The Archives

This picture was taken during DOOM development in 1993. Adrian's in his room (which he shared with Kevin Cloud) and you can see here that he was modeling the Baron of Hell out of clay himself, based on his own sketch of the Baron. Also, this was the very first clay model that was made for DOOM. At this stage, he wasn't called the Baron of Hell, but rather, a Bruiser Brother (since there were two of them at the end of the first episode of DOOM.

This picture was taken during DOOM development in 1993. This is the DOOM chainsaw sitting in a bucket, ready to be scanned by Kevin to create the image of the chainsaw in DOOM. The reason it's in a bucket is because it leaked oil! That's also why there's newspapers all around it. :) Heh heh, yes, the name of the chainsaw was Eager Beaver. The little Post-It Note next to the chainsaw says "Borrowed from Ann Graver Holz". Ann was Tom Hall's girlfriend at the time and since she had a chainsaw (Most of us apartment-dwellers did not own a chainsaw!), she let Tom borrow it. Tom, um, forgot to give it back to her.....so........it's still around. Tom is going to do something with it, probably sometime this year!

This picture was taken just after the Ion Storm office was built-out at the top of the Chase Tower in downtown Dallas in January 1998. The floor is all terrazzo, with game posters on the walls. The walls next to the elevators and near the doors that lead to both sides of the building were limestone and marble stripes. It was a really, really nice place to work, architecturally speaking.

This picture was taken near the end of Quake 1's development period in 1996. American is sitting at his desk, checking out my map E2M1 (with the original Quake interface for the Base theme, in fact). The computer he's using is a NEXTSTEP system made by HP (nicknamed the Gecko), in fact the machine name of his computer was "idtokay". Under his desk, the black hardware looks to be an older NeXT Computer. The room we were working in at that time was called the War Room -- we were all working in the same room while the rest of the office was being built out. To the right of American's desk was Tim Willits', and then my desk.

This picture was taken during DOOM development in 1993. Tom's busy working on a map in my map editor, DoomEd, but don't worry - you won't be able to make out anything on the screen! Tom started many of the original DOOM maps and after he left, Sandy Petersen finished them -- some of the maps had very little work done to them, in fact. On Tom's monitor is a little printout that says, "Quality". He always has notes stuck to his monitor to keep him reminded of .... things. That orange thing could very well be the very first keyboard wrist pad -- made by a friend of his back before you saw them in stores. The speaker at the far right is one of the first Altec Lansing clamshell models. The microphone in front of Tom was there for NeXTSTEP's awesome email feature - built-in voice emails! We always sent them back and forth... I think I might have some of them lying around here...

Left to right: Tom Hall, Jay Wilbur, John Romero This picture was taken just after the "Summer Shareware Seminar" Shareware Industry Awards in 1992. We got awards for two categories that both related to our second Commander Keen series (4-5) that we sold as shareware. Keen 6 (Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter!) was published in retail so it wasn't part of this award. We all rented tuxedoes for the event - something I've rarely done for award events since then! I'm writing this in 2004 and Jay Wilbur has been working at Epic Games for more years than he worked at id Software and Tom Hall is working with me at Midway Home Entertainment in San Diego - we've worked together for over 15 years!

This is the great Bobby Prince, our music composer between 1991-1994. He did the music for Commander Keen 4, 5, 6, Catacomb 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, DOOM, DOOM II. In this picture you can see Bobby at id's apartment office during the summer of 1992, working on the music for Wolf3D and Spear of Destiny. This picture is probably from the month of June. The computer he's using in the pic is a 386/33. Heh. Bobby shipped a ton of his equipment to the office. You can't see the rack he has full of stuff, just off-camera. He was just awesome to work with. Before doing music, Bobby was a lawyer for a long time. If you want to hear more of Bobby's music, just play Duke Nukem 3D - half the music in that game is his. And it's excellent stuff as well - I listen to it almost every day still.

Both Shawn Green and myself are big heavy metal maniacs! During DOOM we used to listen to lots of Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Dokken, Metallica, etc. and here we are going crazy outside my office - HEADBANGING! Yes, this is how nuts it was at id Software. Just a short break between coding, mapping, and insane deathmatch screaming. The rack of CDs are mine and Carmack's and that's my office you can see into. That office door is the one Carmack blasted open with his axe.

