December 10th will mark the 30th anniversary of Doom, the legendary first-person shooter from Id Software. So, to celebrate John Romero and John Carmack are getting together to talk about the creation of the game live on a special livestream.
The news comes courtesy of John Romero himself, who announced the special livestream on Twitter last Friday (November 3rd), and in the process further proved that the pair are still on speaking terms despite going their separate ways and building vastly different careers ever since their high-profile split in 1996.
The news obviously has generated a lot of excitement among fans who will no doubt be tuning in to hear what both men have to say about the legacy of the FPS classic and also prompted some relieved comments from those who thought the pair's differences were irreconcilable.
In fact, in response to one comment about the pair's relationship, Romero posted an excerpt from his recent book Doom Guy: Life In First Person to give people a more nuanced account of their friendship as it stands today:
"Much has been written about our working relationship and our eventual breakup. It’s written as if we were fifty-year-old Stanford MBAs who knew everything about business and not overworked, constantly crunching kids in our twenties with the whole world staring at us as we tried to do the best we could while creating a tech and a design that the world had never before seen. It’s written in polarizing terms, ‘animosity’ being a favourite, with one of us pitted against the other because just makes for a better story. The truth is that Carmack and I were friends, and we cared about each other, and we still do. We talked, we laughed, and like all friends, sometimes we quarrelled and took shots at each other. We made great decisions, good decisions, and terrible partnership-ending decisions. As you read through all that happened, keep these things in mind. As Carmack stated in a 2022 episode of Lex Friedman’s podcast, this chapter of our lives certainly could have gone a different way if we’d been more mature and more experienced and not the twentysomethings we actually were, and I fully agree."
If you want to tune into the anniversary livestream, you can catch it live on December 10th at 8pm GMT on Romero's Twitch channel. The historian David L. Craddock will be the moderator for the discussion.