From: John Carmack <jo...@idcube.idsoftware.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 93 15:29:18 -0600
Subject: Re: id's choice not to develop for 3DO

Feel free to quote this.

We have a few reasons for not developing on the 3DO, but development
machine bigotry isn't one of them. I used an apple IIGS for snes
development (I am never, EVER, going to work with nintendo again),
and I am suffering with an atari falcon for Jaguar work until I can
port the tools to NEXTSTEP. I wouldn't turn away a mac based
environment.

The biggest reason is that I doubt that 3DO is going to become a huge
success. $750 is way out of line for a pure entertainment machine.
Was the NEO-GEO a success two years ago? We bought one, but we don't know anoyone else that did. I doubt there will be all that many
units sold.

To make matters worse, there are over one hundred third party
licensees suposedly developing on 3DO. If there were only a couple
companies developing for it, they might make money. I predict there
is going to be some serious lossage going on in the 3DO developer
community.

The other major argument is somewhat philosphical. I don't like what
people expect out of CD games. Does anyone think that the cheeseball
dialog in crash and burn is a GOOD addition? It turns my stomach.
People expect CD games to have tons of digitized speech and video,
and the 3DO is going to be strongly associated with it. The joke
here is that if we ever do a CD version of DOOM, you are going to get
the game and "The Making of DOOM" a one hour feature film. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting all this media into their games, and it often actually detracts from it. We don't want
to be part of this crowd.

I would rather cut down to the essentials and fit on a cartridge than
uselessly bulk up on a CD. I have a minimallist sense of aesthetics
in game design.

Many developers are planning on waiting out the eary 32 bit hardware
wars, but I want to do a cool product even if it doesn't make tons of
money. Sandy (our map designer) semi-derisively calls DOOM jaguar my

"reward" for writing DOOM pc. "Good job, you can go play with your
new toys." Smile

Our initial appraisal of the Jaguar was "nice system, but Atari
probably can't make it a success". But when I got the technical
documentation, I was VERY impressed. This is the system I want to
see become a standard platform.

I was slated to do a cut down version of DOOM for the super nintendo
SFX chip, but I kept thinking about how cool a jaguar version of DOOM
would be, and nintendo kept rejecting wolfenstein-snes for bullshit
reasons (a golden cross bonus item might offend christians. right.).

We finaly decided that we didn't want to be a part of the
chicken-and-the-egg problem of new systems not attracting customers
because developers haven't written for the platform because there are
no customers. The jag is cool, I think it has a shot at success, and
I am going to put my time where my mouth is.

Why the jag is cooler than the 3DO (from my point of view): It only
costs $250. The bulk of its processing power is user programmable.
The 3DO has a capable main processor (a couple times better than the
weak 68k in the jag), but most of its power is in custom hardware
that has narrow functionality for affine transformations. The jag
has some stupid hardware for z buffering and gouraud shading, but I
can just ignore it and tell the two 27mhz risc chips to do EXACTLY
what I want. A 64 bit bus with multiple independant processors may
not be the easiest thing to optimize for, but there is a LOT of
potential.

There will probably be a version of DOOM for 3DO. We are talking
with a few companies about licensing out the port. It would be kind
of fun to do it here, but I am eager to get to work on the next
generation game engine that will make DOOM look puny...

John Carmack
Technical Director
Id Software