🆕 Never Post! Why Does Everything Run Doom?

Mike talks with two game designers, a nuclear physicist and sound artist about how the iconic videogame became what it is today: something that runs on every piece of technology (and increasingly: biology) known to man

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Everything Plays Doom

• Xaser Acheron on Doomwiki and Github
• Bijan Stephen’s Website and Bsky
• John Matter’s Website and Bsky
• Matthew Gantt on Instagram and Diagnostics, his record on OMR 
• Doom Guy: Life in First Person, by John Romero
• Master of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner
• Next Generation Magazine, 30 Jun 1997
• Compute! Magazine Issue 163
• Computer Gaming World Issue 116Computer Gaming World Issue 116
• Doom Editing Utilities, Doomwiki
• Other uses for DOOM engine, Usenetarchives
• Zfootball, Doomhockey, Hellshots, Gallery Experience, MyHouse.wad

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

I got a tattoo of God. You can’t see it

but it’s everywhere. If I seem out of it,

do the math. I was put on earth.

And then you were, making up your feet

as you went along. New thinspo clanks the spank 

bank. New emoticon makes a Holocene. 

Excerpt of Money Bin by Michael Robbins

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

I could not tell you where I got it nor really when. Possibly on a floppy disk from a friend around 1994, it might have been around 1995 at the grocery store on a CD sold with a magazine that I somehow convinced my mother to buy me. In any event, I would have been 10, maybe 11 years old. I do remember starting it up for the first time, being met almost jarringly with the image of a muscled man wearing a gray porcine visored helmet and green armor. His fatigues are torn.

He's covered in claw marks. The huge blue and gold letters behind him look like a combination of super future technology and impossibly ancient artifact and they spell out a single word, doom. A menu pops up. New game. Definitely enter.

Which episode? Knee deep in Dead, Shores of Hell or Inferno? My adolescent brain barely knows what to make of this. Best to start at the start, I guess. Knee deep in Dead sounds sick.

Enter. Choose skill level. I'm too young to die. Hey, not too rough. Hurt me plenty.

Ultra violence and nightmare. Hurt me plenty? I guess. Enter. What happens next determines to some not insignificant degree the course of my life.

People talk about experiences that change their brain chemistry. This was one of those. Beginning with the sound that you hear immediately upon requesting to be hurt plenty. To modern adolescent ears, I imagine this sounds anemic, but to me, in the mid nineties, it was cool as hell. Somewhat literally, I guess.

Over the next single minute of gameplay, I'm appraised of a set of actualities I'd not previously even considered possibilities. All of them, Doom's now well known hallmarks. First person combat of which it was an early standout, a combination of mythic and technological story elements, you're a futuristic space marine fighting demons from hell on Mars, a fast pace, this game rips. And also, of course, tears. In the coming months afflicted with doom fever, I would learn also of the game's vibrant community of modders supported in no small part by its developer id Software's generosity or perhaps in another view ruthlessness.

Id's permissive attitude is reflected in a number of their decisions. The first episode of Doom was released as shareware, software that's free but often limited or incomplete. The rest of the game's episodes could be purchased only direct from id who enabled, encouraged, and celebrated modifications of their game as long as they weren't sold. They decided to open source the game's engine making it available under a non commercial license. And they did so basically at the height of their game's popularity.

And so an inventive game that could render fan made contributions led to a flourishing community of artists and technologists which has persisted for thirty years. People are still actively porting and modifying Doom, updating it to run as efficiently as ever on modern systems, and making those ports do all kinds of crazy things.

The most recent, like, kind of mod thing I can think of is I wrote a simulation of something called the icing model, which is a model of ferromagnetism. It's kind of a canonical thing that you learn in an undergrad statistical mechanics class.

And like the meme of dinosaurs turning from fossils to petroleum to plastic models of dinosaurs, Doom is used to produce whole new games in which a trace of the true self persists.

Over decades of development has literally gotten to the point where you can ship a Theseus the entire game and create entirely brand new games that if you think about it, of technically share code with Doom, but it's transformed so much over over the decades that you wouldn't recognize it if you weren't looking for it. And so it's nuts that we've gotten to this point.

Many of you will probably also know that folks out here aren't just porting Doom to run clever mods on modern systems, they're porting it to run on everything. Pregnancy tests, ATMs, soda machines, spreadsheets, vehicle dashboard displays, PDFs, graphing calculators, air fryers, alarm clocks, DNS records, e coli, MS Paint, the Kindle earbuds, a vet grown human brain, and even somehow Doom itself have all been hacked apart and made to run Doom.

