Game Dev Stories Volume 1 by Craddock David L.;

Author:Craddock, David L.; [Craddock, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-06-30T13:04:21+00:00

6

John Romero

Apple II, id Software, and First-Person Shooters

Over 10 years before John Romero and his cohorts at id Software created Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Quake on IBM PCs, Romero wrote and sold his first commercial games on Apple’s pioneering machine, the Apple II. And even though Apple ceased production of the Apple II family of computers all the way back in 1993, he’s still active in the scene today. He gave the keynote address at the 2012 Kansasfest, an Apple II-centric convention, and as of this writing, he’s hosted three reunion parties where trailblazers from the halcyon days of green screens and dual Disk II drives come face to face and compare notes—often for the first time.

Over the course of two interviews, Romero talked to me about his earliest experiences as a programmer, the magazines he submitted early games to, and why so many of his peers owe their careers to the Apple II.

**

Craddock: How did you become interested in video games?

John Romero: I used to go to the pinball arcade in Tucson, Arizona, called Spanky’s. It was full of pinball machines on one side, and a snack bar on the other side. After I did that for a while, they started to replace some of the pinball machines with electromechanical games like Dune Buggy. This was around 1974, 1975, around there.

After that, they brought in Pong and Targ, and they got rid of electromechanical once everything was black-and-white video games, like Gun Fight and stuff. That was yellow, but still. [laughs]

I was very excited about video games, and in 1976 I moved up to northern California from Tucson. Around ’79, I saw Space Invaders, Tail Gunner, Asteroids, and then in 1980 came Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the one that got me super excited about video games, even though I was already playing them a lot back then. I started programming games in 1979, and in 1980, I decided it was something I had to do [as a career].

Craddock: What was the first computer you learned how to program?

John Romero: The first computer I ever used was a terminal connected to an HP9000 mainframe located at Sierra College in Rockwell, California. My friend and my brother came to the house and said, “Oh my god, you won’t believe this. We can play video games for free up at the college.” I went, “What?!” and I jumped on my bike and we rode our bikes all the way there. This was in the summer of ’79.

We got to the college, and it was summer, so there weren’t many students there. We went into the computer science building, which was about 60 degrees. There were some students on computers in there, these black-and-white terminals, and I saw they were doing some programming stuff. My friend had access to an account from another friend who lived down the street, so he logged in to that account, and that account had a bunch of games of the time, like Poison Cookie and Hunt the Wumpus.

We were playing those games, and they were very different than video games.

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