David Kopec: The guy who brought us a portal to hell has had one hell of a career in Doom Guy. Legendary game developer John Romero takes us on a rollercoaster journey through his life, career and the video game business. We were honored to be joined by John on the show. Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. But before we get to John and Doomguy, let's introduce ourselves.
David Short: I'm David Short. I'm a product manager.
Kevin Hudak: I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief Research officer at a Washington D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.
David Kopec: And I'm David Kopeck. I'm associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. Designer, programmer and entrepreneur, John Romero is a living legend in the video game industry. He was the lead designer of some of the most influential games of all time, including Wolfenstein, 3D, Doom and Quake. He and the team at id Software in the 1990s is credited with defining the first person shooter genre of video games and helping to solidify and refine new business models for digital video game distribution. The creator of more than 120 games, including critical successes spanning the mobile, social and and of course, first person shooter genres, John today runs Romero Games, based in Galway, Ireland with his wife Brenda Romero, a fellow veteran game designer. John's 2023 critically acclaimed memoir, Doom Guy tells the story of his early life career in video games and design ethos. John, it's an absolute honor to have you on the podcast.
John Romero: Yeah, thanks for having me on here.
David Kopec: So, John, we'd like to start at the beginning of the book talking about your early life growing up in Arizona and California. Those are deeply emotional chapters. I found them very moving, very well written. To set the stage for the rest of our discussion, can you just tell the audience a bit about what your early life was like and why you chose to make that a focal point of the book?
John Romero: Sure, yeah. I grew up in basically the desert in Tucson, Arizona back in the 70s, you know, late 60s and you know, mid 70s, I'd say up to mid 70s. And you know, I grew up in a Mexican neighborhood with a Mexican family. I mean, I was born in Mexican and, and it was like, you know, everyone's poor. Everybody, you know, was a really great loving family. But you know, lots of people got drunk and lots of antics ensued because of that, which is typical. It happens, you know, it happens every day. But for a kid you know, for me, it was like just kind of staying quiet and staying out of the way was the best way to like, avoid anything bad happening. And when my mom got remarried in 76, 1976, she remarried someone who really didn't drink at all. Was, like, pretty much the opposite of my biological dad. And. And so he took us out of the desert and took us to Northern California. It was just an amazing town, Rockland, north of Sacramento. And it was a really great place to grow up. And that was where I finally, you know, met computers for the first time in 1979. And, you know, that's where I really took off. But before that was just lots of just, you know, violence pretty much. And that, like, informed a lot of the, you know, cartoons I would draw and then my, you know, violent video games and that kind of thing. But, yeah, that's. There's a lot of people that read the book and they can really relate to the same stories because, you know, a lot of people kind of grew up similarly, so they're. They're just kind of reading almost their life story sometimes, some people said.
Kevin Hudak: And I thought it was great, too, in terms of your. Your origin story. Some of the things that happened then kind of impacted what you would do in the future. So even things as transactional as, you know, moving around all the time and not having as much stability always led you to ask for your partners to have some skin in the game and give some of the money up front so that you have that security and stability. And then I personally love the story of your mom, who was a really great character and I'm sure great inspiration for you. My. My grandmother was a bank teller, so it resonated with me when your mom went to school and got certified as a bank teller. But I love the anecdote where your family really never played any of your games, but one time you death matched your mom and you let her sort of kill you. And it was, you know, I just thought that was such a nice capstone on the personal family origin side.
John Romero: Yeah, yeah, it was. It was pretty great. Yeah, she's. That was, you know what? She never plays computer games, but the one game that she started and finished in one go is what remains of Edith Finch, which is pretty surprising. It's a 3D game, you know, moving around 3D, but other than that, yeah, she didn't really, you know, she's not a computer gamer.
David Short: So we'll jump forward a little bit and I'll tell a little bit of the story. So you begin Building games on your Apple II or your stepfather's Apple II. By 16, those games are starting to be published. By 18, you've gone to college, but it's kind of the wrong program. You're sort of working some menial jobs while continuing to work on games on the side. Then at 19, your girlfriend becomes pregnant and that's a seminal moment. Obviously you get married and you need to find an income because now you have a family to provide for. So you start interviewing very aggressively and you spend a couple of days digging into the details of the Commodore 64 in order to interview at Origin Systems and you take that big leap to move to New Hampshire, work at Origin Systems. And not really a situation that many 19 year olds can relate to, although obviously, obviously some. Can you tell us a little bit about that, that period in your life? It seems like a bit of a leap of faith. Was it a turning point?
John Romero: You think it's funny? I graduated 1985, say June of 85, and two years later I still didn't have a job in the industry, but it was like, oh, I'm going to kind of go to college and see how that is in school. Never was a thing that I had liked because I already knew what I liked and if I could spend all day learning that that was the best use of my time. I, you know, that's what, that's what I believed. And at the time nobody like knew there was even a game industry. It didn't register obviously on any school's radars. Programming as a vocation was also just kind of a rare thing. So like programming courses and everything was a rare situation and those jobs were kind of rare. The game industry even more so because it was so small back then. But those two years, it's funny because I feel like, God, I just wasted two years. But it's like I just got out of high school and I was trying to see if college was going to help. But I felt in 1983 when I learned assembly language without a computer, which is ridiculous, I felt that I was just starting on the rocket, you know, like really learning a ton, making stuff nonstop. And 85 to 87 felt like a kind of a slowdown. Even though I was still making and publishing at that time, I felt like I should have been able to go, you know, further than I did. But when I just thought, you know, I just heard about the Apple Festival that was happening In September of 87 in San Francisco, which was basically the last one that they would ever hold. But it was an Apple II show. And I thought this is my chance to go and like show, show people there like that. I, you know, I want to get in the industry and I know what I'm doing. And it was pretty amazing because I got three job offers while I was there and well, two job offers and exposure to Origin while I was there. And that's the one I really wanted to go work there. And that was, you know, I would call them all the time, but it was, it was a big deal to just attempt to get a job. You know, I knew that I knew what I needed to know to get the job. I just needed to contact people and really networking is all it took. And networking was everything because I already knew what I was doing and getting in contact with the right people and just keep on contacting them until they connected me to the right person. And then that's when I got my interview and all I needed to do was start talking to people because I knew, I knew what I was, what I was doing. And it was really great being able to do a phone interview, then get flown there for a nine programmer interview and then get hired. And I had just turned 20, just barely turned 20 when I got the job and moved up there. So all the major life changes that people go through, which is like get your first real career job, get married, move across the country without any parents around and then have a kid all within four months in 87 and early 88, that all happened really fast, but I was already on a rocket, so I was just speed running life pretty much.
Kevin Hudak: Well, I'm not as avid a gamer as Kopeck and Short here, but I am familiar with what it's not karma farming, it's farming or up front. You were front loading to get those experience points as quickly as possible.
John Romero: Yeah. Really? I had those 10,000 hours before I tried my first job.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, and I love the vignette. When you went into one of the conferences and just basically put your floppy disk with your coding on it into Origins booth computer and just put it up on screen. And as someone who I run booth presences or I'm at booths for some of my clients and I was like, oh my God, imagine if this 19 year old came up and like plugged into our big screen in front of the conference.
John Romero: Imagine.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, it was quite an amazing story. So you were at Origin then and left in 1988. You had started ID software in 1991, but between that you had some different entrepreneurial ventures, you know, Inside Out Software, Portinghouse, you were at Soft disk as well. But in some, many of them you're entrepreneurial as well. I remember friends would be in touch, colleagues would be in touch, you'd start working on different projects, but some of them would go south. And I was wondering in that kind of interregnum almost between Origin and id, what did you learn? And there were some interpersonal conflicts there even. But what did you learn about managing people and conflict during those ventures that kind of helped you later in your career?
