Sandy Petersen interview I had never noticed before

[Linguica]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-and-the-golden-age-of-first-person-shooters?page=8

 

I believe this article was paywalled for a long time when it first was released, so I never actually read it. But it includes an exclusive interview with Sandy Petersen that talks about his time at id Software working on Doom, and includes some stuff I hadn't known before.

 

Quote

A friend put me in touch with id Software; they were looking for a designer. Or, to be more accurate, their artists were looking for a designer. What happened was that the programmers at id Software, John Romero and John Carmack—the Johns—they were pretty unhappy with Tom Hall's work [on Doom]. They decided that designers were bad and made games worse. This was all stuff I learned after the fact. They wanted to [replace game designers] with an artist to design levels.

 

This makes more sense to me; it always seemed weird that in the "official" history, Tom Hall's levels got supplanted by Romero's forays into level design, and he sort of felt increasingly frozen out and unhappy and the company eventually voted to fire him. It makes more sense if his departure was brought on by the other members of the company actively deciding that the game wouldn't be good enough if he made most / all of the levels, and they had already started looking around to find someone to replace him.

 

Also the idea that John Romero would have ever said that "designers" made games worse is very strange, considering the motto of ION Storm was "Design Is Law."

 

Quote

They brought in an artist; the artist designed a little level; but id wasn't too sure.

 

Then the artists, Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack, said, "No, the problem with Tom is he just isn't the type of designer we need." They looked at my work and their claim was this: "If there was a designer who would work for us, it'd be this guy. He's made a lot of stuff; he's worked in software; he's worked with horror properties. He should know his stuff."

 

id "brought in an artist" to try and make a Doom level? This is news to me??

 

Quote

They said, "Here's our [editing] tool, make a level." I spent a few days putting together a level, and what the artists had done, apparently, was they'd done a stairway. I made part of a level with doors that opened and closed, secret panels, monsters, acid floors that would rise up—I did all this stuff. I was amazed their editor was that far along, but it was, so I put together this whole visual level.

 

That impressed John Carmack, that I was able to do so much compared to what the artists had done in their time. I'm not saying they were bad artists, but the whole job of "level designer" didn't even exist, right? 

 

Sandy offhandedly mentions that the artist they had brought in had "done a stairway" as a test level. It seems highly likely that this was later released as a random map fragment that I can't find the original leak of:

 

 

Quote

John Romero had what the other guys called the bit flip. Either you were the absolute bomb and he loved everything about you, or you were Satan and he hated everything about you. I triggered the bit flip off and on.

 

Sounds similar to what people would say about Steve Jobs...

 

Quote

I'd been building D&D levels since I was 18. When you're a Game Master in Dungeons & Dragons, you create dungeons, lairs for players to go adventuring in. In the early days, they didn't have to make any sense. You'd put traps in them, and monsters, and have spooky things for them to see. All of that transferred 100 percent to making Doom levels, even the part about it not making sense.

 

I have said in the past that E2M5 seems it's a D&D map, and this supports that theory.

 

Quote

Originally, there were two groups of levels I was doing. I was taking Tom's levels, which he had done a few of, and some of them were stubby. Sometimes they would have only one texture in the entire level. Everything was silver. To illustrate how amateurish id Software was, the reason his levels were all silver is because that was the first texture the artists had designed. It was everywhere because that was the only texture he had. When I did my levels, they weren't all silver, but occasionally I'd put in a silver plate somewhere. The programmers would say, "Don't use silver, it's overused." I'd say, "Dude this game isn't even out yet. It's overused because you saw a lot of it in Tom's early levels." They didn't really get that.

 

lol

 

Quote

So, I took Tom's levels and added monsters and traps and other Doom stuff to bring them up to par. I spent weeks on all of Tom's levels, and when the game came out, id Software did its Kremlin thing where they said, "Let's take away all of Tom's credit in the game." I said, "You really shouldn't do that. Tom did a lot of this and that level." He also helped write what they called the Doom Bible. I insisted that his name go in on the levels. Then I did my new levels.

