Doug: 0:29

Welcome back to the Uncannery or for any first-time listeners out there, welcome to the Uncannery. I'm Doug, I'm Ron, I'm Don, and would you, gentlemen, mind if I sang you a little something real quick.

Ron: 0:42

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Doug: 0:43

You are historically a good singer and I like music and Don any objections. I've never heard you sing, so I don't know anything about this history. Okay, here we go. Anything, any, any. Feelings arise as I begin to hit those Volkswagen commercial.

Don: 1:11

It's for the Jetta.

Doug: 1:14

No, don, it's not for the Jetta. I thought you would hear the pulse pounding.

Ron: 1:20

No, I'm pretty pumped. Yeah, I want to do something. I want to do some hill in the world right now Whoa. Yeah, I wasn't going to take it that far. That'm pretty pumped. Yeah, I want to do something. I want to do some hill in the world right now Whoa.

Doug: 1:25

Yeah, yeah, I wasn't going to take it that far.

Ron: 1:27

That's pretty wild, I think that's a primal bar that you've dropped here. Cool, this is Doom. You are singing to me, doom Whoa.

Doug: 1:38

You actually got it. You actually got it. You got it For the listeners at home. Um, I was just, uh, pretending that I was doing the MIDI sound of the guitars from E1 M1 hanger level of the original 1994 classic. Monstrous accomplishment of a game that is doom by id software. Um, gentlemen, how, how familiar are you with the game? If not, is it the best game of all time? We all know it is. Anyway, go ahead, tell us what you know.

Ron: 2:13

My introduction to doom was what you said. 94 came out 94, so I don't know if it's doom 1 or doom 2, but my uncle had. My uncle was like the first pc gamer I knew. Yeah, he had like a pc with a sound card and stuff right, and uh, he would show me doom and I was terrified of it as a child, of course, like he's running through the dark halls and then a big minotaur, whatever pops out, and I was like I thought it was a scary game and I thought he was like it was an element of his personality that I had no idea.

Ron: 2:45

I was like, wow, I thought he was just a sch and I thought he was like it was an element of his personality that I had no idea. I was like, wow, I thought he was just a schmuck, but actually he could play these very terrifying games, absolutely. And now, looking back, thinking that anything about Doom is scary is silly to me. But I've actually never played the original Doom, but I did play the. Was it 2016 remaster? Yeah.

Doug: 3:08

That kind of took the world by swarm, uh uh, storm. Well, swarm is appropriate if we're talking about doom. It is a swarm of demons coming in.

Ron: 3:12

So, yeah, that's it, and I did finish 2016 and I started eternal and I never finished eternal completely different game, so like it's eternal is almost like a sport yes, compared to 2016, which I was enjoying, but, um, I didn't have the time to devote to the sport. I think the same time around.

Doug: 3:27

Did you play the original? You just watched it.

Ron: 3:30

Yeah, I only watched it. I've never gone back and played it, really Okay.

Doug: 3:33

Very cool.

Don: 3:34

Don tell us about your experience. I played it. I played it in college. Not very much. You were brave. I didn't think it was. Yeah, it wasn't that scary for me, um, when it came out, yeah, so, yeah, um, and it just wasn't something I wasted a lot of time on, spent a lot of time on, I guess I know exactly where this podcast is going.

Don: 3:54

I'll just say that right now, um, yeah, but uh, um, but I had friends that were playing it more than I was, so okay, okay, so I got to see a lot of it, but uh yeah, it was fun.

Doug: 4:07

I mean immediately. The reason I asked what's your experience with doom and didn't ask you the question what do you know about doom is because I think that generally it's regarded uh enough that anybody who has a basic knowledge of video games is going to know about Doom to a certain degree.

Ron: 4:26

I bet everyone has heard the word Doom and they know that's a video game, but I'm not sure if everyone knows what it is, or what sets it apart from? Other video games.

Doug: 4:34

It does a lot. It is not the first first-person shooter ever made and, as a matter of fact, when Doom came out, the word first-person shooter wasn't even being thrown around at that time, and that might be something that's unfamiliar to our audience, but it was one of the first games that became widely accessible. That kind of put you in the perspective of the character that you were playing and you were looking through the eyes of that character as you proceeded. And this is far after Battlezone or some of these arcade games that did have this.

Ron: 5:08

Is that the tank one? Yes, yeah absolutely.

Don: 5:11

Which I love, that one too, yeah me too, Absolutely.

Doug: 5:13

Remember that animation when you get hit like it cracks the screen.

Ron: 5:16

Yeah, so cool. I love that game too, so immersive.

Doug: 5:20

Yeah.

Don: 5:22

Yes, it was.

Doug: 5:24

Yeah, for me doom was a quintessential experience. I, the more that I've thought about this, I realized it's informed a lot of just things that I love about media. I think in general because it came at a time for me that that was the big step up. Um. According to my dad, I think the first game that I ever played was out of this world. I think that that was the title of the game is a PC game. I think it had a sequel called flashback or something like that.

