Cloud and Willits stumbling in to id in the morning.

Kevin Cloud

Kevin Cloud: When you're creating a game, and seeing it evolve every day, you don't get the chance to experience playing it the same way a gamer does -- you can't get that fresh, out-of-the-box experience. Even despite the great reviews, tens of thousands of people playing the game, and the "mainstream" press that had really started to take notice of the game and id, the idea that we had really created something that would be so influential didn't really solidify for me until much later (1996), when DOOM was inducted into Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.

Kevin Cloud: I hope so. The barriers are high, but not insurmountable. Eventually, the Internet will become a legitimate source for game distribution, and when that happens I think we'll start seeing a revival of small, self-funded teams getting great games to market. id continues to release the full source code to our older titles (under the GPL) as a way for "garage developers" to create games on our technology that they can release commercially without paying us anything. An independent developer could freely use the Quake II engine (the same technology that has powered million-unit selling games) to develop their own game and release it at retail -- that's not a bad deal.

Kevin Cloud: The team had developed titles for the PC at Softdisk. Since we began as a shareware developer there wasn't any thought towards making games for consoles, and the arrival of VGA really separated the PC from other home systems. Also, around the same time we began work on DOOM, several PC game developers had ambitions to create some type of real-time first-person game. What separated DOOM from the other first-person titles was not just the technology available on the PC, but that technology combined with the simple fast-action gameplay and frightening (for that time) atmosphere.

Kevin Cloud: I think our greatest design challenge was to balance between realism and fun. We had some false starts as we tried to make things a bit too realistic. But since we developed DOOM in less than a year, I can't really say there were really any BIG challenges.

Kevin Cloud: My favorite part of the DOOM development was the variety of stuff I got a chance to work with. Moving from concept drawing, to sculpture, to camera work, and back to pixel work was fun.