 

If there is one thing I think we can take away from this, it's that Sandy Petersen does not have hugely fond memories of working at id Software at the time.

 

Quote

Doom E2M6: Halls of the Damned was the first map Petersen made for Doom. He added wings, traps, and enemies over weeks of fine tuning. 

 

I swear in the past I have seen Romero claim that E3M6 was the first map Sandy made for Doom, which always seemed suspicious to me, so him saying he first made E2M6 makes a lot more sense (and makes sense why Romero might mess up and say E3M6 instead).

 

Quote

First, because I was never an artist, I was never a true level designer. My levels were often not very attractive, but they're often very striking. They would do things [with gameplay] that hadn't been done before. For example, I did the first outdoor level [in Doom], I did the first level that looked like a city [in Doom 2]. Then, after I'd done an outdoor level, John Romero would do one.

 

A lot of people forget that Map15 and Map20 were Romero maps, because they seem so removed from his Doom 1 work. Sandy influence mayhap??

 

Quote

I also was generally skimpier with ammo. I wanted you to use your brain on my levels. I don't know if that was good or bad. John Romero would give you all the ammo you wanted; you could blow up everything. That was his thing, and that worked because he had really fast-paced levels. I think, at his weakest, he would do a lot of meaningless things. For example, when you're about to be ambushed by a monster on one of my levels, I prided myself on you always kind of knowing that it was going to happen. Like, here's this long hall with lights flickering. You know something's up.

 

In some of John's maps, you walk down to a place, and then [monsters] would teleport in behind you. I usually didn't do that kind of thing; it was more like a story for me, I guess.

 

Interesting that Sandy felt you needed a "story" for every monster encounter in Doom. I think history has shown he lost that argument.

 

Quote

In every case, the way I did all my levels was I would start with a section of the dungeon. Often that would be the starting area, though not always. It was always what I thought might be the start. I would think, What would be a cool theme for this [level]? For example, there was one level [E3M4: House of Pain] that was based on a pair of lungs and an intestinal track. I think E2M3 was the warehouse level; I modified that from one of Tom Hall's. I'd figure out a theme and try to work around it. If I got tired of a theme partway through, I'd add to it. Like, "Oh, this part of it should be absolute hell."

 

So, I would do a little part of a level. Then I would test that part out to make sure it worked. Then I would add another section to it and test that part out. It was almost episodic: I'd go through each part and the level would get bigger. Then I'd say, "Okay, I've come to the end of this section. Here, I'll get the blue key, and I'll put a blue door near the start so I have to go back and open it." The blue door would lead somewhere, and maybe I'd give you some [item] to send you back to another part.

 

We can actually sanity-check this claim using https://github.com/devinacker/dmvis

 

 

Quote

That was the genius of Adrian Carmack. He gave me those Barons, and I knew just where I wanted to use them [in E2M8]. He said, "Can you use this art anywhere?" I said, "Oh, boy, can I. I know exactly where I want it." I knew it would set the tone. People would go, "Uh-oh, something killed Barons of Hell?"

 

I guess I never really thought about the dead Barons at the start of E2M8 as intentionally telling a story, but it fits with Sandy's ethos.

 

Quote

Yeah, I was constantly breaking their level-making engine. That always made John Carmack mad. He wanted things to be smaller, lighter, easier to handle. He always cared about speed of programming, and I was making these sprawling levels that went all over the place.

 

Romero has told the story many times about how his early E1M2, and especially the staircase at the start, prompted Carmack to abandon the portal system he was trying to get working, and discover the power of the BSP. But I never heard about any arguments over Sandy breaking the engine.

 

Quote

[E2M6] was the map that got me my job at id. It was the first level I ever did. Now, of course, it wasn't complete. What happened was I made the start area and a door to open. You go into that room, and I said, "Oh, I should have a secret behind the other door and have a monster in there." That's where that came from.