Doug: 5:54

Apparently, I have some vague recollections. We used to play Dune Dune uh, not to be confused with doom. Uh, doing the sci-fi epic. There was dune um on computer um, and there was a few others, definitely super mario's in there. But the biggest memories I have um were when I was I was allowed to play doom. That was a big deal um at the time because, yeah, it was scary and there's monsters and demons and all these scary things um, but but it it blew my mind. I could not believe that something would be in in the first person perspective, so that already um had kind of taken it there and there was so much buzz around the idea of you could um, it was under a model that the way that you could get it was. It was called shareware, which, uh, I guess we kind of have to go back to talk about software in general, because so many things are just downloaded now, but people are passing around disks that you could get basically the first third of the game for free. You could play through I think it was between 8 and 10 levels that were designed in the beginning and that was free. You could play through that. But in order to get the last two volumes of the game, of the game, or um episodes of the game, you had to uh buy it.

Doug: 7:09

And what is also wild about this is thinking about um. You know, when you go to buy a video game in the store, it's always in a pre-packaged kind of box. If not download it, like the, the people that are still holding onto hardware um, you have to go in and uh, basically they would sell places like comp USA or like these stores uh, the rights to sell the discs out of a box and they would give them to. You know, like, sell them that and say, like, just slap a price on it, you can make the box look however you want. So people who have copies of doom from the uh mid nineties. They all all the boxes are different depending on what you got, because it was such a different way to distribute this piece of software.

Doug: 7:54

Essentially, the the reason I wanted to talk about it today is not just because of the influence it had on me. This isn't an autobiographical episode, but there is a. There's an interesting wave of programming that has kind of caught my eye in that this game from 1994, it is very historic and so of course people are going to continue to talk about it. And if it has all of these marks of modern gaming for why first-person shooters are so popular, that's going to be something to talk about. But it's actually also a programming. I don't know how would I phrase this. It's a programming challenge. Yeah, it's like a programming challenge that recently there's been a wave of people probably over the past 10 years, but I've really seen it pick up in the past three years of people using the original source code of doom to program it into very strange places that are not just computers, uh, that can run this software. So, um, obviously you've got phones like that somewhere that you can imagine.

Doug: 9:03

I do have a phone obviously you've got phones like that somewhere that you can imagine these things. I do have a phone, absolutely, and we hope that you do too at home um, go buy a phone.

Ron: 9:09

If you don't have one, you gotta go get one before you can listen to this episode pro phone podcast yeah, talk to your parents.

Doug: 9:15

Tell them it's time I deserve a phone thank you, um, but what uh looking at that, with some of the things that uh could be interesting like? I don't know if the best way to do is go through a guessing game here, but what are some of the strangest areas that you can imagine this game being programmed into?

Ron: 9:35

The hump of a camel. Okay, Ron Got him. It's not that strange, is it?

Doug: 9:44

We are going to get into the biological. It is going to get very strange once we look at some of the other stable points. There is going to be one stop that we take that is biological. But no, I'm looking for more mechanical.

Ron: 9:58

Okay, so I do have some experience. The strangest thing I've seen someone program the video game Doom onto was a calculator. I couldn't tell you what kind of calculator. I was never a calculator guy. I can't tell my T-1000 from a T Math calculator. Yeah, some sort of math calculator.

Don: 10:15

And.

Ron: 10:15

I had like a fifth grade student who was like, just showed me, look, I got Doom on here. I'm like what. And he was playing Doom on a calculator and it looked really good, Like, and he said he did it himself and I was so completely blown away and confused and I was like, wow, this must be the smartest kid in the world. This guy's the next Isaac Newton.

Doug: 10:39

Yes, um, yeah, that that is exactly like what you're experiencing. Live there. Um is interesting. Yes, ti 84 calculators have become a staple of this Um, and so to think that, something from 1994, that, um, my dad, I think, had to buy extra Ram for at the time to make sure, or like a new chip that he had to put on his motherboard, or new motherboard, um, you're just saying words now.

Don: 11:04

You don't. You don't know what he did. Motherboard and ram are real words those are words, and you're correct.

Doug: 11:10

I don't know which one between the two, but he did have to increase the processing power of his computer so we could play doom at home these are all words.

Ron: 11:16

I've seen labeling aisles in a fries electronics absolutely rest in peace. Fries electronics oh my god, my favorite store ever. Me too, I'd love to fries electronics absolutely.

Doug: 11:29

Yeah, dad and I would take many a trip um to go look at games and computer parts um why is this building so tall? Absolutely for selling dvds and cables because when you say I found the game I wanted, it needs to echo through a huge warehouse. That's it um. So yeah, ti-84 calculators um kind of became a mainstay because they could process um the the game. So that that's one um any other guesses or okay, so weirder than a calculator, yeah yeah, it does get weirder.

Doug: 12:04

Tamagotchi, tamagotchi I didn't find anything on that and it is possible, but no, I did not find any tamagotchis that had them programmed. Um, although there is a device called the tilt, which is about the size of three legos stacked on top of each other, that has a screen about the size of your pinky nail that responds to movement, uh, left, right, up and down, uh, that somebody did program doom into and all the movement controls were done through tilting the object and pressing the lego button on the top of it in order to shoot so that is another item sick yeah, absolutely microwave oven

Doug: 12:40

microwave oven. I have not not seen up to this point. That's another one, and what's wild about this is maybe is the answer, but a refrigerator two years ago has been taken care of. There was a refrigerator that had an LG screen that was attached to it and when you would open up the door to get a beverage and then go back to close it, it would load up e1m1 that you could play through the entire time. Um, and I think when you they had it programmed to when you shot the first enemy, it could start dispensing ice, which I thought was absolutely insane. But that's something else. That's there. What's e1m1? That is episode one, uh, map one, the very first level of Doom that I sang from at the beginning of this episode here.

