For those unsure what is meant by “you have to have the original Doom”:
Doom binaries require the presence of an IWAD with the “full game” flag set in order to load PWADs (i.e. level sets like Sigil). The shareware Doom WAD lacks this flag; the retail version’s WAD, and Doom 2’s, have it.
You can buy a copy of Doom, ready to run on modern hardware, from Steam. This will include the “full game” WAD, and thus be able to load and play Sigil.
There is also, if you can’t or don’t want to drop a fiver on the official release, a WAD available from the FreeDoom project, which you can use with the more capable GZDoom binary. The FreeDoom WAD also has the “full game” flag, and using it with GZDoom will also satisfy the requirement and enable you to load and play Sigil.
You don’t need it to be so original that it comes on floppy disks and specifies a 386 to run on. But, if you have that, that will work too - although it’ll probably have a hard time with modern WADs.
Me, I’m looking forward to playing it in Project Brutality, which is something like Doom might have been if the hardware of the time had allowed it.
> although it’ll probably have a hard time with modern WADs.
Excuse my ignorance as it's been 20+ years since I did any DOOM development, but has the format of the WAD file changed over the years? I thought it was just binary assets joined together with a simple header that specified the file names & byte boundaries
I believe he meant the game engine itself: Those new levels were all designed using modern Doom engines, you can see even Romero is uzing gzdoom for screenshots etc. So they usually have a lot more corners and polygons than the doom maps devised at the time the game went out for the first time. It'd probably struggle to render in software.
It's not a hardware VS software thing since modern ports of software renderers for DOOM are not very demanding and can easily get upwards of 1000fps (yes, thousand). It's more to do with assumed memory constraints of the original DOOM.EXE on DOS for PCs which placed constraints on renderer related resources available which in turn limited level complexity. With modern ports, those constraints have been loosened quite a bit and more complex levels can be made.
There are also some hard limits on the amount of geometry and sprites in the map at one time. I used to use PRBoom which removes the limits while retaining compatibility with the original Doom
This business model is cool, free game digitally, but boxed it costs money. (let's ignore the "you need the original doom" stuff for the purposes of considering this business model)
Also, the company providing the actual boxes, Limited Run Games, does cool stuff. I thought a game was going to be digital only, and then found them doing a version in a real box, DRM free, no steam activation required; I thought that was cool of everyone involved.
I miss big boxes. Apparently they disappeared because Walmart wanted to make room for DVDs by removing software SKUs, so the software publishers downsized the boxes so they wouldn't have to put fewer SKUs on the shelf at Walmart. https://rome.ro/news/2018/4/18/big-box-extinction (intro) and https://rome.ro/bigbox (actual blog post w/ story)
Lastly, John Romero, if you're reading: fix your blog ^ why is the intro not included on the blog post page?
This business model is cool, free game digitally,
but boxed it costs money.
If you're not Romero (and probably even if you are) this is a plan to make basically beer money - or any way, not enough to support a development studio making these games.
A friend of mine runs a small music label in Italy ( https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/ ) in the stoner segment and had some success printing vinyls in limited edition of the bands he publish
You have to create your fan base first, but usually when you build it from the ground up it's loyal and buys everything you print
He makes enough to sustain a small business and had the satisfaction of getting in touch with the bands he once listened to when he was younger and to republish them (Nebula, Nick Oliveri from QOTSA, Brant Bjork from Kyuss)
if the artists can't live making their music, the label can't publish them
BTW in this specific case the bands get the full cachet for the live gigs and the merch they sell at the venues, the label pays for the pressing and gets its own share from selling the records and from the merch sold on the label's website
It's a small business, not a shady multi billion company
You can make a pretty professional album with a band of five people and a few thousand dollars in equipment. Game budgets regularly breach 10s of millions.
As time goes on, I think game development will come to be more and more dominated by hobbyists. With the amount of games out there, it becomes harder and harder to make a case for trying to start your own studio.