That's what Doom is. They gave us some they gave us the tools and people used the tools and then it became funny to use the tools in a way like that they weren't intended to be used. But also that was the whole intention the entire time like, again, like if you go back to even the the par system, like why does Doom have par? That doesn't make any sense.

It's become a part of the software's promise, its purpose, that it become integrated into all sorts of wildly bespoke systems, that it be used in ways that make you ask, Doom? Like the video game.

A lot of my own practice, know, I I kind of came from experimental music, you know, synthesizers, generative music, different spatial things. And I've been doing a lot of work kind of connecting that to game engines, you know. It's the same way you might patch a modular synthesizer. Here's a, you know, a generator manifesting something. I've been really interested in game engines, game simulations.

It's kind of like a almost like a cybernetic system conceptualized as a patchable environment, you know, rather than an LFO into a sound, you know. Maybe you know, projectile, maybe player depth, maybe the speed of a three d object could be could be mapped into something.

In this episode of Never Post, we're gonna talk about why the hell this all happened. How did this game come to be used this way over any other for this long? It turns out the answer is in part circumstance, but also significantly because the people who made Doom wanted this to happen to some degree. And then the Internet kind of did the rest. In the first half of this episode, we're gonna talk about the five years id software took to arrive at Doom, and then about how Doom works as a piece of technology.

In the second half of this episode, we're gonna talk about why that piece of technology can run on almost any system, and then we're gonna hear from some artists who use Doom to make things. They're gonna tell us why you might muck around in a game about Mars and demons to make, you know, like a string quartet or jokes about a dead British prime minister overdoing those things literally anywhere else. I hope by the end to have shown how we can use Doom to think broadly about using technology to make things, especially older technology, which in some ways requires more of us, but in other ways less. I think Doom as it exists now can help us see what it takes to be creative at a time when most technology seems to want us more than anything to be consumptive. Doom was far from id Software's first game.

The original founders, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall, eventually joined by Adrian Carmack, no relation, met as coworkers several years prior to Doom's release. They called themselves IFD for ideas from the deep, and they were employees of Louisiana based SoftDisc. Softdisk put out regular Megazets, a snail mailed publication of personal PC software in floppy disk format. One of the group's early contributions was nineteen eighty eight's side scroller Dangerous Dave. John Romero very explicitly admits that dangerous Dave was a rip off of Mario.

Except the first dangerous Dave title didn't actually scroll but paged. When the player reached the screen's edge, the whole frame would redraw to show the next area. Carmack later devised a technique where only the edge of the screen is redrawn, allowing the background to scroll smoothly with the player's movement. This was something that at the time only consoles could do, but Carmack built a workaround for the PC. The team used his technique to fully recreate the first portion of Super Mario Brothers three on PC with dangerous Dave in Mario's place.

In his book, masters of doom, David Kushner writes, by the time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the best selling hit in the world. They then sent it to Nintendo. They included a letter explaining their interest in licensing the rights to Super Mario for the PC. Nintendo wrote back in short order telling them, this is nice work, but no thank you. We have no interest in the PC market.

The never released game was titled dangerous Dave in copyright infringement. The technological achievement was undeniable though. Their manager at SoftDisc said Carmack should patent this development, and he refused on principle, saying, apparently, if you ever ask me to patent anything again, I'll quit. Kushner explains that, quote, patents were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to John Carmack's life, writing code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he couldn't solve a problem without infringing on someone's patent, he would be very unhappy to live there, end quote.

While they were developing dangerous Dave for soft disc, the team also picked up a somewhat shady side gig with Apogee software. They would simultaneously develop the similarly Mario inspired side scroller, Commander Keen, about an eight year old defending Earth from aliens. In his book Doom Guy, John Romero writes that Keen is the first game for which he and Carmack had the idea to write a game engine. Something Romero takes credit for naming if not conceptualizing altogether. Though he does admit that's the kind of thing that might be impossible to prove.

Very briefly, if you're unfamiliar, a game engine is a base layer of reusable code to manage assets and to make game development more consistent. So they develop the Keen engine and then the Keen games which Apogee releases as shareware. Apogee would upload early episodes to a BBS or an FTP and then they would sell the complete games direct via mail. The IFD team eventually has a falling out with Apogee in part because they may have used their Keen engine to make other games without paying a licensing fee. And Romero seems to suggest it's not so big a deal that Apogee may have used their code, it's more so that they just weren't cool about it.

