[yumaikas]

Games are dramatically simpler.

Like, Commander Keen and the other of those games are the same amount of effort that might go in to a particularly well staffed month-long game jam today, just in terms of assets and total needed code. CV-11s video on Quake has a section covering that transition from mostly 2D to mostly 3D. It caught a lot folks off guard.

[ben7799]

Yes and no.. assets were simpler, games were simpler.

But they had to write a lot their tools to create the assets. They had no middleware, no engine to license. They had to write stuff in assembly. The computers they used were super slow and you could crash them so easily. At some points in iD's early history they were smuggling computers from Softdisk out of their offices and working over the weekend and then taking the computers back Monday morning. The tools were terrible. Documentation was a lot harder to come by. A lot of the people in iD at the beginning were also juggling a day job, they were moonlighting making those earliest games. IIRC Wolfenstein was the first one they worked full time on.

[Johanx64]

Writing stuff in assembly is not hard, especially not in those days when x86 instruction set was simpler/smaller.

Neither the tooling were terrible, in fact, arguably the opposite. Some of the best dev tools ever made come from that era (Borland stuff)

People still write a lot of asset creation tools today. That's standard in games industry.

[smm11]

DOOM was written on a 68040 33MHz processor.

[homarp]

https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Development_of_Doom

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NeXTSTEP operating system. The final game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's compiler was used.

https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answe... adds:

Over the entire course of Doom and Quake 1’s development we probably spent $100,000 on NeXT computers, which isn’t much at all in the larger scheme of development. We later spent more than that on Unix SMP server systems (first a quad Alpha, then an eventually 16-way SGI system) to run the time consuming lighting and visibility calculations for the Quake series. I remember one year looking at the Top 500 supercomputer list and thinking that if we had expanded our SGI to 32 processors, we would have just snuck in at the bottom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDAzJLBB6pE is a visit to id Software in November 1993

[ddingus]

Perhaps that is another differentiator contributing to the ID team moving as quickly as they did. SGI NUMA systems were not cheap! How many teams had that kind of best in class hardware in house?

16 MIPS CPU processors housed in metal heat sinks that can look and feel like small bricks! Real steel amd aluminum all over the place!

IRIX delivered NUMA style multiprocessing running on a single OS image they scaled up to 2K CPUs! I believe NASA had a 2K CPU system for quite a while.

Running one of those beasties was an excellent overall computing experience. At that time, perhaps unexpectedly, one of the most impressive features was the documentation. The early version of that system was called, "Online Books" in the software manager, which itself was what we know as a package manager today, and featured a Windows Help type application designed to render the docs and many high quality illustrations in a compact and searchable, selectable form. Selecting text meant being able to work through advanced system examples copy paste into terminal style, among other things.

For people who enjoy command line, in the terminal style coding, the SGI terminal font and white on blue was, and in my view remains, one of the top easy on the eyes, fast and low fatigue text interfaces ever done.

I will often grab one of the modern, similar to the fast bitmap fonts SGI used, and use white on blue today. My first home computer was an 8 bit Atari, also setup to display white on blue, similar to the C64, which can be set that way quick and easy.

Anyhoo, I was using and setting up those systems for a time,from workstation up through 8 CPU Origin and Onyx class NUMA hardware, and absolutely loved it. Exemplary computing experiences.

A comment can be found in the SGI freeware Doom package, "SGI graphics run Doom real sweet." (Or something to that effect.)

Newbies would be surprised to find even their "slow" SGI Indy could run multiple copies of Doom at the same time, rendering into a window with full sound effects and no dropped frames. I would play one while a few others were running in attract, or "demo" mode, all smooth, display frame locked looking crisp and responsive.

[WillPostForFood]

Yes! NeXT TurboColor Workstation w/68040

https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/comments/j5943h/im_over_...

[ddingus]

Drool!

One day, I would live to take the time to explore that computing experience. Like SGI, everything about those machines looks super sweet!