Don: 13:29

The Jetta commercial.

Doug: 13:30

Yes, the Jetta commercial, indeed Some other notable options If you had the version and I don't know if MacBooks are still doing this, but there was a digital display bar that was at the top of macbooks that you could use to turn volume up and down the touch bar thank you obviously and no they don't make them anymore, but they still exist special edition.

Doug: 13:52

Uh well, you could have gotten an even more special edition in which somebody just programmed the led in the top of that bar to play doom, so not the actual computer that's running it, but just the, the, the volume controls and brightness controls. That was reprogrammed so it would play doom in the bar while your computer was running a completely separate operation perfect like a secret secret I'm in a meeting look I'm working

Ron: 14:18

yeah absolutely working awfully hard over there, don, that's right that's right.

Doug: 14:23

Um so that was there. Um we uh also have had um an atm. There was an atm.

Ron: 14:31

Uh, that was programmed would it dispense all the money when you beat the level?

Doug: 14:35

that you had to finish the entire game.

Don: 14:37

To get there, you had to get all the way through hell and the line, the line behind that exactly you go.

Doug: 14:45

You select the difficulty, and then it decided what stratosphere of capitalism you were strapped into forever.

Don: 14:50

That's the ATM I wish they had at the casinos in Vegas. Yeah oh, I couldn't agree more. Oh man, oh man, I can't get it. That's right.

Doug: 15:00

Another option there old generation iPods, one of my favorites. A pregnancy test. A pregnancy test, uh, a couple of years ago.

Ron: 15:10

What are the mecha like? Uh, uh, maybe I'm showing my lack of knowledge but how many inputs are there on a, on a pregnancy test? I think this is the piece stick.

Don: 15:21

Yeah.

Doug: 15:24

Originally it was just one line, two lines or a dot. Now, uh, featuring doom. Um, I don't think it played the. I imagine the, the chugging a guitar that I did in the beginning, coming out of a pregnancy test right. But yeah, pregnancy test was used to run Doom as well. It looks incredibly archaic and you can barely see what's happening in the graphics, but the entire game can run through that, as poorly manifested as that is. That is the one that you referred to earlier. Ron, you're joking around about a camel, but an.

Doug: 15:59

MIT biotech researcher was able to get at least at least like frames to begin to pop up.

Ron: 16:08

In the eyes of a chimpanzee.

Doug: 16:11

No, actually off of gut bacteria. So, MIT researcher Lauren Ramlin didn't get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the game. The frames were running that it would change a frame about every 70 minutes, a frame about every 70 minutes, and so somebody had calculated that it takes. Uh, if somebody were to go through the entire game off of gut bacteria, it would take 600 years to finish the game. But somebody actually used gut bacteria.

Ron: 16:45

So we're putting gut bacteria in like a dish or something, and then we are commanding them to move so that they order themselves into the shapes of pixels that create a picture.

Doug: 16:55

We're now getting just past my area of expertise, if not far beyond it at this point, but from what I saw, there was a digital input screen that kind of looked like a reverse negative image and tons of wires just going into some guy's abdomen.

Ron: 17:18

He's screaming. It's so funny because I was thinking hey, chill out, charlie, we got two frames.

Doug: 17:26

Yeah, we're almost there. I kept thinking about how funny if it was an actual person. I don't think it was. No, I don't think it was in a person, I think it was just gut bacteria used as a sample, but I was thinking if somebody was hooked in they would look kind of like the demons in Doom, yeah, yeah. That have kind of like cybernetic, you know, attachments to them in some way.

Ron: 17:45

This sounds like a gross misappropriation of research funds. Yeah, 100%. I don't know why you can't eat gluten, but but look at this doom on my gut.

Doug: 18:01

You thought your stomach ache was bad. Now, doom that's right.

Doug: 18:05

Exactly. So, yeah, this, this is some wild stuff, obviously, and it got me thinking about it a little bit because this game from my childhood. So so to go back for just a second, this game for my childhood I I loved. I can't even tell you. I think there was at least two summers that that was what I was doing during the summer.

Doug: 18:28

It was like, yes, I would play with friends, but when mom and dad went off to work, I remember booting up MS-DOS, which, if we're not familiar with, obviously now operating systems have a graphical interface. You just have to type in every single command and executable that you would put into your computer. And I remember having friends over and like just going to the hard drive and typing in DIR, which is just directory, and it would just tell you what files you had on your computer. And so my friends would come over and be like you want to see something really crazy. I just opened the directory and it would just list you what files you had on your computer. And so my friends would come over and be like you want to see something really crazy. I just opened the directory and it would just list all the files on my computer and I'd look at them. I'm like I can hack. There's nothing absolutely interesting about it. Like such a basic, this looks a lot like that scene in Jurassic Park right guys, no, no no.

