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Interview with Daikatana Creator John Romero

02-11-2000 

The id

PC: What led to the founding of id software?

JR: We had a group of guys, Lane, Adrian, John, Tom, and me, who loved doing games. Tom was actually in a different department, but he loved making games and was helping us out a lot. At that point, we were doing games that took two months, but that wasn't enough time to do something cool. We were frustrated doing the games in Gamer's Edge because SoftDisk's primary market was four-color CGA users. That meant our games had to be four-color CGA, not 16-color EGA. At that time 256-color VGA was even out. We had to feed the bottom of the market.

This was in the middle of 1990. We were also frustrated with the fact that we were doing these games, but no one was seeing them because they were all going in this little limited-exposure disk magazine. The stuff we were making was really cool! Carmack was working on this scrolling engine, an EGA-panning engine. The first demo that blew me away was made one night when Carmack stayed up until 5 a.m. with Tom Hall. John had just finished the panning code to move things smoothly across the screen.

Tom was there when he finished, and Tom said "Wouldn't it be cool if we did the first level of Super Mario 3?" John said, "Yeah, lets do it!" So they worked on it all night. Tom did all the graphics for the first level of the game, and John did all the coding for jumping and moving in a tile-based world. They used the main character from my PC game, Dangerous Dave. They put together this demo called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement because it was a rip-off of Super Mario 3's first level.

When I came in at 10:00 the next morning, I saw this disk that they'd left on my keyboard. So I ran this little program, and I started watching the demo with smooth panning and everything and I was like, "Oh my god. This has never been done on the PC before in a game." I was just blown away.

By the time they came in that morning, I'd shown it to almost everyone in the company who was interested. As soon as I saw it, I knew we were out of there. That was our ticket out. I told the guys that SoftDisk couldn't do anything with what we were creating because of the market, and that we needed to create our own company and make games that take longer. Since we had this cool Mario-like engine and we already had a start on the graphics, we wanted to see if we could do a demo of Super Mario 3 to send to Nintendo in hopes that they would want us to do the PC port of the entire game.

We spent a week and most of one weekend, with Tom making the graphics, me coding stuff like the game's world map, and Carmack coding the game physics, jumping, and other details. We got the demo together and sent it to Nintendo. Eventually it got to Nintendo Japan and to Shigeru (Miyamoto, creator of the Mario games). We got a letter back saying how awesome this demo was, but that unfortunately Nintendo would never do anything on the PC because they own their own hardware. They also informed us that we could not publish the demo because it used Mario, their trademarked character. So even though it was useless for us to do that, it was a boost for us that it got to Japan.

At the same time that this was happening, Scott Miller, the owner of Apogee, was writing me letters at SoftDisk under several different names hoping that I would get in contact with him. He'd seen the games I'd done on the PC before I started Gamer's Edge, and he wanted me to do shareware games for him at Apogee. So he was writing me all these letters under different names, and I had them all on my wall like they were fan mail.

One day I was reading a "PC Games" article about The Kingdom of Kroz, a series of PC text games Scott Miller had written. At the end of the article, there was an address given to contact Scott at Apogee. When I read that address, I knew I'd seen it somewhere previously. I looked over at my wall, and I realized that every letter on the wall came from that address and I'd never noticed it before. I was so mad! I realized that Scott was the mental guy who apparently had been trying to contact me. I wrote this super-mean letter to him, mainly, I think, because my pride was wounded because I had no fans, I just had a wacko trying to contact me. I gave him my direct phone number so he could call me at SoftDisk.

When he called, I told him how mad I was, and he didn't even care. He said, "I think the stuff you did is really cool, and I want you to do games for Apogee! You don't understand how much money there is in shareware!" I told him I wanted to send him some of the stuff we were working on at that time. He said, "No, no, that stuff you did before was really cool. Just do more of that and we can put it out, and we'll make tons of money."

I told him, "Dude, that stuff sucked! You need to see the stuff we're doing now. This has never been done before." We sent him the Super Mario 3 demo, and he just couldn't believe it. I told him he needed to give us $2,000 up front to show us he was really serious. If he'd do that, I said we would do a game for him. He said, "Sure, no problem!"

Back then Scott only had $5,000 in his bank account, but he knew what he saw was "it." He took a big chance and sent the $2,000. When we got it we realized he was serious and we split the money among those of us who'd be working on the game, Tom, Adrian, John, and me.