It's like with music or movies or novels; you're taking a huge risk by quitting your job to do it full time. The sad thing is that it was only a few years ago when it actually did make some sense to try it.
(Keep in mind that 150000 EUR might be "beer money" in the US, but the typical German salary for a non managerial SW engineer is around 60000 EUR, so 150000 EUR are 2 "good" man years' worth of money).
It's more of a "feel good" symbolic support model, and that's great! There should be a place for that in our lives too.
Being paid for working on something that ultimately isn't about the money is actually a really tricky problem to solve, and this feels like a decent approach.
Needing the original Doom is par for the course for this sort of megawad project, even if it’s Romero making it. There’s a bunch of tricky licensing issues around shipping the original Doom wad that you’d need for core game resources.
Yeah, understandable; that's what I meant by the "let's ignore you need DOOM" part, because everything Romero made he's giving away free. So his business model is still "it's free digitally, but costs for the box set".
What I wanted to avoid was people saying "oh but it's not free you have to buy DOOM", which is irrelevant to the idea at hand.
Now that I think of it, locomalito did this before, http://www.locomalito.com -- he makes retro freeware games, and occasionally sells box sets of those for a fee.
I've looked into it & you're basically making cents on the dollar on these limited edition boxed sets due to manufacturing cost at such a small scale + shipping. It's nice for a hobby but not a good way to make a living.
Sure. It could always be used as a promo tool / halo product though; e.g. the press you can generate with the limited edition could move units of the non-limited one.
But you're right, generally it's a hobby or just a gesture for the fans, not a business decision -- and that's cool.
I hope so, I've preordered already in the hope that SIGIL runs on the original release - then I'll be playing it on my actual 486 when it arrives!
Obviously I'll have to transfer the WAD over but it's set up so that Win 3.1 can see my NAS so the fact that it ships on USB media hopefully shouldn't present a problem.
While I suspected the disappearance of big software boxes had something to do with available shelf space, it didn't know it was competition from DVDs that were the main factor.
DOOM was great game in mid 90th. It has inspired me as a schoolboy actually to learn computer programming and graphics. It actually inspired me to read some great books like "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C" and "C programming language".
I learned a lot about BSP trees, sprites, 3D modeling, I did modify WADs, wrote my own simple engine to work with them. I finally could understand how this amazing Game was made!
I followed a similar path as you, I didn’t learn 3D modelling though, but I went down the hex editor path modifying the doom exe to make rockets move faster. It took me aaaaages to learn this (probably 2-3 months total time over a period of years)
Echoing you too, Thank you Mr Romero!
I can’t wait to play this for the pure hit of nostalgia
In fact that's the official reason John Carmack fired Romero from id: "not working hard enough". This is, spending too much time on IRC, newsgroups, etc. engaging with the community instead of working.
The husband of noted game developer Brenda Romero is doing fine. By all accounts, he is selling his old treasures mostly for nostalgia reasons. He has fond memories of those times developing Doom and he wants to share those pieces of gaming history. Plus at a certain age you just realize that you have stuff cluttering up your attic which is doing you no good but still has value to others.
His company Romero Games Ltd. has had at least one big hit in recent years, Gunman Taco Truck, which by all accounts made a nice little profit. I believe he also occasionally lectures in Ireland on game design.
From everything I gather, John is happy, healthy and wealthy enough to be able to devote the odd few hours to a passion project which is dear to his heart. He loves Doom something fierce and given both the impact it had on society and the period of his life developing it took place it, it is hard imagine how he wouldn’t have it occupy a special place.
Reading the Q&A on the page, it seems like this is something he worked on in free-time:
>Q: How long did it take you to create Sigil?
>A: I worked on it part time during 2017 and 2018, mostly while I was on vacation or in the evenings. I wanted to have a surprise for DOOM’s 25th anniversary.
