you get in a month, this is 10 hours.

To see more of John Romero’s side projects, check out his site Play Barf 

CZ: But what if my dream game is in the style of a Final Fantasy game? 

JR: You need to scope way down. A scoping exercise is like the most important thing you can do at the very beginning. Like, just think about this: since we’re talking about the horror genre and I did this 10 hour thing, one of the most memorable horror demos that people have seen in recent years?

It’s P. T. It’s a hallway, and people won’t forget it, right? It’s a hallway. And that tells you everything about the amount of content you need to make to stick in people’s minds. It’s the design that matters. It’s not the size. It’s not a gigantic adventure. It’s doing something brand new no one has seen in the genre that you’ve chosen that’s really unique.

And if you’re talking about spending a lot of time on a game, spend it on design. Think about what you’re doing and think about something that’s new and pushing the boundaries of the genre that you’re in. 

CZ: What if you are stuck in a 2,3, or even 4-year-long development hell?

JR: If you don’t see the end, if you don’t see a good end, if you don’t know where it’s going to end up, but you have an idea for something else that you’re more excited about, it’s really hard advice, but I would like do the thing that you’re most interested in doing, even if you’ve spent that much time.

It’s going to show that it’s not this big inspired amazing thing because you wouldn’t be in that position if it was. So move on to the next thing as soon as you can. You’ve learned a lot. You’ve learned what happens when you have big ideas and they don’t turn out to be what you were hoping for.

Try to make something maybe more doable in a shorter span of time. Even if it’s mildly successful, you’ve learned something. Do another thing that’s a little bit bigger.

And it could be a sequel. It could be an offshoot. If it’s the kind of game that you like, but start small always and release something that’s interesting and then go up from there. Don’t ever start with something gigantic if you haven’t done it before, because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you’ve never done it before.

The bigger it is, the more off course you’re going to get. Just think about an angle where you’re trying to hit a mark years down the road. If it’s off by one degree, what’s it going to look like years later? 

Those errors will magnify over time. So you need to make sure that you make really good decisions at the very beginning and try to correct them as soon as you can.

As soon as you see something’s wrong, cut your losses as soon as you can. You have a certain amount of time. You only have so many games. 

CZ: Final question, what do you think about the term Boomer Shooter?

The funny thing about boomers, it doesn’t even matter because for people who made up the term boomer shooter, anyone who’s old as a boomer, boomers are actually the kids of World War Two vets.

That’s my mom. My mom is 20 years older than I am. She’s actually a boomer. So, boomers are not typically developing games. 

It’s funny. It’s a funny name. And I usually say it is a boomer shooter. It’s got a shotgun in it. It makes a big boom sound and you’re shooting. it doesn’t bug me. It’s really like you’re trying to nail the aesthetics of the style and that’s like that’s a phrase that kind of says what you need to know 

Additional reading and watching

Watch John Romero’s talk about the making of Wolfenstein

Watch John Romero’s GDC talk about the making of Doom

Buy John’s Book.

Or get the audio book version

Appendix

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