 

Then you walk into that initial hall with all the pillars, and there's a stairway. That section in the middle was the stuff that got me my job. You're fighting, and there's a hall off to the side; you could run in there really quick and get a treasure [large medkit], and if you didn't get out fast enough you'd die in the acid, so it was a little treat you could get if you ran quickly. Then there was a surprise when the bridge started to lower [Berserk pack].

 

You can right now go play the start of E2M6 and see precisely what got Sandy his job at id, which I think is neat.

 

Quote

Another feature of my map is that they don't always lend themselves well to deathmatch. This map [E2M6], for example, is a terrible deathmatch map. If you run down into the dark halls, you have to hope someone wanders down there after you. Deathmatch maps are better if there's some [quick] way to run through the level. I didn't have that, but of course, no one was thinking about that at that time.

 

I don't know if it's ironic, exactly, but SIGIL is including dedicated deathmatch arenas in all the maps, probably for this sort of reason (good SP map != good MP map).

 

Quote

We just had Bobby Prince do them, a guy from Florida. He wrote all our music for us. I thought he did a really great job, but eventually the other id guys did their bit-flip routine. That's why we got Trent Reznor for Quake. 

 

Calling Bobby Prince "a guy from Florida" is funny to me. Saying they dropped Bobby Prince for Trent Reznor is also maybe a poor example of what he calls the id "bit-flip" because I mean, come on, Trent Reznor in 1995? Like a year after the release of The Downward Spiral? id Software would have been idiots not to hire him when he showed interest.

 

Quote

They all went to dinner with [Reznor]. I didn't go; I had something else I was doing because I wasn't super excited about it. Someone at the dinner put PCP in American McGee's drink, and he got really sick for several days. We thought we knew who did it, but weren't sure. But we knew it wasn't Trent [Reznor].

 

So, you see, we were so innocent. When I worked at Chaosium, they would openly smoke weed. When making business decisions, they'd sit in the back and say, "I'm going to go cook up some hash for us." I'd always think, Oh, hash, that sounds yummy. No. Not that kind of hash. But they were very open about it. I'd be there, and they'd pass the [pipe] around, and they'd always politely pass it to me, just to give me a chance. I would never take it. I'm sure I got plenty of second-hand [exposure], but that's all right; what are you gonna do?

 

But at id, they weren't even hard drinkers. Those guys were amazingly clean cut. They had to figure out [American had been given] PCP from what the doctors said. Maybe some of them smoked dope at home, but if they did, they didn't talk about it.

 

UHHH WHAT THE HELL?

 

Quote

It took about six weeks to do a level and get it to where I felt it was polished and finished. Now, that wasn't six weeks only on that level. I spent probably two weeks only on one level, and then there were four weeks where I'd work on other levels, try new things out, get an idea and go back to an older level. So, I played all those levels a lot.

 

Always nice to get some idea of the timeline for the work.

 

Quote

Another big thing about Doom 2 was I no longer had any of Tom Hall's levels that I had to adapt to my way of thinking. A lot of levels in Doom 1 were mine from the start, but I think the combination of what he'd done and my trying to adapt it often led to interesting results. They weren't all mine, which was kind of fun. I'm not saying my way was better or worse; I was just different.

 

I agree that map collaborations are often more interesting than individual maps from each person would be.

 

Quote

All the levels in [Doom 2] were named by me. John and American didn't name their levels. I had to name them; that was part of my job.

 

News to me!

 

Quote

You know, I think Map 10 of Doom 2—and I could be wrong because this was 23 years ago—I think that was the original boss level for Episode 1 of Doom. Tom Hall started it, and I ended up building one from scratch, which became E1M8. But then I said, "Maybe this map [Map 10] isn't so bad, but just not a boss level." I took elements of it—going through this big underground base, and then at the end was the Baron of Hell—but I just said, "This isn't a boss level. A boss level should be themed around the boss. It's the boss's house." That was my feeling.

 

Hmm, weird.