If he is downplaying a need for income, then he definitely is masking it well. It seems like it's just a labor of love.
"Actually, there are only nine distinct level wad files. It turns out that you can put both the single- player and the deathmatch levels in the same wad..."
I would love to understand or even hypothesize why one would want to do it this way.
I grew up with doom so this is awesome. I know that he is the original creator and that this is technically a free mod, still wonder if Bethesda will just let him do this if it proves to be popular.
I thought this was pretty cool when reading about it. And then I read Buckethead made the music and now I HAVE to order the Limited Edition! :D Dang it will set me back $166 but hey Christmas is around the corner. Happy holidays!
as for the 16GB flash drive - I assume that in a bulk purchase the price difference between that capacity and lesser capacities were negligible. It does appear that they are packing some extras on the flash drive too (though i can't guess as to what - I assume wallpapers and audio)
This is awesome, and I do hope he creates a new level pack for Doom II's anniversary. The new enemy types and double-barrel shotgun make Doom II a lot more interesting IMO.
For those unsure what is meant by “you have to have the original Doom”:
Doom binaries require the presence of an IWAD with the “full game” flag set in order to load PWADs (i.e. level sets like Sigil). The shareware Doom WAD lacks this flag; the retail version’s WAD, and Doom 2’s, have it.
You can buy a copy of Doom, ready to run on modern hardware, from Steam. This will include the “full game” WAD, and thus be able to load and play Sigil.
There is also, if you can’t or don’t want to drop a fiver on the official release, a WAD available from the FreeDoom project, which you can use with the more capable GZDoom binary. The FreeDoom WAD also has the “full game” flag, and using it with GZDoom will also satisfy the requirement and enable you to load and play Sigil.
You don’t need it to be so original that it comes on floppy disks and specifies a 386 to run on. But, if you have that, that will work too - although it’ll probably have a hard time with modern WADs.
Me, I’m looking forward to playing it in Project Brutality, which is something like Doom might have been if the hardware of the time had allowed it.
> although it’ll probably have a hard time with modern WADs.
Excuse my ignorance as it's been 20+ years since I did any DOOM development, but has the format of the WAD file changed over the years? I thought it was just binary assets joined together with a simple header that specified the file names & byte boundaries
I believe he meant the game engine itself: Those new levels were all designed using modern Doom engines, you can see even Romero is uzing gzdoom for screenshots etc. So they usually have a lot more corners and polygons than the doom maps devised at the time the game went out for the first time. It'd probably struggle to render in software.
That's what I understood from it tho.
It's not a hardware VS software thing since modern ports of software renderers for DOOM are not very demanding and can easily get upwards of 1000fps (yes, thousand). It's more to do with assumed memory constraints of the original DOOM.EXE on DOS for PCs which placed constraints on renderer related resources available which in turn limited level complexity. With modern ports, those constraints have been loosened quite a bit and more complex levels can be made.
From his "interview" under the announcement:
Q: How did you create Sigil’s levels?
A: I used the incredible Doom Builder 2 by Pascal vd Heiden (with support from several other authors). You can get it at http://doombuilder.com
If the game used to limit maps to 8MB and it’s since been changed to allow up to 8GB, new maps can be incompatible due to their size.
There are also some hard limits on the amount of geometry and sprites in the map at one time. I used to use PRBoom which removes the limits while retaining compatibility with the original Doom
I think it's more a matter of a 386 being old and slow, and modern WADs being developed for and tested on newer and faster systems.
Those of us running Zandronum use a mix of WAD and PK3 now days. Try Complex Doom Invasion.
This business model is cool, free game digitally, but boxed it costs money. (let's ignore the "you need the original doom" stuff for the purposes of considering this business model)
Also, the company providing the actual boxes, Limited Run Games, does cool stuff. I thought a game was going to be digital only, and then found them doing a version in a real box, DRM free, no steam activation required; I thought that was cool of everyone involved.
