The Icon of Sin news
The legendary game developer, Jordan Mechner, has published his GRAPHIC NOVEL memoir and it’s really great! I love his artwork and it goes into his family history and all the way through his FOUR DECADES in the game industry (Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express, etc.) Check it out at Jordan Mechner.com !
No results found
Art by Montagu Studios SIGIL has been out for a while now. I uploaded the free version on May 31, 2019. Many YouTube playthrough videos have been uploaded and the response has been good. I had a great team of DOOM technicians helping me make sure all the data was as good as possible. Even though DOOM is 25 years old, every single line segment in a level has a bunch of information on it. Most…
The SIGIL update as of today is that we have all the various parts of the package together and they will be boxed up over the weekend. Satan willing, they will be shipping to customers next week! Here are some photos of the goods.
I just wanted to update you on SIGIL. There were a few snags in production trying to make sure everything is top-notch for fans! I just wanted to let everyone who purchased either the Big Box or the Beast Box know that it is now looking like it will ship sometime in April. Thank you for your patience, and I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. This also means the free version of…
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for the stars. Incredibly, and perhaps a bit naively, we made a list of the technological wizardry we…
Game boxes used to be really cool. They had different dimensions, they took chances with very expensive designs like SUSPENDED, and before they turned into folded cardboard with a paper sleeve over it, quality of the package was really important. Witness LucasArts and Origin Systems' boxes from the 80's as exemplars of the game box. But over time, game packaging evolved and changed. But how did…
It's a big deal to us that Apple decided to feature our son Donovan and our game Gunman Taco Truck on the front page of the App Store! They did an excellent interview with Donovan and wrote a very nice article. If you have any comments about the game please leave one below – Donovan would like to know what you think about his game.
We live in Galway, Ireland and situated Romero Games Ltd. in city centre. We were at our first location for two years and, because our team size grew, we needed a bigger place. We looked at several places we could get in addition to the office we were already in because we really loved our first office – it was nice and cozy. Luckily, while we were looking at extra space, a new building appeared…
As a game historian, I know it's very important to get the facts right. Figuring out the origin of significant aspects of games is important, and to document them is imperative. So, when I read a story that said Tim Willits invented the idea of multiplayer-only maps, I felt compelled to correct it. The story told about how he came into the office and talked to me and Carmack about his idea, and we…
This is part of a recent email I got: “ I’ve recently been going through the old Catacombs and Dangerous Dave games, and I’m wondering why Commander Keen, Doomguy and Quakeguy never had a run-in with Nemesis the Lich? Seems like that guy is more immortal than Castlevania’s Dracula. Or did he turn out to have a critical weakness to Dangerous Dave’s Shotgun? ” — James S.P. Nemesis was a…
I've been playing some Quake lately. Our lead programmer was a top-ranked Quaker back in the day and it's a blast playing deathmatch 1-on-1 with him. I did a twitter poll recently asking people which game they'd like to see trivia about and Quake won this time. DOOM had such a fast player speed. It's still so much fun deathmatching in DOOM with that speed. Quake was way slower than DOOM, and I'm…
It was going to happen sometime. Recently on Twitter I ran a poll asking people what game they'd like to see a piece of trivia about. I had Wolf, DOOM, Keen, and Quake listed. DOOM won handily with 40% of the votes. I thought about all the trivia that I know about DOOM. I thought,"Hmmm – I wonder if people know who the Doomguy is modeled after? On the cover of the box." Well, I decided to reveal…
Here in Galway, Ireland we have game jams. I did a 10-hour game jam with Ian Dunbar and we made a creepy little game called July 4, 1976. The game is on the iOS App Store now (free). You can read about it here. Read about July 4, 1976
I just uploaded the interview that I did with Nasir Gebelli in 1998 at my company, Ion Storm, during an Apple II Reunion that I hosted. There's a lot of great information about his history in the industry and how he got started. Nasir wrote games entirely in assembly language and did not save source code. He didn't even have a printer to look at his code! He wrote all his NES games on an Apple II…
I just got some stub pages up for the bigger games like Wolf 3D, DOOM, Quake, etc. I rescued a few of my oldest game entries from the Wayback Machine, too: Crazy Climber, Alien Attack, and Bongo's Bash. I decided to update the game pages and put gameplay video of the games on them (as well as download links for emulators). It's crazy to think that I can play a game I wrote in 1982 in an Apple II…
Man, 26 years. Seriously? Ok, well, I better deal with it. I've told the story several times before about how much fun we three had making the first Keen games (me, Tom and John). Here's something that I've never talked about before. In early January 1992, before we decided to make Wolfenstein 3D, we planned on making the third Commander Keen trilogy, "The Universe Is Toast!". This is the VGA…
It's that time of year again, where we say Happy Birthday to one of my most favorite games, DOOM! Every year I try to reveal something about the game's development that hasn't been documented to death. Believe me, DOOM has been documented more than most games. But never fear, I have so much stuff that no one has seen that I could do this forever. Of course, I'm limited in what I can release, so…
Carnage Con Truckie We're getting very close to completing development on Gunman Taco Truck, Donovan's first soon-to-be-published game. There's no release date yet as our publisher will be spending some time checking it out. It's been a blast working on it; such fun times. I've been tweeting some info and images recently and people sound pretty excited to check it out. Here are some examples:
Twenty years. Wow. Where has all the time gone? We've all had many adventures during those years and Quake spawned many a game franchise and/or game company whether directly or through its influence. For this 20th I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur called QUAKETALK 95. This Quake FAQ was created on 10/22/1995 to keep people up to date on everything that had been posted about…
Here's my Twitterstream for all the latest...
