Endless

Sandy is conflating four stories: - The story of the contract programmer is incorrect, and was before Sandy’s time at id. The contract programmer was hired to do the SNES port of Wolf 3D (not the network code). They ended up not doing it. So, we had to stop development on DOOM for three weeks to do the port. That person was employed by another company at the time, and although they assured us they had approval to do the work, that was not true. To avoid a lawsuit, we gave them rights to publish the Mac version of Wolf 3D. See ch 12 DOOM Guy for this story. The person was a good programmer, but not genius (ie Carmack, Sweeney, Gebelli, Woz). While the story was certainly told to Sandy, it was not told as it happened because Sandy was not there. - The DWANGO story is incorrect. DWANGO happened after DOOM II shipped. John Carmack had nothing to do with that, nor did the contract programmer mentioned above. I wrote the client code for this with Kee Kimbrell. It was a win for id and for our games. See ch 14 in DOOM Guy for this story. - The story of DOOM being banned from universities due to its network code is partially correct. The issue with DOOM 1.0’s network code was it used broadcast packets that flooded networks. DOOM was banned at universities until we released v1.2 on Feb 17, 1994 to fix that. It didn’t hurt us at all. DOOM found a way. - The network code topic is wrong. We never had an external coder for network code. That was id programmer John Cash. John Cash definitely had nothing to do with DWANGO in any way. We never had an external programmer for network code.