I miss big boxes. Apparently they disappeared because Walmart wanted to make room for DVDs by removing software SKUs, so the software publishers downsized the boxes so they wouldn't have to put fewer SKUs on the shelf at Walmart. https://rome.ro/news/2018/4/18/big-box-extinction (intro) and https://rome.ro/bigbox (actual blog post w/ story)
Lastly, John Romero, if you're reading: fix your blog ^ why is the intro not included on the blog post page?
I suspect this is mostly a hobby for him.
It works in music though
A friend of mine runs a small music label in Italy ( https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/ ) in the stoner segment and had some success printing vinyls in limited edition of the bands he publish
You have to create your fan base first, but usually when you build it from the ground up it's loyal and buys everything you print
He makes enough to sustain a small business and had the satisfaction of getting in touch with the bands he once listened to when he was younger and to republish them (Nebula, Nick Oliveri from QOTSA, Brant Bjork from Kyuss)
It works for the label, but does it enable the artists to live off of their music? I doubt it.
Most musicians live off the money they make touring and performing. It's rare that a musician makes enough money off of record sales alone.
if the artists can't live making their music, the label can't publish them
BTW in this specific case the bands get the full cachet for the live gigs and the merch they sell at the venues, the label pays for the pressing and gets its own share from selling the records and from the merch sold on the label's website
It's a small business, not a shady multi billion company
it's made out of passion, not for greed
You can make a pretty professional album with a band of five people and a few thousand dollars in equipment. Game budgets regularly breach 10s of millions.
The game development business it's very similar to music industry right now
many small indie actors, few giant ones
minecraft was created by a single developer, angry birds costed officially around 100K, both made hundreds of millions
putting up a band that sells records in the tens of millions doesn't cost less than making angry birds
and it's harder to get to that point, band that sells so many records are just a few
For example Lady gaga sold globally less than 9 millions records, Angry Birds has exceeded 12 millions
As time goes on, I think game development will come to be more and more dominated by hobbyists. With the amount of games out there, it becomes harder and harder to make a case for trying to start your own studio.
It's like with music or movies or novels; you're taking a huge risk by quitting your job to do it full time. The sad thing is that it was only a few years ago when it actually did make some sense to try it.
One counter example; time will tell whether this will be sustainable: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma...
(Keep in mind that 150000 EUR might be "beer money" in the US, but the typical German salary for a non managerial SW engineer is around 60000 EUR, so 150000 EUR are 2 "good" man years' worth of money).
I agree with both you and with GP.
It's more of a "feel good" symbolic support model, and that's great! There should be a place for that in our lives too.
Being paid for working on something that ultimately isn't about the money is actually a really tricky problem to solve, and this feels like a decent approach.
Needing the original Doom is par for the course for this sort of megawad project, even if it’s Romero making it. There’s a bunch of tricky licensing issues around shipping the original Doom wad that you’d need for core game resources.
Yeah, understandable; that's what I meant by the "let's ignore you need DOOM" part, because everything Romero made he's giving away free. So his business model is still "it's free digitally, but costs for the box set".
What I wanted to avoid was people saying "oh but it's not free you have to buy DOOM", which is irrelevant to the idea at hand.
Now that I think of it, locomalito did this before, http://www.locomalito.com -- he makes retro freeware games, and occasionally sells box sets of those for a fee.
I've looked into it & you're basically making cents on the dollar on these limited edition boxed sets due to manufacturing cost at such a small scale + shipping. It's nice for a hobby but not a good way to make a living.
Sure. It could always be used as a promo tool / halo product though; e.g. the press you can generate with the limited edition could move units of the non-limited one.
But you're right, generally it's a hobby or just a gesture for the fans, not a business decision -- and that's cool.
Today it's very easy picking DooM from GOG or Steam, or any warez site.
Does "Original Doom" also include the version on Steam?
I hope so, I've preordered already in the hope that SIGIL runs on the original release - then I'll be playing it on my actual 486 when it arrives!