Don: 19:12

You don't have the magic password.

Doug: 19:15

So, yeah, I've been going through, but I, I, I had it memorized essentially like how to get to doom and go through the process, and I, I remember just loving you know, going through the different levels the level design is so good and like finding the different key cards, going to different places and trying to run through the exits of these levels. But what world I don't understand is why now and we're currently in the year 2024, why we're looking at this game that is now 30 years old and we're still trying to program that one specifically onto so many different devices and objects. Like, why has this become such a challenge? And so I throw that to you guys for just a second of why this game? Why this game, in particular, with the very limited knowledge that we have? What would you think?

Don: 20:09

Why not? Because it's there.

Ron: 20:11

Because it's there, okay, but I mean, we're not recreating Pokemon. Not, we're not. We're not recreating pokemon, we're not recreating, uh, the first mario game. Uh, there must be. Uh, is there like a sort of a gross simplicity in its, in its programming, or something? Is it just like?

Doug: 20:31

you know like a fifth grader with a calculator can program this kid who just blew your mind is the next great programmer of his time. Well, um, from from what I've been able to take in, I do think that that is a part of it is. It does come from an era that, um, this was programmed in assembly language. So we're looking at down to the microchip and sending the. Uh, this is where the memory is going to go and this is what I want the memory of the computer to be used for. Um, this was something that was programmed in a lower level language that people could access immediately. Um, I, I, my, my hypothesis is, um, one of the the things that interests me the most still about the original doom and doom to like that that system is in 1997.

Doug: 21:20

Um, john Carmack, who is the one of the lead programmers in software, released the source code to the internet and said run wild with it. Essentially, you can even look in, and this was something I was looking at. In the read me file there's a section in which he is talking about. I strongly suggest that, if you're interested in modifying this game and we hope that you are that you continue to interact as a community. Think about the weapons that you can add. Maybe you add flying. You can change the format of this game in some way, and I think that there's a lot that can be said for the fact that he decided to release the code to the public that they could use it. They'd already moved on to their next game, quake, which that's a whole separate podcast about e-sports and everything else.

Doug: 22:02

Cause arguably that started that Um, but he released it into the community that everybody could kind of begin to build off of that and um, and they did, and they still are to this day, um, one um one. One very interesting uh direction that this has uh gone in is a mod was released in the, I believe the past five years called my house um, which is a doom mod. Are either of you familiar with um, the book house of leaves? Yeah house of leaves. What do you know about house of leaves?

Ron: 22:34

I've read houseaves. It's a sort of what are there like three narratives or something. It's a sort of like a book about a guy finding a book, about a person writing a book. Am I right?

Doug: 22:49

It's been a while, but yeah, yeah, okay.

Ron: 22:51

So the person in a house, yeah, anyways, it involves this sort of like multidimensional house, right, that when people enter it, the the interior volume of the house does not match as sort of outward appearance, right, and so they eventually have to send uh.

Ron: 23:05

My favorite part was, like the, the essentially start sending like polar explorers into this house to like map it out or find the very center of it. Um, and it's, it's kind of a uh, avant-garde, uh-esque novel, right, or uh, where there are there's uh. The author plays with the formatting of pages so that there's missing text, or sometimes the text is tilted so that you actually have to physically rotate the book in order to read it, and it becomes a kind of fun puzzle, right I've always described it to people as a book that's almost haunted by itself.

Ron: 23:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah in a way it is like a haunted house story, right, but in a yeah, a Very fun novel new way.

Doug: 23:43

Yeah, a programmer a few years ago made a modification to the game called my House, in which, when you boot it up, you are put in front of what looks like a suburban house inside of a squared off fence. You go into the house. There's some demons from the game Doom, that you're attacking as you're going in and as you continue to traverse the corridors, exactly as you just described. Because of the programming of the game and how simple it is to build off of itself, he was able to create that each time that you go into a new area, the dimensions of the house change. So the way that it's programmed. It's interesting, because of how the format is presented to itself, that when it goes through doors, there's places that clearly, based on the mechanics of how it's designed, when somebody goes in through a door, it opens up into a new corridor and it's impossible that it could be there because of the way that it's designed, essentially like there's no way that physically, there could be two doors in a segment where there was one hallway that's leading to the place that it is, but because of the nature of how you can program doom, the designer of that file, who continues to remain anonymous, is most likely from what people can speculate online, use the doom programming code because you could build on top of it, within the source frame of the code, in order for it to do the same thing that this book did, of kind of putting you into like an alternate dimension in which the dimensions of the house can continue to manipulate themselves.

Doug: 25:10

And, um, the game I think it has, like you know, five different endings and depending on how you go through it and what you do with the files within the game, it changes your experience.

Doug: 25:20

But even still, then I'm looking at it's a 30 year old game and you want to to put this masterwork that's a commentary on a piece of literature, but then putting it as a video game. And you're still going to use Doom to do it. And it continues to mystify me because again, it's this very, you know, archaic. It's a piece of history, but again people are still using it as this modification. So, going back to this idea, I think that John Carmack, because he decided to say this should be the thing that people are free to use and design their own games with, I think that that lends to this entire community, that now we get today people who are using gut bacteria to to program this game because of the free association with this piece of art that he made and said go out and make amazing stuff with it. We see that that's still happening today.

