Author's Note: This interview comes from Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, Shacknews' flagship Long Read feature. You can read the full Long Read here to learn more about the making of id Software's Quake trilogy, the studio's triumphs and turmoil, and the making of other classic FPS games from the '90s including GoldenEye 007, Half-Life, and Team Fortress.

John Romero affectionately refers to Sandy Petersen's block of Quake maps—which comprise almost all of Episode 4: The Elder World—as "insane." Petersen doesn't mind the label. Insanity has factored heavily into nearly all of his creative endeavors since he since he stumbled upon his father's copy of The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales, a WWII Armed Services edition of H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories, at the age of eight.

Petersen joined id Software a mere 10 weeks before Doom was uploaded to the University of Wisconsin's FTP server on December 10, 1993. In that short period, he built 19 of the game's 27 levels, less than half of which stood on a foundation of maps that Tom Hall had built before his departure earlier in the project. Of Doom II's 32 maps, he constructed 17.

Drawing on years of designing tabletop and PC games, Petersen imbued every id game he touched with level constructions that—by his own admission—were not as aesthetically pleasing as those of his peers, but were inarguably distinctive. From grisly tableaus of mutilated Barons of Hell in Doom, to rows of explosive barrels set amid swarms of monsters in Doom II, to pools of water floating in midair in Quake's fourth and final episode, Petersen was responsible for some of the quirkiest, most challenging, and most memorable levels in arguably the most influential shooters of the 1990s.

Petersen and I discussed his attraction to Lovecraft's writings, how he impressed John Romero during his interview at id Software, and the many signatures and indelible marks that set his maps apart from every other.

Sandy Petersen at a convention in 2011.

I grew up in a religious home, and there were times when I had to talk my parents into letting me play certain games, namely Mortal Kombat and Doom. Before you made video games, you made pen-and-paper RPGs that stemmed from your interest in Dungeons & Dragons. Growing up as a Mormon, did you encounter resistance to D&D or other games after witch hunts for those games started to occur?

Sandy Petersen: I didn't get into Dungeons & Dragons until 1974, which is when it first came out. At that time, I was 18. There's two aspects to that. The first is that no one was on the radar saying D&D was satanic. It took years before people started to pretend that that was the case. The other thing is that the Mormons are not actually a fundamentalist Christian sect. We don't really behave like one. Mormons have a lot of variation within them, but in general the "people bothered by D&D" group and the "people worried about satanic rituals"—that's [not a cross-section]. We didn't have to deal with that. The Mormons kind of didn't care.

Now, when Doom came out, there were some Mormons up in a place of Utah that got [upset] over this "satanic" game, and were picketing and saying bad things. I got phone calls from radio stations in Utah, wanting to get my feedback on that. They asked me what my local Mormon church leaders thought of it, and my answer—which was truthful was, "Well, mostly they want to know if they can get free copies of the game so they can play it."

Let me tell you about the one time there was sort of a conflict. Here's the thing: I have no problem depicting demons, partly because that's not what Mormons think demons look like anyway, and partly because they're the bad guys, right? You're totally not in favor of the demons in Doom; you're walking around shooting them every chance you get. Later on, in Quake, Kevin Cloud and Adrian [Carmack] started doing some really nice art. It was sort of creepy, but it was almost a Christian orientation where there were images of Christ. They had patterns of Christ they put up on the wall, usually displayed over a room to make it more ominous. I also had no problem with that, because why would I object to having images of Christ, right?

So, we had these images in the game, and images of demons, despite the fact that almost everyone in the company... either they were atheists, or I didn't know what [faith] they were. But John Romero was making this level, and one of the rules we had was that when you have a button you press on in the game, you put a special texture on it so you can tell it's a button. He put the face of Jesus on a floor button as his texture. I went to him and said, "John?" He said, "Yeah, what's up?" I said, "Look, you know I haven't been all [uptight] about 'We can't be satanic, we have to be good,' but this button that you have to press before you lower the bridge?" He said, "Yeah?" I said, "Probably let's not make our players step on the face of Jesus to lower a bridge." And he goes, "Oh! Good call," and we switched it to a demon face.