 

Quote

I did get assistance from John Romero on E1M8. I wanted to have this giant, star-shaped [interior] and for all the walls to lower after you killed the Barons of Hell. John Carmack didn't want to do it, so Romero went to bat for me.

 

Romero made a lot of the line action specials so it would make sense to me that he would put in code for the E1M8 wall lowering thing.

[pavera]

Really interesting read. Some spicy info in there for sure. Who poisoned American???

[Count651]

Wow, that bit about the PCP..

[Miss Bubbles]

That was really interesting! Thanks for finding and sharing it Linguica. Always crazy to hear new information surface from the old id days.

[DMPhobos]

19 minutes ago, Linguica said:

I swear in the past I have seen Romero claim that E3M6 was the first map Sandy made for Doom

To be fair, sandy has also mistaken his first map as e3m6 too in another interview
 

Spoiler

 

 

[hella knight]

What a great find, thanks!

I wish someone would put pcp in my drink...

[Vermil]

I have a recollection of Mr Petersen's first map being E2M7 for some reason, but I can't for the life of me remember why I thought that.

[Doomkid]

A lot of Sandy’s map-based story telling connected in my brain as a child and immersed me deeper, his maps are truly great in that regard. I was so scared of whatever had the strength to kill and string up 4 barons when I first played Tower of Babel for example.

 

Refueling Base was definitely too good to go to waste and really did serve better as a sprawling crowded base with a large percentage of fodder, everything about it screams “not a boss map”. Small, dedicated battles are much more memorable, even boss battles as easy as those in Doom.

 

Sandy even politely tolerated making games on team with a bunch of stoners, just as the cherry on this sundae of an interview. Good to know if I time travel back to the early 90s I’ll still be able to find a job in game design :^) I’m also not surprised to hear that id were mostly clean back in the day.

 

Insightful stuff. I really want to check out that map fragment too - something about how clean yet boring and uninspired it appears on the auto map reminds me of early 2000s ZDoom mapping (yikes). Give me a big, ugly, challenging, fun and memorable map any day.

 

Sandy should release a new episode too, just to literally beat Romero at his own game (hehe) especially now with all the engine limits lifted. I’d love to see what he could do. Tom Hall should do the same, just to prove the theory that every map he makes is ‘boring’ wrong. Oh yeah, that’d be cool. A man can dream, right?

Edited January 3, 2019 by Doomkid

[Doom_Dude]

What an interesting read.

[seed]

Pretty interesting read, particularly the part about Tom Hall. I always wondered why silver was so present in his levels, thought he just liked it or had something very specific in mind. According to Sandy he only had that texture lol. 

[ella guro]

really interesting interview! nice to see so much candid talk about Doom and id, even if it isn't all super flattering. i still get annoyed when i think about how they threw Tom Hall under the bus during the making of D1, but it kinda is not surprising for a bunch of relatively immature guys in their 20's to not be forthright communicators. lol. it's possible that Romero was under the influence of Carmack when he said that designers were bad and they needed more artists and then changed his course and made some amends after leaving id after Quake 1. you can sort of tell that Sandy probably isn't exaggerating anything very much in here because the info is mostly too weirdly specific to lie about. although him saying E3M6 in a video interview was his first level instead of E2M6 in this interview is a little weird. but he also could have easily just said it wrong.

[Jaxxoon R]

Considering two people so far have confused E2M6 with E3M6, they could've at some point shuffled the level slots around.

 

And note that Petersen said "level-making engine", he's likely referring to the level editor as the thing he kept breaking.

[⇛Marnetmar⇛]

16 minutes ago, Jaxxoon R said:

Considering two people so far have confused E2M6 with E3M6, they could've at some point shuffled the level slots around.

 

And note that Petersen said "level-making engine", he's likely referring to the level editor as the thing he kept breaking.

 

Actually, episodes 2 and 3 were switched around before release so this makes sense.

[IMX]

Just mentioning this for further reference, this interview was originally published on December 4, 2017. I would like to assume they make articles public a year after they're published, but who knows, really.