I've been busy rebuilding my site quietly here and there when I have time. Reposting years of blog entries is really tedious! But I want to retain the history of my site so I'm doing it – almost done, in fact. I just announced Night Work Games a couple days ago, and that I'm working on a new First-Person Shooter. If you want to sign up to get late-breaking news on the game, sign up at…
The newest version of Doomsday is fantastic! You can grab it at http://dengine.net. Just click on the icon at the bottom for your operating system. I had a problem setting up a multiplayer server, but I finally figured it out. Here’s how to do it: 1) Make a DOOM folder and put both the Doomsday Engine and Doomsday Shell in that directory 2) Copy your DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD into that directory 3)…
I married Brenda Garno on October 27, 2012 on the Mark Twain steamboat at Disneyland, then again on November 10 at our house with a larger audience. We're both very happy and she's just amazing.
It's been a long time coming, but the decision has been made - Brenda Brathwaite (my fiancé) and Tom Hall (my good buddy) are teaming together to make an Old-School RPG that harkens back to the 80's and 90s great RPGs we all played and loved. They plan on making the game at our company, Loot Drop, Inc. located in San Bruno, CA.
It's that time again! The good news is that the company is still intact and working on projects (DOOM 4 for sure). The bad news is that id laid-off a batch of people earlier in January, probably because they didn't need 100 people to sit on a brand-new team. Also, it's unfortunate that this birthday hasn't been recognized anywhere, not even on id's own blog. They're probably too busy dealing with…
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was written before new, amazing SDK's were released such as Corona SDK. Other posts will address Corona as a better place to start. I believe anyone wanting to learn programming should start with the basics, and that means the C language. It also means no graphics so the focus is on the language itself and understanding just the language, and not an IDE or environment…
Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote anything here... thank you very much, Facebook. Most of my updates happen over there, but not really anything important or game history-related. I use Twitter as well, but don't do much. I'm just very busy running my game company, Loot Drop, and forgetting to update my site. At GDC 2011, Tom Hall and I did a DOOM Post-Mortem, which basically talked about…
What would it feel like to actually make Disneyland in a magical, fairytale forest? That's what I wanted to find out with Ravenwood Fair. I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the…
When John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and I officially started our first day at the lakehouse on Cross Lake in Shreveport, Louisiana, we had absolutely no idea that our company would last twenty years. After three months, Tom Hall officially joined us in May 1991. He wanted his transition from Softdisk to go smoothly, so he stayed to train his replacement. Our first year at id was spent mostly…
I use GMail a lot, and love the Archive feature. The problem is that when I use Mail.app on my iMac it doesn't have an Archive button or Archive the messages when I delete them. It actually DELETES THEM, which is not what I want. So, I figured out how to do this in a real easy way. In Mail.app: 1) Near the bottom, expand your GMail folder 2) Expand the [Gmail] folder inside 3) Select the All Mail…
Over the course of the last year, I've been working on a project to document the history of game design , and I've interviewed everyone from Sid Meier to Noah Falstein to Nasir Gebelli. As a part of that, this weekend, I set out to find the legendary game company Sierra On-Line. Unencumbered by research, my girlfriend Brenda and I spontaneously decided Friday night to leave Saturday morning for…
I've been asked several times by people on Twitter what I think about Duke Nukem Forever having an actual due date; that the game might actually come out. Well, I think it's awesome for several reasons. First, because I've been a huge Duke fan since Duke Nukem 3D . I absolutely loved that game. My memories of playing DN3D are as awesome as my memories playing Dark Forces, Outlaws, Jedi Knight ,…
Prototype Box I recently tweeted about the fact that there was actually a sequel, mostly finished, for Origin Systems' game, 2400 A.D. titled 2500 A.D. MobyGames and Wikipedia were updated with the information which prompted someone on my TwitterFeed to ask about an unreleased Origin game titled HomeCourt . Luckily, I'm one of the few people to know about this project. HomeCourt was a basketball…
I was reading CNN today and there was a story about a guy whose Toyota randomly started accelerating and he crashed into two cars at 70mph. This was back in 2006 before all the recent Toyota issues. The man has finally been freed as the court found it wasn't his fault. It brought back the memory of how the same thing happened to me back in 1991 when I was working on Commander Keen 4-6. I was…
There's a new magazine in town for game developers, and its name is Gamesauce . The first issue had an interview with Trip Hawkins. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the second issue by Brenda Brathwaite and answered some of the more interesting questions I've been asked thus far. There are some other great articles inside, such as Ensemble Studios' development transition from Age of…