Obviously I'll have to transfer the WAD over but it's set up so that Win 3.1 can see my NAS so the fact that it ships on USB media hopefully shouldn't present a problem.
Install Zandronum or ZDoomGL, and copy the doom.wad to it. You will get a much better experience.
Good tip, thanks.
Yes.
Chris Anderson wrote a book on these sort of "pricing" systems: _Free: The Future of a Radical Price_ [1].
Worth a read if you're into this idea. It includes some interesting historical examples of creative selling.
Can't say I _agree_ with the book, but glad I read it.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp....
While I suspected the disappearance of big software boxes had something to do with available shelf space, it didn't know it was competition from DVDs that were the main factor.
> a wad is a default file format for DOOM® and DOOM II®. It stands for “where’s all the data?”
All this time and I never knew that.
I always thought a “wadded up” ball of paper, like a map or a blueprint
I think they aimed for that double meaning.
Me too, me too...
:)
DOOM was great game in mid 90th. It has inspired me as a schoolboy actually to learn computer programming and graphics. It actually inspired me to read some great books like "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C" and "C programming language".
I learned a lot about BSP trees, sprites, 3D modeling, I did modify WADs, wrote my own simple engine to work with them. I finally could understand how this amazing Game was made!
Thank you Mr Romero!
I followed a similar path as you, I didn’t learn 3D modelling though, but I went down the hex editor path modifying the doom exe to make rockets move faster. It took me aaaaages to learn this (probably 2-3 months total time over a period of years)
Echoing you too, Thank you Mr Romero!
I can’t wait to play this for the pure hit of nostalgia
Respect. DOOM nostalgia runs deep. And if anyone hasn't read Masters of Doom it is certainly of the most powerful origin stories imaginable ;)
Whenever Masters of Doom is mentioned, my ears perk up. I've read it four times. Again, definitely worth the read.
In the process of finishing Masters of Doom, definitely worth the read.
Save me a read - what's the winky-face emoticon entail?
So this guy just asked buckethead to make some music and he did. Huh. That’s cool.
It's like if one of the beetles (of video games in this case) asked if you wanted to do a collaboration. Of course he did it.
And then says this about himself!
> if I hadn’t been a part of DOOM®’s creation, I would have absolutely been a hardcore member of its community.
...who's harder-core?! Roll them out, please!
I wonder how many game developers can say that of themselves nowadays!
In fact that's the official reason John Carmack fired Romero from id: "not working hard enough". This is, spending too much time on IRC, newsgroups, etc. engaging with the community instead of working.
I noticed Romero has been selling a lot of his gaming collection in eBay the past year.
Along with this Sigil release, it makes me think he's struggling a bit, I hope not.
Still a cool concept, I miss games that come with packaging and games.
The husband of noted game developer Brenda Romero is doing fine. By all accounts, he is selling his old treasures mostly for nostalgia reasons. He has fond memories of those times developing Doom and he wants to share those pieces of gaming history. Plus at a certain age you just realize that you have stuff cluttering up your attic which is doing you no good but still has value to others.
His company Romero Games Ltd. has had at least one big hit in recent years, Gunman Taco Truck, which by all accounts made a nice little profit. I believe he also occasionally lectures in Ireland on game design.
From everything I gather, John is happy, healthy and wealthy enough to be able to devote the odd few hours to a passion project which is dear to his heart. He loves Doom something fierce and given both the impact it had on society and the period of his life developing it took place it, it is hard imagine how he wouldn’t have it occupy a special place.
Reading the Q&A on the page, it seems like this is something he worked on in free-time:
>Q: How long did it take you to create Sigil?
>A: I worked on it part time during 2017 and 2018, mostly while I was on vacation or in the evenings. I wanted to have a surprise for DOOM’s 25th anniversary.
If he is downplaying a need for income, then he definitely is masking it well. It seems like it's just a labor of love.