Yes, this is the clay model of the DoomGuy that Adriani created! One pose, folks, or it breaks into a silly mess.

This is me, Kevin and Adrian posing for a pic during DOOM II development. I'm always looking nutty in pics - cause i'm nutty!

Here are some Asian versions of DOOM and Wolfenstein. Since piracy was so insanely rampant over there, we sold the rights to sell copies to the biggest pirates for $1 per copy - that way we made a little money and they felt legit.

This is my wife Raluca's favorite monster in DOOM II - the Mancubus. This is the model that Greg Punchatz created and we used a video camera to scan it in (8 rotations), clean up the pixels, and put it in the game.

Here's Greg's model of the Revenant for DOOM II. He's a favorite of mine because I just LOVE the punching sound - it makes me laugh every time! Yes, I made sure the sound made me laugh. :)

Here's a closeup of Greg's latex and metal model of the Spiderdemon.

This is a picture of the Shreveport lakehouse that id Software started in. Tom took this pic of John Carmack and me while we were working on the Super Mario 3 demo for Nintendo - so this was sometime in September 1990. You can see how nice it was outside while we were inside just coding. Heh. The computer setup on the far table was Tom's 386/33 and a TV set hooked up to a VCR that had a videotape of Super Mario 3 freeze-framed so he could duplicate the graphics pixel-by-pixel. The TV between John and I was hooked up to an NES so we could play SM3 and watch the movement and how things worked so we could duplicate it. There's a whiteboard propped up with writing on it that detailed all the tasks we needed to do to finish the demo. During this time there was a lot of summer flooding around the lake and one day I actually waded through a ton of water up to my waist to get to id to keep coding. Lucky for me I didn't run into any snakes!

Here's another id lakehouse pic - this is me and Jay Wilbur in the swimming pool in the backyard. Why was I wearing sunglasses in the pool? They were prescription and I ran out of contact lenses! Heh. This pic is from summer 1990.

In Spear of Destiny (1992), I put a secret screen in the game that could only be reached by a secret keypress in the menu system. The original screen (320x200) is in the upper right-hand corner and it had the subtitle "We're Not Wearing Any Pants!". This picture was taken in the Mesquite, TX id apartment during the same session and was a "crazy shot" we didn't use.

It's the "Bad Ad", the one that got a generation of gamers and journalists hating me! Suck it down.

The October 2005 issue of Computer Gaming World had an editorial on the backpage and it had a cool little graphic montage. Here it is, magnified.

Computer Gaming World, October 2005, back page article. I still don't understand what the article is supposed to be saying... I'll react to the inaccuracies in the article right here: #1: Daikatana sold over 200,000 copies worldwide after its first year on the shelf. That is not a pathetic sales number in the PC market, especially circa 2000. #2: I wasn't the marketing dept. at Ion or Eidos - I didn't come up with the "Bitch Ad" #3: I didn't sneak my face into DOOM II - that was an easter egg planted by Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud #4: I "court celebrity" just about as much as anyone else doing their job in this world. When a magazine wants to know what I'm doing, I tell them. It gets printed. There you go, that's the whole crazy, power-hungry trip I'm on - I talk to journalists so they can write and make a living.

Back in 1982, just before moving to England during my sophomore year of high school (10th grade), I wrote a book about how to program Apple II arcade games and the school paper wrote about it. LOVE THOSE MASSIVE GLASSES! Also, the little ad for Supercade: I *LOVED* that place! I used to go there alot. In fact, it was there that I saw Donkey Kong the very first time. I still remember the New Smell of that place, the way all the arcades smelled back then.....freshly minted arcade games finally unleashed....ahhhhhhh!

Here's an old article from PC Gamer's February 2005 issue. I guess they weren't a fan of the old look and my infrequent postings. I never claimed to be some current news site! Heh. I think the latest change to a blog format would give me a higher rating next time! Oh, wait. I don't care.