He was firmly atheist, but even he could see that that [could be a touchy subject]. He wasn't trying to offend anyone, he just didn't think. That was the one contribution of my Mormon faith to Quake and Doom. They would occasionally ask me, "Is it okay to have images of Jesus?" and I'd say, "Sure, I love Jesus. Just do it in a respectful way," which I think Doom did.

The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales.

You were uniquely suited to design Quake, in particular, because of your knowledge of Lovecraft and work on Call of Cthulhu. How did you discover his writing, and what about it resonated with you?

Sandy Petersen: I was one of those annoying, precocious kids who read a lot. My dad was a science fiction fan from the old days. He had lots of these old science fiction books. We lived in a house where he didn't have anywhere to store the books, so they were all downstairs in big boxes. I would go down into those books and pore through them and look for things to read. I was around eight, and I wasn't able to understand all the books, but I was able to read a lot, so I'd pick out books and take them [upstairs].

I'd read Edgar Allen Poe and liked him, and I liked ghost stories and scary things, so I got this book that was published in 1942 about Lovecraft. I read it, and it just blew me away; I'd never read anything like that. I didn't understand a lot of the stuff that was in it, but it was really cool. When I say I didn't understand, I did know what the words meant; it was more, What's going on in this? I wanted to read more Lovecraft.

One of the things the book had was a lengthy introduction about Lovecraft which referenced stories that weren't in the book. I couldn't find Lovecraft stories anywhere. Then the book vanished. It was gone for three years. I didn't know where the book was, but I remembered that Lovecraft was this really amazing [writer] who I'd never got a chance to investigate. I'd see one Lovecraft story in a collection of scary stories, and I'd go, "Oh, Lovecraft. That's the guy."

When I was 12, I found out where my book had gone: I'd forgotten I'd loaned it to a friend, and he brought it back after three years. When I was 14, I found out that the local college library had hardback copies of the old Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's tales, and I could check them out with my junior-high badge. I checked them out and read them. I'd check them out every six months and read them all again, just saying, "This guy is amazing." 

I read other things, but there was something about Lovecraft that really spoke to me. I'm not exactly sure what. Maybe it was the combination of science fiction and horror; maybe it was his semi-logical approach to horror. I know a lot of people like illogical, vague horror where things are not clear, and that's okay. I have no problem with that. But Lovecraft was always pretty straightforward. He was big on fear of the unknown. It wasn't really psychological horror. People would go insane, but it wasn't really psychological horror; there were actual things trying to get you. Everything was very [tangible], which I liked.

About when I turned 15 or so, the college library found out that the Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's books were worth hundreds of dollars, so they put them under lock and key; I couldn't get to them anymore. When I turned 17, Ballantine released Lovecraft's stories in paperback. I was able to use my small amount of money from various part-time jobs to buy them. Since then, Lovecraft has been in print. He was still a super experimental writer. Every person I knew who knew about Lovecraft had learned about him through me; I evangelized him.

It's hard for me to verbalize exactly what struck me about Lovecraft. I think that's partly because I've [admired his work] for so long, since I was eight years old, and I certainly couldn't verbalize thoughts I had at that age. It was just everything about him. It amazed me. He wrote long, fancy words that I liked, and I'd have to look them up sometimes. Also, his approach. He did things beyond what any other horror writer had done. He had monsters that were going to destroy the world, like Cthulhu. He had a whole town full of monsters. He had eldritch horrors, invisible monsters bigger than a house. 

And there were implications of other things going on. He never just told a story; there were all these implications [layered] above them, and each of those implications could have been other stories. These things drew me to him. I started out with his short stories before moving on to longer ones, and even the short stories had implications that amazed me.

Part of it may have been the long slog of trying to find his books and read the stories. It took me eight years to gain access to more of Lovecraft's tales, and even then I couldn't find all of them. It was almost like I was one of the heroes in his stories, trying to find this ancient tome of forgotten lore. 