Ron: 26:07

I do think that's one of the like interesting things about video games as a medium is that they do cultivate these oftentimes not all video games right.

Ron: 26:15

Some video games are still like products and they're the people that make them are very protective of the code and giving players and creators access to that code to play with that right. But, like, the idea of modding a video game is fairly common for certain kinds of games. Right, the idea that the player interacts with the art, the creation, in more ways than just playing through it, the way it was intended, that you can actually create on top of that right. Are there other mediums we can think of that where, like, uh, the, the audience is um kind of invited to create with the like on, build on top of the strata of the medium, in the same way that, like, video games frequently are, because it sounds like that's part of what you're excited about here. Right, like this game existed but then it was released to people and then they could um continue to utilize it in the ways they saw fit or exciting. Right In like fan fiction.

Don: 27:12

Yeah, it kind of works like that right, the universe has been established for you and then fans come along and tell stories that layer on top of that universe and usually change details and things like that. But that's the only thing I can really. I mean, there's some like, some like participatory theatrical.

Ron: 27:27

You know one-off things you can go to it yeah, some weird, some show or something, some guy you knew in college who tricked someone into giving him a play space for night.

Don: 27:39

Yeah, yeah, that's right but I think you're right, the, the, um, the one of the things that draws people to that, the medium of the of the games, is that it, it, it does allow the, the players, some some freedom of creativity and application on top of it, and that's actually one of the things that that in the story of doom because I'm not like, I don't play doom, still, I don't like it. I don't remember.

Don: 28:04

I remember shooting the meatballs with teeth, that's all I remember yeah, caco demons I'm familiar, um, but uh, that it was one of the first network games, so it was a. It was one of the first games where you were not just playing against the machine, you were playing against other people. And it started off in, in, you know, college computer science labs, right with with cable strung. But then it was the first right, it was the first online they were the first.

Doug: 28:35

Um, they were the first. It was like there were online games, but it was kind of like more games which, like you take a turn, then I take a turn, you're sending it back and forth and waiting for the yes, yeah, chess strategy games.

Don: 28:44

Golf like I take my swings, you take a turn.

Doug: 28:45

then I take a turn. You're sending it back and forth and waiting for the yes, chess strategy games, golf, like I take my swings, you take my swings. They wanted live real time, like send the bod from your modem, and we're gonna do this in real time.

Don: 28:56

yes, so I think that, actually that because it's the first game that has that community aspect I think that is part of the answer to the question you're asking us about why it has this staying power in and because the focus from the from the get go, was on building a community of players that are all in the same universe, same environment and interacting with the same features. So um, so yeah, when it's released and then the community feels a responsibility not only to um to continue the work that Carmack started, but then to enjoy doing it and and being creative with it.

Doug: 29:30

Yeah, and it's. It's one of the things that I've had to look at is I've I was just, you know, listening to so many different podcasts. I watched um, a high score episode on doom. Uh, I was listening to John Romero, who was one of the other programmers, talk about the process of what they were doing and what they were pulling from creatively, and it's so interesting because it's a lot of things I think that we've touched on, like a lot of the ideas for what the demons look like, like the meatball with teeth that you're talking about was pulled from beholders in their dungeons and dragons section of the session of, like, how do we turn that into something that's more demonic?

Doug: 30:07

And then at one point, they had licensed um, they had licensed to do a video game based on the movie aliens which had come out, and then they decided to do away with that.

Doug: 30:16

But then what stuck was the idea of these like space military bases that they were going through and different ships and things like that. And you see, or even the music that I was alluding to and singing earlier, is because they're playing like Slayer and Metallica, as they're continuing to program all of these things. And you see, like, where a lot of the things that were influencing them end up showing up in the game. And I think that it's probably just a testament to id Software and the fact that they were so inspired by these things and saw that inspiration was a big part of what they did. And they, you know, I would assume that they would also be putting that out because they're seeing what the community is already starting to do and they're like, well then, have at it. And like, let's see what we can continue to make. And it's yeah, it's just incredible that it's lasted for such a long time.

Ron: 31:04

Yeah, I think that you make a good point, don about like it had a community from the beginning. Right. I think in some ways this is sort of like the backgammon question. Right, you were asking us a few weeks ago which was, like you know why this game right, and so at least it has to have an audience to begin with, right, like are there people creating for some old? Like what were?

Doug: 31:29

they muds multi-user dungeons. Have you ever heard of these?

Ron: 31:30

these are like yeah, they're like proto multiplayer games, right yeah I'm sure there are people still programming like weird mud games, right, yeah, but um, they're not trying to run them on a refrigerator, right?

Doug: 31:40

probably because they didn't have that level of popular penetration Right. Yeah.

Ron: 31:44

And so yeah, so it has to have like a basis or a history of communal involvement. Like you said, the source code must be like pretty wieldable, right, Like pretty versatile. You can do a lot with it or fit it onto a lot of things, and then I feel like there must be like another ingredient here, though Right.

Doug: 32:04

Like well, one thing. There's another aspect that I haven't even touched on, um, which is they. They were sitting a lot of times when they'd be programming. They had a Nintendo entertainment set like the original NES was sitting next to them, and one of the things that really inspired them was playing super Mario brothers three. And this is something I take for granted because, like I just, I grew up with super mario brothers three and I was just always seeing it.

