If you still remember Doom your childhood was probably awesome, along with most of us who can boast quite a few hours hooked up to the legend that the game was. However, since time flies faster than you can actually guess, it seems like the game is already celebrating its 20th anniversary, with equally legendary John Carmack talking a thing or two about the future of the franchise and what developer id Software can do to make that future a possibility.
id Software co-founder John Carmack, who’s currently serving as the CTO at Oculus VR, was present in an interview with Wired where he spoke about the classic FPS title, alongside taking a few questions regarding a possible Doom 4.
As expected, while Carmack didn’t really reveal anything much regarding a future Doom title (or even a remake for the next generation, for that matter), he did reveal some tiny bits of information about the game’s development.
When asked about the current status of the next Doom game and if indeed it will happen sometime in the future, Carmack stated: “That’s something I can’t really go into much in detail.”
“It’s been hard—one of the things that was a little bit surprising that you might not think so from the outside, but deciding exactly what the essence of Doom is, with this 20-year history, is a heck of a lot harder than you might think. You get multiple Doom fans that have different views of what the core essence of it is, and there’s been a design challenge through all of it.”
“The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often,” he added.
“And that was id’s mantra for so long: ‘It’ll be done when it’s done.’ And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game.”
The last Doom title to have arrived was way back in 2004 when id Software released Doom 3 that was set in the year 2145 on Mars. Good old times, eh?