He describes himself and Carmack as, quote, programming evangelists. We had no problem with anyone using our work, he writes, but in the spirit of shareware, if a company is using our engine to make money, they should share the wealth. After the first royalty check for Keene hits, they quit SoftDesk and formed their own company, id Software. At first, standing for in demand, but later retconned to sort of maybe be a reference to Sigmund Freud, but mostly it seems like they just thought it sounded cool. The final commander keen game is released in 1991, and then they begin work on Wolfenstein three d.

Wolfenstein three d is a major turning point for id in both, business and technical senses. It has its own mini history that we're gonna look at really briefly in a second, but first, I think it's worth considering what we've seen up until this point. Looking at the early days of id, Carmack and Romero settle into two distinct roles. Carmack makes a significant technological development and then Romero uses it to create what's essentially an homage. He takes and in a lot of ways improves upon preexisting often very popular games.

We also see, amongst the early id crew, early hostility towards gatekeeping and the desire to share not just as a business model, but as a kind of technological principle as well. Id gives away portions of their games. They also license their game engines, albeit with mixed results early on. We see an early fascination with Mars in Commander Keen and in Dangerous Dave, both gore and shotguns. Id's first first person shooter is a game called Hovertank one, released on 05/31/1991.

For Hovertank, John Carmack wrote id's first three d rendering game engine in only two months. They'd refine their first person and three d rendering approach over the next six months in Catacombs three d, in which Carmack would implement texture mapping, a technique where the game engine maps the three d level model with two d images. In catacombs three d, id also introduces a hand, bottom center screen to represent the player character. Id's first significant FPS is Wolfenstein three d, an homage to nineteen eighty one's Nazi infiltration classic Castle Wolfenstein. They bought the IP rights for Castle Wolfenstein for $5,000 after Carmack had already started work on a revamped engine.

And this engine had two notable additions, the ability to add secret areas and an emphasis on speed. Id wanted this game to be fast. They released the first episode of Wolfenstein three d as shareware in May 1992. It was a smash. They did nearly a quarter of $1,000,000 in sales on the commercial episodes in the first month.

All in, the engine and shareware episodes took four months to develop and the remaining five commercial episodes took a month and a half. Not a terrible outcome for six months of work. By the fall, around the time an additional retail episode of Wolfenstein three d is about to launch, John Romero notices something. He writes, we soon found out that some rather enterprising hackers had figured out how to extract and decompress the levels from Wolfenstein three d and modify them. This was a big surprise to us.

Not only was it a lot of work, but it required a high degree of technical expertise to hack the Wolfenstein three d executable and get the maps decompressed. Soon after, several map editors appeared on the Internet and people were busy making levels and expanding the base game. The era of modding our games had begun. Kushner writes that while Carmack and Romero did worry about the possibility someone may use their game engine to sell modifications, they tabled the issue. They were hard at work on the final episodes of Wolfenstein three d and in early development for the engine of their next title, a military themed demon slaying action game.

Doom comes together as a culmination of everything id has learned up until this point. CarMax engine makes use of more advanced three d rendering techniques built upon what he learned with catacombs and hover tank one. He improves upon his texture mapping techniques. He focuses on the speed and feel of the game and provides the ability to hide things within maps. Romero builds a level editor called DoomEd that allows him to quickly design levels for CarMax engine as well as place enemies and things inside those levels.

The whole team sought to make a visceral experience. Romero claims that levels were subject to thousands of playthroughs during design. With designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack, they all pulled together themes, objects, and ideas from all of their previous games, shotguns, ghosts, demons, gore, aliens, a first person perspective, and they develop a master design document called the Doom Bible. And then they decided early on that since people would modify this game, no question, why not just let them? Romero writes that amongst all of the features, Doom being an open game was the most important to them.

It was, in a way, an homage to homages, itself built to encourage the creation of further derivative works. And of course, the first episode of Doom would be distributed as shareware. Hell came to Earth via FTP on 12/10/1993. So many people were waiting to download the game that the sysadmins needed to reconfigure the server. Id had to demand that fans log off in order to reliably upload the installer.

Thousands of people downloaded it. In the following weeks, id would make $50,000 a day in direct sales. Game press reviews were glowing. Compute Magazine called it a quote graphic extravaganza that's completely free of the kinds of redeeming societal values found in sim health. Computer Gaming World wrote that quote, Doom represents a huge technical improvement over id's earlier titles, giving the gamers what they asked for and the industry a new benchmark.

