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John Romero, the co-founder of id Software, has responded to a recent social media post by Sandy Petersen, the DOOM, DOOM II, and Quake level designer, in which the latter criticised video game piracy for indirectly gutting id Software, claiming the situation with DOOM is a lot more "complicated" than he is letting on.
Over the weekend, Petersen publicly responded to a Twitter/X account called "Video Game Nostalgia" that was asking for people's opinions on piracy.
In this post, he told video game pirates to go "f**k" themselves "as a man who designed video games from 1988 through 2012", blaming piracy for the death of companies including "Atari, Amiga, Cinemaware, 3D Realms (Duke Nukem!)" and for being responsible indirectly for the large amount of staff departures at id Software following the release of Quake.
In his original post, Petersen had claimed, "70-90% of Doom's players" pirated the game, with the level designer going on to state, "If not for that, we would literally have had so much more [money] for our workspace and upcoming projects", and "Quake may not have gutted id Software."
This led many people online to disagree quite strongly with his interpretation of events, pointing out other, more pressing factors for why many of the companies mentioned ended up dying, and noting that free distribution was part of Doom's marketing approach — Romero being among them.
Romero told Petersen that history is often a lot "messier than 'pirates killed the companies' and stated DOOM was "a complicated example," when it came to piracy, reminding Petersen that DOOM's shareware approach is what helped it reach the world in the first place:
"Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model," wrote Romero. "DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.
"By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended."
He elaborated, "That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number," suggesting that this is where Petersen is potentially getting this percentage from.
He also disagreed with Petersen's assertion that piracy gutted id, telling Petersen that "id is still around and still making games," and stating that, though lost sales may have cost id money, "it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways." In fact, Romero suggests the distribution model may have been what made DOOM "impossible to ignore," implying it may also have driven sales.
If you follow Petersen on social media, you'll probably know this isn't the first time Romero has stepped in to correct him.
In the past, Petersen has made a habit of making some pretty bold and exaggerated claims online, often about the development of Doom, such as that he was responsible for building E1M1, creating the original Doom backstory, and saving the game's shotgun from being cut. Because of this, id Software co-founder John Romero has regularly seen fit to address these claims publicly, usually prefacing his message with a rather polite "Hi Sandy, I hope you’re doing well," before debunking whatever it is Petersen is saying this time around.
This seems to just be the latest example of that, with PC Gamer rather hilariously having kept track of all the previous examples of this, for your reading pleasure.