 

Sandy confirming that he put the torn Baron corpses in E2M8 intentionally to tell the player something big was coming is amazing. He definitely got the reaction he wanted from some players at the time.

 

That bit about him naming all the levels in Doom 2 just further adds fuel to that (yet to be debunked or confirmed) factoid about MAP21.

[Linguica]

29 minutes ago, IMX said:

That bit about him naming all the levels in Doom 2 just further adds fuel to that (yet to be debunked or confirmed) factoid about MAP21.

 

Sandy Petersen didn't know who Trent Reznor or Nine Inch Nails were in 1995, and he thought his coworkers talking about "hash" was about a mixture of chopped meat, potatoes and spices, but you think he intentionally named Map21 "Nirvana" because you start with a SSG sitting in front of you and he was making a weird and very abstract reference to Kurt Cobain committing suicide? Instead of drawing on his well of knowledge about religions and religious iconography? If anything this confirms that weird dumb theory was, in fact, weird and dumb.

[IMX]

That's why I said factoid.

[Marcaek]

avoid the 'toid

[KVELLER]

Quote

He put the face of Jesus on a floor button as his texture. I went to him and said, "John?" He said, "Yeah, what's up?" I said, "Look, you know I haven't been all [uptight] about 'We can't be satanic, we have to be good,' but this button that you have to press before you lower the bridge?" He said, "Yeah?" I said, "Probably let's not make our players step on the face of Jesus to lower a bridge." And he goes, "Oh! Good call," and we switched it to a demon face.

 

I wonder how the public would've reacted to that.

[Jaws In Space]

Quote

Yes. I like to let players know what's in store for them. I telegraph things. I think that's more fun for the player. Also, you get that in E1M8, which is one of the two levels I did for Episode 1. You start off and see the barrels below, with all the demons around, and if you hit the barrels just right, you can [explode] all the demons.

That's the first I've heard of Sandy doing more than one level in E1. E1M4 was a map started by Tom Hall so it would make sense that Sandy would have finished that map as well, even though it's long been credited to Romero for finishing it.

[wheresthebeef]

Quote

Yeah, I was constantly breaking their level-making engine. That always made John Carmack mad. He wanted things to be smaller, lighter, easier to handle. He always cared about speed of programming, and I was making these sprawling levels that went all over the place.

 

That sure as hell sounds like John alright. Reading this made me instantly think of Doom 3's design.

 

I like knowing that both Romero and Peterson had an iterative design process. They'd just start making a section of a level, play it, add a section, play it, etc etc and eventually decide "Yeah, thats a good enough length. Onto the next level" I like to plan my levels out ahead of time to let myself think up encounters and areas for a longer period.

 

Thanks for posting this, Ling. It was an enjoyable read!

Edited January 4, 2019 by wheresthebeef

[cybdmn]

15 hours ago, Linguica said:

Sounds similar to what people would say about Steve Jobs...

...

If there is one thing I think we can take away from this, it's that Sandy Petersen does not have hugely fond memories of working at id Software at the time.

 

 

 

Seems pretty understandable to me. I was always under the impression, that inside id always there were always strong tensions, and many ego wars happened. Tom Hall fired, and "kremlined out" of the books, like mentioned by Sandy. A thing also mentioned in these Coop with Bobby Prince videos posted here some time ago here. Bobby said there too, that Tom Halls influence on Doom is underestimated. Look how Romero was kicked out, and Paul Steed fired in retaliation in the Doom 3 internal discussion. And finally the drop out of Adrian Carmack.

[termrork]

thank you a lot for the find and editing, read through it completely what I seldom do. sandys 01 08 13 and especially 27 are my alltime favorite maps. I was surprised when I first checked who made the levels that my favorite ones were all done by sandy and not romero. fascinating to read about the story telling. one can clearly see in 27 that he liked to lure you in with an item which releases monsters as soon as you get it (in almost all rooms you have it). you find this in 08 and 13 too. Of course other mappers did this too, but I think not to that extend.