In PC Gamer, what makes Doom so special? Simplicity, realism, and profound carnage. Doom unseated Myst as the number one worldwide game on Usenet, Posts on alt.games.doom, the freshly minted news group for Doom players, read things like Doom is thoroughly excellent. I've tried Doom at a local computer store, and I find myself nearly addicted. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam?

What a great freaking game. I cannot wait to play deathmatch. TM question mark? Players were having all kinds of new experiences. Sawing through a demon torso with a chainsaw, yes.

But also a number of things that would go on to become major pillars of gaming. Doom was one of the first early broadly popular games to support both co op and versus multiplayer at first via a LAN and then via dial up. As such, many people draw a line directly from Doom to esports today. Doom also included a par time for each level suggesting that players could race the clock to finish each area as quickly as possible, an early precursor to speedruns. Doom also allows players to record keystrokes and share their playthroughs.

A predecessor in some views to let's plays and modern game streaming. And finally, within two weeks of release, id had also published details about how their game design or WAD for where's all the data files were structured. The first complete fan made level editor, Doom Editing Utilities or DEU, is released on 01/26/1994, only forty seven days after Doom itself. You can even go to a Usenet archive and pull up threads of people talking about building editors and what to use them for. A Hunt on 01/12/1994 writes, I think the Doom engine could be used very effectively for things other than the maze shoot them ups, which I love.

How about football first person? The Doom engine limitations should not be a problem, vertical views, etcetera. The mountains could be a stadium. Replace the multitude of monsters with more views of teammates. Hockey too.

The rollerblade feel of the movements on a fast machine already show the graphics speed wouldn't be a problem. Just you wait a hunt. Just you wait. Then in only the amount of time it takes to get to Mars using the Hohmann maneuver, Doom two Hell on Earth is released. Doom two is retail only and it hits the shelves 10/10/1994.

It was developed in much the same manner and with many of the same tools as the first Doom, but it's bigger with more guns and more demons. And I can tell you exactly where I got this one. Babbage's in the Natick Mall with a paper gift certificate I got for my birthday. In early nineteen ninety five, the source code for both Doom games is released under a noncommercial Doom license. These were Linux versions of the code given the use of proprietary audio software in the MS DOS versions.

On 10/03/1999, the licenses for each are converted to full new general public licenses, which requires all work made using the code to be released under the same license. It's at this point, all of the technical pieces are in the world, available by design for anyone to use, and it was required that if you did so, you also share your work. Hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of software using Doom's code have followed since. Mods, user made levels, total conversions, where it sorta seems like you're playing a whole different game, source ports, and more. It's a branching rhizome of projects that assure that no matter what your system, it can run Doom, often with more features and greater fidelity than the original.

A vibrant community of hackers, modders, and artists are doing exactly what id designed their game to do, run well and be shared. We're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk to two game designers, a nuclear physicist, and a composer about what people are making with Doom and why exactly they're making it with Doom. Doom is small.

Like, the actual size of the game. It's tiny. I'm looking at the files for both Doom and Doom two right now, and they're 11 megs and 16 megs respectively. That's smaller than some photos I've taken with my phone. So before you even get started making things with it, Doom itself is very portable, and boy, howdy, has it been ported.

Back whenever Doom source code was released, like, we're talking the nineties. Right? A lot of people were just like, oh my gosh. This is the coolest thing ever. Let's, like, update the game.

That's Zazer with an x, Acheron.

I currently work at Nightdive Studios as a game developer, but I've basically been plugged into the Doom community for twenty plus years, which is crazy, doing programming, level design, art, music, all sorts of Doom mod stuff.

Zayzer is thanked by name at the end of John Romero's book. And though I know it will slightly embarrass him, I am going to mention that the Doom Wiki describes him as, quote, the Doom community's truest polymath. He really has done a bit of everything. So I wanted to ask him to help me understand the finer details of why Doom will run on a Sony PocketStation memory card. The explanation begins with one of Doom's early source ports.

Meaning, someone takes the engine source code and modifies it to run on a different type of system. Crucially, this isn't necessarily the game itself, but the software that runs the game. So a source port can run Doom, but it can also run modifications of Doom.

And one of the earlier ports that ended up sticking around for a long, long, long, long, long time was called ZDoom, And it was just done by someone named Marissa Hite. She just was like, hey. I wanna make a Doom source port and did it for years. And the thing that drew people to it was it started adding a ton and ton a ton of modding features. Like, the earlier Doom source ports, a lot of them started focusing on, like, visual fidelity.