John Romero: Let's see, my first company was the one I started when I just started making games. And that's the Capital Ideas software company which I had for many years. And when I went to work at Origin, that became my full time thing. I then in 88, the manager, the guy that I worked with, who I really looked up to, John Fashini, he asked if I would be interested in co founding a company with him. And we had a really great relationship. We go to lunch every day, we talk about all kinds of stuff. It was really, really great. And so I really liked him. And Paul, Paul Neuroth, who I was actually working on his project called Space Rogue. He asked me if I would be interested in co founding a company and I told him, oh man, it's too late because I already told John last week that I would join his company. He's starting up. So he co found that one anyway, so there was a lot going on and that New Hampshire studio was kind of winding down. Interestingly, just maybe a week or two ago, Paul Neroth sent me a big long email about more insight into what was going on New Hampshire at Origin at that time and how the early days of Looking Glass and how all that stuff went down. I was super focused when I was at Origin and I was a one person team so I didn't have to work with other people. I just reported to John I was doing stuff very quickly, like creating hardware to transfer data between computers when there wasn't anything around to do that. And so that got me a raise like pretty quickly after starting there. That was for me it was just natural. Just like I solved a problem, here's how I'm doing it. And so John, that was one of the reasons why John wanted to work with me. So when I left and started working with John, you know, that had to have been like the biggest leap of faith probably in my whole career where I loved working in Origin, that was my dream company to work at. And I was leaving like nine months, less than nine months later to found another company. You Know, with someone that I really liked working with. And I mean I had a kid, a wife, I was living, you know, living there, not, not with any, you know, safety net with my parents or anything, just way out in New Hampshire. And you know, I was just like, this is the next step, I'm going to do it and let's see how it goes. And it actually was working out pretty well until the industry started falling apart. Then I needed to get another job, which is when I called up Soft Disk and said I want to talk to the president. And then that was another level, the same, I guess, confidence that I had when I was doing the interview for Origin on the phone and live in person the second interview. That same confidence is what, you know, I'm basically calling up Softest to try to talk to the president to get a job because I knew Jay Wilburn was interviewing there and immediately like yes, I will fly you down immediately, you know. And so that was, that was amazing. And then got hired at softdisk after just a weekend being there and just seeing people and hanging out. From then on it was just like I was learning as fast as I could at softisk I was learning and I was making stuff while I was learning. So I was learning a language on a new computer, start turning stuff out the first month. And that kind of to me that was like the stuff that I used to do at night which is pouring all of my time and effort into my own games and stuff. I was doing that at Soft Disk and loved it. It was amazing. I would even come home and then I would do even more work to make stuff I would sell back to softisk. So it was crazy. I would make my day job is like on the PC and at night I'm making Apple II stuff, selling it to the Apple II department at Soft Disk. It was just non stop. I would just never stop making stuff. And then I felt that I was stagnating after a year. And that's when I told the president, I need to make games. I can't just be here doing utilities and stuff like that. And so he convinced me to stay and that they would start a new product which is what they gamer said thing was. And that was really like a pretty critical moment. I stuck with him, I stayed there and then I was able to hire a team. For me it was like starting a company within a company. So I was able to like build a new team, get an office, get computers. It's like, it's like making a company, you know, a startup within this big company and I get to hire the right people. And I picked John Carmack because I saw, I saw that just from the way that his code worked that he was really good. And I wanted to hire him just from, just from seeing his code. I knew nothing about him, but I could tell from his code. Then the story that I heard was the, you know, he, he rented a PC because he found out that he could make more money selling PC versions of his games. So he rented a PC, learned how to program it, ported his game in a week and returned the PC rental. And I'm like, I need to hire this guy. He is incredible. And when we got together for the interview, it was just like perfect, absolutely perfect. And then that's when he came in. And then things really went fast from that point on until we made Commander Keane. Within five months of meeting each other in launching and doing the company together and everything, it was like so fast, but it was super intense because it was all the hours except for maybe eight hours a day.
David Short: That anecdote of, of John joining where they're like, oh, we've, we've tried to recruit him. You're like, no, no, no, he needs to talk to me. He needs to know it's someone else who actually understands this stuff. And we're only going to be making games. You guys are trying to sell about something completely different.
John Romero: Yeah. You have no idea how to talk to someone who, who is as smart as him and knows that he wants to make games. And I can convince him that that's what we're doing and not some other garbage.
David Kopec: I think that's a through line of the book. The book to me, beyond just an incredible personal story and game design story is an incredible entrepreneurship story. And you're founding venture after venture, working nights and weekends. When you found ID software, you have still the job at Softdisk. And you're putting in these 16 hour days you describe in the book. Eight hours at Softdisk, eight hours on ID at night and barely sleeping. And so I'm wondering where that drive comes from in you. Is it something from those early chapters? And I'm also wondering, you're an incredible people attractor. You're the one who really put together this, the early team for id, the finding Tom hall, working with Tom hall, getting John Carmack to come to Softisk, finding the art intern Adrian Carmack and figuring out he's going to fit together. Well, I'm wondering where does that entrepreneurial spirit come from for you and where did you gain that Ability to kind of be able to cite talent and see these folks would work well together.
John Romero: Well, you know, like I think I'd mentioned before, you know, in the book or whatever, is like having 10 years of game dev experience before that, having way more than 10,000 hours 10 years later, like insane 80,000, who knows? You know, at that time I got, I knew everything about that Apple II and every way that anyone could program the Apple ii that when I saw something on the screen I can tell the. It's almost like programmer art. It's like I could tell the programmer art style, which is basically the way that the person wrote the render code to put the images on the screen. What you have to do on a, on an Apple too, you can't just use sprites like Ataris and Commodores. You have to actually put every dot on the screen in a style. And that's up to the programmer in how good they are and what they want it to look like. So it's almost like looking at a painting and saying, that's a Rembrandt. I know who that is on the Apple ii. I could tell you who wrote anything by just looking at the screen. And that's how deep I knew that computer. So when I see Carmax tennis game, I can tell you that that was expert level programming. And that was rare to find because I was very used to seeing everything that was everything ever made on the Apple II commercial retail software. I saw all of it and seeing John's code for a little tennis game was just like, that's on par, you know, that's really good. And I knew how much you needed to know to do that. So it was already a lot of implied information, a lot of experience that I just knew looking at the screen how much that person had to know to do that. So being excited about games and loving to talk about programming, loving to talk about game design, that kind of thing is like other people who like that, they love talking about it too. And they want to talk to people who are just as excited. And so that I think is just a natural thing. Like if you're excited about something and you are talking to someone else who's on the same wavelength, then they're excited. And like, why wouldn't you want to make something together with people who know, who have the same passion level, same dedication, same amount of knowledge that you're not going to get frustrated, that they're going to just do dumb crap, like they actually know what they're doing. It's like those are the Kind of people that you get very fired up working with. And it's easy to create a team when everybody feels like they're similarly passionate, talented and driven. And when you can get that many people together, you know, to make something, that's really rare, especially at that time where. Where game software development was barely moving into the team realm. You know, like, everybody that was on that ID team had been making games for 10 years, and no one had ever made anything with someone else. That's how solitary it was back then. So we were like a new team back in. When teams were beginning to form.
