id Software origin story | John Carmack and Lex Fridman
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- čas přidán 7. 08. 2022
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Andrew Bustamante: CIA...
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Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA covert intelligence officer. Check out his work and podcast at everydayspy.com
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Lex asks about the beginning of id software. John, after 10 brillant minutes, is talking about Pascal compilers and C.
Someone must invent the Futurama _head jars_ because we must keep Carmack's head for eternity.
He's so great that only Civvie's John Carmack titles compilation can describe his greatness.
Meta destroying interdimensional overlord corporeal being by choice, John Carmack
I see you are a man of culture.
@@zatozatoichi7920 Thank you!
Civvie is our man, may be he is born mid 80s like me
Engineering Elemental and Luddite Nemesis, John Carmack.
Lex needs to have John Romero on the podcast
I would love to see that.
+1
Doom Guy audiobook is the best 17 hours of my life.
Read John's book "Doom Guy", real interesting!
Didn't know this existed. Thanks! I read Masters of Doom over a decade ago and have been wanting more ever since. @@user-kk3jr8gi2x
Have a friend that worked at SoftDisk when this went down. He’s not a gamer but remembers those ‘weird guys in the other office that always were drinking soda’.
John Carmack is a very interesting guy, his stories are very nostalgic for me personally.
Agreed
Yeah he was already my God in the 19902s lol
made me smile that lex was shocked by "write games in assembly". I grew up in the 80's and knew hackers who wrote big programs entirely in assembly. There used to be animation competition that had to fit on a floppy disk. It was all written in assembly with particle animation and music.
bit of a difference writing whole games and little hacking scripts(was this even necessary in the 80s?)
@@Heopful Most, if not all, console games up until the "64bit" era were written in assembly. I believe Mario 64 was the first Nintendo game written in C.
Roller Coaster Tycoon games were developed entirely in assembly by a single guy. It's bad for conservation, but it was great for performance.
@@Heopful Yes it was necessary on consoles until the release of the PS1 and Sega Saturn in the mid 90s. Until then the hardware wasn't fast enough to use anything but assembly for commercial games. Even then most Japanese devs used assembly well into the late 90s and it was mainly the American and European devs that used C.
@@Heopful He's talking about the demos and the demo scene, not the stuff of script kids. Amazing stuff at the time.
This is wonderful. Thanks so much for making this happen, Lex, and thank you John for indulging our endless curiosity about the early days and your team's contributions to gaming. John is one year younger than me and I am also a career programmer who was drawn to those primitive machines whenever I could get my hands on one, starting in the 6th grade. Such an incredible time, watching it all happen, including the incredible improvements just in that short amount of time.
This is so fun hearing John talk about Pascal and assembly, casually blowing Lex's mind. I remember playing around with the early 386 machines and those were the two tools I spent the most time with.
14:28 I smiled a little when Carmack mentioned wizardry there.
You and me both.
Started Castle Wolfenstine on an Apple IIe, the old green screen. Next was Wizardy. Man I spent hours and hours going after Werdna in the basement. Damn greater demons!
Lex: Wait! you wrote games in assembly?!
John: Yes.
Lex: .... [When your GetNextFacialExpression(); returns NULL]
exactly 😃
One month apart from each other!!
Lex: ...."Runtime error! This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way."
@@leezhieng 😆
Man, I loved these shareware times! When you finished the first episodes of games like Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem, they showed still pictures of the other episodes with new monsters, environments or weapons. That really sparked the imagination and encouraged to somehow get the other episodes. Best times🤘
Duke Nukem shooting them in the toilets.
This is a core memory of mine and warms my soul lol
This is the closest you can get to time travelling and being there just listening, I wish they did a tv show/netflix series about it, something like Silicon Valley or Halt and Catch Fire but based on true events.
Would love to see a tv show about the life of John Carmack.
They almost made one.
I have soooo much respect for OG game makers and programmers in general, I would have not even imagined to write assembly all day every day for work… I’ve dabbled with it using the Pi and man it’s hard
"If you want something done, ask a busy man."
