Mike Rugnetta: I could not tell you where I got it nor really
when. Possibly on a floppy disk from a friend around 1994, it
might have been around 1995 at the grocery store on a CD sold
with a magazine that I somehow convinced my mother to buy me.
In any event, I would have been 10, maybe 11 years old. I do
remember starting it up for the first time, being met almost
jarringly with the image of a muscled man wearing a gray
porcine visored helmet and green armor. His fatigues are torn.
He's covered in claw marks. The huge blue and gold letters
behind him look like a combination of super future
technology and impossibly ancient artifact and they spell
out a single word, doom. A menu pops up. New game. Definitely
enter.
Which episode? Knee deep in Dead, Shores of Hell or Inferno?
My adolescent brain barely knows what to make of this. Best to
start at the start, I guess. Knee deep in Dead sounds sick.
Enter. Choose skill level. I'm too young to die. Hey, not too
rough. Hurt me plenty.
Ultra violence and nightmare. Hurt me plenty? I guess. Enter.
What happens next determines to some not insignificant degree
the course of my life.
People talk about experiences that change their brain
chemistry. This was one of those. Beginning with the sound
that you hear immediately upon requesting to be hurt plenty. To
modern adolescent ears, I imagine this sounds anemic, but
to me, in the mid nineties, it was cool as hell. Somewhat
literally, I guess.
Over the next single minute of gameplay, I'm appraised of a set
of actualities I'd not previously even considered
possibilities. All of them, Doom's now well known hallmarks.
First person combat of which it was an early standout, a
combination of mythic and technological story elements,
you're a futuristic space marine fighting demons from hell on
Mars, a fast pace, this game rips. And also, of course,
tears. In the coming months afflicted with doom fever, I
would learn also of the game's vibrant community of modders
supported in no small part by its developer id Software's
generosity or perhaps in another view ruthlessness.
Id's permissive attitude is reflected in a number of their
decisions. The first episode of Doom was released as shareware,
software that's free but often limited or incomplete. The rest
of the game's episodes could be purchased only direct from id
who enabled, encouraged, and celebrated modifications of
their game as long as they weren't sold. They decided to
open source the game's engine making it available under a non
commercial license. And they did so basically at the height of
their game's popularity.
And so an inventive game that could render fan made
contributions led to a flourishing community of artists
and technologists which has persisted for thirty years.
People are still actively porting and modifying Doom,
updating it to run as efficiently as ever on modern
systems, and making those ports do all kinds of crazy things.
John Matter: The most recent, like, kind of mod thing I can
think of is I wrote a simulation of something called the icing
model, which is a model of ferromagnetism. It's kind of a
canonical thing that you learn in an undergrad statistical
mechanics class.
Mike Rugnetta: And like the meme of dinosaurs turning from
fossils to petroleum to plastic models of dinosaurs, Doom is
used to produce whole new games in which a trace of the true
self persists.
Xaser Acheron: Over decades of development has literally gotten
to the point where you can ship a Theseus the entire game and
create entirely brand new games that if you think about it, of
technically share code with Doom, but it's transformed so
much over over the decades that you wouldn't recognize it if you
weren't looking for it. And so it's nuts that we've gotten to
this point.
Mike Rugnetta: Many of you will probably also know that folks
out here aren't just porting Doom to run clever mods on
modern systems, they're porting it to run on everything.
Pregnancy tests, ATMs, soda machines, spreadsheets, vehicle
dashboard displays, PDFs, graphing calculators, air
fryers, alarm clocks, DNS records, e coli, MS Paint, the
Kindle earbuds, a vet grown human brain, and even somehow
Doom itself have all been hacked apart and made to run Doom.
Bijan Stephen: That's what Doom is. They gave us some they gave
us the tools and people used the tools and then it became funny
to use the tools in a way like that they weren't intended to be
used. But also that was the whole intention the entire time
like, again, like if you go back to even the the par system, like
why does Doom have par? That doesn't make any sense.
Mike Rugnetta: It's become a part of the software's promise,
its purpose, that it become integrated into all sorts of
wildly bespoke systems, that it be used in ways that make you
ask, Doom? Like the video game.
Matthew Gantt: A lot of my own practice, know, I I kind of came
from experimental music, you know, synthesizers, generative
music, different spatial things. And I've been doing a lot of
work kind of connecting that to game engines, you know. It's the
same way you might patch a modular synthesizer. Here's a,
you know, a generator manifesting something. I've been
really interested in game engines, game simulations.
It's kind of like a almost like a cybernetic system
conceptualized as a patchable environment, you know, rather
than an LFO into a sound, you know. Maybe you know,
projectile, maybe player depth, maybe the speed of a three d
object could be could be mapped into something.