Kevin Hudak: And one of the reasons I would encourage everyone listening to read the book fully, too, from. Because ultimately, this is a business books podcast. Right. And Kopeck was spot on in saying this is also a story of entrepreneurship. My takeaway was every team that you work on needs to have the Tom hall, the John Carmack, the John Romero, the Adrian Carmack, and you guys. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but you just created great archetypes throughout the story to really give us a sense of those four key players, who they were and what made them tick and how they contributed to the business. And I really appreciated that. But going on into sort of the end of your time with softdesk, you know, there were some legal concerns that were brought up since you kind of started ID while working at Soft Disk, and ultimately the founder of Soft Disk, Big Al, who you, you know, also painted with a vivid paintbrush as well, you found a way to resolve that conflict amicably with. With him. And it almost seems from the book that if it weren't for Al's kind of practical, reasonable terms, we may not have had its software. And I'm wondering, you know, what can we learn from the way that the situation was resolved, the way that you negotiated with Al, that you would kind of give as advice to young entrepreneurs potentially managing conflicts like that.
John Romero: Yeah. So there wouldn't be. It's. Of course there wasn't an Al Ykovius. He was amazing, amazing person, gave me amazing chances. You know, it would not have happened if it wasn't for him. He's such a great person. And. And because I really did like Al so much, you know, I really respected the fact that this guy ran a company at that time for 10 years with 90 people in it. That's hard, you know, and he did a lot of different things to make that money for those 90 people. He was doing direct mail. He was doing all kinds of extra things outside of his Subscription products to make it work in a very depressed economy there in Shreveport. So I really respected him. And when, when we decided to leave to form ID and he, he basically said, please don't go. Let's see if we can, like, start something together. I didn't just say, screw you, you're going to try and take part of the money or any of that. It was like, okay, let's see if we can do this. And so he, he did talk about it to the other people at the leadership level at Softisk, and they revolted. Like, they were like, we will quit if you do this, because these guys are like pirates. They're out there, you're mutinying basically, and you're going to reward them with ownership to do this. And it's like, what about us? We stuck with you this whole time. And so it was really like. And he was honest. We met after that and he's like, I wish I could do it, but they would all quit if I did this with you guys. And I was just like, that sucks. I'm sorry. I mean, we had a really good rapport, Al and I. So, so leaving was. I did not want to screw him over because I wanted to start a product that would be horrible for me to like, I want to start something. All right, we're going to grind these brand new gears and start making a whole nother thing that's hard to do. And we're going to put in all this effort with marketing and sales and everything, and then never mind, I'm gone. I just made something like, horrible if I would have done that. So in order for him not to get screwed, and basically said, how about this? We will leave, but we will continue doing what we were doing in the office. We're going to do it from our own office and we will continue to give you the same level of stuff on the. On deadline, just like before, not skip a beat and maybe even go a little bit faster. And then you will have stuff in the can while you bring an internal team up to six speed on our tech. If you want the latest stuff, use our technology. Let those people learn for a year. Let them put stuff in a can as well, and we will keep on making stuff for you. You don't lose. And if. And you just pay 5k a month, which is what you may have been paying or maybe would have paid us or less. Actually, Actually, he was paying. He was paying half the amount probably, you know, because if we were making 20k each, that would be, you know, 80k for four of us, that's 60k that he's paying for an 80k amount of work. So he actually got a really good deal out of that, actually. Sorry, it's even worse than that. It was 5,000 a game, which is two months, every two months. So it was 30k for a whole year for 80,000 worth of employment. So he had a really good deal. He's got three times the value, not counting how.
David Short: And a fully booked employee is actually quite a bit more than just their, their salary as well, I'm sure. Yeah, you're getting full benefits and everything, but, you know, just the space and all of that.
John Romero: Zero benefits. We had no connection to them anymore. It was just a contract to turn something in and get 5,000. We have to deal with it ourselves. So that was, you know, it was a sacrifice for us so he would not get hurt. And a year is a long time for a new team. These programmers were good that were on our technology. They were not going to have a problem. In fact, they eventually quit Softdisk and started using our Wolfenstein engine and they made Blake Stone. So they ended up being an indie team as well in shareware.
David Kopec: Another theme of the book is being on the cutting edge of technology. And I think this is true throughout your career. That kind of new enabling technologies enable new kinds of game design. I even think late later in the book when you were early in mobile or early in social gaming. But going back to 1991, when you offhandedly said to John Carmack, what if we could have smooth scrolling on the IBM PC? Which it's hard for my students to imagine, but you couldn't play a game like Mario on the IBM PC in 1991. How is it that nobody else came up with this until this team of four and you specifically having the foresight to realize this was so important and was actually doable, and John Carmack figuring out how to do it. But how is it throughout your career that you've always had these technical insights and how they could weave into game design that other people don't seem to either think are possible or, you know, are not on yet?
John Romero: I think that part of it has to do with coming from the 80s. And the reality of development back then was you did everything. You were the game designer, you were the artist, you were, were the audio person, you were the programmer in game designer, you had to do everything. And when you're in everything, you know how they all work together, you know how important game design is and how much work on the code side. It takes to actually have a cool idea but then make it happen, you know, so it's like, it's a lot of work to do that. Like ideas are easy, you just pop those out anytime. Making those a reality takes time and it takes effort to take all of the ideas and create the perfect architecture on the code side. So you're not doing a whole bunch of code to, you know, you're writing code to make all of these things work in a much tighter amount of work. Versus here are all my options. You just like make a million things one off. That's a really bad way to architect. It's all about taking everything that you want, boil it down to the perfect engine for functionality. And when you think in that way, that's just natural. It's not hard to imagine say with the scrolling situation. And it was actually in 1990, in mid-1990 when we did this, the situation was the fact that John got vertical scrolling working in Slordax and he said that that's what he wanted to try to do. When I saw that he was actually using the CRTC address registers for the EGA card to basically say, you know, where in memory it should start displaying the screen that in that one thing that I hadn't heard of anybody doing on the PC. So it was the first time that I've heard of anyone on the PC doing this hardware level trick. And it was like, that's incredible. Nobody does. No one's done it. He's doing it in a really smart way with this smart title refresh. And then for me I'm like, none of those Xevious clones. You know, xevious is a 1985 game. None of these Xevious clones ever have changed the world. They're always just like, it's a vertical scrolling thing, they're fun, but it's more arcade world. It's more of the arcade world versus the console world, which was Mario dominated, right? Mario was the game back then. It changed everything. It rescued the whole industry in 1985. So for me it's like if we can get smooth scrolling like a Nintendo, then we have conquered this machine that. That basically is garbage and can't barely do anything graphically because the way that you have to, the way that a lot of people would program it is through this thing called the bios which was really primitive and actually pretty slow. And I gave John, I basically knew smooth scrolling horizontally enables us to make a world, a virtual world that's really long, really big. It's like Mario, right? If we can do that, we can change everything for this computer. This computer has now become a game system and that just alters the whole market for everything. And to do that required horizontal panning. And so I just told them like, if you can do this, if you can get a horizontally panning, now we got something, you know, that like that's a really big deal. And you know, for him it was like, oh well, it's just another register and I just need to do kind of what I'm doing with Xevious, but I just need to do it. Or you know, it was floor decks, but I just need to do it horizontally. And it's a little trickier to do it horizontally. But then he did it, you know, it was just like, I immediately knew, like I've never had anything in my whole life be that massive of like a nuclear blast going off because I just knew that this was something no one had ever done before. It's ridiculous that no one had done it. Why had no one done. Why, why had, had nobody ever done this before? Because it is probably as technical as it gets for programming on the PC. Like it's all an assembly language which drastically reduces the amount of people programming on the PC. It was more of a business computer where you would use C compilers and you would use Quick Basic and higher level languages. Lower level languages like assembly were mostly for the 16 bit computers, you know, and so people doing assembly on the PC did not tend to get into the hardware of the PC. They would just use assembly to make the game parts go faster and the graphical parts would not go as, would not go so fast because they have limited knowledge of that. But I had gotten a book that was just released in 1990 by Michael Abrash that had all the information in it that you could ever know about the hardware on a video card, like you called video adapters back then. That's what I gave John. And it was just like, this is all you need to learn everything about graphics. And then if you can do horizontal scrolling, that's it. And then he did it. And that was, I was like, we got to get out of here, dudes. Like, this is unbelievable. We have, the world has changed and it doesn't even know it, you know.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, and I, I think too what I took away was that the design direction and the ambition and the desire to world build drove the technology in a way and the engineering of the environment and the engine itself, right? And you know, I think one of the things I lamented as I was reading you mentioned the dozens, if not, you know, hundred of pages, Doom, Lore book, the Bible that you put together. And I feel like that was so different than other games that time. And it reminded me of the Warcraft 2 instruction manual, which was basically a novel. And I read that thing back to back and I would draw my own maps and everything because of what I read in that book. And I just lament and hate that. It seems like games don't do that anymore, right. They don't have the supporting material and that was part of it all the lore and the world building drove the engine and then the engine was just technologically superior to be able to support that.