So, like, earlier versions of Edge, which also had a lot of modding features, JDom, Doomsday, and ZDoom, they all had things like, hey. You could play it at high resolution, and, oh, we're adding a couple little features like jumping and things, and there's glowy lights and dynamic stuff. There are some early OpenGL ports.

This continues until today, literally. Since the mid nineties, there have been legions of people, Zazer included, who exert Olympus Mons amounts of effort to ensure that Doom runs and runs well. It would be a project all its own to recount the history and lineage of every Doom source port. There have been many. They are constantly being improved and extended.

And in fact, the newest major source port called u z Doom was updated eleven hours ago at time of writing. So running Doom, very easy, which is to say nothing of the fact that

Doom is incredibly easy to make content for. Like, you can have zero experience doing anything in resembling game design, and you can install Ultimate Doom Builder and make a Doom map and test it and do that within ten or fifteen minutes. I literally tell people, hey. If you wanna get into game design and you're brand new to it, install a Doom editor. Like, that's that sounds weird.

Right? Like, wait. I wanna make a game. I wanna make my own game. Why would I want to make a mod for something else?

Right? Well, the reason why is because if you want to make a game, what you actually need to do is, like, 20 different things. Like, oh, you gotta pick an engine, and you maybe have to be a programmer, and you gotta figure out what things to install if you're using Unity. And then you have to figure out, oh, am I a level designer now? Am I an artist?

What am I doing for? Okay. If you wanna make a doom app, here's what you do. Draw some lines in an editor and play around, and then hit the test button. It works.

I don't know if you've ever opened Unity or Unreal Engine. I've spent a fair amount of time in each just as a hobbyist. And for beginner, the experience is not unlike looking into the cockpit of an airplane through a kaleidoscope. It's tough to even get started and getting to a point where you can play around represents a kind of opportunity cost. There's an inherent risk assumed until you're well versed in the software.

And Zazer's conjecture is, this is not the case with Doom. You wanna try something out? Go to hell. I took his advice, and I thought, okay. Let's say I wanna make a version of this episode that's playable as a level of doom.

How long would it take to get on my way? Not faffing about with files or menus, but actually making and testing something. So I downloaded u z doom and a level editor, and I timed myself. It took six minutes before I was pushing Doomguy around inside a map that I designed. I mean, it was a very simple map, but I I made it.

Doom, the set of tools for building games, exhibits the same kind of speed and responsiveness as Doom the game. Its lack of fussiness verges on almost magical in 2026. The first time I sat down to make something in Doom felt so similar to the first time I sat down to play Doom. A few menu clicks and suddenly, oh my god. Is this for real?

My brain chemistry forever altered.

Again, I do think this is tied to early computing and early internet culture. Like, are these are very, like, specific times and places with very specific culture.

This is Bijan Steven. You may remember him from the first episode of Never Post. He's a video game writer at Compulsion Games and a music critic for the nation.

And a player on Fun City Ventures, the best tabletop role playing game podcast that you've never heard of.

Cesar told us how. Bijan is gonna tell us why. What about Doom inspires all this experimentation and extension? All the technological factors stipulated why this game in particular.

Doom became part of the culture because it was something that everyone was playing, and it was something that everyone had access to, and it was something that you could mess with, like, very easily. So it became this natural fit. And then those those, you know, those forums and videos and whatever, all of that stuff, like, filtered in like, filtered down to the next generation online. And it's like the the designers are daring you to break it. They're daring you to do stuff with it that they didn't expect.

Why else would they open source the engine? Why else would they ship it with demos? They gave us the tools and they they gave us, like, the tool the paints and the brushes and the easel and the canvas, and they expected us to get get to work. That's what it was. But video games are interesting because again, they are prescribed experiences.

They they are there is a beginning, middle, and an end that has been set down and thought about by the designers. Right? But the thing that Doom sort of posited in a very early stage in this development of games was, like, what if that wasn't the end? What if what if we our vision for this wasn't actually what this game is? And if the further we get from its origins, the funnier it gets.

Like, what do you like, why are you still doing this? But I think I mean, it's it's it's not because it's like the designers and developers sort of intended for you to fuck with it, but, like, did they mean did did they really think that you were gonna do this with it? I don't know. It's it's I I think it's really hard to say. This is like it's like you're you're asking questions about the human spirit, and I don't know how to answer them.

