Did John Carmack had any creative input on id's games ?

[DoomChex]

Sorry for the rather lame username, I have no intent to stay long here. I thought it would have been better to ask a Doom-related question here rather than on, say, Reddit. Who cares anyway, this is not a debate.

I was watching Ahoy's video on Quake when something came to my mind : did John Carmack had any kind of creative input on id Software's projects or was he was only interested in coding ? For instance, would have he objected if John Romero and Tom Hall would have came to him with an Army Men (a game about small toy soldiers battling against each other) or a Chex styled art direction for Doom ?

For some reason, I always imagined hilm as a guy who doesn't care what the game he's working on is about, as long it can program it.

 

Thank you !

[gibfrag]

He had input for sure, but his main goal was getting the game engines working. For example, he didn’t really see the point in the push walls for Wolf 3d initially, but Tom Hall and John Romero kept asking for it, and eventually realized he wasn’t going to do it, but then, out of nowhere, they discovered that he did in fact implement this feature. It was ultimately his decision that lead to that feature being in the game. The other games he absolutely had input as well. After all, the game engines were ultimately his responsibility, so he had a lot of influence on the outcomes of each game.

[Bauul]

Honestly I suspect id Software was way too small for Carmack not to have any creative input.  They would have been discussing the content of the game pretty constantly given they basically lived together, so even if the actual assets he created were all engine-related, it just isn't feasible that he wouldn't have given his opinion on how the game should play.

[houston]

You bring up Quake already so you probably knew about this bit, but Carmack had it out for the strafejumping exploit a little bit.

If I remember it right (you could probably look it up), some action was taken to nerf it from it's utterly broken QuakeWorld form to Quake II. It remained more or less in that state until it was patched once and for all in a Quake III update.

I don't know whether this was in that day's .plan file, Usenet or some webforum, but Carmack more or less told the bunnyhoppers zooming around his maps to suck it, and that the intended playstyle was to be these kind of strong, bulky characters. After discussing it a bit with fans (or reading through their flame), he apparently reverted that change in another Quake III update.

 

Movement bugs were known about at least on some subconcious level within the studio prior to that since executing a ledgejump is required for a secret on Petersen's E4M1.

[david_a]

Quake losing the "use" button seems like a Carmack thing, although I don't remember if that's a fact.

 

Once the other id old timers quit or were fired, I think he started carrying a lot more weight simply because he had been there from the start and he was A Name at that point. However, I think a lot of his input was around the way the player interacted with the game, not necessarily story or anything like that (he famously didn't care about story in the early days).  I know he had Strong Opinions about how the player interacted with the terminals in Doom 3, and the artists had to pester him to add ragdoll physics for the enemies when they died.

[pantheon]

The gist I got from Romero's book Doom Guy was that for Wolfenstein and Doom they went back and forth about both gameplay design and technical engine matters and both play tested extensively, indeed with Carmack focusing more on tech and Romero more on design. Sort of a yin and yang with each having some mastery of the other's primary focus which allowed them to communicate well and for both tech and design to dovetail productively. I don't recall that any particular Doom gameplay elements were attributed to Carmack in the book but Romero definitely stated that they had this sort of reciprocal relationship. Doom's diminishing lighting system is probably one of the clearest examples he gave of a Carmack engine feature that had a significant creative impact. When Quake came around, the challenge of creating such a complex engine meant Carmack became more sequestered, their communication deteriorated, and there was a long period of time when creative decisions had to be put on hold for the tech to catch up which led to the hard feelings we're familiar with.      

[drygnfyre]

Do we know if Carmack ever made a single Doom map, or contributed artistically to one? I guess some other posts here said he had opinions about "intended" gameplay and may not have liked certain exploits. Makes me wonder what he thought about the rocket jumping you need to reach the E3M6 secret (officially), or if he even tried out making a WAD.

[Doom-X-Machina]

On 9/12/2023 at 8:30 AM, pantheon said:

The gist I got from Romero's book Doom Guy was that for Wolfenstein and Doom they went back and forth about both gameplay design and technical engine matters

Indeed. Romero talks about how creative design pushed engine and tech, which in turn also pushed the creative design... over and over again.

[Gez]

I got the impression that Carmack's creative input was mostly negative than positive. By that I mean he was mostly concerned about vetoing off things he considered too complex or ambitious for the project, rather than suggesting ideas of his own. Famously he had to be convinced about pushwalls for Wolf 3D, and teleporters for Doom, both ideas he originally opposed as being unnecessary.

 

You can look at the Doom Bible and compare with what the game actually ended up being to see that indeed, a lot of ambitious and complex ideas have been dropped. I don't know how many of those changes were because of Carmack vs. other people in the team, as well as how many were dictated by simple technical constraints (how much work it required vs. how much time was available) or by playtesting and experimentation (turns out a realistic base design makes a rather boring level), though. Given it all happened over 30 years ago, even people that were in the team back then may not know for sure; it's hard to remember all the details after such a long while.

[Gifty]

If I remember correctly, he was responsible for the infamous Doom 3 flashlight mechanic which was then reversed in the BFG edition. He talked about it in one of the Quakecon keynotes.

 

But yeah, I think over time he started having more design input into their titles mostly due to his company seniority after all the other original creative staff had left.

Edited March 4 by Gifty

[Individualised]

On 3/4/2024 at 1:32 PM, Gez said:

Famously he had to be convinced about pushwalls for Wolf 3D, and teleporters for Doom, both ideas he originally opposed as being unnecessary.

I'm still not sure if the whole story about him not wanting teleporters/flying monsters in Doom is accurate. The story goes that Tom Hall kept pushing him to add flying monsters, but they still weren't added even long after he was gone. Plus, I'm not even sure if John Carmack would have been handling things like that anyway; I'm under the impression that John Romero was in charge of implementing things like enemy logic and gameplay features.

Edited March 6 by Individualised

[drygnfyre]

"Masters of Doom" mentioned that one of the reasons Carmack didn't like the push walls was it was "ugly" to program into the code, and he valued clean code. Carmack seemed to be against anything that would slow down the engine or the gameplay, so from a pure "run and gun" standpoint, I can see why he wouldn't be as supportive of exploration and discovery.