The birth of id Software

theverge.com:

I was speechless.

I know that may be hard to believe. I talk passionately about games to anyone who listens whether it is about programming techniques, upcoming games and consoles, or the latest game I am into. Softdisk even had a conversational atmosphere.

Still, on September 20th, 1990, I was at a total loss for words. But my silence wasn’t the real story. The reason for my silence — that was the real story.

In the space of about one second, at the age of almost 23, I had glimpsed my future, my colleagues’ future, and the future of PC gaming, and that future was phenomenal.

Moments before losing my capacity to utter a single word, I had arrived early to an empty Gamer’s Edge office to find a 3.5-inch floppy disk on my keyboard with a note from Tom instructing me to run the program on the disk. I inserted the floppy.

I was greeted with a brown title screen announcing, Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement.” One side of the screen had a circular portrait of Dangerous Dave, a character I had created a couple years earlier, in his signature red baseball cap. The other side had a portrait of a judge bedecked in a powdered wig holding up a gavel. I took in the image and wondered how Dave was going to interact with the halls of justice. I had no clue where this was going.

I hit the spacebar and got the shock of my life.

This article is adapted from John Romero’s autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person , out on July 18th.

A familiar video game lit up my PC screen. I was looking at a replica of Super Mario Bros. 3: the billowing white cloud characters, the green shrubs, the construction blocks, and rotating gold coins. But Super Mario didn’t exist on the PC, because the technology that powered it didn’t exist on