On a recent trip to the US I dug up some old items of mine from storage that indicate the beginning of my game developer roots. First, here’s a picture of me at 15 years old along with John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Shawn Green from id Software. It was taken in 1996 at the Computer Game Developers Conference, or CGDC, which later became the GDC we know and love today.
At the time this was taken I was playing a lot of Doom 2 and it was awesome for those guys to take some time out to chat with an aspiring game developer who looked up to them. I ran into Romero at GDC 2009 and he was just as friendly as ever. Doom 2 is still one of my all time favorite games.
The photocopied check in the upper right is from my first job as an intern at a defunct game developer named Rocket Science Games. That company was in a building on 2nd and Townsend in San Francisco. The same building now houses Secret Level and ngmoco.
Next we move onto early experiments in game design. Below is a map of a pen and paper RPG (geek alert) I created as a kid with a childhood friend of mine. Construction paper for the win!
We were working on that right around the same time I started to teach myself how to program, around 11 years old. The game was called “Catiso”. I don’t remember many of the details unfortunately but I do remember that we had a rulebook to go along with the maps. Hopefully I’ll find that someday. I bet lots of game developers have fun game designs from their youth too. It would be great if someone shared a story in the comments.
Finally, this isn’t related to me but here is a cool video from Romero that was recorded during the creation of Doom. It’s great that he uploaded it – it’s fun to see how small id Software was during the creation of one of the biggest games of all time.
A Visit to id Software from john romero on Vimeo.
Really great anecdote. I like seeing the young Mark Cooke.