Mike Rugnetta: In this episode of Never Post, we're gonna talk
about why the hell this all happened. How did this game come
to be used this way over any other for this long? It turns
out the answer is in part circumstance, but also
significantly because the people who made Doom wanted this to
happen to some degree. And then the Internet kind of did the
rest. In the first half of this episode, we're gonna talk about
the five years id software took to arrive at Doom, and then
about how Doom works as a piece of technology.
In the second half of this episode, we're gonna talk about
why that piece of technology can run on almost any system, and
then we're gonna hear from some artists who use Doom to make
things. They're gonna tell us why you might muck around in a
game about Mars and demons to make, you know, like a string
quartet or jokes about a dead British prime minister overdoing
those things literally anywhere else. I hope by the end to have
shown how we can use Doom to think broadly about using
technology to make things, especially older technology,
which in some ways requires more of us, but in other ways less. I
think Doom as it exists now can help us see what it takes to be
creative at a time when most technology seems to want us more
than anything to be consumptive. Doom was far from id Software's
first game.
The original founders, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom
Hall, eventually joined by Adrian Carmack, no relation, met
as coworkers several years prior to Doom's release. They called
themselves IFD for ideas from the deep, and they were
employees of Louisiana based SoftDisc. Softdisk put out
regular Megazets, a snail mailed publication of personal PC
software in floppy disk format. One of the group's early
contributions was nineteen eighty eight's side scroller
Dangerous Dave. John Romero very explicitly admits that dangerous
Dave was a rip off of Mario.
Except the first dangerous Dave title didn't actually scroll but
paged. When the player reached the screen's edge, the whole
frame would redraw to show the next area. Carmack later devised
a technique where only the edge of the screen is redrawn,
allowing the background to scroll smoothly with the
player's movement. This was something that at the time only
consoles could do, but Carmack built a workaround for the PC.
The team used his technique to fully recreate the first portion
of Super Mario Brothers three on PC with dangerous Dave in
Mario's place.
In his book, masters of doom, David Kushner writes, by the
time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the best
selling hit in the world. They then sent it to Nintendo. They
included a letter explaining their interest in licensing the
rights to Super Mario for the PC. Nintendo wrote back in short
order telling them, this is nice work, but no thank you. We have
no interest in the PC market.
The never released game was titled dangerous Dave in
copyright infringement. The technological achievement was
undeniable though. Their manager at SoftDisc said Carmack should
patent this development, and he refused on principle, saying,
apparently, if you ever ask me to patent anything again, I'll
quit. Kushner explains that, quote, patents were jeopardizing
the very thing that was central to John Carmack's life, writing
code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he
couldn't solve a problem without infringing on someone's patent,
he would be very unhappy to live there, end quote.
While they were developing dangerous Dave for soft disc,
the team also picked up a somewhat shady side gig with
Apogee software. They would simultaneously develop the
similarly Mario inspired side scroller, Commander Keen, about
an eight year old defending Earth from aliens. In his book
Doom Guy, John Romero writes that Keen is the first game for
which he and Carmack had the idea to write a game engine.
Something Romero takes credit for naming if not
conceptualizing altogether. Though he does admit that's the
kind of thing that might be impossible to prove.
Very briefly, if you're unfamiliar, a game engine is a
base layer of reusable code to manage assets and to make game
development more consistent. So they develop the Keen engine and
then the Keen games which Apogee releases as shareware. Apogee
would upload early episodes to a BBS or an FTP and then they
would sell the complete games direct via mail. The IFD team
eventually has a falling out with Apogee in part because they
may have used their Keen engine to make other games without
paying a licensing fee. And Romero seems to suggest it's not
so big a deal that Apogee may have used their code, it's more
so that they just weren't cool about it.
He describes himself and Carmack as, quote, programming
evangelists. We had no problem with anyone using our work, he
writes, but in the spirit of shareware, if a company is using
our engine to make money, they should share the wealth. After
the first royalty check for Keene hits, they quit SoftDesk
and formed their own company, id Software. At first, standing for
in demand, but later retconned to sort of maybe be a reference
to Sigmund Freud, but mostly it seems like they just thought it
sounded cool. The final commander keen game is released
in 1991, and then they begin work on Wolfenstein three d.
Wolfenstein three d is a major turning point for id in both,
business and technical senses. It has its own mini history that
we're gonna look at really briefly in a second, but first,
I think it's worth considering what we've seen up until this
point. Looking at the early days of id, Carmack and Romero settle
into two distinct roles. Carmack makes a significant
technological development and then Romero uses it to create
what's essentially an homage. He takes and in a lot of ways
improves upon preexisting often very popular games.
We also see, amongst the early id crew, early hostility towards
gatekeeping and the desire to share not just as a business
model, but as a kind of technological principle as well.