>Along with this Sigil release, it makes me think he's struggling a bit, I hope not.
You can check his auctions for prints and he says there that the funds are going towards a Game Design museum he's trying to build in Ireland.
Mid life crisis?
Not meant as an insult.
I assume he's had all the sports cars etc, so he cant really reach for those.
Are you also required to own a PC with 386 CPU, 4 MB of RAM, a VGA card and MS-DOS in order to play this?
You can get DOOM ported to run on modern hardware on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280/Ultimate_Doom/
Install Zandronum or ZDoomGL, and copy the doom.wad to it. You will get a much better experience.
I'm certainly planning on playing on my DOOM machine - 486 DX4/100 with 16MB RAM, SoundBlaster 16 etc.
Looking at the complexity of the designs you'd probably best use a Pentium.
> and requires players own the original 1993 registered version of DOOM® in order to play
Dude. Even if I could find the game I had back then, I don't even have a floppy or CD drive anymore.
I think he means "the original DOOM, not the recent reboot of it" not "break out the floppy disk drives." It's five bucks on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280/Ultimate_Doom/
DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD are literally two of the easiest files on the internet to find
He also knows you know that. He fully expects people to have a copy or to have got it from one of the stores (it's findable I believe)
e1m8b: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/d-f/e1m8... -- has mirrors
Be very gentle, the server seems taxed: e1m4b: https://www.doomworld.com/e1m4b/e1m4b.zip
"Actually, there are only nine distinct level wad files. It turns out that you can put both the single- player and the deathmatch levels in the same wad..."
I would love to understand or even hypothesize why one would want to do it this way.
The deathmatch levels are rooms in the single player campaign. Lock some doors and change the spawn point, and save some disk space.
I grew up with doom so this is awesome. I know that he is the original creator and that this is technically a free mod, still wonder if Bethesda will just let him do this if it proves to be popular.
The original creator is a bit much. John Romero was mostly a level designer. Carmack did the heavy lifting.
Carmack worked on the engine. Romero built the dev tools in addition to designing levels. Both contributed significantly to the design of the game.
Carmack is one of the most talented engineers alive, but that doesn't negate all of the work that the rest of iD put into Doom.
It takes both kinds of genius to make a great game.
The favicon is Apple's logo? https://www.romerogames.ie/favicon.ico
I thought this was pretty cool when reading about it. And then I read Buckethead made the music and now I HAVE to order the Limited Edition! :D Dang it will set me back $166 but hey Christmas is around the corner. Happy holidays!
Can someone elaborate on the meaning / significance of E1M4B and E1M8B ? Particular in this context:
> I learned a lot from E1M8B and E1M4B, so I think I did a better job this time.
Also, why does a few doom levels need 16gb?
E1M8B and E1M4B were Romero's first new Doom levels in years - https://mashable.com/2016/01/15/doom-john-romero-new-level
as for the 16GB flash drive - I assume that in a bulk purchase the price difference between that capacity and lesser capacities were negligible. It does appear that they are packing some extras on the flash drive too (though i can't guess as to what - I assume wallpapers and audio)
> Can someone elaborate on the meaning / significance of E1M4B and E1M8B ?
Those were the last two levels created by John Romero, more than 20 years after the original launch of the game.
They were also really good. He certainly doesn't seem to have lost his touch.
DOOM levels (“maps”) are grouped into “episodes” — these are the E and M numbers. B implies some sort of “alternative” to the original maps.
This is awesome, and I do hope he creates a new level pack for Doom II's anniversary. The new enemy types and double-barrel shotgun make Doom II a lot more interesting IMO.
> A 16GB 3 1/2-inch floppy disk themed USB that includes the free megawad data and extras.
Should be 5 3.5gb 3 1/2-inch floppy disk themed USBs
I mean, if this is what we’re doing
If that's what you're doing, then surely 12 1.44gb USBs?