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The DOOM, DOOM II, & Quake level designer Sandy Petersen can't stop getting details about id Software's history wrong.
Just one week after his comments on piracy and DOOM, he has once again been corrected by id Software's co-founder, John Romero, for spreading false information — this time about a story regarding the game's dial-up code. I'm not sure if it's deliberate on Petersen's part, a failure of memory, or what, but it seems like almost every time he takes to Twitter/X to share a "fun fact" or an anecdote about the development of Doom, sure enough, you can expect id Software's co-founder John Romero to follow closely after with a correction, suggesting Petersen's recollections are not as accurate as he might believe.
For example, as I mentioned, last week, Romero, who has hyperthymesia (which gives him "highly superior autobiographical memory," according to his memoir Doom Guy: Life in First Person), had to step in to correct Petersen when he suggested that piracy had indirectly "gutted" id.
On that occasion, Romero told Petersen outright, "I do not agree with your framing," before countering the level designer's claims, explaining to Petersen that not only was DOOM developed with free distribution in mind via shareware, and the 20 million shareware installs were not, by default, pirates, but that id's issues during Quake had nothing to do with money, leading to a community note being added to the original post.
For fans of id's games, this proved to be just the latest in a long line of social media corrections directed at Petersen, which actually date back to 2021 (the rest have been compiled in this handy article by PC Gamer), but it certainly wouldn't be the last. That's because this week, Petersen has shared another story that Romero has once again had to swoop in and correct.
The story, which Petersen shared as part of a longer thread, was said to be an example of a time he "was there" when game companies got "fleeced," and started with an example regarding Doom's dial-up internet. In this anecdote, he stated that John Carmack had once hired "a brilliant programmer" to work on Doom "to do the code over dial-up internet." As he claimed, this person "lived out-of-state" and worked at another company, but was given permission to work for id "as a side gig, with the idea being that when they finished at their current job, they would leave and join id.
This didn't end up happening, though, with Petersen saying the contractor's boss had laughed at id when they phoned up, and that while the contractor "WAS a genius programmer", they were also "a pathological liar," having done "zero work on our dial-up code," and having lied to id about their plans to join the company.
As Petersen claims, John Carmack, therefore, ended up using DWANGO, an early online gaming service, to implement a quick dial-up solution ahead of launch, but id's network code had issues that caused the game to be banned at universities across America until the issue was fixed, which "probably hurt" id in "the first month or so." He says ultimately that id never went after this worker, speculating that maybe "the Johns felt that him not getting hired by id Software after he saw Doom's success was punishment enough," something he agreed with.
All in all, it sounds like a great story and the type of behind-the-scenes stuff we typically love to hear on Time Extension, but almost immediately, Romero quote-retweeted Petersen's thread — this time with no well wishes for the level designer — stating, "Sandy is conflating four stories."
In his own post, Romero offered corrections to Petersen's thread, telling his followers that the incident with the dial-up code actually concerned the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D and that it took place before Petersen joined the company, so he "wasn't there" as he had led people to believe.
This is an episode covered in Chapter 12 of Romero's book, which is also featured in Masters of Doom, and was an incident involving an Interplay employee (given the pseudonym Robin in the book, though their identity has previously been revealed as Rebecca Heinemann) who had been contracted to work on the SNES version of the game for Imagineer, without Interplay's permission, but ultimately ended up "flaking" on the team.
This is an incident that caused id to have to stop development on DOOM for three weeks while the port was worked on internally, and for the company to give Interplay the rights to publish "the Mac version of Wolf 3D" to ensure the latter didn't sue them for using any of the programmer's code (which would have been Interplay's copyright-protected material). It's also seemingly been forgiven by both John Carmack and John Romero in the decades since, with both men being among those who paid tribute to the legendary game programmer when she passed away last year.
Remarkably, this isn't the only detail Petersen got wrong, either, with Romero stating that the DWANGO story happened after DOOM II and that "John Carmack had nothing to do with that, nor did the contract programmer mentioned above." Instead, Romero "wrote the client code... with Kee Kimbrell," and, as he noted, "It was a win for id and for our games."
Of everything Petersen posted, one aspect Romero conceded had a kernel of truth was the story of DOOM being banned from universities due to its network code, which Romero said was "partially correct," but said this never really hurt id, as Petersen suggests.
As he explained, "The issue with DOOM 1.0’s network code was that it used broadcast packets that flooded networks. DOOM was banned at universities until we released v1.2 on Feb 17, 1994, to fix that. It didn’t hurt us at all. DOOM found a way.