Scott said that, since he'd given us that money, he at least needed to know what we were going to make. John Carmack came up with the idea of a kid of saving the universe, and Tom offered to write it up. Tom instantly created Commander Keen, and Scott said, "OK, go! Do it!"

It took us three months in our spare time while we still worked at SoftDisk to do the Keen stuff. We would even take our computers home from work on the weekends because we were so poor we had no computers of our own. We did the games in three months, and the entire trilogy came out on December 14, 1990.

We put it in shareware and it just exploded. We were getting one-third of the profit back then, and after the first month it was out, without any announcement or publicity, we got a royalty check for $10,500. We knew we didn't need to work at SoftDisk anymore, because that was enough money for four guys to live on. I felt bad about leaving SoftDisk since I'd started that whole division, but we just couldn't turn this down.

We told Al, SoftDisk's president, that we were going to leave. He wanted to try and find a way for us to continue working with him. He offered to start a division of SoftDisk outside the company that the four of us could own, but not as id Software. We were all ready to do it because it seemed like a cool plan. It was easier to go into something that already existed, because we just wanted to make games, not deal with business stuff.

The other editors at the company got wind of the plan and were very upset because we were being treated differently. They were all threatening to quit and Al just couldn't go through with it, so we told him we were going to leave. He started threatening to sue us, so we made a deal with him that we would supply the company with games until the internal team came up to speed with our game engine.

We started id Software on February 1, 1991, and for half a year our whole job was to continue programming games for SoftDisk until they got their team in place. After those six months, we got to start on the next Commander Keen project as id Software.

SC: What was id like in the days before Doom?

JR: We did our second set of Commander Keen games, but it didn't do really well because it wasn't sold as a trilogy. One game, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter, was released into retail by FormGen, and the other two were released into shareware. In the shareware market, people would only buy a product if there were three games, so sales suffered. However, Carmack had an idea for a really cool new 3-D technology that used texture mapping.

By the beginning of 1992, he started working on the Wolfenstein 3D engine. It took us six months to do Wolfenstein 3D. I wanted to do Wolfenstein 3D because we'd all played and loved the Apple II Castle Wolfenstein in our younger years. Everyone else agreed, so we started working on it. Tom designed it, and six months later it came out, on May 5, 1992, with no public announcement beforehand. When it came out, it did better than anything we'd ever seen. It was selling 4,000 copies a month just though mail order at $60 a pop. We were selling the game, the three-pack of Nocturnal Missions, and the hint book all together for $60.

We'd moved to Wisconsin at the end of 1991, and it was really miserable and cold there, so we decided to move somewhere hot. We moved down to Texas on April 1, 1992—the same day we hired Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud. We were still working on Wolfenstein 3D down in Texas, and it was nice and warm and everyone was happy. We released the game and we were doing interviews and all kinds of neat stuff. We were still in our first office in Dallas then, which was just a one-bedroom loft apartment at the La Prada Club apartments.

Tom and I used to play around with Robert's audio stuff and record lots of stuff on tape, just playing around and making all kinds of answering-machine messages, and that was really fun! The whole company took a vacation together to Disney World (on the Grand Plan) after Wolfenstein 3D was finished, and that was a blast. When we got back we had to do Spear of Destiny, which was our second obligation to FormGen. It took us two months, and we delivered it to FormGen on September 18, 1992. While we were working on Spear of Destiny, John was working on a "better than Wolfenstein"—type engine which Raven used for Shadowcaster. Then he started working on the Doom engine.

In January of 1993 we had a good sense of what the technology would be for the next game, so we put out a press release that month describing what Doom would be, including the background story. Tom had come up with lots of cool stuff. We said we were going to have multiplayer, among other things, so people were going nuts!

It was really fun working on Doom, coming up with all the ideas and getting new engine architecture. Tom left to go to Apogee because he just wasn't enthused about all the blood and guts and violence. He was into fun, colorful, character-based games like the Commander Keen stuff, and that's what he wanted to do. We hired Sandy Petersen in his place, who was a game designer for Microprose back then. He helped us design the rest of Doom, which came out on December 10, 1993.

SC: What made you want to leave id and start your own company?