Id gives away portions of their games. They also license their
game engines, albeit with mixed results early on. We see an
early fascination with Mars in Commander Keen and in Dangerous
Dave, both gore and shotguns. Id's first first person shooter
is a game called Hovertank one, released on 05/31/1991.
For Hovertank, John Carmack wrote id's first three d
rendering game engine in only two months. They'd refine their
first person and three d rendering approach over the next
six months in Catacombs three d, in which Carmack would implement
texture mapping, a technique where the game engine maps the
three d level model with two d images. In catacombs three d, id
also introduces a hand, bottom center screen to represent the
player character. Id's first significant FPS is Wolfenstein
three d, an homage to nineteen eighty one's Nazi infiltration
classic Castle Wolfenstein. They bought the IP rights for Castle
Wolfenstein for $5,000 after Carmack had already started work
on a revamped engine.
And this engine had two notable additions, the ability to add
secret areas and an emphasis on speed. Id wanted this game to be
fast. They released the first episode of Wolfenstein three d
as shareware in May 1992. It was a smash. They did nearly a
quarter of $1,000,000 in sales on the commercial episodes in
the first month.
All in, the engine and shareware episodes took four months to
develop and the remaining five commercial episodes took a month
and a half. Not a terrible outcome for six months of work.
By the fall, around the time an additional retail episode of
Wolfenstein three d is about to launch, John Romero notices
something. He writes, we soon found out that some rather
enterprising hackers had figured out how to extract and
decompress the levels from Wolfenstein three d and modify
them. This was a big surprise to us.
Not only was it a lot of work, but it required a high degree of
technical expertise to hack the Wolfenstein three d executable
and get the maps decompressed. Soon after, several map editors
appeared on the Internet and people were busy making levels
and expanding the base game. The era of modding our games had
begun. Kushner writes that while Carmack and Romero did worry
about the possibility someone may use their game engine to
sell modifications, they tabled the issue. They were hard at
work on the final episodes of Wolfenstein three d and in early
development for the engine of their next title, a military
themed demon slaying action game.
Doom comes together as a culmination of everything id has
learned up until this point. CarMax engine makes use of more
advanced three d rendering techniques built upon what he
learned with catacombs and hover tank one. He improves upon his
texture mapping techniques. He focuses on the speed and feel of
the game and provides the ability to hide things within
maps. Romero builds a level editor called DoomEd that allows
him to quickly design levels for CarMax engine as well as place
enemies and things inside those levels.
The whole team sought to make a visceral experience. Romero
claims that levels were subject to thousands of playthroughs
during design. With designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack,
they all pulled together themes, objects, and ideas from all of
their previous games, shotguns, ghosts, demons, gore, aliens, a
first person perspective, and they develop a master design
document called the Doom Bible. And then they decided early on
that since people would modify this game, no question, why not
just let them? Romero writes that amongst all of the
features, Doom being an open game was the most important to
them.
It was, in a way, an homage to homages, itself built to
encourage the creation of further derivative works. And of
course, the first episode of Doom would be distributed as
shareware. Hell came to Earth via FTP on 12/10/1993. So many
people were waiting to download the game that the sysadmins
needed to reconfigure the server. Id had to demand that
fans log off in order to reliably upload the installer.
Thousands of people downloaded it. In the following weeks, id
would make $50,000 a day in direct sales. Game press reviews
were glowing. Compute Magazine called it a quote graphic
extravaganza that's completely free of the kinds of redeeming
societal values found in sim health. Computer Gaming World
wrote that quote, Doom represents a huge technical
improvement over id's earlier titles, giving the gamers what
they asked for and the industry a new benchmark.
In PC Gamer, what makes Doom so special? Simplicity, realism,
and profound carnage. Doom unseated Myst as the number one
worldwide game on Usenet, Posts on alt.games.doom, the freshly
minted news group for Doom players, read things like Doom
is thoroughly excellent. I've tried Doom at a local computer
store, and I find myself nearly addicted. Oh, wow.
Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam?
What a great freaking game. I cannot wait to play deathmatch.
TM question mark? Players were having all kinds of new
experiences. Sawing through a demon torso with a chainsaw,
yes.
But also a number of things that would go on to become major
pillars of gaming. Doom was one of the first early broadly
popular games to support both co op and versus multiplayer at
first via a LAN and then via dial up. As such, many people
draw a line directly from Doom to esports today. Doom also
included a par time for each level suggesting that players
could race the clock to finish each area as quickly as
possible, an early precursor to speedruns. Doom also allows
players to record keystrokes and share their playthroughs.