[boris]

12 hours ago, Jaxxoon R said:

And note that Petersen said "level-making engine", he's likely referring to the level editor as the thing he kept breaking.

Their editor, DoomEd, was created by Romero. But it sounds likely that DoomBSP, that compiled the text-format output of DoomEd into the WAD file was created and/or maintaned by Carmack. That way he could have just added or modified the output to his needs without having to touch the map's source file.

 

[Looper]

19 hours ago, Linguica said:

"Don't use silver, it's overused." I'd say, "Dude this game isn't even out yet. It's overused because you saw a lot of it in Tom's early levels." They didn't really get that.

 

Yes, good. Use Brown! Much better!

[Dark Pulse]

11 hours ago, Marcaek said:

avoid the 'toid

Forget that - avoid the "fact." It's only a fact when it's proven true.

[Job]

Great find. It never ceases to amaze me that we're still finding gems like this after 25 years. Sandy's map designs can be controversial, but when you examine them in context of who he is, his philosophy on design, they have a whole new appeal. If nothing else, he seems like a nice, chill guy. Sometimes, I think he gets a bad rap in how history remembers him, so I'm glad when stuff like this comes to light.

[Woolie Wool]

On 1/3/2019 at 8:06 PM, IMX said:

That's why I said factoid.

A factoid is a trivial or irrelevant fact. The word for the Nirvana story is "bullshit".

[termrork]

maybe some also missed this interview: very interesting details about doom2 maps

https://donanimgunlugu.com/efsane-sandy-petersen-ile-roportaj-192559/2

[wheresthebeef]

1 hour ago, termrork said:

maybe some also missed this interview: very interesting details about doom2 maps

https://donanimgunlugu.com/efsane-sandy-petersen-ile-roportaj-192559/2

I thought Doom 3 was abysmal and was glad that it led to the demotion of my former co-workers who masterminded it. I have not extensively played Doom 2016, but what little I’ve seen looks pretty great.

 

Damn, Peterson not holding back!

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

On 1/4/2019 at 5:11 PM, Job said:

Great find. It never ceases to amaze me that we're still finding gems like this after 25 years. Sandy's map designs can be controversial, but when you examine them in context of who he is, his philosophy on design, they have a whole new appeal. If nothing else, he seems like a nice, chill guy. Sometimes, I think he gets a bad rap in how history remembers him, so I'm glad when stuff like this comes to light.

Yeah, I definitely agree that Petersen is often underappreciated.  He tends to get slammed as "the guy that made a bunch of ugly maps" but even if you don't think his maps are any good (personally, some of them are some of my favorites) there are a whole lot of other things he had a hand in here and there (like balancing the weapons/ammo, you know, the thing Doom frequently gets praised highly for compared to the wave of similar games that came out after it?)

 

Most surprising/intriguing thing to come out of this latest one for me is that he may have had a hand in some of the stuff in Quake II despite being uncredited for it?  (It's a little unclear whether he's saying he did some stuff for it that didn't make it in at all, or that it was recycled without credit apparently as the intent had been with Tom Hall's stuff).  I'd hazard a guess maybe parts of Makron's palace?  But really I'm basing that mostly on the presence of that one texture found there that's recycled from Quake I (and tended to be prevalent in E4 as I recall).

 

That a lot of the Doom II maps were named after the fact and not by the people who designed them half the time certainly sheds a new light on the whole "none of these places look like what they're supposed to be" complaint.

 

Also interesting to hear his thoughts on what makes a game good horror or not; I tend to agree with that point of view (I don't play a lot of "horror" games, admittedly, but of the ones I did play Amnesia: The Dark Descent was by far the most genuinely scary to me and a big part of that was the helplessness of being unable to fight back, only run and hide.)

 

2 hours ago, termrork said:

maybe some also missed this interview: very interesting details about doom2 maps

https://donanimgunlugu.com/efsane-sandy-petersen-ile-roportaj-192559/2

There was a thread on that one not too long ago, I'm certain.