JR: I decided to leave id because the design of Quake didn't turn out the way we originally wanted. The final game wasn't at all representative of the original design. It was going to be like a Virtua Fighter-type game, which would be in third-person side view for combat, and exploration in first-person for the rest of the game. The story line was much deeper than Quake's, which wasn't deep at all. It had lots of cool, evil stuff in it like sacrificial altars and power spheres. That design never happened. There was a rift in the company about how we should finish designing Quake.

We'd spent so much time creating the engine technology, and not enough time creating a game. It had been about a year since the game was started, and the engine was almost finished. We just didn't have enough of a game.

Half of the company wanted to do something more like Doom, just throw some first-person weapons in there and call it a game. Some others, and me, wanted to do the original design, something new. I mean, we had new technology, why not do a new game design, too?

I made the decision to go because to me it was a big problem that half the company wanted to do something new and the other half didn't. It wasn't the same place it had been. Too many people had a voice in changing the direction of the game. I was going to finish Quake, and then I was going to leave. That was in November of 1995. Then in January of '96 I started talking to Tom (then at 3D Realms working on Prey) about starting our own company again after Quake was finished. I left on August 6, 1996, and at that time Tom and I came up with the plan for Ion Storm, and were really looking forward to starting it.

Raising a Storm

SC: When did you create the original story line for Daikatana? What was the original inspiration for the theme and what influences can be seen in it?

JR: After leaving id, Tom Hall and I were playing lots of games in our spare time to prep us for getting back into the creative beginning stages of game design. I knew I was going to make a 3-D shooter, and that the idea would come when it was time. Since Tom was going to be doing an RPG, I got him to play ChronoTrigger from SquareSoft, which came out in 1995. It came out a year before I left id, and I'd already played it and beaten it. It was just the best game I'd ever played. Tom was blown away by it, as well. There were so many cool things about that game that we both borrowed ideas from it to put in our own games. I knew I wanted a game that had a lot of variety.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what the first-person-shooter genre was like. People were making a lot of maps without continuity, and there was very little story being told. You were just going from one map to another. One of the other problems—I saw a standard number of monsters, usually around sixteen, that you'd see throughout the entire game. Also, there wasn't much diversity in the music.

Since I was used to making games in episodes, I figured that was a good way of breaking a story up into pieces and to have lots of variety in those pieces. I decided to make a game with four episodes, like Quake had, because that seemed to be a good number. I wanted to have different time periods, because it worked so well in ChronoTrigger. I knew we had to have medieval in there, because it's so cool.

I didn't want to do Egyptian, because we'd tried to do that style in Quake and just weren't inspired enough. I thought of the Greek time period, because there's so much good reference material for that. I wanted to have a near-future type time period, kind of like Duke Nukem, and that's the San Francisco episode. I thought the game should start with something far-future, which ended up being the 2455 C.E. Kyoto, Japan, episode.

Once I had the four different time periods, I wanted to make sure each of them was really different and unique. Everything needed to be unique—weapons, music, monsters, locations, textures, and everything else. It was a lot of figuring out what types of weapons would work well and making sure none of them duplicated the weapon sets in the other episodes.

The idea for the Daikatana sword came about because I really liked playing Zelda, and it has a sword that gets more powerful as you progress. I wanted to do something similar, and I thought it would be great to have a main character that was Japanese instead of some big, white B.J. Blazcowitz or a space marine. I didn't want the lead guy to be this big, blond monster taking on the world by himself. I decided to make him Japanese, but still a big guy, and really good with a sword. I thought it was fun going through ChronoTrigger with sidekicks or multiple characters, like most RPGs have. I wanted to do that in an action game, and that's where the idea for the two sidekicks came from.

I didn't want them to be conventional either, so I created Superfly Johnson, this big, strong black dude, and Mikiko Ebihara, who's a really smart Japanese woman. I thought that would be a good mix of characters that was unlike most games out there. The sidekicks would each have to help you through the game, and I wanted the player to worry about them and keep them alive: if the sidekicks die, the game is over.

I didn't just want them to be simple, or just shoot things and die. I wanted to make it even more RPG-ish, with experience points where you kill monsters and get experience and go up levels. When you go up a level you get to add a skill point to one of your five skills. I just tried to take all these different elements that were really fun and put them into one game.

The name Daikatana came from a weapon I used in John Carmack's D&D campaign in the early '90s. I had a really cool sword that was an ancient +5 Daikatana, and I thought that was a really neat name for a sword. It's a single word that's not too short, and I thought it would work well.

SC: What were the biggest hurdles you faced during the development of Daikatana, and how did you overcome them?