John Romero: Yeah, it was basically how do we need to take this Mario at this point, Mario Super Mario World was out and it's like, it's very smooth. The SNES hardware was amazing. So we have to catch up right? This first time the PC has been able to do this level of tech. We're still in almost like NES world because we haven't gone VGA. We're still in that 16 color world. But we are doing things on a PC that you could do on the Commodore and the Amiga and the Atari 800 but on a business computer that everybody has that is basically took over and all those other computers absolutely died like that. Those markets were erased and so the only real thing was the PC. And it's like starting over with like a gimpy machine but discovering the secret of how to turn it into a game system. And then it's like how do we take that smooth scrolling and make it something that is. Now we're not trying to copy the consoles, we're trying to take the design lessons of the console, but make a game for the PC that is not a copy of Mario. It needs to be something like we've internalized all lessons of Mario and we need to take those lessons and make something that we all think would be fun but not, not completely derivative or you would just go, oh, it's just Mario. It's got its own storyline. It appeals to, to people like, like especially the Commander team storyline where like the kid that you're controlling is a genius. He has a 314, you know, IQ, he's going to save the earth while his parents are sleeping. You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's a cool story. And so like we start off with an interesting story. We have world changing technology and we give it away for free. We give the game away for free. When we put it out, I mean everything we were Doing was new. And that was like, that was a shock to a lot of people. Like the fact that like a brand new game just came out that has technology the PC has been waiting for since it was created. And it's for free and you can download it, you copy and give it to your friends. And that right there, that's your word of mouth.
Kevin Hudak: Well, and you know, that ambition, that drive, that world building and what you're talking about, the great technology, essentially. The ID team in the early 90s had that incredible chemistry and it seemed like everything that you all were touching turned to gold. And I was just wondering, how is it for a team, you know, all in their early 20s? You keep reminding us in the book, remember, we were in our mid-20s here, and we would have done things differently if we had the wisdom of old age. But, you know, how did a team in those in the early 20s, how were you able to handle that kind of success, right, with. With venture capitalists and stories? Nowadays we sometimes hear about investors bringing the adults into the room, you know, to manage young entrepreneurs. But ID software was a bootstrapped venture set up from the start in a kind of a quasi partnership structure. You know, there were still wires coming down from the exposed ceiling tiles. And, you know, I'm just wondering, like, how did the young team, you know, aside from buying the Ferraris, and I know you were kind of uncomfortable in yours at the start, start, but how did that young team handle this incredible success and keep things going without having that stricter management in place? And do you think more constraints would have killed the creativity?
John Romero: Yeah, probably, because if any biz guy had stepped in, they would basically take whatever they knew from their world that they came from and try to apply it to our world, which was a thing no one had seen before and would have ruined it if we would have listened to them. But we were pretty adamant that we are going to continue owning what we are, who we are, and keep doing what we're doing and keep trying to make the next best game. Like, our focus was always on, this game is going to destroy our previous game, which was like, the best game. This new game is the best game. That last game is dead. Like, dead to us. We're going to make this one and wipe out the previous game. We never thought, well, this one will sit alongside the previous game in a really nice way. It's like, nope, better, better, better, right? And so start writing stuff from scratch, make new stuff. Nobody's seen this before. Last game is old garbage. This new game is the game. And that was always our attitude. And so we're always trying to do better and make better stuff. We didn't let it go to our heads because we were always working like, what are you going to do? This is who we were. We made games all the time and we were at work all the time. We play games at work. We love everything that we're doing. We didn't all of a sudden make tons of money and go, you know what? I just don't feel like making cool stuff anymore. I don't want to make amazing games. I'm just like, that's all I needed to do. It was. It just kept driving us. It was like, okay, we're doing the right thing. That's why this money's coming in. Let's keep it going. All the money that comes in, put it in the company. If something happens, there's money in the company. If for some reason there's a downturn or, or it takes us longer to get something done and the, the last game doesn't sell long enough, you know, at least we've saved all this money because what we really cared about was just continuing to make gains. That was the reason why we were living, was to keep making games and.
Kevin Hudak: You would keep cannibalizing your own product. But you still fostered the community and you elevated the community. And you say repeatedly in the book, always respect the fans, respect the players, the users.
John Romero: Absolutely. They're the ones who are playing your game. And I mean, to the crazy levels that we went to, which was, here's our game, change it as much as you want, have fun with that. And then later, here's all the source code to the game. Change that if you want, do whatever you want. This game was made obviously for all of you, this community that has really grown up and stuck with us. It let us make more games. So we're going to let you play around with the thing that, that, that you love. I mean, we created Doom, you know, so people could also mod Doom. They could change the game and do really fun stuff with it. And the like, nobody was open like that. That just was not a thing back then. I mean, modding was a thing in the 70s because everyone knew basic, but the things you're modding were like adventure games and stuff. By the time Doom came around, it was a lot more complex making stuff, but it was still at that critical turning point where it was still simple enough to change the data, to feel like you made an impact and did something cool. Before the future of Complex modding with Quake began. So it was at this amazing technology point that everybody just jumped in and made hundreds of thousands of levels and all kinds of stuff and, and just really love the game. You let people change the game. We're giving the game away for free. You can death match with people. All this stuff, all of it was free. You could just do all of it for free. Like it doesn't get any better than that, you know.
David Kopec: John, another theme of the book I think is really people management. There are later on in the book issues at Ion Storm. But I want to go back to these ID days and something that really felt like it crescendoed was when you were working on Doom and there's some conflict about the direction of Doom between the rest of the team and Tom hall. And Tom hall is a close friend of yours. You would go on to work together for many years later on in your career. But it kind of comes to a crescendo and this decision has to be made and you're the one that has to kind of deliver the news and make the decision. I'm wondering if you can speak to what it's like kind of mixing personal friendship with professional work environment in the kind of intense environment like a game studio is and you're working those 16 hour days with your friends and that can lead to of course to conflict in any business. But this is a creative venture. This is a venture that, that has to be a little bit more freeform as we discussed earlier. So what was that like having to deal with that conflict during the development of Doom and how. What's your advice to folks who are navigating these kind of situations?