Doom 1 "shareware" was amazing. My dad would take me to the local computer store when I was a young kid, and I'd pick up a computer paper (with computer ads, review, and BBS numbers in it), but also I'd browse the $5 shareware floppy section of the store. The artwork for games never matched reality, but that didn't matter -- it was exciting; every game was fresh and new.
Doom 1 SW was playing out on display one day, probably on some IBM Aptiva, and it just BLEW ME AWAY.
Doom required I upgrade my 386SX though, which my dad did for me (VGA/ADLIB), and my addiction began. I was first in line to drop $60 to buy Doom 2 when it was released a short while later. I bought it with my savings too -- most games I got were "lent" to me by my friends, or were shareware titles my dad got me. My dad did get me a few boxed titles, like Lemmings or Myst, but they were pretty PG-rated.
HAHA , The look on your face when John said he wrote these games in assembly LOLLLL
I'm 10 years younger than John, but when I was around 10 in the early 90s i did my games in qbasic and wrote all the routines for gfx in assembly. So basic was only used for game logic
I wrote a bunch of games as a teenager in Turbo Pascal. Loved its inline assembly feature.
Turbo Pascal was incredible. I wrote a whole VESA library to use the high resolution VGA modes, carefully mapping the video memory pages. Of course this was all interrupt based and inline code was hugely important.
Also, using MSCDEX to directly grab audio from an audio CD and doing a three band FFT on a window and then using the time accumulated amplitude to switch three pins on two serial ports to control 220V powered lights per solid state relays. So cool back then!
Also, doing really fast 7 segment displays by not updating the screen, but only the palette; each segment using its own entry 😎
An architect behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, Typescript is Anders Hejlsberg. This guy shifted the industry multiple times.
back in my day Pascal was a primary language for coding challenges. Nostalgia :)
6:45 "contributed to building up the skill set" .. He mentions how much they learned cranking out a game in one month, and I was thinking of how good the Beatles got playing every night, for hours, in Hamburg, so I'll have to agree when he mentions the Beatles too. Love that Lex brings in the Dostoyevsky reference, when he had to write "The Gambler" in a month. Probably another good example is Philip K. Dick (of Blade Runner fame) who wrote numerous short stories.
A monthly subscription for games you say?
Best so far. I loved the apple IIe in UK. Then we had the BBC B. I had turbo pascal and programmed when I was 15 and it was only 20 pounds when all else was 200 and my parents bought it for me. Later I moved to Delphi.
I love that Carmack actually credited Tom Hall
next best guest: Gabe Newell (Valve founder)... there wouldn't exist a Valve without id Software
Wow I am so loving this interview with John. He is bringing back so many memories. Dr Dobbs Journal. After maxing out the basic programming capabilities of the Atari 2600 my parents bought me the Commodore VIC 20. I learned machine language on that machine and then I moved on to the Commodore 64 where I learned how to write games in machine language. It was very challenging. Finally I moved to a PC programming in Turbo Pascal.
"Finally"? I hope you've moved on from Pascal since 😅
i had a VIC 20!!
@ LOL I ended up becoming an electrical engineer designing hardware. That would be funny though, using pascal today.
@@anotheryogateacher8499 gotta love that 7KB memory expander cartridge.
@@jefefpv1695 i was 5 years old. i played games called Snack-Man and Frog-ee.
LOL, and then Id Software became infamous for, "It's done when it's done."
Not to brag but I wrote a game in assembly for the TRS 80 computer, back when I was just a teenager, it worked, though it crashed with some kind of memory error and didn't have sound, but still today I am amazed I was able to do that and at that age. It was similar to Sabotage for the Apple computers back in the late 80's
Could listen to John for hours...reminds me of a classmate of mine...brilliant
Fun fact: Niklaus Wirth wrote Pascal for the same reason that Donald Knuth wrote MIX assembler. He was writing the book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" and needed a language for it. At the time Algol was too big for computers at the university so he invented Pascal.
I want to be bad-ass enough to pull this off at least once in my life time 'Oh, that? Yeah I cobbled it together because I needed something its size and shape to fill this crater that opened up!' Thanks for sharing!