Bijan posits, I think, a kind of doom, a metagame, which doesn't involve military bases on Mars, cacademons, chainsaws as much as it involves an IDE, GitHub, and Discord. Urdoom has one goal, the creation of more doom, and there's no win condition because there is always more doom to be made. It would again be a project all its own to list even 1% of the incredible mods and conversions of Doom, but we will at least fulfill some of a hunt's wishes. Z football is a 2,004 mod build as, quote, the first complete soccer themed total conversion for z doom. Doom hockey is, exactly what it sounds like and multiplayer.

Hellshots is a game where in place of a gun, Doomguy holds a putter or a wedge or an iron. That's right. It's Doom Golf. Doom the gallery experience trades the plasma rifle for a red wine glass and the armor power ups for cheese. And yes, you do exit through the gift shop.

Doctor Robotnik's ring racers is, get ready, a Sonic themed tournament tuned Mario Kart style racing game built on Doom Legacy. Its website reads, quote, Ring Racers is not a pickup and play experience. If you aren't already a racing fanatic, the learning curve will be quite steep, end quote. And perhaps the most famous is a surreal survival horror maze discovery game called my house dot wad, which Bijan describes as

One of the best Doom things I've ever seen. It's unbelievable. Somebody tried to do House of Leaves with Doom. What? Like and then they succeeded.

That's the crazier part. It it it is genuinely unnerving. It is so strange. Because again, Doom, the way Doom looks is very specific. And the way that the person making my house dot wad understood they they understood how Doom looked and how Doom felt and they made it feel eerie if you've ever played Doom, which I think again, it feels like a love letter to a community.

It feels like very specific to a very time and place and specific to a certain group of people who like are very aware of this thing that they're doing and this thing that they're playing.

The way Doom looks is very specific, but so is the way Doom runs. Doom does not require a GPU. It runs entirely on the processor. Meaning, unlike many modern games, it doesn't need specialized hardware. The code is also, as discussed, very well optimized.

It's also written in c, which while sort of old fashioned, is straightforward for most systems to compile or interpret. So, basically, what this all means is that when you ask a computer, whatever computer, to run Doom, you're only giving it one job, run Doom. And it doesn't really take much of a computer to do that. Embedded software,

you're gonna you're gonna program and see. Like, that's that is the root foundation that almost every device ever that isn't a desktop PC is gonna use. So that by itself is already a massive chunk that allows you to take Doom and compile it for your thing of choice. And and the fact that it's, you know, was designed to run on what a three eighty six well, four eighty six if you had infinite money back in the early nineties means that you could run it on a potato because your your modern embedded device probably is gonna be a little bit more powerful than what they had back then. So, yeah, you're gonna be fine.

The the history of doom is also is also the history of technology because it is everywhere we go. Somebody's putting Doom on it no matter what, like, whatever we make. It also, I think, has sort of become like a minimal like, the the minimum viable computer can run Doom, which is how it was designed. And I think that's sort of like it's almost like proving that it's a computer.

Doom has more or less grown up in the myriad ways it has alongside computing as a commercial enterprise and computers as consumer products and the Internet as social infrastructure and communities of people using all of those things to make media and art and jokes. So why Doom? It was popular. It was available. It was made to be shared.

Homage is in its guts, which are also maybe splattered on a nearby wall. Its usage as raw material was not only encouraged, but supported by its authors and the community of people who grew around their work. Going back to the Usenet, there are countless discussions like with many games at the time asking, does Doom run on this system or this system or this configuration? And people working to discover that the answer, unlike with many games at the time, was often yes, if with a little bit of tinkering. It's very easy to imagine then how someone might eventually stand in front of a GE vivid s five ultrasound scanning machine and think, I bet I can get that to play doom.

As an aside, though, that is maybe not something that you should voice aloud while standing in front of a GE vivid s five ultrasound scanning machine. In the last and final act of this episode, we're gonna talk to two people who make things professionally and occasionally do so with Doom. Throughout all of this, I've not stopped wondering, don't the guns and gore and demons make it harder to use Doom, why not start from scratch or with something that has less significance or meaning? Why choose to engage with Doom's baggage?

There's a WAD where if I remember correctly, the big bad is Margaret Thatcher. Yeah. Makes me think of that clip. I don't know. Have have you seen that clip of this this old British woman at Thatcher's funeral?

Not a bit of good. Not a bit. I put a stick through her heart and garlic around her neck to make sure she never come back.

Hello. My name is John Matter. I'm a nuclear physicist turned software developer.

I know John from Weird Music Internet and from their string of public experimentations with Doom.

I think the most recent thing I did was playing Doom on a monom grid, which isn't really Doom modding itself, but it is part of this like, can it play Doom thing. So I wrote a max patch that takes video, massages it so that it displays on a grid. This, you know, matrix of LEDs with variable brightness.

