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[IMG News]

In honor of the tenth anniversary of Apple's merger with NeXT Software John Romero's blog offers a look back at his experience with the NeXTSTEP OS during the creation of Doom and Quake at id Software. NeXTSTEP eventually served as the foundation for today's Mac OS X.

We wrote all of DOOM and Quake's code on NeXTSTEP. We debugged the code in NeXTSTEP with DOOM and Quake's 320x200 VGA screen drawing in a little Interceptor window while the rest of the screen was used for debugging code. When all the code ran without bugs we cross-compiled it for the Intel processor on NeXTSTEP then turned over to our Intel DOS computers, copied the EXE and just ran the game. The DOS4GW DOS-Extender loaded up and the game ran. It was that easy.

I'll bet you didn't know that DOOM, DOOM II and Quake weren't the only games developed on NeXTSTEP. When I got Raven Software to agree to develop Heretic for us I had them buy several Epson NeXT computers (Intel based) and I flew up to Madison, WI to get them all set up and teach them how to develop the game with our tools and engine. It was a great time I'll never forget - seeing their team get excited about the power of the new environment and that they got the game developed and released in under a year. They signed on for another title and developed Hexen on NeXTSTEP as well.

To read the entire post head over to the site listed below.

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