John Romero: Well, the thing that was really important was recognizing what was really happening and that the reason why Tom was not like really delivering on the stuff that he was doing with Doom is because he would just, it just wasn't his kind of game and that's not the kind of person that he is. You know, it's like we just went darker with Doom. You know, like Wolfenstein was like mowing down nazis and blood everywhere and screaming and then like Doom was even darker than that. And Tom is just a very positive, happy person. He's the Commander Keane type person. So it was, it was like it was hurting him to keep working on the game, you know, and so it was like this actually was going to help him, you know, get away from that and you know, and not feel pressure making something that you really don't even believe in. It was just like a situation that Just obviously it's like a frog in boiling water. Like, you don't recognize it, but it's like that's the kind of situation that things slowly turned in, was like, here's the kind of games that is true id. And Tom is not that kind of gamer or personality. And, and so it was just like, you know, it was just being honest about it and Tom felt relieved, you know, like, yeah, you're right. It just. This isn't my thing. You know, we still hung around as friends, you know, and that's why we started Multi. Two other companies together. I've been working. I work with Tom every day in my office here in Ireland. He's working right next to me. You know, we're, We're. We're still working along, you know, for years now, he's been working on my new shooter.
Kevin Hudak: There's a line in Mad Men. You never know what builds loyalty. And it was when they didn't fire Pete Campbell. And I'm not saying that either of you all are Pete Campbell or Don Draper or anything, but you never know what builds loyalty. You never know what builds friendship. And it sounds like in that instance, you took on the difficult decision to, you know, ask him to leave the team, but in doing so, it was for his benefit, and it's why he probably was ordained and he was at, you know, did the wedding of you and Brenda. Right. That decision you made, you know, ultimately probably made your friendship even more enriching as opposed to him suffering and boiling like the frog. And so I appreciated that in, in the story.
John Romero: Yeah, I didn't. But he's. He, he was a friend. Like everybody was, you know, at that company, Jay and everybody. And, and it's like I still hung around. I, I still hung out with them and went and ate. Ate out together and, and. And everything because we were friends, you know, that was, it was more important than everything else. And we both love the same thing. And we both went through years together of working. I mean, I. Even before starting id, I had gone over to Tom's place to make stuff, you know, make. Make this little, this little Alfredo game together at his. At his place. And, you know, just. We had the same humor. We just matched so well, and there's no way I'm going to throw that away. You, like, rarely find people in your whole life that you can connect with, you know, on that kind of a level. And so it was, it was important that, I mean, that I stay friends with Tom. I just, I. It didn't even matter what we did together just as long as we're hanging out and, and making stuff because he's just like unbelievable. He's just an incredible person. You know, I, I feel the same way about Adrian and, and everybody. Like we, we went through a lot of stuff together and you know, it's not like being in, in the army or, or anything, but, you know, we spent a lot of hours, made a lot of really great stuff. We respect each other. You know, we all did really great stuff in our own areas and, and you know, that was the most important part of our life, you know, that early, doing that stuff. And, and it would be ridiculous to, to have it all just fall apart over the years and, and all kinds of arguments and, and all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, I still talk to Carmack, you know, sometimes meetings on Zoom. Adrian. Hang out with Adrian as much as I can. You know, he'd been in Ireland for a while and we, we had, had done stuff for a while together too. So I've been in touch with all these people. I still email Lane, I still email Jay. You know, like we know each other for a long time. I've known Jay since 1986.
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John Romero: Notes.
David Kopec: A lot has been written about the incredible productivity on the ID team as you're building these games. You're building the King games in like a couple of months. And I've seen you talk in previous interviews about, well, you know, you already had more than a decade of experience really building games. You're in your early 20s, but this is in your blood. I've also heard you talk about the chemistry on the team and that you use engines that have already been used on prior games. But even with all of that, the productivity just seems out of this world. And I'm wondering if some of that. And maybe you're a little too humble to put it this way in the book, but, like, are you all just 10x programmers? Is Adrian a 10x artist? Is Tom just a 10x designer? I mean, is there something just genetic here that it's hard to recreate?
John Romero: Number one, it was a really special time back then because there was no social media like that. Social media will kill you. There were no notifications, there were no cell phones, there was no email. There was nothing that was going to interrupt your flow. And all four of us were in the same room and we just had music playing and we were focused on what we were doing. Like, nowadays I would not be able to focus if I had, like, lyrics in the room, like with music. But back then I could. I could sing Dawkins songs while coding and assembly really fast. So, like, I don't know what that was, but, like, we could all do that. We listen to Metallica and focus, Hyper focus. Like, I wonder like, if we all had OCD and adhd, because, like, I think multiple, you know, we're on the spectrum somewhere, right? But that hyper focus is. Is how we got to where we were at to meet each other. We recognize that we have this thing and that hyper focus is how we got things done really fast. And we knew to make something appear on the screen, all the types of code that we have to write to do stuff, we know exactly what has to be written. Quantification of everything that has to get done is the number one thing that we needed to do when we start on a new game. It's like we need this many characters, this many frames of animation for these types of animations. We need this many characters, we need this many items, we need art for all of this stuff. We need background tiles for all of these types of terrain, these foreground tiles, title screen, credit screen, all of these. All these things, they all get broken down into lists and we just crank on them. We just code them, we draw them, we, you know, we. We design the stuff. We know how to limit our scope. We've been doing that forever. You know, we think about making a game, we know how long it takes. Just like that idea right there, that's probably like two months, you know, so we just know because we know the work that goes into it. Because being doing everything yourself, you get really good at estimating. After 10 years of making 100 things, you know, 100 games or whatever, it was all. That's all of us together knowing how to estimate. Like, we all had experience doing that and we would not have a problem rescoping on the fly in a second. You know, like, you saw that we had, you know, times where we were like, that's it, we're getting out of here. 1:00am in the morning, we're moving. Like, we made decisions like that and we did it. We did. We spent all that time having a great time making stuff. You know, it was like, you don't, you don't make games for, you know, 12 hours a day by being serious all day long. That's boring. So we have to have fun. You know, we have to talk, we have to like, comment on things, show each other the cool stuff that we're doing, get everyone excited about things and almost like, you know, treat these games like they're, you know, two month game jams, you know, where everyone's just pouring every second into it to get it done as fast as possible. And we just kept doing that for years.
Kevin Hudak: And don't forget Dungeons and Dragons for the creative direction, vision and put it off steam.
John Romero: Yeah, yeah. D and D is the foundation of pretty much all games. You know, like, that is, that's conflict resolution, that is pacing, it's turn based, you name it. Everything comes from D and D. And we love dnd and we would play D and D. Like the fact that we play games together or like John and I would play F0 and Super Mario World and you know, Fatal Fury and Street Fighter 2 and you name it. Like all those games, we played everything together and, and so we would take breaks. Go play games. Okay, come back in there. Start coding. It was just, you know, like constant. Like I said, I'm going to go barbecue. Let's go. Wait, no, let's go knee boarding. Let's come back. Code. Keep on making the game. You know, it's just like we knew that, that, that after making games for that long that we needed to have breaks. Whatever times we felt like we didn't structure anything. So it was just like, ah, I just want to go do this. I'm going to run to the store. All right, I'll go pick me up or whatever. All right, go. Come back. Here's the stuff, man. Code, you know, like, it was just like we knew when to take a break from the screen, but we also took, you know, took breaks with each other doing stuff. Yeah, it was, it was, it was really cool. Like, it's like UFC number one came out and we're like, we're all going to go to carmax because he has a big screen tv. We're going to watch UFC number one. We're going to see Hoist Gracie. We're going to like, you know, we're going to watch this brand new thing and just hang out and then we go, go back to work. Let's go out to the pool in the middle of the day, all right, Come back from a swim and code make world design. So it was just like, that's the way it was. We just hung out together. It was a great, it was just a great time and it was just like we were making really fun stuff. We loved it. We were such gamers that we felt that if we liked it that other people would like it. And we're always trying to put the newest stuff in there. It's like, oh, hey, sound cards now can make audio, like did samples. So let's do that. Like we'd have some screaming and chain gunning and shooting and everything. No one's ever heard this before. Let's do it. And you know, that's what we did when we were making Wolfenstein and trying to make music better and like, you name it, every little bit of our craft or trying to inch it forward to the next level when that piece of technology was released or something was something new and presented itself.