I wanted to chat with a couple people who use Doom not just as a game or a development environment, but as a kind of medium for weirder ideas. Ones that might involve say, Maggie, no such thing as society thatcher. John likens Doom to a performance practice or a genre almost.

I think it kind of fits into a similar, I don't know, heritage as like jazz or folk. You know, it's this kind of shared context where people can play with existing tools or idioms or memes, whatever. There's just this shared material that you can borrow from and build on and just do something with.

Doom, in this view, isn't so much a game or a program as it is charts, chord changes, or as Bijan said, paints and brushes. The software doesn't represent the end of some creative endeavor, but its beginning. Id has said, here's the first thing we made with these tools. You use these ideas. Use these materials.

You make the next thing. And that is just not how things are usually done, especially not today and especially not in media and technology.

Doom is interesting to me because it's kind of the opposite of an NFT. Like an NFT is a thing that encloses artistic expression. It commodifies it. It takes this thing that anybody could duplicate and play around with and it just says, nope. Here it's this finite resource that has to be exchanged for money.

But Doom kind of resists that because it plays on, you know, so many pieces of hardware. Maybe some of the appeal of Doom is that it's just focused on being this weird charming little shooter as opposed to something that can expand and, you know, get more and more bloated as we think of new ways to monetize it. Like, maybe that's the appeal is that it's just a game where you can do stupid stuff and have that be the end result.

I think that is also John subtly roasting me for asking questions about the human spirit. But the point here is that it's meaningful that this unenclosable territory exists. Doom, unlike many of our beloved things, remains isolated from private equity, from corporate control, from software as a service, and planned obsolescence. It is subject to the whims and drama of the open source community, which, you know, is not nothing, but I will take that drama over shareholders any day.

Yeah. Nobody's doing microtransactions in doom. And if they are, I'd plead look inward. What is yours? I I you're concerned for the the the safety of your eternal soul.

What all of this adds up to, I think, is that your various art and technology hooligans feel safe making things for and in and with doom. There is good reason to believe that the software will persist, be easy to get up and running, support all kinds of weird ideas, and the opportunity cost of experimentation will remain extremely low.

I've been teaching myself to to make Doom mods, rather than making new content or new levels, but actually to modify the the audio functionality to send out MIDI hooks to to a synthesizer, to MaximSP. And the idea then recasting Doom as a kind of instrument or kinetic sound sculpture environment. Yeah. That's Matthew Gant. I'm a composer, dirtbag game scholar.

Let me try this again. I'm failing miserably. I'm a composer, artist, faux game scholar, enthusiastic cave person, doing a lot of work with experimental music, game engines, and virtual reality.

I'm a big fan of Matthew's work. I have been for a long time. And over the last number of years, he's incorporated more and more video game technology into his composition process. Unity, Unreal Engine, Doom. I was curious to ask Matthew what he found meaningful about Doom in particular, and specifically, how much it matters for him that Doom is Doom.

Like, does it matter that this is a game about demons and hell and guns and a marine and sick MIDI guitar riffs? It turns out that the answer is, yeah, kinda.

All of these things take on this associative baggage. Now I don't wanna call it a whole Duchampian ready made thing, but it's just nested layers of association. So the fact that it is both very awesome and very iconic, but also very derivative simultaneously, It it it feels really interesting to me. You know, I guess this happens with really any media or a medium of anything, you know, in the world, you know, has both like a functional quality. You know, what can it do?

What are the affordances? And and, you know, an associative quality. You know, what does it signify, you know, culturally, aesthetically, conceptually? And, you know, and Doom is kind of like right there, you know, a great example, you know, very very very aura heavy in both. Right?

You know, it's not you know, it wasn't the original FPS, you know, but, you know, somehow it is just more iconic than, you know, something like Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem. You know, may maybe just because it did reach a larger audience, maybe because it was just a little more polished, what have you.

The way it looks, the way it sounds, how playing it feels, It is undeniably an old game, open parenthesis, complimentary, close parenthesis. And this fact becomes inseparable from the fundamental offering of whatever you make using Doom. The work itself will always be in conversation with everything everyone knows and thinks and feels about doom. Matthew likened this to something his composition professor, composer Morten Subotnick, said about the structure of writing music.