Doug: 32:28

But there was, um a desire for computer games to get the same smooth feeling of mario mario being able to go across the screen, and it wasn't refreshing the screen to where it'd have to reset the screen completely.

Doug: 32:42

It just he could just very smoothly go across the screen and there was no um, there was no reset where the image had to change.

Doug: 32:50

In a way, it's like it felt like the world was just continuous, the more that he would run back forth, up and down. Everything was there, and that was a big thing that, um, the programming team at id had put together was. They found a way to do that on the computer through vertical programming, of putting things into columns, so you weren't having to refresh the screen over and over again. It was like the sides of the screen were the only things that had to be reset. So that perspective, that doom is giving you from this Ray it's called Ray casting of looking out from the perspective of the first person, was able to just program within these columns the the places that were refreshed so it could run at a very fast speed. So also, I mean I would think that this was a big deal because people were like, oh, they finally fixed the problem that we've been having with computer gaming. It's finally at the speed we want. It looks like it's a console, so now we can start to play with code. That's actually really good and we don't have to solve this gigantic problem of how do we put this at the same refresh rate as, like some of the things that had mystified them for so many years before so you're saying it's like an engineering feat also right it seems to be there's

Don: 33:56

several yeah, no, karmic has several engineering feats that he accomplished here. So the one that you're describing is called um, binary space partitioning, um, which, uh, which does exactly what you say. So it takes the perspective from one individual spot and it allows the computer to render only the surfaces that are visible from that location and not anything that's behind, like blocked by a wall. So traditionally in, like the, the consoles, what would be happening in a 3d environment, is it? It's called picture frame rendering, so it renders the background and then it renders the mountains on top of the background and then the tree in front of them. So that way, when it's done with all that layering, the view that you get is the correct 3d view. But that requires a lot of processing because it has to process every single one of those, those planes. But what, uh?

Don: 34:42

What Carmack came up with with binary space partitioning is is um, they would draw the map and then um the map prior to the gameplay. So this is when the map is created, it, it divides itself, it partitions itself into individual sectors and then subsectors, so that the game already knows, in any given location, which frames it has to or which not frames, which columns it has to render and it doesn't render anything else. So it's actually a super light rendering engine. So it doesn't take up, which is why it will run on a computer where it from 1993, where other games wouldn't run on a computer from 1993.

Doug: 35:19

It's interesting you say that because I saw somebody who was looking at it through a programming base that it could graphically render what it looks like from a top down view. And what I found fascinating about that, and speaks to your point, is the character in the game is actually not moving, and what I mean by that is the map is moving around the character Right.

Doug: 35:40

So it's like, when you see it, you're just seeing the static thing and a map flying all over the place around this dot, which is the character. And that also is interesting because, of course, when you're playing the game, you're thinking about you because it's from your first person perspective, running around in this environment and blowing stuff up and doing what you do. But really and I think that speaks to his innovation and genius is he's looking at it from the perspective. How are we going to render this? Well, now, the map is the thing that is moving around this and we can render it that way. So little things like that of like, how do you solve these problems?

Doug: 36:11

And it seems like early programming, because, from what I, when I talk to people, it seems like you're kind of always looking within the realms designing games nowadays, that you have a base Like, you're like. Well, I'm using unity, I'm using this engine, I'm using, I'm using the doom engine, you know like, or the quake engine, whatever it is. There's an engine that's already kind of setting up the parameters for what you're doing. But he's looking at it from the perspective of like, going back down to maybe not binary of ones and zeros, but pretty close to that of, like I need to command this to do this, so I can actually set up the engine for what I'm trying to accomplish, which makes it that that programming code yeah.

Don: 36:49

It's akin to um, it's when you go to the theater, right? So the the way I think about binary space and this is rough analogy, but just for our non-computer science listeners um, if you go to the theater and you see a backdrop painted on the set and there's a big couch in front of it, they didn't have to build the set behind the couch because nobody in the audience right, right so that's what the computer is doing.

Don: 37:14

It's, it's deciding oh, nobody can see what's behind that wall, so I'm not rendering any of that right. Um, but the. But the other thing that carmack does is he also develops this thing called hardware abstraction, where each component is modular. So there's a component in his code that is just dealing with the graphics and a component that is just dealing with the sound and a different component that's dealing with the input, and all of that runs through kind of like a decoder ring called the hardware abstraction layer.

Don: 37:42

And so one of the reasons you can port this to so many other devices is all you have to change is that hardware abstraction, the decoder ring, and then the rest of the of the code, works fine. So two things right. We've got the, the binary space partitioning that lowers the computation requirement of the hardware, and then you've got this decoder ring that you just have to change this one element and then it'll work on a pregnancy test or it'll work on a refrigerator or whatever. So those are the two like the technical things that I found that allow this to be ported so many different places. But I don't think we've touched on the question of why you can do it but like why would you put poor doom, why would you port doom to a pregnancy test or to gut bacteria or to a microwave or to whatever? Why?