A predecessor in some views to let's plays and modern game
streaming. And finally, within two weeks of release, id had
also published details about how their game design or WAD for
where's all the data files were structured. The first complete
fan made level editor, Doom Editing Utilities or DEU, is
released on 01/26/1994, only forty seven days after Doom
itself. You can even go to a Usenet archive and pull up
threads of people talking about building editors and what to use
them for. A Hunt on 01/12/1994 writes, I think the Doom engine
could be used very effectively for things other than the maze
shoot them ups, which I love.
How about football first person? The Doom engine limitations
should not be a problem, vertical views, etcetera. The
mountains could be a stadium. Replace the multitude of
monsters with more views of teammates. Hockey too.
The rollerblade feel of the movements on a fast machine
already show the graphics speed wouldn't be a problem. Just you
wait a hunt. Just you wait. Then in only the amount of time it
takes to get to Mars using the Hohmann maneuver, Doom two Hell
on Earth is released. Doom two is retail only and it hits the
shelves 10/10/1994.
It was developed in much the same manner and with many of the
same tools as the first Doom, but it's bigger with more guns
and more demons. And I can tell you exactly where I got this
one. Babbage's in the Natick Mall with a paper gift
certificate I got for my birthday. In early nineteen
ninety five, the source code for both Doom games is released
under a noncommercial Doom license. These were Linux
versions of the code given the use of proprietary audio
software in the MS DOS versions.
On 10/03/1999, the licenses for each are converted to full new
general public licenses, which requires all work made using the
code to be released under the same license. It's at this
point, all of the technical pieces are in the world,
available by design for anyone to use, and it was required that
if you did so, you also share your work. Hundreds, maybe
thousands of pieces of software using Doom's code have followed
since. Mods, user made levels, total conversions, where it
sorta seems like you're playing a whole different game, source
ports, and more. It's a branching rhizome of projects
that assure that no matter what your system, it can run Doom,
often with more features and greater fidelity than the
original.
A vibrant community of hackers, modders, and artists are doing
exactly what id designed their game to do, run well and be
shared. We're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to
some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
we're gonna talk to two game designers, a nuclear physicist,
and a composer about what people are making with Doom and why
exactly they're making it with Doom. Doom is small.
Like, the actual size of the game. It's tiny. I'm looking at
the files for both Doom and Doom two right now, and they're 11
megs and 16 megs respectively. That's smaller than some photos
I've taken with my phone. So before you even get started
making things with it, Doom itself is very portable, and
boy, howdy, has it been ported.
Xaser Acheron: Back whenever Doom source code was released,
like, we're talking the nineties. Right? A lot of people
were just like, oh my gosh. This is the coolest thing ever.
Let's, like, update the game.
Mike Rugnetta: That's Zazer with an x, Acheron.
Xaser Acheron: I currently work at Nightdive Studios as a game
developer, but I've basically been plugged into the Doom
community for twenty plus years, which is crazy, doing
programming, level design, art, music, all sorts of Doom mod
stuff.
Mike Rugnetta: Zayzer is thanked by name at the end of John
Romero's book. And though I know it will slightly embarrass him,
I am going to mention that the Doom Wiki describes him as,
quote, the Doom community's truest polymath. He really has
done a bit of everything. So I wanted to ask him to help me
understand the finer details of why Doom will run on a Sony
PocketStation memory card. The explanation begins with one of
Doom's early source ports.
Meaning, someone takes the engine source code and modifies
it to run on a different type of system. Crucially, this isn't
necessarily the game itself, but the software that runs the game.
So a source port can run Doom, but it can also run
modifications of Doom.
Xaser Acheron: And one of the earlier ports that ended up
sticking around for a long, long, long, long, long time was
called ZDoom, And it was just done by someone named Marissa
Hite. She just was like, hey. I wanna make a Doom source port
and did it for years. And the thing that drew people to it was
it started adding a ton and ton a ton of modding features. Like,
the earlier Doom source ports, a lot of them started focusing on,
like, visual fidelity.
So, like, earlier versions of Edge, which also had a lot of
modding features, JDom, Doomsday, and ZDoom, they all
had things like, hey. You could play it at high resolution, and,
oh, we're adding a couple little features like jumping and
things, and there's glowy lights and dynamic stuff. There are
some early OpenGL ports.
Mike Rugnetta: This continues until today, literally. Since
the mid nineties, there have been legions of people, Zazer
included, who exert Olympus Mons amounts of effort to ensure that
Doom runs and runs well. It would be a project all its own
to recount the history and lineage of every Doom source
port. There have been many. They are constantly being improved
and extended.
And in fact, the newest major source port called u z Doom was
updated eleven hours ago at time of writing. So running Doom,
very easy, which is to say nothing of the fact that
Xaser Acheron: Doom is incredibly easy to make content
for. Like, you can have zero experience doing anything in
resembling game design, and you can install Ultimate Doom
Builder and make a Doom map and test it and do that within ten
or fifteen minutes. I literally tell people, hey. If you wanna
get into game design and you're brand new to it, install a Doom
editor. Like, that's that sounds weird.