I remember he was telling me. He was like, composition is like well, I think the comparison is like telling a joke, essentially. And essentially, if the punch line is or if the setup is so obvious that you already know the punch line, you know, it doesn't work because, you know, who cares? And if the setup is sort of so non sequitur that, you know, you hear the punch line and there's no connection, you can't drive meaning from it, you know, just as bad. So the key thing is establishing some sort of legibility and then subverting the legibility.

Doom is exceedingly legible, which makes subverting it easy. It's also a game about demons, which makes subverting it fun. Doom Golf? Incredible. Doom Modular Synthesizer?

Hell yeah, brother. Pulling these things out of Doom's source code is a punchline to the ultraviolet open source setup. The impact of that punchline is often augmented by Doom's limited nature. It's an old game and there's a lot it can't do. And this might make you think as a tool, it's restrictive.

But Matthew explains how it's actually quite freeing.

You know, thinking about this kind of like why doom? And and maybe this is a little bit left field, do you know that composer Mark Fell by any chance? Are you Mark Fell head?

I am, in fact, a huge Fell head. I just recently reread Mark Fell's book, Structure and Synthesis. It's one of my favorite treatises on the creative process. Fell writes mostly about making music with computers, but much of what's in the book could just as well be about making things with doom.

There's this great quote where he's talking about, you know, the way artists tend to deal with technology, and they think they say, you know, we we all want an open system. Everyone says they want an open system, But what they really want is they wanna use that open system to design a closed system that just has the affordances that they need and and play within that limited thing.

You know,

that it gives you a limitation to push against.

Thel takes issue with some artists' insistence that technology not guide their creative process. But how else, he argues, could it be guided? The tools at hand structure a dialogue out of which is born the work. It's the technology which enables and constrains and informs the creation of artworks. And when those tools have no constraint, it becomes that much harder to make something.

When one can make anything, it is often easier to just make nothing, especially as a lone artist with an individual practice. Doom is a bounded tool for the creation of games, media, music, technology, and even Doom itself. Doom is almost like Computation's Giant Steps, the jazz tune by John Coltrane. It's a time tested standard, an instructive ledger of moves, something to be referenced and recombined endlessly. And people have been using it to do just that for decades with no sign of slowing down, and it's all free.

You can go, you can download u z doom and the level editor right now and make something that plugs directly into this massive and massively participatory history today. You will not have to spend a single dollar. You will not have to create an account. You will not have to log in or even give your email address. You will not have to disable AI features.

The software will not show you ads. You will not need to fill out a survey about your experience. All you have to do is share what you make with others. Thank you so much to Zazer, Bijan, John, and Matthew. You can find links to all of their work in the show notes, and

I

highly highly highly recommend that you do. Thanks also to Nash Muhandis, Lane Nooney, and Dominic Torreson for their help with this episode. So I hinted at this a couple times, throughout this piece, but everyone we spoke to for this episode said at some point when I asked them a question, well, jeez, you could write a whole book just about that. And so I don't know. We might try.

So I'm curious. Hey. Would you read a short book about how Doom became a piece of technology for experimentation in art and media? Because, I mean, I would like to write that book, but only if someone would read it. So I don't know.

Let let me know. I also, in this episode, did not get to talk about Quake, which is arguably even more modifiable than Doom. So I think what we're gonna do is schedule some streams so we can see some of these modifications. You can watch me play them. I can tell you how to get them up and running, and we'll also talk a little bit more about Quake and how it, both fits into and extends and in some ways is an alternative, to some of the things that we talked about.

So, if you aren't already, make sure that you are subscribed to the mailing list, because that is where, most likely we will, first announce, when those things will be once we get them scheduled. And hey, finally, perhaps most importantly, have you made something in Doom? Because if so, I would love to know about it. You can call us. You can leave us a voice memo.

You can leave us a voice mail. You can send us an email. You can leave a comment on the website. Any of the ways that you can get a hold of us, they're all in the show notes. Tell me about the crazy things you've done in Doom.

I want to hear about them, please. That is the show I have for you this week. We will be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, June 4. Did you enjoy this episode about Doom? I enjoyed making it and I would love to make more heavily researched segments like this one to help me and the rest of the Never Post crew spend more time making more Never Post more for just four dollars a month.

A wild deal for the stuff we're putting out, if I'm being completely honest. You can head over to neverpo.st and become a member today. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer.

The show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. I got a tattoo of God. You can't see it, but it's everywhere. If I seem out of it, do the math. I was put on earth.

And then you were making up your feet as you went along. New thin spoke clanks the spank bank. New emoticon makes a hollow scene. Excerpt of Money Bin by Michael Robbins. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by Radiotopia.