David Short: And then down the line, let's get Nine Inch Nails to do the music for us as well. Yeah, so you described that really well. And I guess for me it sounds like you guys kind of shifted away from like any kind of work life balance to just like it was your life, the work was your life, it was the thing that you loved and you were sort of living that way and it literally oftentimes leaving basically just to sleep. But I did want to go into that a little bit because this has become a bit of a contentious topic in sort of the work world generally and in gaming as well. So you really were working incredible hours obviously with people that you were friends with and like you're saying you're sort of taking the breaks as you needed them, but many of these were sort of 16 hour days that you're describing. And I think that crunch probably was critical to a lot of the work that you did. So I guess, what, what do you think about those, those time periods? Is there, is there anything that you would have done differently? And like, what, what do you think of some of the, I don't know, modern views that, you know, we need to, we need to give, give employees, you know, work life balance and stuff like that? Like how do you think it's possible to do some of the incredible things that you had done. Yeah. Like how do you think that that crunch period applies in our current time as well?
John Romero: Yeah. So back in, back in the day, if we had said, hey, you know what, 6:00, let's make sure we go home and we come back tomorrow at 10 and continue. So we have this, you know, so we have like lives that are like normal lives. We totally could have done that. We could have kept on making what we did. But I think that for one, I was the only person with a girlfriend. And the other guys would have just kept making stuff. They would have not stopped Carmack, absolutely no way in hell would he have stopped. There's no way. I mean, that's what we wanted to do. That's all we wanted to do. It's like someone who's a painter, who's obsessed with painting and just has a vision and they're going to make it happen and they're going to do it until it's done. That's exactly what we were like. We didn't feel like it was a job ever. It was who we were, it was what we did. And the fact that we're with other people who can perform at that highest level and we're all making really great stuff, it's just like, you just want to keep doing it. There was not a time where we were at night just like, God, I wish I wasn't here. That never happened. Right. That was like, if you think that then you leave and go home. Like, that's real simple. You know, they've. We've put in enough time. We don't need to justify going home because we have a headache or we're just tired of it. We did that because that's what we love doing. And that's what we were. You know, nowadays, work life balance is super, super important. And my company right now, we have a hundred people on it. And you know, people, people. This is like, this is a real professional job. Like, this is a real vocation like any other professional vocation out there. Being a lawyer, you know, someone who's working a desk job. Like this is that kind of a job. And. And people are doing really great creative work. But you cannot expect 100 people to be on the same, you know, like that they're not in their 20s, right. Like everyone, they're 20s, where you have unlimited energy. So everybody needs to like, you can't force people to do things they don't want to do. There's an expectation of this is the time that you can spend at work, pay you for that time and then please go home. So you are, you have a really great, you know, family or you, you're going to do the things that you really love doing, you're going to come back here. We are not going to pretend that this job is your whole world at all. And that's really important because you cannot expect people to think that their job is going to be their whole world. You know, we hire for people that are very qualified and we don't know what they're doing at home. They could have a big family, they can be alone, they could love their cats, have fish, whatever it is, spend all that time with what you love doing, have some hobbies and love your work and do a good job while you're here, but nobody is expected to work overtime. And we've been doing this for years here now. So we have absolutely shifted over to the work life balancing long ago, at least, jeez, 20 plus years ago, we've shifted over to that. And it's not changed the fact that we could make cool stuff. It's just that that's, you know, that's the timeline that we're on now versus back then.
Kevin Hudak: Good mental wellness and good mental hygiene is important.
John Romero: Yeah, absolutely. Everyone is not the same. And so you have to establish a baseline that's healthy for everybody. And that's basically what we have. We're in Europe. We give people way more time off, like five weeks minimum a year. It's. Yeah, and, and yeah, it's really, really. Or if you look at our benefits on our site, honda games.com, you'll see, like, we have benefits that nobody has and it's because we're mature. We've been in this industry forever. We know what it's like to, to work and have families. People don't stay at jobs forever. You know, like, you can't burn people out and make them leave. You need to have people who are happy. And because we've have this attitude, we've had our employees with us for, for like 10 years now. And, and it's because they just like, this is just a really safe place to work and they're not expecting me to kill myself. So this is great. You know, I work with really smart people. I get time off whenever I need it, anytime. Doesn't matter. Anything personal happens, please go. Do not think about work. Go take care of whatever it is. We care about the people more than anything. And you have to treat people like that and you have to back it up. So that's how you keep people around, is to give them a job that's better than everything else that they can see around them.
David Kopec: I love that kind of. You've given us a great segue as we get to the end of our time to talk about your role as a manager. And I feel like you were really wearing the business hat on that original team of four that was really clear. You were the one going out and licensing the engine. You were the one going out and overseeing the progress on things like merchandise or on deals for distribution. And I'm wondering how that period of working on a very small team and being the person with really the business hat on forged your identity as a manager, as you've done so many other entrepreneurial ventures since. And what was it that led you to want to take on that role? Why did John Romero take on that role instead of John Carmack or Tom hall becoming kind of the face of the company and. And the business person?
John Romero: It was pretty simple. It was because I had the most experience with the people that I was with. If there was someone else that I was with in that group that had more business experience, please do that. Go do that. Right, like, say, Scott Miller. I'd say that when we. When we connected with Scott Miller, he had way more business experience. It was. It was evident, and it was important. He was at a different company, so obviously he couldn't run our company. But we took his advice 100%. When he said, you need to take a game and cut it into three pieces, we said, yes, sir, we'll do that. You know your market that you're selling to. We do not. And we're not going to pretend that we know that and you don't. You know, he's not going to tell us how to make a game. We're not going to tell him how to market and publish. And we respect each other in that way, and it worked out really, really well. But if I. If I had run into anybody that knew business and software and all those things that I had done better than me, I would have loved it. For them to just do that, that would have been really nice. But the longer you do it, the more, you know, you kind of become the person who really knows all this stuff. And it gets to be really hard trying to find someone that actually has that much experience that can just do it for you. So, you know, luckily, like right now, in my Romero games, my wife is the CEO. She's been in the industry since 81, so she's. She's a great CEO. Our COO has run demonware for ran demonware for 15 years for Activision, for Call of Duty, like, ran that whole company doing that, you know, so we have people who have a lot of experience managing hundreds of people running teams, like all of that stuff. And so I can take the game director position and not worry so much about business stuff. I can just worry about the game and focus on that. And that's why having 100 people means you have a lot of specialists in a lot of different areas.