Ron: 38:31

I think there's a missing element, yeah, that we're talking about, which is um also, it just needs to be fun, like it needs to be a good game, right, like it needs to not be light and easy to uh manipulate and uh run on all these devices, but it has to be like really cool, right like, like you know, pong pong didn't have much, yeah, yeah, people aren't putting pong right, like you know, but pong was like a was like a artistic or like a historical artifact.

Ron: 39:01

My parents would like I feel like they bought these atari, stick it to like vga, plug it into your tv like they bought like five of these when we were kids, and you'd play it like on christmas day and be like, oh wow, cool, we're gonna play some older. And then you're like, oh god, we're gonna play pong I still love pong.

Don: 39:19

My grandparents bought the original pong.

Ron: 39:20

It was the coolest thing when it was the only thing that existed.

Don: 39:24

Absolutely yeah, but uh you know, atari was cool too, and it was the only thing that existed when star wars, shadows of the empire exists.

Ron: 39:31

You don't want to play pong. I mean that's.

Doug: 39:34

That's very fair, I think yeah, some people are even pushing doom aside when you get to that level of going whoa, yeah, it's true um but I mean doom.

Ron: 39:43

So you're saying the doom is fun. Yeah, it's a fun game.

Don: 39:45

Right, it's a, it's a because who doesn't want to shoot a meatball?

Ron: 39:48

yeah, like I think there are lots of elements of doom that lend it like uh, you know there are lots of shooter games and, like you said, this is not the first shooter game, um, but like uh the.

Ron: 39:58

The game design is pretty genius also, right. Right, you have these multiple types of enemies. They all have, like, different behaviors. They provide different challenges. You can kind of remix the combat areas by just by choosing which of these enemies show up and how many of them. So now there's two flying guys and three guys who run at you super fast. So then it's like very quick decision making who do I target first, who do I hit?

Don: 40:22

And then there's like room to execute with actual skill right and I I might be inventing this, so I'm asking for help. Are there sections where there it's like a puzzle kind of like you can? See the enemy, but you don't know how to get to the enemy, to to a bit like that.

Doug: 40:37

Um, the biggest thing and this was actually the part I of course like love the shooting, because it's like ooh, explodey, explodey, boom, boom.

Doug: 40:44

Like of course you're going to love that when you're younger. But I think the staying power was the maps of having to get certain key cards to access certain areas. Or you would see like an area of like I can't get up to there, how is that possible? But there'd be like a secret door in the corner or switch that you'd flip or you'd go to a certain area and something would happen, or a trap door would kind of spring, which is also very Dungeons and Dragons, like all of these maps that are kind of outlined, with all of these tricks that are designed for you to go through, and so that's a part of it too is as much as it's a shooter, it's also, I agree, like it's very much a puzzle as well, as you're going through Scratches that like a human exploration itch right, Like it is not just a combat game, it is also yeah, you can kind of like pick the parts of it you want to do.

Ron: 41:31

Really well, I actually I never had patience for the exploration parts. I was like I don't care that, I'll watch someone on. Youtube, get up there. I just want to go do more shooting Stick with your 2016,. Man, a hundred percent, no, but to go do more shooting stick with your 2016 man yeah 100 percent?

Doug: 41:44

um no, but to go back to your question, don't yeah like what? Why this?

Doug: 41:49

one I would answer. It's a bit more abstract, but I think that it's a great example of artistic expression with video game, and what I mean by that is you're looking at a game that's coming out that has yes, it's innovative for its time, but right before that, the Wolfenstein 3d was also a massive success, which was taking a world war two stealthy game and then putting it into first person perspective. That did a very similar thing. Before that they had a game called catacomb 3d, which my, my dad and I had, which was their first experience, or like kind of one of their first delves into first person perspective, although you kind of have like a mage hand that you're like fighting enemies in a dungeon with Um. But doom seemed like it had a certain amount of artistic flair in that. Uh, people have described it as 2.5 D, like where it's just it's giving you vertical height, it's giving you it's not just corridors, but you're also seeing it that it seems like it's more expansive levels.

Doug: 42:49

There's lighting design, that it has just enough dynamics, that I think it was the first one that really seemed like it brought things into 3d, even though it wasn't full. 3d, like quake, is actually their next game. Quake is actually the real big one. That um kind of set that up, that that we have polygons and textures that are mapped there. And I wonder if that design challenges because that was such a big leap in terms of the artistic expression of video games, in terms of like these are these things that we've designed from our minds, from the metal that we're listening to as're designing this thing, from our Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that we're pulling art and design. They even had something called the Doom Bible which they were going through and saying like these are the rules and environments of doom.

Doug: 43:30

It is in this kind of sci-fi atmosphere but scientists have messed too much with this technology and they've brought in the realms of hell to this Mars base that everybody's fighting through. And though the story isn't ever really implicitly, it's not a very like the forefront element of the game. As you can progress through the game and things get more and more, I guess, hellish as you're going, like deeper into the realms. The level design kind of speaks to that and I wonder if, like those small pieces that I saw as a kid and going, this is something completely different, if that staying power, the simple code, so like the art, the code and the fact that it's something that is kind of this Marvel, is why it sticks around like that. Cause I don't know if I mean maybe super Mark, but I would put the I mean it's up there with the biggest games of all time, like maybe super Mario would be there and, and all time, like maybe super Mario would be there, um, and, and a lot of these like the biggest names ever.