JR: Trying to teach people what's good, quality stuff to have in a game and what doesn't belong in a game was tough. It's just been a challenge trying to get the right people working on it. I think the toughest thing for the team was dealing with the changeover from the Quake engine to the Quake II engine. That was probably the biggest obstacle, because we expected it to just be a drop-in of the code. Instead, the entire engine had been rewritten. It took us a lot of time to get the game back into the mode it was running in before we switched engines. That was a major setback.

The second major setback was when that big part of the team left. After that, the tough part was getting another team together and bringing them up to speed.

SC: What's your role in the development of the game? What sort of work do you do on a day-to-day basis?

JR: At the very beginning of the project, my role was to design the game. I started at the beginning creating the lists of assets to be created by all the team members—the artists, programmers, musician, sound engineer, and mappers. It was a lot of concept work at the very beginning, and trying to get the design document together to show what the game was going to be like.

After that I started to do some mapping, but that wasn't working out because there were just so many questions to answer while developing the game. The team needed to know how things should look and animate, or how many hit points something should have, how things should move, and just everything else associated with the gameplay. My role evolved into that of a full-time game designer and project leader.

My job was to make sure everyone's questions were answered, solving problems with technology and hardware, and making decisions for the business. The majority of it was working with the team on game details, drawing concept sketches for the mappers, or explaining to the artists what I needed them to model. I usually spend lots of time writing emails to various team members about the things they're working on, and making sure the high-priority items are getting done. I spend most of my time directing the game, because that's my job.

At the end of development, I get in there and start modifying maps. I focus on architectural and entity detailing, and adding gameplay and puzzles. I make sure every detail is covered and the game turns out like I want it to.

SC: Did you get the opportunity to contribute any content to the game?

JR: I didn't do any programming in Daikatana. Level design-wise, I did work on some of the maps. Several times I had to take a map that was somewhat confused and straighten it out to make it a little less confusing, better looking, and more fun.

That had to be done several times. There were some situations that came up where I just needed to do a bunch of map work all at once to straighten something out and get it finished so we could move on to another task. I created the idea for and directed the detailed development of nearly everything that you see or hear in the game. That concept and detail work was very time-consuming, simply because Daikatana is such a massive game.

SC: What stands out about Daikatana in your mind and makes it a fun game?

JR: The thing that really stands out about Daikatana is just the huge amount of variety in the game and how big it is. What makes it fun is the exploration, the variety, the different monsters, the weapons, the cool story that you get to play through, and the sidekicks you have to watch out for and take care of. I just think that the entire game, just as a whole, has a lot of good things in it. All together they make a really unique, different game.

The Man Behind the Monitor

SC: Do you want to continue developing first-person shooters exclusively, or would you like to explore other genres?

JR: I really enjoy first-person shooters. I want to make something that's more aggressive than what I've done in the past. I really love making games that get your adrenaline pumping and make you scream! I think for the next game I want to get more evil with it, and also make it more violent with more action. I'd like to take some of the ideas from the fighting games, like combo hits, but still keep it in first person. It would be great to have huge explosions and gigantic stuff on the screen with everything happening really fast. The single-player portion of the game would be very different from the deathmatch.

SC: What are your favorite games of all time, and why? What other genres do you enjoy most?

JR: The one genre I enjoy like I do shooters is RPGs. If I were ever going to do a game in a different genre it would definitely be an RPG. I really like real-time strategy games as well, but they're below RPGs and shooters.

ChronoTrigger is one of my favorite games of all time, because it has everything—great music, cool variety, awesome characters, excellent story, and it's totally fun to play through. It doesn't feel too repetitive.

Ultima V is another of my favorite games because it was, to me, the best in the Ultima series and it was the last Apple II Ultima. I really enjoyed that game because it was the only one I played that had two climaxes. The first was the defeating of the Shadow Lords, and the second was the rescuing of Lord British from the dungeon Doom. It was also the only game I'd played that combined a part of the packaging that came with the game with the actual game itself. The player read something that came with the game and then followed the whole thing inside the game.

The whole Mario series was also huge for me. Super Mario has always been a terrific collection of action games. We emulated that feel with the Commander Keen games. Age of Empires is another one of my favorite games. It's one of the best real-time strategy games I've played. The feeling it gives you when you're creating and building up a civilization and then your using your forces to destroy the other players is amazing.

