/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5638894
>mmmmmm

Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions, they were concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players had to erase the original Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images; once a Nazi was changed into Barney, there was no way to bring the Nazi back quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized the data so players could replace sound and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He created a subsystem that separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym, suggested by Tom Hall, it stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every time someone booted up the game, the program would look for the WAD file of sounds and images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the main program to a different WAD without damaging the original contents. Carmack would also upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and utilities program so that the hackers could have the proper tools with which to create new stuff for the game.

This was a radical idea not only for games but for any media. It was as if a Nirvana CD came with tools to let listeners dub their own voices for Kurt Cobain’s or a Rocky video let viewers excise every cranny of Philadelphia for ancient Rome. Though there had been some level-editing programs released in the past, no programmer–let alone owner–of a company had released the guts of what made his proprietary program tick. Gamers would not have access to Carmacks graphical engine, but the stuff he was making available was more than just subtly giving them the keys. It was not only a gracious move but an ideological one–a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations. Carmack was no longer a boy dreaming of computers in his Kansas City bedroom; he was the twenty-three-year old owner of a multimillion-dollar company, and he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. He could live the Hacker Ethic big time.