It is a fact that id software had far superior feel to their games than any other games at the time. Unreal, later on had a nearly as good feel, but I remember, even things that used the doom engine were not responsive in the same way. Id always had great feel. It was a long time before other games began to feel universally decent.
They're actually really lucky they weren't working for a greedier, more ruthless employer at the time.
The full episode link is wrong.
Carmack seems like a very orderly/focused person.
You can see who worked harder in thumbnail, romero acting like bass guitarist
Thank you so much for this! Carmack is the Carl Sagan of the tech and Information age. What an inspiration!
Such a great story. My favorite book of all time is "Masters of Doom". I've literally listened to it over 20 times.
Lex, I too was a kid that grew up on just the shareware version of games. I would take my weekly allowance down to Radio Shack every weekend for a new game. Those were the best times.
Thanks to lockdowns in 2020 the TV series based on the book was cancelled :(
@@joncarlmatthews They were making a TV series??? That would have been awesome. Now I'm bummed...
@@VrilWaffen I read it again every 1-2 years. Just love the build-up and the fact that reality is better than fiction!
There's a lot of misinformation in Masters of Doom. John Romero puts it right in his new book.
@@sperrin what is his book called?
You guys talk about Turbo Pascal as well as JavaScript in another clip... you should totally interview Anders Hejlsberg... author of Turbo Pascal, C# and TypeScript.
omg john carmack aged so well
"Everyone wrote games in assembly at that time" literally probably a couple hundred people max out of the 4 billion people on the planet at that time.
Context. 'Most anyone who was programming games at the time.'...most were assembly. He's right. Most games pre-x86 were in assembly.
Everything was to some degree back then written in asm, nothing special here. Especially for earlier programmers, people from scientific computing and the hardware guys.
Practically every commercial game was was written in assembly from the C64 and ZX Spectrum era onwards. BASIC was just too slow for anything that wasn't text based.
Lex, assembly coding back then (6502) really wasn't hard ;). It looked cryptic, but the instruction set was pretty slim and the coding style was way more direct. Brute force, writing directly into video memory, registers etc. Nothing of this abstraction methods/patterns we use today. Writing a good C++ program is way harder :D
Really like listening to Carmack. Great storyteller :)
When I was in hs I’d often see one of - at least what were rumored to be -carmack’s ferraris parked outside Id hq when I went to Town East mall in mesquite.
Feels a bit surreal that my first language was Pascal using the Turbo Pascal IDE, and on the first day I used it I played Dangerous Dave, which was randomly installed on the computer club computer I was using. This was in 2003.
uses crt;
is how my journey really started... Writing TSRs to hack games while playing them was my hobby. The TSR would search the memory for specific values relating to in game money for instance and then take keyboard input to replace this value with a higher number.
Those were great days.
It’s crazy that this guy has no degree. And he’s the best programmer of all time , more or less. Insane
a guy like him it would've made him worse
@@Heopful it would have molded his brain into a box more or less. University, mainstream theory box
He's an insanely good programmer, but the best programmer of all time might be a bit strong.
@@Unit_00 agreed. I don’t actually know but I’ve heard it in more places than here
If he had purple hair, tattoo's and screamed on Twitter about everything while dressing like a unicorn it wouldn't really contribute anything.
I just want to see every person possible with a platform just do everything in their power to get some interview time with this man. We need to get this guy's brain mapped and catalogued. Just everything about his abstract methods of thinking through problems that makes some pretty ingenious solutions needs to be studied by coders everywhere so we can keep progressing tech forward. Carmack won't be around forever, we can't keep counting on him to reinvent the wheel lol. Hell his work in the VR space has been incredible so far too!
Yeah its the saddest part of perhaps human advancement - and not just technological; past what can be documented all the other 'intangibles' are scrapped when consciousness is filtered through death. There's a german word for what you are describing - its like the flavor of a mans thinking habits! Whoever figures it out will have her name carved on the moon!
I used to get CDs in magazines with random programs and games. You just installed them to see what they did. Before you had the bandwith to download from the internet directly.