Its very fun just trying to get to the point of attacking as fast as possible and trying to figure out strategies for defending and attacking. It's just an awesome game. I would have to say Doom and Quake are some of my other favorites. I don't know which I like better, but they're some of the best first-person shooters I've played.

SC: What's some of your favorite game music?

JR: I listen to video-game music while I work. Some of my favorites come from the ChronoTrigger soundtrack. I love the Secret of Evermore soundtrack. Outlaws has awesome music in it, and I listen to that a lot. The whole Final Fantasy series has a lot of really good music in it, especially Final Fantasy VI, and I have almost all the CDs made for all the Final Fantasies. Grim Fandango had really good music in it, and very different from any other game. I listen to the Dark Forces soundtrack often, because that was a great game that had a big impact on me. I love the music from Duke Nukem and I listen to it over and over.

SC: What are your favorite books? And who are your favorite authors?

JR: I like books with more plot and less characterization. I used to like Stephen King a lot, but his characterization just got out of control. I started reading more science fiction stuff. Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite authors of all time. I truly loved the whole Foundation series and all the robot novels.

Greg Bear is an awesome sci-fi writer who wrote "Eon", one of my favorite books. I enjoy Frederick Pohl and his Gateway series. Dan Simmons, who did the "Hyperion" series, is great. David Gemmell wrote "Legend", and that was an excellent book. I loved "Lord of the Rings". When I was very young I read C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" and it was awesome.

SC: What are some of your favorite movies and why? Have any of them influenced the games you've made?

JR: I loved the "Star Wars" set of movies, the "Indiana Jones" movies, the "Aliens" series, "Terminator", and "Predator". I love action movies! "Aliens" and "Evil Dead" partly inspired Doom, with the shotgun, chainsaw, and tons of monsters. I enjoy scary, supernatural movies like "The Haunting", "The House on Haunted Hill", "The Changeling", and "The House that Would Not Die". "Halloween" was terrific. John Carpenter is one of my favorite filmmakers, along with Steven Speilberg and George Lucas. Really wacky, off-the-wall movies like "The Dark Backward", "Repo Man", "Tremors", "Brain Damage", "Reanimator", and "From Beyond" are fun, as well.

SC: Who among the current generation of game designers and developers do you admire most, and why?

JR: I really admire Ray Gresko at Nihilistic. He's a great technology person. He wrote the Dark Forces and Jedi Knight engines. The guy is an awesome programmer, and has some really great game ideas, as well. He's getting to move into the game design realm now, and he's just amazing.

I really admire Justin Chin, as well. He's a great designer, he's got fantastic ideas, and he's going to make them happen. I admire Peter Molyneux for coming up with great new ideas in the genre he created. I admire Sid Meier because he's been so consistent, and his stuff is amazing, as well. It's cool that he gets to program it himself.

I admire Roberta Williams a lot. She's made a lot of great games that are really fun. They might not be the most awesome, leading-technology games, but that's not the real reason games are fun, and she understands that. Her stuff has been great, since Mystery House in 1980. I admire Tom Hall and Warren Spector because they have great ideas, are super-creative, and know how to get their games finished!

I very much admire Tim Schafer over at LucasArts, because he just creates these great game ideas. He does so much of the stuff himself until he assembles a team, and when the game comes out it's totally his. It's his whole idea, and his programming and effort have gone into it, which is really fulfilling. Ron Gilbert is really good. He worked with Tim Schafer and taught him a lot of stuff. When he left LucasArts and created Humongous, the stuff he made there was just perfect. The whole "edutainment" market needed Ron to get in there and show them what was fun, and what was cool, quality stuff.

I think Cliff Bleszinski at Epic is pretty cool. He's got a lot of great ideas, he understands game design and knows what's fun. He's really someone to watch for in the future.

Over at Ensemble, Bruce Shelly and Sandy Petersen are both really great game designers with a wealth of knowledge of history, warfare—and insects! They have tons of industry experience, too, so they're just amazing.

Obviously I admire Shigeru Miyamoto. You can't forget about Shigeru! He's just awesome. He's the game-design god of the universe.

SC: What do you envision yourself doing ten years from now?

JR: Hopefully, ten years from now I'll be able to make games and actually program them and work with a small team that's really tight. I prefer smaller teams than the teams we're working with now. I think it's always cool to start over every once in a while.

• Taken from Primagame.com