Right? Like, wait. I wanna make a game. I wanna make my own
game. Why would I want to make a mod for something else?
Right? Well, the reason why is because if you want to make a
game, what you actually need to do is, like, 20 different
things. Like, oh, you gotta pick an engine, and you maybe have to
be a programmer, and you gotta figure out what things to
install if you're using Unity. And then you have to figure out,
oh, am I a level designer now? Am I an artist?
What am I doing for? Okay. If you wanna make a doom app,
here's what you do. Draw some lines in an editor and play
around, and then hit the test button. It works.
Mike Rugnetta: I don't know if you've ever opened Unity or
Unreal Engine. I've spent a fair amount of time in each just as a
hobbyist. And for beginner, the experience is not unlike looking
into the cockpit of an airplane through a kaleidoscope. It's
tough to even get started and getting to a point where you can
play around represents a kind of opportunity cost. There's an
inherent risk assumed until you're well versed in the
software.
And Zazer's conjecture is, this is not the case with Doom. You
wanna try something out? Go to hell. I took his advice, and I
thought, okay. Let's say I wanna make a version of this episode
that's playable as a level of doom.
How long would it take to get on my way? Not faffing about with
files or menus, but actually making and testing something. So
I downloaded u z doom and a level editor, and I timed
myself. It took six minutes before I was pushing Doomguy
around inside a map that I designed. I mean, it was a very
simple map, but I I made it.
Doom, the set of tools for building games, exhibits the
same kind of speed and responsiveness as Doom the game.
Its lack of fussiness verges on almost magical in 2026. The
first time I sat down to make something in Doom felt so
similar to the first time I sat down to play Doom. A few menu
clicks and suddenly, oh my god. Is this for real?
My brain chemistry forever altered.
Bijan Stephen: Again, I do think this is tied to early computing
and early internet culture. Like, are these are very, like,
specific times and places with very specific culture.
Mike Rugnetta: This is Bijan Steven. You may remember him
from the first episode of Never Post. He's a video game writer
at Compulsion Games and a music critic for the nation.
Bijan Stephen: And a player on Fun City Ventures, the best
tabletop role playing game podcast that you've never heard
of.
Mike Rugnetta: Cesar told us how. Bijan is gonna tell us why.
What about Doom inspires all this experimentation and
extension? All the technological factors stipulated why this game
in particular.
Bijan Stephen: Doom became part of the culture because it was
something that everyone was playing, and it was something
that everyone had access to, and it was something that you could
mess with, like, very easily. So it became this natural fit. And
then those those, you know, those forums and videos and
whatever, all of that stuff, like, filtered in like, filtered
down to the next generation online. And it's like the the
designers are daring you to break it. They're daring you to
do stuff with it that they didn't expect.
Why else would they open source the engine? Why else would they
ship it with demos? They gave us the tools and they they gave us,
like, the tool the paints and the brushes and the easel and
the canvas, and they expected us to get get to work. That's what
it was. But video games are interesting because again, they
are prescribed experiences.
They they are there is a beginning, middle, and an end
that has been set down and thought about by the designers.
Right? But the thing that Doom sort of posited in a very early
stage in this development of games was, like, what if that
wasn't the end? What if what if we our vision for this wasn't
actually what this game is? And if the further we get from its
origins, the funnier it gets.
Like, what do you like, why are you still doing this? But I
think I mean, it's it's it's not because it's like the designers
and developers sort of intended for you to fuck with it, but,
like, did they mean did did they really think that you were gonna
do this with it? I don't know. It's it's I I think it's really
hard to say. This is like it's like you're you're asking
questions about the human spirit, and I don't know how to
answer them.
Mike Rugnetta: Bijan posits, I think, a kind of doom, a
metagame, which doesn't involve military bases on Mars,
cacademons, chainsaws as much as it involves an IDE, GitHub, and
Discord. Urdoom has one goal, the creation of more doom, and
there's no win condition because there is always more doom to be
made. It would again be a project all its own to list even
1% of the incredible mods and conversions of Doom, but we will
at least fulfill some of a hunt's wishes. Z football is a
2,004 mod build as, quote, the first complete soccer themed
total conversion for z doom. Doom hockey is, exactly what it
sounds like and multiplayer.
Hellshots is a game where in place of a gun, Doomguy holds a
putter or a wedge or an iron. That's right. It's Doom Golf.
Doom the gallery experience trades the plasma rifle for a
red wine glass and the armor power ups for cheese. And yes,
you do exit through the gift shop.