Lots of games of that era were written in assembly, e.g RollerCoaster Tycoon.
I love John Carmack so much. He is my hero. He is one of the main reasons i'm into computers and video games.
Amazing video, i really enjoyed it, John Carmack is my idol, thank you.
First time i did that shareware was with doom. Had wolfenstein 3d from friends. And when doom came along put down that money. Remembering trying to make .wad levels eventually too!
Those old, sweet memories from the past brought back by the one himself...
Regardless of the lack of financial success long term of shareware programs or games I know that is how me and everyone and their dog played Doom, Heretic, Hexen or really any games of that era. 💯 Think WinRAR. 😂
18:17 later there was free pascal, which lets you run on Dos Protected Mode 😍😍😍
I'm a software engineer now because I put all my effort into being able to edit faster with vim.
Great story
Carmack is always smiling
What I would ask him was how he got the faith that hard work would pay off for him.
Around here only rich kids had their own computer or even regular access to a computer in the 80s.
I don't think I have EVER heard Carmack mispeak... but he just said "innovation is the mother of necessity", but the quote is the other way around. "Necessity is the mother of invention".
He’s human, he probably misspeaks 50 times per day, especially after his brain is fried from programming.
@@black_tech_owner absolutely, yes.
Maybe he meant it that way
I wish id software would take over the Halo games now that they're under Microsoft too
Programs in the 1980s pretty much had to be written in assembly, or they'd run like garbage.
Playing Doom Eternal while listening to this. Thanks John ❤
40y.o. me just watched this with my mouth open
Of course - it all traces back to The Beatles.
Essentially, The Beatles invented video games, they just didn't have the technology at the time to fully realize the concept.
disclaimer: I'm a Beatles fan.
14:00 😂
"You wrote games in assembly"... pacman, space invaders, etc... all machine code. Tbf I'd rather write assembler on a spectrum than write in anything in a modern gui.
Loved hearing about the shareware model I played so many games this way they used to give them away free with magazines. I remember playing one game called search and destroy over and over.
It's an ethical minefield, but I suspect many of the live questions can be answered at least in part by the instantiation of hardware in a wetware substrate or vice versa. A large learning model cannot learn that which it's not equipped to... If a thinking 'machine' is integrated with or housed in a substrate whose input is impacted by sensory systems capable of 'experiencing' pleasure and pain, it seems we have a game changer. Another thing that strikes me in these conversations is that qualia is desirable in the evolution of non-biological intelligent systems. For biological entities there are advantages (dealing with survival pressures, for instance) of being wrong through over cautionary behaviour (is it the wind or a predator rattling the bushes? Who cares? Run, just in case...). Is it an advantage for a system that can utilize sensory perception we don't have (discerning there is no danger in that bush etc.) to invoke a kind of Pascal's Wager on environmental situations? We don't know what consciousness is but we know that our form of self awareness is dependent on being deceived just enough to err on the side of caution . A.I. may not require the crude mechanisms and spandrels of natural selection as the selection parameters are provided for by an intelligent programing source. Knowing what some of our many levels of caprice are as coders for them, we might be well served by not imbuing A.I. with our evolutionary flaws and biases.
can you imagine carmack telling you a bedtime story.... "once upon a time, there was pascal c++...."
Carmack....i LOVE him.for defending pascal!!! Great knowledgeable guy
Did he misspeak at 7:36 or am I just not smart enough to understand that colloquialism
He misspoke. He meant to say necessity mothers innovation
Necessity is the mother of invention. It's why for instance some lower cost medical breakthroughs come from developing countries.
Just let him tell the FSR story
LEGEND!
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so good !!
smart man indeed
Romero
Lex is not getting. John Carmack is not great because he wrote games in assembly language. A lot of other things made him great. Assembly language was the way that any professional software on the microcomputers were written. C was becoming more common, but that didn't happen until the mid 80s. If you guy much earlier than that, it's a lot less common.