Kevin Hudak: So speaking about the business, of the business and continuing on that after ID Software, you reconnect with Tom hall and you get that publishing deal with Eidos Interactive to start Ion Storm. And as you go into detail in the book, ultimately, Ion Storm, you know, ended up being something of a disaster. Not through you know, any fault of one person or anything like that. But the biggest problem was not the games themselves, but sort of the people management that sort of forced you into some, you know, bad business decisions. And it was a difficult environment in which, you know, the games were developed. You know, your first CEO, Mike Wilson, he pushes you to do marketing stunts and media interviews that you're not really comfortable with. You know, he relentlessly pursues forming a publishing company or publishing division, you know, even before the initial games that you contracted for have good momentum. And ultimately he tries to steal some of your team. He does the opposite of what you guys did in terms of honesty and transparency. With Big Al earlier, the second CEO, Todd Porter, who was one of your founding partners, along with Jerry, the art director, and you and Tom hall, he's being verbally abusive to members of the staff, making them uncomfortable, causing some of them to leave. It seemed like a hostile work environment. But because he and Jerry, Todd and Jerry, control 50% of the partnership, you were sort of unable to fire or control him. And ultimately Eidos had to, you know, kind of handle that just by necessity. I have to ask, given your business background while at id, didn't you have the experience to sort of be the CEO yourself? Or was it something that you didn't want to take on and you wanted to focus on the games, would it have detracted you from being able to focus on building, you know, Daikatana? But, you know, I was reading this thinking, I almost wish that John had taken on the role of CEO from the start so that you didn't have to deal with some of these, you know, outside pressures, or you could have made some more decisive decisions there. But tell us a little bit about that progression and tell us a little bit about Mike Wilson and Todd and, and, and should you have been CEO from the start instead?
John Romero: Yeah, the thing is, I did not want to be the CEO because I wanted to focus on making my game because that was the whole reason for this company was, was to make the next shooter that went a little bit further in design than what had been done in the industry. And if I was the CEO, you have no idea. That was a 120 people company. And we had two offices. We had so much going on. I mean, we had a coo, a Chief Marketing officer, a cfo, CEO, coo, cfo, cmo, all in all in charge of stuff that had to be done. And then we had four teams developing. It was just like, that was so much stuff to do. What I need, like the whole reason for everything was for me to make Daikatana and for Tom to make an akronox.
David Short: Well, just spend eight hours as the CEO and then eight hours developing Daikatana. Come on.
John Romero: That's not fun. I know, but, but that was just. It was all not good. Like, it definitely should not have started the company with anyone but Tom Hall. It would have been a much smaller company than, than the way it turned out. And, and we would have done things really differently. Really would have turned out differently.
Kevin Hudak: But I'm trying to remember the name of the gentleman. I'm sorry to interrupt you, John.
David Kopec: The.
Kevin Hudak: The name of the gentleman who headed up the team for Deus Ex in the Austin office, I believe.
John Romero: Oh, Becker. Yeah.
Kevin Hudak: You gave him the experience. Right. You gave him all the rope that he could have. You gave him a great environment and they were able to sort of be insulated from all the trash that you were dealing with with the Mikes and the Todd's of the world.
John Romero: Yeah.
Kevin Hudak: And so in my thinking, I was like, well, why didn't he just somehow create that insulated walled garden for himself? But it was almost impossible.
John Romero: It was impossible. Yeah. We had a big open environment at that company. There weren't doors on things. It was just a big, open, free flowing, you know, office space two stories high. It was completely open. It was not a place where, you know, you didn't have a warren of offices.
David Short: Small anecdote. I've actually worked in that building. My. I worked for a consulting firm that has offices. A really nice building. The wood on the walls is all like, you know, in the elevators is labeled from the different, you know, foreign countries that's come from and everything. It really speaks to like the peak of Texas, like oil money in the 80s or whatever.
John Romero: Anyway, yeah, the oil club, there's an oil club, petroleum club is in that building and, and we had the two top floors. That's crazy.
Kevin Hudak: Just before we move on too, I think one, I always kind of call back to our past episodes and one concept that was brought up by Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz was the idea of management debt. And I think that we have examples of management debt here. And that's when you make a decision in the short term that doesn't necessarily ruffle feathers. But then just like a bank account, you're adding debt from not making that decisive. And, and I see like with Tom hall you made that decisive decision and you were able to not incur management debt. But you know, with, with the Todd's and the Mikes of the world and even with John Carmack's report card, right, that was when to not ruffle feathers. You sort of, you built up some management debt as a result of that. And you know, I think you came out great on the other side. But you know, obviously for our listeners it just, it's a lesson to kind of follow your gut. It's one of your Romero's kind of business rules at the end. Follow your gut and yeah, take care.
John Romero: Of things before they fester. Like immediately deal with situations head on and try and resolve them in, in the best way possible. But don't just let them fester. Like that kind of debt sucks. You know, like in game development there's a thing called tech debt where if you don't fix a thing that is broken or is not working well, you're going to do it later and it'll probably take more time to fix it because there's so much work done around that thing that to fix it you have to now rewrite it to interface with everything else around it. So you know, the earlier you are fix that thing as early as possible. That includes someone on the team has an issue with someone else, immediately deal with that. Don't hope that it blows over or hope that someone will get over something. Like immediately have people in the meeting and try to come to a resolution. It doesn't help because that just could become poison and poison will kill your company. So you need to immediately get people to resolve differences, give people different jobs if they need it, different roles, whatever it takes. And yeah, it's really important to just make sure your people are happy just for your healthy progress on any vector. Don't build up any kind of debt in Any way, because you'll pay more for it later than there's interest. Absolutely.
David Short: Shifting forward a little bit, you were early in mobile games and had some critical success, although I don't think as much commercial success. And then you had a lot of success in the social gaming space with, with Ravenwood Fair, which you developed with your wife, Brenda, I believe. Could you go into a little bit about. Is there something universal about game design that allows you to work across these varied fields? What did you bring from. I mean, obviously your 80,000 hours of experience is always important, but what was it like shifting into this very different.
John Romero: Vector for gaming with social games and Facebook? Number one, not assuming that you know anything about that world. Even though I've been making games at that time for, geez, 30 years, still not assuming that, that I knew what the people who are playing those games really got into. I needed to, I needed to study it. Making it happen and coming up with a design is the easy part. The part that's hard is, is trying to figure out what your demographic is and what they like and how you can do something better than what they are currently enjoying. And that was the, you know, three days of research that I needed to do to kind of find, yeah, these, these, these games make money. Where are the monetization pressure points that people accept in this world of Facebook games? What are the patterns of play? What are the patterns of user interface on the screen? Because it was really important that I, in my game, I adhered to the norms of the interfaces of the, of the current big games. Because if my interface was really different that the women who are playing my game at lunch, they wouldn't play it if they had to learn a whole new interface. It needed to look like their other games, you know, functionally and the buttons in the right place to do some of the similar things. So it's really important to keep your game as easy to play as possible, to keep your design the same as much as possible. But go a little bit further, like show people that this is more interesting and has a new thing that makes the whole world more interesting than the other game that they're playing. And so that was all that needed to be done. It was hard to come up with a design and it just happened immediately. It also happened that I found a Facebook game engine that was the fastest thing that no one had seen yet. So it was almost like, oh my God, I got another secret weapon here. And so I have a great game engine that can draw graphics at 60 frames a second on screen. So my design needs to fill the screen to blow away everyone else and all the other game companies making Facebook games to go, how are they even doing that? That's not even possible on Facebook, you know. And so I needed to design something and took that into account. But in wove that into the design and the patterns that this demographic, which is 43 year old women playing games on their lunchtime, I needed to make that kind of a game that appealed to that person that was very responsive, very fast, generous, more generous. And the time allowed for play free before they monetize so people would, they would spend more time on my game because I allowed them to play long. So yeah, it was real important to do all those things. Right. And so I designed the game instantly, pretty much. And then we just executed that design over two months and 19 days and released it on October 19th. And the rest was history. And it exploded. The game made, you know, million bucks its first month and had 25 million players six months later. 25 million every month, which was huge. You know, the company went from 30 people to 130 people. So that was, you know, really big success with that game. But that was just. It was a bubble. The bubble blew up.