Doctor Robotnik's ring racers is, get ready, a Sonic themed
tournament tuned Mario Kart style racing game built on Doom
Legacy. Its website reads, quote, Ring Racers is not a
pickup and play experience. If you aren't already a racing
fanatic, the learning curve will be quite steep, end quote. And
perhaps the most famous is a surreal survival horror maze
discovery game called my house dot wad, which Bijan describes
as
Bijan Stephen: One of the best Doom things I've ever seen. It's
unbelievable. Somebody tried to do House of Leaves with Doom.
What? Like and then they succeeded.
That's the crazier part. It it it is genuinely unnerving. It is
so strange. Because again, Doom, the way Doom looks is very
specific. And the way that the person making my house dot wad
understood they they understood how Doom looked and how Doom
felt and they made it feel eerie if you've ever played Doom,
which I think again, it feels like a love letter to a
community.
It feels like very specific to a very time and place and specific
to a certain group of people who like are very aware of this
thing that they're doing and this thing that they're playing.
Mike Rugnetta: The way Doom looks is very specific, but so
is the way Doom runs. Doom does not require a GPU. It runs
entirely on the processor. Meaning, unlike many modern
games, it doesn't need specialized hardware. The code
is also, as discussed, very well optimized.
It's also written in c, which while sort of old fashioned, is
straightforward for most systems to compile or interpret. So,
basically, what this all means is that when you ask a computer,
whatever computer, to run Doom, you're only giving it one job,
run Doom. And it doesn't really take much of a computer to do
that. Embedded software,
Xaser Acheron: you're gonna you're gonna program and see.
Like, that's that is the root foundation that almost every
device ever that isn't a desktop PC is gonna use. So that by
itself is already a massive chunk that allows you to take
Doom and compile it for your thing of choice. And and the
fact that it's, you know, was designed to run on what a three
eighty six well, four eighty six if you had infinite money back
in the early nineties means that you could run it on a potato
because your your modern embedded device probably is
gonna be a little bit more powerful than what they had back
then. So, yeah, you're gonna be fine.
Bijan Stephen: The the history of doom is also is also the
history of technology because it is everywhere we go. Somebody's
putting Doom on it no matter what, like, whatever we make. It
also, I think, has sort of become like a minimal like, the
the minimum viable computer can run Doom, which is how it was
designed. And I think that's sort of like it's almost like
proving that it's a computer.
Mike Rugnetta: Doom has more or less grown up in the myriad ways
it has alongside computing as a commercial enterprise and
computers as consumer products and the Internet as social
infrastructure and communities of people using all of those
things to make media and art and jokes. So why Doom? It was
popular. It was available. It was made to be shared.
Homage is in its guts, which are also maybe splattered on a
nearby wall. Its usage as raw material was not only
encouraged, but supported by its authors and the community of
people who grew around their work. Going back to the Usenet,
there are countless discussions like with many games at the time
asking, does Doom run on this system or this system or this
configuration? And people working to discover that the
answer, unlike with many games at the time, was often yes, if
with a little bit of tinkering. It's very easy to imagine then
how someone might eventually stand in front of a GE vivid s
five ultrasound scanning machine and think, I bet I can get that
to play doom.
As an aside, though, that is maybe not something that you
should voice aloud while standing in front of a GE vivid
s five ultrasound scanning machine. In the last and final
act of this episode, we're gonna talk to two people who make
things professionally and occasionally do so with Doom.
Throughout all of this, I've not stopped wondering, don't the
guns and gore and demons make it harder to use Doom, why not
start from scratch or with something that has less
significance or meaning? Why choose to engage with Doom's
baggage?
John Matter: There's a WAD where if I remember correctly, the big
bad is Margaret Thatcher. Yeah. Makes me think of that clip. I
don't know. Have have you seen that clip of this this old
British woman at Thatcher's funeral?
Matthew Gantt: Not a bit of good. Not a bit. I put a stick
through her heart and garlic around her neck to make sure she
never come back.
John Matter: Hello. My name is John Matter. I'm a nuclear
physicist turned software developer.
Mike Rugnetta: I know John from Weird Music Internet and from
their string of public experimentations with Doom.
John Matter: I think the most recent thing I did was playing
Doom on a monom grid, which isn't really Doom modding
itself, but it is part of this like, can it play Doom thing. So
I wrote a max patch that takes video, massages it so that it
displays on a grid. This, you know, matrix of LEDs with
variable brightness.
Mike Rugnetta: I wanted to chat with a couple people who use
Doom not just as a game or a development environment, but as
a kind of medium for weirder ideas. Ones that might involve
say, Maggie, no such thing as society thatcher. John likens
Doom to a performance practice or a genre almost.
John Matter: I think it kind of fits into a similar, I don't
know, heritage as like jazz or folk. You know, it's this kind
of shared context where people can play with existing tools or
idioms or memes, whatever. There's just this shared
material that you can borrow from and build on and just do
something with.