Here's a PC Gamer article about the Masters of DOOM book, February 2003. John Carmack and I had to sign off on the accuracy of the book before Random House would publish it. It's all true! :)

This is a picture from 1997 after a hardcore Quake1 deathmatch session with my friend Noel Stephens at Ion Storm (the 30th floor, a year before we moved up to the 55th floor). The rule that I created (back at id Software with my friend Shawn Green) was that if you got beaten in a deathmatch your opponent could go absolutely nuts and degrade you and you had to just sit back and take it. So after our insane deathmatching session in which Noel beat me down, I went freaknuts and grabbed my keyboard and started screaming and chopping at the legs of my computer table - and hacked at the leg until it folded up and the table fell down. Then Noel ran over and started yelling at me calling me all kinds of names and I had to just suck it down. I subsequently did this to the table my computers were on and the entire table and computers, monitors, etc. all slid crashing to the floor. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of that mess. :)

PC Gamer, May 2003, Most Controversial Game article. Not bad for a 10 year old game!

This was probably the biggest article printed about Ion Storm and our games over the years. I thought it turned out pretty good. Four double-page mini-articles to follow.

Hahaha - we're gonna make everyone eat their words! GULP! We ate ours.

Here's the Daikatana article

Nice article about Tom's Anachronox

Nice article about Warren's Deus Ex. Most people don't know this but Warren named the game Deus Ex so most people would mispronounce it "Do Sex". Deus Ex is short for Deus Ex Machina - The God in the Machine.

March 2006 PC Zone article helping people catch up on what I've been doing. This text was posted online on computersandvideogames.com in a two part series.

This is the real meat of the PC Zone article here. The pic of me at the bottom was taken by Rhaluka when I visited her in Bucharest.

I had lunch with Warren Robinett (author of Adventure on the 2600, Rocky's Boots, co-founder of The Learning Company) recently along with my friends Jeff Buchanan (left front) and Chris Mayer (next to me). Warren is incredibly brilliant and works nearby occasionally.

Here's my old id Software business card. Since I did so many things (biz stuff, packaging guidance, exec producing, coding, level design, game design, audio, product mastering, etc.) I just named myself Project Specialist.

Here's our Ideas From The Deep business card that Lane and I created back in 1989. The company is still around now after 17 years! http://www.ifd.com

Here's my Ion Storm business card. All of Ion's corporate identity, game packaging for ALL our games, etc. was designed by Sasha Shor - the same woman who designed the Quake logo, font, packaging, etc.

This was the front of my Midway business card which I made myself because I didn't like the normal boring card design they had. This one's more fun!

And here's the back of the card. I decided to put a bunch of my published titles on the back in case anyone was wondering. Usually when you get a business card from someone you only get their title but no idea what they've actually done - this card solves that problem. Actually, the most useful business cards have a white back on them so people can write notes on them. And, yes, Wolfenstein is missing its N!

We had a mini Softdisk reunion in the summer of 2003 at Tom Hall's house. From left to right are: Tom, Rhonda Reimers, Lane Roathe, me, Jim Weiler, Carolyn Drain, Fender Tucker.

I organized the Apple II Reunion of 2004 at the house of John Garcia (owner of Novalogic, coder of Zaxxon on the Apple II) and invited many Apple II alumni. Steve Wozniak graced us with his august presence once again and even rode up on a Segway! To the right of Woz is Squirrel (coder at Ritual Entertainment and a great, great guy). To the right of him is John Miles and you can barely see Lane Roathe behind him with the sunglasses on his head. Tom Hall and his soon-to-be wife Terri are in the foreground.

Here's a picture of John Garcia and Steve Wozniak. I even got the G4 video team over to do a story on the reunion.

This is the lapel button that attendees had to wear to get in. The security was very, very tight but luckily everyone got in.

Here's the front of the inviation I made for the event.

The back of the invitation.

This is the original id Software lake house in Shreveport, LA - the place where we started the company. Located on Lakeshore Drive, this is what the house looks like today. Back in 1990, there were 4 Softdisk guys living in this house together; it was a total frathouse. Jay Wilbur, Jason Blochowiak, John Carmack and Lane Roathe were the main residents and Tom Hall and myself would come over every day to work on our games.

Another view of 7450 Lakeshore Drive in Shreveport, LA. The house was right on Cross Lake and had a moor and boat dock off the back. There's a huge backyard as well.

Here's a view of Cross Lake and the island we used to go kneeboarding around.

The extremely venerable Softdisk headquarters - it looks like a dump. The streets on both sides went up a hill and the streets behind the building were even with the roof......which is where the employees parked their cars! The garage door with the black accordian bars was where Al Vekovius used to park his Mercedes. Good ole 606 Common Street. The coders and artists were actually in a much nicer building just down the street on Milam Ave.