My Wordpress install got hacked a week or more ago, and I couldn't work on figuring it out until tonight. Well, it looks like some hacker found out my wp-config.php file had some bad permissions set and he inserted some code in there that basically scanned every php file on my site and injected every php file with code that will redirect users to various malware sites. It was easier for me to edit…
Three years ago I wrote a post about getting Dark Forces (DOS, 1995, LucasArts) running under Windows Vista. Well, I got it working under Mac OS X (I use Snow Leopard) easily. Here are my updated directions for Mac OS X: (1) Copy entire contents of the Dark Forces CD to a directory (ex. ~/Games/Dark). Keep the directory name to 8 letters or less. (2) Download the latest Mac OS X version of DOSBox…
This month, Retro Gamer in the UK published issue 75 (over 6 years) and did something they've never done before: they had a guest editor. And, you guessed it, that was me. It also has my name on the cover, so that kinda gives it away. The cover of the magazine is Wolfenstein 3D (much like another issue several months before that was all about the making of Wolf 3D). I got to read/edit all the…
This is pretty incredible. Commander Genius is a Virtual Machine for the Commander Keen series. It interprets all the input from your modern computer and output from the 20+ year-old Keen games and plays the games perfectly. Commander Genius on SourceForge
Today is the 14th anniversary of QTest , our release to the public of the Quake executable along with three deathmatch maps, to test our network code over the internet. Quake was our first internet-playable game, and we knew it would be great to let players try out the net code before the game's release so we had some lead time to fix all the bugs found with it. At id Software, we never had a QA…
I was going through some old pictures, and figured I might as well just start uploading my old stuff. Why wait? So, in the Quake section I've put up some sketches of maps, artifacts, etc. that I drew for the game. I have several pages of notes that describe a game different from the Quake that you know. I'll put these up when I start the Quake game page so I can explain what I was thinking for…
It was June 1992. We had already shipped Wolfenstein 3D, the shareware episode only at that point, and were working on finishing the rest of the 6 episodes. Bobby Prince was in the house busy making the music for those last 5 episodes. Bobby brought his entire audio rig with him which consisted of a huge sampling keyboard, speakers, and a rack with lots of effects units. id Software was working…
Back in the Commander Keen days, Tom Hall created the id logo. In 1992, Kevin Cloud updated the id logo. Tom and I were getting tired of the one we created back in the Keen days and before we released Wolfenstein 3D, Kevin fired up Adobe Illustrator on NeXTSTEP and created the id logo in a day. Fast forward to Quake development in 1996, and while I was working with Sasha Shor on all the Quake…
How great is it to be ranked #5 on a list of the top 30 "gaming geeks"? Pretty great, if you ask me! Ahead of me are Steve Jackson, Shigeru Miyamoto, Reiner Knizia and Will Wright. That's a pretty awesome group of people. There's a down arrow on me, and an up arrow on Will Wright, suggesting that I used to be ranked higher than #5. Wow. Thanks, Geek-O-System guys! It's great to see 10% of the list…
It's id Software's 19th birthday today. It makes me wonder: how many people working at id right now actually know that? Next year will be two decades of Keen , Wolfenstein , Doom , and Quake . How many game companies still standing can boast 20 years? Not many. And most companies that live past 20 years are so far removed from their origins that they're not even the same company. John Carmack and…
At id, we were always looking for a better way to develop our games. In the beginning we developed games for DOS machines on DOS machines. In 1991, John Carmack investigated the NeXTSTEP operating system, and decided that cross-development on a superior platform would result in a better game and a better development experience. We all converted over to NeXTSTEP at the end of 1992, after Spear of…
Heeeeeeere's Johnny! It was dark in my office in 1995, warm, and I was busy programming QuakeEd . I had my stereo playing Great White, Ratt, George Lynch and all other manner of hair metal. I was in my element - in the zone . At some point, I needed to go to the bathroom. I went to my door, turned the knob, and nothing. The door wouldn't open, the knob turning and turning. I was thinking,…
We were in Quake development. It was at the beginning when things were going smoothly, not the last seven months that turned work into a very dark place (from December 1995 on). But, I digress. Michael Abrash , the legendary programmer, was working at id and occupying the space where Tom Hall, followed by Sandy Petersen, resided - out in the open in the black id cube building in Mesquite, Texas.…
The box cover for Subnodule, renamed in this collection as Sub Hunt. I spent some time last weekend and created the entry for my game, Subnodule . I've received some emails recently asking me about more information concerning its development. The resulting article is a template for how I plan to address each of my games - there are lots of links, music, pictures, and as much recollection about the…