Gadbury
Warming Up
Posts: 21
Registered: 02-12 |
I'm glad the discussion has remained civil :)
There are so many aspects of Doom that were done right (and admirably stand the test of time), I find it very hard to believe that there was much luck involved, but its success and longevity was due to talent and well-considered decisions. However, as I too like to ponder, of course it has crossed my mind; were they lucky? Was Doom some kind of happy accident?
Generally, I think not. The team was exceptionally talented and experienced. Lets not forget that although id Software were in their infancy, and the guys were young, the two Johns - for example - were experienced programmers and had been writing games for many years (in Romero's case for 14 years). Design decisions were being (well) made up until the end of Doom's development. I often wonder 'what if?' to many of the ideas that didn't make it in to the final game (the same for Quake also). However, the cuts were made with good reason; Romero particularly seemed to have clear idea what the game should and shouldn't contain, particularly through iterative development and playtesting ("remove the collectable items / lives, it just slows the game down", "levels can look like this"). Romero clearly lived and breathed this game - his enthusiasm is affective. There was clearly enthusiasm, excitement and synergy in the group (perhaps except Tom Hall, although his contribution cannot be discounted; i.e. he was responsible for elements such as push-walls, teleports and enemies that fly/float), and coupled with the talent, experience, confidence, desire to do new things and very hard work, its no wonder the results were wonderful.
I think people want to figure out why this game was (and is) so magic, thus the eager analytics! To the fans, this game is a rare gem, and games like it come along very rarely.
As a side note, one game developer that was amazingly lucky - and often confesses to this - is Peter Molyneux. How he got his break is incredible. Also, key features of his groundbreaking Populous were a result of experimentation and his lacking programming skills i.e. raising / lowering of the land was manually controlled as he couldn't figure out how to automate it. Once the workaround was playtested, he found that it was actually an enjoyable and strategic mechanic. For those that are interested, here is Peter Molyneux's post-mortem on Populous - very interesting: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/101462...Game-Postmortem
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02-04-12 19:52 