David Kopec: Well, as we conclude, John, I did want to ask you a structural question about the book and I don't want you to take this as too much of a negative because this was my favorite entrepreneurial book. I think I've read in the dozens I've read for this podcast. I absolutely loved the book. But there was one structural thing that I found interesting which was early in the book, the first few chapters, obviously, because you're a young person, really focus on your personal life. And I got really invested in you and in your personal life. And then around the time that you're starting ID software, it really focused to professional life. But almost exclusively we do get some updates. We get a paragraph page here and there and you know. But I got so invested in you in those first few chapters. What was, as an author, why did you decide to make such a radical shift around when you're in your early 20s when you were writing the book?
John Romero: Well, even in the, even in the, I'd say my teenage years, I was getting more and more deeper, basically deeper into programming and spending more time on it. And I and basically wanted to reflect that the amount of time I was spending making stuff at the building, all of my stuff, that the amount of words in the book dedicated to that versus any personal stuff was actually appropriate because I did spend all my time Doing that. Like, when you look at the amount of hours every day that I was spending and the amount of hours that I would be, like, go home and sleep and say hi to the person I was with, very little time, you know, like, that was what I did. It was kind of like, if you ever read Isaac Asimov's, his autobiography, he had his hands on a typewriter most of the every minute of the day. And that was a manual typewriter. And he wrote 800 books. Like, incredible output. And for game development, that's basically what I had. I was spending all of my time doing this stuff. And so that was like, I did not spend much time not making games back then, so I didn't really write much about. About the people I was with because I didn't see them that much.
Kevin Hudak: So I have a counterpoint to Kopeck, though. And, you know, he did also say that this was his favorite entrepreneurial book that we read when you weren't on the podcast. So we know it to be true. But, you know, I think it. Your book starts with family, and for me, it almost like ended with family, if that makes sense. And unfortunately, it was a very traumatic time in your life when your house flooded, but that's when it kind of came back to that cinematic. We're in the desert. But in this case, it was your mid-20s son, Michael, leading you through the house with FaceTime to discover that the archive was still there. And I enjoy that. Then it came back to family, and that's when you almost kind of opened your life back up more. And the one thing I noticed, too, was, you know, you were almost now living the first person through him as he was guiding you through, and he pushed that door in your closet and was almost like a door in Doom that he was opening. And I just thought it was cinematic and incredible.
John Romero: And.
Kevin Hudak: And after that point, you almost gave up the first person POV and the first person shooters, and you went into some of these more the social and, you know, the smartphone. And so I don't know if that was intentional. I'm an aspiring novelist stuck in the body of a research consultant, and so I always love those features in books, but I thought you did a great job. And that was my counterpoint to Copeck.
John Romero: Oh, thanks. Yep. Yeah. And. And. And I work with Michael. He's been working on this game for a while. He's in California, I'm in Ireland. But he works on it every day. One of our oldest daughters, she's in the office every day she works, you know, on at our company as well. And the youngest daughter, she's a programmer at the company as well. So like we have three of the kids are working at the company on this game or, or doing stuff with the game at the company. So it's a family business. There's 5 of us total working at.
Kevin Hudak: The company and I love that because sometimes parents will say don't do what I did, go into something different. But you have a lot of trust and you have a lot of faith in that industry, in that system where you brought your kids into it.
John Romero: Yeah, yeah, yep. And, and the things that they're learning could be applied anywhere else. So it's not like they got into a dead end too specialized field. It's a super applicable the skills that they're learning. So you know, like if the, the, the kids who are programming need to just like, well, the game industry imploded or something, there's plenty of other things that they could do and they are, you know, they have more expertise than it takes to like do JavaScript and build websites. Like that's pretty way beneath them and, and it's easy to get a job, you know, doing that at their level, but they wouldn't do that anyway.
Kevin Hudak: And like you said, go, go recode Obamacare 2.0. You know, a person that worked with you. Right. So there's, there's always application.
John Romero: Yeah, that was Joey.
David Kopec: It really feels like your fans have been really excited, John, the last few years that you've been kind of returning to your roots, getting back into the first person shooter genre, expanding on Doom. And I'm just wondering if you could tell us a bit about what you're up to right now at Romero Games and, and what's looking forward for romero games.
John Romero: Sure. Sigil 1 and 2 are now part of Doom 1 and 2's remaster that's just been launching right now. So Sigil 1 and 2 are in the main menu, they're in the packaging, on the COVID you name it. That's amazing to have that recognition and to have that in front of millions of people. I'm working on Hellion, which is for Doom 2. It's a big huge collection of levels. That's just something I do in my spare time. I'm also during the day working on my big shooter, Unreal 5 based FPS. Big publisher behind us, been working on it for years. Have not mentioned, it's not announced yet, but it will be announced at some point and then we'll be able to talk about it. But other than that there's just lots of conferences, go to conferences, work on projects, work at the company on games or on the game, and just manage all of it. Because it's really a lot of work. To just like to oversee every little detail of a design of a giant game is a lot of work. But that's what I'm doing every day, and it's a blast. I just love it. So, yeah, really, really in a good spot right now.
David Kopec: Well, John, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know I speak for all three of us. We absolutely love Doom Guy. It's one of our favorite books that we've read on the. And is there anything that you want to plug to our listeners that they should go check out right now? Of course, we'll put all of your socials in the show notes and links to Romero games, but is there anything else that they should have an action item on right now?
John Romero: Absolutely. If you love Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, any of the stuff, Sigil, all that stuff, go to Romero.com and we sell tons of merch. I sign all of it. I can personalize it. And, you know, that's if you want any kind of Heretic and Hexen and all those games, all that stuff is sold on our site. So if anybody wants any of that stuff, just go to Romero.com and check it out.
David Kopec: Well, thank you so much for everything, John. I know my students are going to be shocked that I interviewed the John Romero, and we hope that you've enjoyed the conversation, too. Thank you so much.
John Romero: Yeah, thank you.
David Kopec: Wow, it was really amazing having John on the show. We're going to be reading another book that's in a very different genre for next month. David, can you tell us a little bit about our book for May?
David Short: Yeah. So we're picking a timely book this time around. We will be reading Free Trade Under Fire by Dartmouth professor Doug Irwin. It unpacks various viewpoints on free trade and tariffs, and in the fifth edition, which we'll be reading, covers the first Trump administration, but generally debunks many of the myths around free trade and globalization and really will help our readers to understand the importance of free trade, the impact of tariffs, and real data on the impact of tariffs on our economy. The three of us all graduated from Dartmouth, so we're really excited to get a chance to learn from Professor Irwin. Hope you'll all enjoy reading along with us.
David Kopec: And you're making the assumption that free trade is necessarily a good thing? I guess we'll decide for ourselves after reading the book and talking to Professor Irwin. Okay, anything that the two of you want to plug? How can listeners get in touch with you?
David Short: You can follow me on x@davidg short.
Kevin Hudak: And you can follow me on x@hudaksbasement h u d A K s Basement.
David Kopec: I'm on X avecopec D A V E K O P E C Don't forget to subscribe to Business, Books and Company on your podcast player of choice. Hit that follow button. Hit that subscribe button. We do monthly episodes, so there is a little bit of a gap between each of our episodes, but they're worth the wait. And if you like the podcast, don't forget to leave us a review. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you again next month.