Mike Rugnetta: Doom, in this view, isn't so much a game or a
program as it is charts, chord changes, or as Bijan said,
paints and brushes. The software doesn't represent the end of
some creative endeavor, but its beginning. Id has said, here's
the first thing we made with these tools. You use these
ideas. Use these materials.
You make the next thing. And that is just not how things are
usually done, especially not today and especially not in
media and technology.
John Matter: Doom is interesting to me because it's kind of the
opposite of an NFT. Like an NFT is a thing that encloses
artistic expression. It commodifies it. It takes this
thing that anybody could duplicate and play around with
and it just says, nope. Here it's this finite resource that
has to be exchanged for money.
But Doom kind of resists that because it plays on, you know,
so many pieces of hardware. Maybe some of the appeal of Doom
is that it's just focused on being this weird charming little
shooter as opposed to something that can expand and, you know,
get more and more bloated as we think of new ways to monetize
it. Like, maybe that's the appeal is that it's just a game
where you can do stupid stuff and have that be the end result.
Mike Rugnetta: I think that is also John subtly roasting me for
asking questions about the human spirit. But the point here is
that it's meaningful that this unenclosable territory exists.
Doom, unlike many of our beloved things, remains isolated from
private equity, from corporate control, from software as a
service, and planned obsolescence. It is subject to
the whims and drama of the open source community, which, you
know, is not nothing, but I will take that drama over
shareholders any day.
John Matter: Yeah. Nobody's doing microtransactions in doom.
And if they are, I'd plead look inward. What is yours? I I
you're concerned for the the the safety of your eternal soul.
Mike Rugnetta: What all of this adds up to, I think, is that
your various art and technology hooligans feel safe making
things for and in and with doom. There is good reason to believe
that the software will persist, be easy to get up and running,
support all kinds of weird ideas, and the opportunity cost
of experimentation will remain extremely low.
Matthew Gantt: I've been teaching myself to to make Doom
mods, rather than making new content or new levels, but
actually to modify the the audio functionality to send out MIDI
hooks to to a synthesizer, to MaximSP. And the idea then
recasting Doom as a kind of instrument or kinetic sound
sculpture environment. Yeah. That's Matthew Gant. I'm a
composer, dirtbag game scholar.
Let me try this again. I'm failing miserably. I'm a
composer, artist, faux game scholar, enthusiastic cave
person, doing a lot of work with experimental music, game
engines, and virtual reality.
Mike Rugnetta: I'm a big fan of Matthew's work. I have been for
a long time. And over the last number of years, he's
incorporated more and more video game technology into his
composition process. Unity, Unreal Engine, Doom. I was
curious to ask Matthew what he found meaningful about Doom in
particular, and specifically, how much it matters for him that
Doom is Doom.
Like, does it matter that this is a game about demons and hell
and guns and a marine and sick MIDI guitar riffs? It turns out
that the answer is, yeah, kinda.
Matthew Gantt: All of these things take on this associative
baggage. Now I don't wanna call it a whole Duchampian ready made
thing, but it's just nested layers of association. So the
fact that it is both very awesome and very iconic, but
also very derivative simultaneously, It it it feels
really interesting to me. You know, I guess this happens with
really any media or a medium of anything, you know, in the
world, you know, has both like a functional quality. You know,
what can it do?
What are the affordances? And and, you know, an associative
quality. You know, what does it signify, you know, culturally,
aesthetically, conceptually? And, you know, and Doom is kind
of like right there, you know, a great example, you know, very
very very aura heavy in both. Right?
You know, it's not you know, it wasn't the original FPS, you
know, but, you know, somehow it is just more iconic than, you
know, something like Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem. You know, may
maybe just because it did reach a larger audience, maybe because
it was just a little more polished, what have you.
Mike Rugnetta: The way it looks, the way it sounds, how playing
it feels, It is undeniably an old game, open parenthesis,
complimentary, close parenthesis. And this fact
becomes inseparable from the fundamental offering of whatever
you make using Doom. The work itself will always be in
conversation with everything everyone knows and thinks and
feels about doom. Matthew likened this to something his
composition professor, composer Morten Subotnick, said about the
structure of writing music.
Matthew Gantt: I remember he was telling me. He was like,
composition is like well, I think the comparison is like
telling a joke, essentially. And essentially, if the punch line
is or if the setup is so obvious that you already know the punch
line, you know, it doesn't work because, you know, who cares?
And if the setup is sort of so non sequitur that, you know, you
hear the punch line and there's no connection, you can't drive
meaning from it, you know, just as bad. So the key thing is
establishing some sort of legibility and then subverting
the legibility.
