Romero On Doom

John Romero has made a .plan update reminiscing about the release of Doom six years ago today.

It was six short years ago, down to the hour. I remember staying up the last 30 hours doing exhaustive testing before Jay Wilbur uploaded the shareware version of DOOM to the University of Wisconsin's FTP site. We couldn't get in -- too many people were sitting on the site, waiting for our upload. The target directory was full of bogus files with names like "when.is.it.coming" and "hurry.up.id", but finally we got the sysop to up the connect limit to 250 and we barely got in. After that upload, things changed.

I remember the crazy lockup bug we had the day before -- if DOOM sat running for too long, it would just lock up. Turned out to be a value that was being incremented by the 140-tic-per-second timer function that was wrapping around (it takes a very long time for a LONG to wrap, even at 140-tics-per-second, but this one was uninitialized so it took even less time). So, we finished it up and sent it out, just knowing everyone would have a lot of fun with it. Happy Birthday, DOOM.

Happy birthday indeed!

i always wanted to do this

I heard that John Romero wanted to do Wolf2K... now I know why he isn't... I just hope Doom2K doesn't suck without his touch.

If they make Doom2000 I sure hope they use their brain and make it like "Doom 3", NOT like "Doom64". Maybe they said Final Doom was the end. The very last Doom, or whatever. But they could always say "we lied", or something. After all, even if they did make Doom2000, it's not likely to be done before 2001. I say, Doom 3 all the way!! Comments anyone? Heh, probably not...