I was just a kid in High School, and I wanted to write games, so you ask around how it's done, and they tell you a few things, and you read some magazine articles, and look things up in a book, and learn a few tricks, and all the instructions you're being given on how to do things are in assembly language. And you have an assembly, and you start doing it. Also, the instruction set of the 6502 wasn't that complicated. It's weird, but it's not complicated. It's not like it is right now with pipelining, etc., where it's nearly impossible to have a human being write in assembly language that can possibly be better than what a C compiler can produce. It's just not very intuitive to break down instructions in seemingly unusual order that makes the code look less readable, but it's better for the CPU because it can pipeline things.
♥ Commander Keen ♥
Robot from the future
legend
I'm sorry, but how does Lex, at 40 years old, need DOS explained to him... and not know what "game feel" is... and come off like he's 20 years old and new to computers?
I am 25 and I know and have known about DOS and still play games on DOS. I found out about DOS when I was 15, There is no excuse for him LMAO.
@@Born... I'm 42 and I grew up on DOS/Win 3.11 from age 11 until I was 16, haha. Age 16 was my introduction to the amazing Windows 98. Lex is my age so... WTF.
These stupid interruptions and nonsense questions deviating John to a totally boring and different path when he is exactly coming to something interesting, that is so annoying. When he is about to say something that was not said by Romero in any interview or book, we find him answering bullshit like Pascal and Turbo Pascal.
It's such a dicotomy having John Carmack, a really bright, enrgized person interviewed by a sloth like Lex, it's just painful, "is Dos like a pre-cursor to today's OS?" what!?
As a computer scientist I'm surprised Lex didn't already know this history. I'm around the same age and I was fortunate to have CS professors who grew up on punch cards and recounted the history of the field (mostly in the context of evolving design of programming languages over time). Lex must have had an aversion to hearing anything about games, you'd have to go out of your way to avoid this info while being immersed in CS.
Interviews are not really about what the interviewer knows, it's more about asking questions to get answers that the audience may not know
@@Fatvod That's fine but unless Lex completely faked his reaction for the benefit of the audience, then it's still surprising he didn't know this.
Don't think I ever heard a single lecturer in computer science mention it.
Technology ruined the planet.
I think people ruined the planet. Technology gives people opportunities. People decide what those opportunities are.
@@manolkalinov2195 I think you give people way too much credit. People like you seem to not understand what the concept of influence is
@@sicknado What do you envision by 'people like you'? What I do believe is that if people, as a group, do things with good intentions, then a positive outcome is possible. And what do I not understand about influence? Large corporations, or the people in them, took what was an easy way to communicate, and made it dystopian for their benefit. And you're right, maybe I do not understand, there are a million things I do not understand, just as everyone else. Could you give me your point of view so that maybe I can expand my perspective?
@@manolkalinov2195 basically for example by influence I mean that people say if you don't like having a cell phone just don't have one- but its impossible. The only way for that to work- unfortunately- if for everyone else to also give it up. Because, the only reason I would want a phone again is because other people have it. This is well know in the Tech companies- its called media lock.
@@sicknado I think I understand where you're coming from and I agree 100% with that influence. And what's worse, most people are even afraid to admit it. Funnily enough, as a software developer, it took me years to finally get a 'smart phone'. I hate them. Not because of what the offer, but because of the habit-forming and controlling influence they've been made to have. There should be some balance between technology and social interaction. A point where both work to help us as a society. That's what 'true' technologists offer, in my opinion - the tech platform. But that's not what's happened, because corporate-driven sociopathic media frenzy has taken over everything. And, like you said, have locked us in small boxes.
But that underlying tech platform is why this guy John Carmack is so well respected. The games he helped create were 'true-in-spirit' video games, where the game's experience is the product, if that makes sense. And even though most modern games stand on the foundations he laid almost singlehandedly, most of them now are just a front to addict and take money from people.
lex is a clown
This is very niche, who understands 10% of what he is talking about?
Anyone who's followed id from the beginning. I'm not a programmer and still follow it.
The most boring podcast of all time
I can totally see how this can be boring for non software eng.(or related) people, but believe me, it's very valuable for many.