/vr/ - Retro Games

“Hey,” Romero told Carmack one day at the office, “there’s something you have to see.” He booted up Doom –or at least what was supposed to be Doom– on his computer. Instead, the trumpeting theme of the Star Wars movie began to play. The screen filled with not Doom’s familiar opening chamber but instead a small, steel-colored room. Romero hit the space bar, and a door slid open. “Stop that ship!” a voice commanded from within the game. Carmack watched as Romero jolted down the hall past bleeping droids, white Stormtroopers, laser guns, the deep bellows of Darth Vader. Some hacker had completely altered Doom into a version of Star Wars. Wow, Carmack thought. This is gonna be great. We did the Right Thing after all.

The Right Thing was programming Doom in such a way that willful players could more easily create something like this: StarDoom, a modification, or mod, of their original game. It was an idea hatched after seeing the early modifications that players were creating for Wolfenstein 3-D. That small phenomenon had caught Carmack by surprise, even though he had long hacked games like Ultima himself. The Wolfenstein modifications were different, however, because players weren’t just finding the code that they could change to increase their characters’ health; instead, they were changing their characters altogether, replacing the bosses with Barney.