Don: 44:25

But I think that that might be a part of it as well. I think you're right, and the, the, that artistic expression, right, the, the. I think computer programmers are not often given a whole lot of artistic credit because it seems so technical, um, but uh, but that artistic expression, like it, can be used for, um, for other purposes too. So, um, porting doom onto some devices has even been a type of activism, um, so there's a, the, there's a tractor, a John Deere tractor, right and uh, and it was uh, the, so the, the image of doom running on the touchscreen on the tractor, um, it was a statement that you know, John Deere locks down its computer code and and it won't let you mod the tractor and it won't let you repair the tractor and and so the the proof of concept that you could run doom on the tractor was um the idea that that users are able to manipulate their own hardware and their own computer devices.

Don: 45:27

So why? Why don't their manufacturers let that happen? It's a it was a right to repair um activism campaign. Um, so that right, it links that, that idea of artistic expression to a cause in this case. But but I think you're right. Um other thing that I I was wondering about too is um have you guys heard of the omelet test?

Ron: 45:50

Hmm, can it cook an omelet yeah?

Don: 45:52

And uh, and do you know what it's supposed to show?

Ron: 45:56

That, uh, some surfaces are very hot.

Don: 45:58

Exactly, we're on the right track, perfect, hot, exactly. Yeah, on the right track, perfect, it's so. The the omelet test is a. It's a test of a of of cooking right.

Don: 46:09

It's supposed to demonstrate your ability to cook, because it's a relatively simple task but it's really complex in in other aspects, and so it's a, it's a complete sort of event that will demonstrate your overall cooking ability and and I'm wondering if, if porting doom is like that because it's a it's, the code is clean, the code is simple. You've just got to, you know, change that hardware abstraction layer, but it does two things it proves your ability as a coder to manipulate those things, but it also proves the hardware's ability to run that when you're done with it, right.

Don: 46:41

So it's a. It's like, uh like I think there's a law, right, if you go to um like Sam Ash or a guitar center.

Doug: 46:47

I was just going to say this right.

Don: 46:49

When you're testing a guitar, you have to play a stairway to heaven Right and, of course, they always have a signs up.

Doug: 46:54

Don't play stairway to heaven.

Don: 46:55

No, stairway is always what they have. But yes, but there's always right, and, and I imagine out of the musical instruments there's probably a, a, a thing you're supposed to play when you pick up a violin to see if it, if it works. I think that this is kind of like how do you test the capability of a computer? Well, will it run doom? And and then you prove that it, that it can, and it's. It's the omelet test of your hacking, it's the omelet test of um, of the computer's ability to to run it and um. So I wonder if that's going on too.

Ron: 47:24

So what's kind of like a I was going to say like in the world of literature.

Doug: 47:27

It's kind of like you have to write a book about someone undergoing a divorce, right Like what stairway to heaven is to rock music is what doom is to yeah is to the classics. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready to go play Deathmatch right now. Shall we boot it up? Yeah, please, I want the rocket launcher Absolutely. Do you want to play it on gut bacteria, or would you rather do it on the ATM? It only takes 600 years, absolutely.

Ron: 47:52

I'm hoping we can get it on some hair follicles or something.

Don: 47:58

You know it's funny. You should mention that because I found. So it's not reporting doom, but I did find a story about some scientists in Australia that are actually they've I don't know how they've connected rat brain cells onto a computer chip and they're actually training these random brain cells how to play doom.

Ron: 48:22

Oh, so that's the next level.

Don: 48:23

Yeah, so it's going to. So it's, can you run it? Can you play? Doom Skynet is real, absolutely Wait, is it?

Ron: 48:30

working? Are they are? They are the? Are the rats playing Doom?

Don: 48:33

As far as, so, as far as they have gotten so far, they've gotten the brain cells to grow on the on the chip and they on the on the chip, and they are, they are learning. I don't think they've actually played the whole game yet, but it's has to do with with aiming and and and sending happy electric signals and and uncomfortable electric signals to the brain chip, to to tell us yeah, they are, but it's not a real, it's not a real brain yet, and it's just themselves.

Doug: 48:59

So well, hopefully. A real brain yet and it's just some cells.

Ron: 49:04

So well, hopefully they get to at least e1 m2 by the time, that uh incredible breakthroughs in the fields of uh neurobiology, absolutely. Thank you, john karmack.

Doug: 49:11

Absolutely yeah, yeah, absolutely. I. I am eternally grateful to id software for some of the best memories of my childhood, and so I am really. But it is amazing to me to see the ways that it continues to play out, because I do think that it's art and I think that this conversation is an expression of that.

Ron: 49:30

And it is cool to see something from your childhood like persist right and be adopted by subsequent generations who find something cool about it and make it their own in some way.

Doug: 49:39

Right, Big, time, absolutely, gentlemen. Thank you for indulging me and taking me back. I'll go boot up the computers right now.

Ron: 49:47

Thank you, Dougie doom.

Don: 49:48

And we're never going to get another episode done. You guys are going to be playing forever.

Doug: 49:52

What can I say? I love that BFG 9,000 children of the nineties. You.