Mike Rugnetta: Doom is exceedingly legible, which makes
subverting it easy. It's also a game about demons, which makes
subverting it fun. Doom Golf? Incredible. Doom Modular
Synthesizer?
Hell yeah, brother. Pulling these things out of Doom's
source code is a punchline to the ultraviolet open source
setup. The impact of that punchline is often augmented by
Doom's limited nature. It's an old game and there's a lot it
can't do. And this might make you think as a tool, it's
restrictive.
But Matthew explains how it's actually quite freeing.
Matthew Gantt: You know, thinking about this kind of like
why doom? And and maybe this is a little bit left field, do you
know that composer Mark Fell by any chance? Are you Mark Fell
head?
Mike Rugnetta: I am, in fact, a huge Fell head. I just recently
reread Mark Fell's book, Structure and Synthesis. It's
one of my favorite treatises on the creative process. Fell
writes mostly about making music with computers, but much of
what's in the book could just as well be about making things with
doom.
Matthew Gantt: There's this great quote where he's talking
about, you know, the way artists tend to deal with technology,
and they think they say, you know, we we all want an open
system. Everyone says they want an open system, But what they
really want is they wanna use that open system to design a
closed system that just has the affordances that they need and
and play within that limited thing.
John Matter: You know,
Matthew Gantt: that it gives you a limitation to push against.
Mike Rugnetta: Thel takes issue with some artists' insistence
that technology not guide their creative process. But how else,
he argues, could it be guided? The tools at hand structure a
dialogue out of which is born the work. It's the technology
which enables and constrains and informs the creation of
artworks. And when those tools have no constraint, it becomes
that much harder to make something.
When one can make anything, it is often easier to just make
nothing, especially as a lone artist with an individual
practice. Doom is a bounded tool for the creation of games,
media, music, technology, and even Doom itself. Doom is almost
like Computation's Giant Steps, the jazz tune by John Coltrane.
It's a time tested standard, an instructive ledger of moves,
something to be referenced and recombined endlessly. And people
have been using it to do just that for decades with no sign of
slowing down, and it's all free.
You can go, you can download u z doom and the level editor right
now and make something that plugs directly into this massive
and massively participatory history today. You will not have
to spend a single dollar. You will not have to create an
account. You will not have to log in or even give your email
address. You will not have to disable AI features.
The software will not show you ads. You will not need to fill
out a survey about your experience. All you have to do
is share what you make with others. Thank you so much to
Zazer, Bijan, John, and Matthew. You can find links to all of
their work in the show notes, and
Matthew Gantt: I
Mike Rugnetta: highly highly highly recommend that you do.
Thanks also to Nash Muhandis, Lane Nooney, and Dominic
Torreson for their help with this episode. So I hinted at
this a couple times, throughout this piece, but everyone we
spoke to for this episode said at some point when I asked them
a question, well, jeez, you could write a whole book just
about that. And so I don't know. We might try.
So I'm curious. Hey. Would you read a short book about how Doom
became a piece of technology for experimentation in art and
media? Because, I mean, I would like to write that book, but
only if someone would read it. So I don't know.
Let let me know. I also, in this episode, did not get to talk
about Quake, which is arguably even more modifiable than Doom.
So I think what we're gonna do is schedule some streams so we
can see some of these modifications. You can watch me
play them. I can tell you how to get them up and running, and
we'll also talk a little bit more about Quake and how it,
both fits into and extends and in some ways is an alternative,
to some of the things that we talked about.
So, if you aren't already, make sure that you are subscribed to
the mailing list, because that is where, most likely we will,
first announce, when those things will be once we get them
scheduled. And hey, finally, perhaps most importantly, have
you made something in Doom? Because if so, I would love to
know about it. You can call us. You can leave us a voice memo.
You can leave us a voice mail. You can send us an email. You
can leave a comment on the website. Any of the ways that
you can get a hold of us, they're all in the show notes.
Tell me about the crazy things you've done in Doom.
I want to hear about them, please. That is the show I have
for you this week. We will be back here in the main feed on or
around Thursday, June 4. Did you enjoy this episode about Doom? I
enjoyed making it and I would love to make more heavily
researched segments like this one to help me and the rest of
the Never Post crew spend more time making more Never Post more
for just four dollars a month.
A wild deal for the stuff we're putting out, if I'm being
completely honest. You can head over to neverpo.st and become a
member today. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans,
Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name,
last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive
producer is Jason Oberholtzer.
The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. I got a tattoo of
God. You can't see it, but it's everywhere. If I seem out of it,
do the math. I was put on earth.
And then you were making up your feet as you went along. New thin
spoke clanks the spank bank. New emoticon makes a hollow scene.
Excerpt of Money Bin by Michael Robbins. Never Post is a
production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by
Radiotopia.