But I read Lovecraft differently than other people [today]. I had the experience of reading the story The Call of Cthulhu without any idea what a "Cthulhu" was, other than a word. I had no clue. When Cthulhu shows up at the end and he's huge, that was a surprise to me. I don't think that's an experience that would be possible to have today. I'm not saying I had it better or worse; it's just different. Now, if someone reads the story The Call of Cthulhu, they probably have an idea what Cthulhu is from the start.

It was all those things together [that intrigued me].

Cthulhu rises again.

Your path to Lovecraft is interesting, because what I love about Lovecraft is this idea that there are these eldritch beings all around us, and if we keep poking and searching, we can rip the veil aside, and there they are; they've been there the whole time. How did you become principal designer on the Call of Cthulhu game?

Petersen: What happened was, I got into D&D when I was 18 or so. I made levels and things, and then got into another game called RuneQuest, which I really liked. A friend of mine encouraged me to contact the company, Chaosium, about some stuff I'd made for RuneQuest. They liked it, and I published something in their magazine, then I published the RuneQuest Bestiary for them with a big list of monsters, and they liked that.

In talking with them, I proposed that I would do a supplement for the RuneQuest game. It was like D&D—not quite the same rule system, but still fantasy with guys and girls running around with swords and spells. It was set in the Dream Lands world, which is a high-fantasy world. They said they weren't interested because they already had someone doing a game set in the modern world involving Lovecraft stories. That was really interesting to me. I said, "Can I help in any way? Can I read manuscripts?" I was fascinated by the idea of a Lovecraft game.

They called back and said, "This guy who's doing it is doing kind of a crappy job. He's going really slow." And they gave me the entire project, out of the blue. I asked to get the materials the other guy had written, but they never actually sent me anything, so I did it all from scratch, which was fine. So, I really liked Lovecraft, and I'd never missed a deadline [for Chaosium], so they liked those things.

The other thing that was interesting was that Lovecraft wasn't well-known yet, certainly not like he is now. The Stuart Gordon movies [Re-Animator, From Beyond] hadn't come out, and nobody had played my game, Call of Cthulhu yet. Those were the two things that kind of popularized him. The general attitude toward Lovecraft was that he was a hack; he wasn't widely appreciated. The Chaosium guys thought he was a hack, too, and didn't care for his stories. But they were smart guys. A lot of people, if they didn't care about a movie or something they had to do, they'd do an exploitation job, or even a parody. The Chaosium guys said, "If we try to do a Lovecraft game, we'll get it wrong, so we'll get this guy, who loves Lovecraft, to do it. Then we'll have [the support of] Lovecraft fans for life."   

That was a stroke of genius. That's why the third movie in many superhero series sucks because the original director is gone, and they bring in the guy who thinks superheroes are for kids. They said, "[Superheroes] are jokes, I'll just make a comedy," and [the movie] is terrible, right? That's when you get movies like Batman & Robin. Chaosium didn't make that mistake. And I didn't know they hated Lovecraft until after I worked there.

Rulebook for Call of Cthulhu.

What did being in that position give you the chance to do with Lovecraft's mythos? Growing up a fan, did you have certain stories or ideas you'd wanted to explore?

Sandy Petersen: I wanted to have the player feel like he was a character in a scary story, primarily Lovecraft's. I wanted him to feel like there was nothing that could help him, and it was up to him. I did a lot of things differently. Most horror-themed roleplaying games will cast you as part of a government agency—some kind of thing to give you help and give you an easy way to find stories. Like, your assignment is to go to New England and explore this old house. I didn't have anything like that; my [characters] were on their own.

I also made the game very contrarian. It's very different from the usual RPG. In typical roleplaying games, the general thing is you go out, beat the monsters, get experience or money, and then you're better. Then you go back and fight again. There's a grind to upgrade your character. Call of Cthulhu was totally different in that the more your character went out and did things, the crappier he got. You were gradually being ground down. Instead of grinding to [upgrade] yourself, grinding caused you to grow more insane or get infected by alien viruses. The characters get worn out. Your character ends in a terrible fate. Whereas in a regular game you grind your character up to level 14 and conquer the world, in Call of Cthulhu, you're kind of feeling, yeah, at some point my guy will die a spectacular death. That's his endgame, in a sense.

Also, you're trying to avoid combat instead of [seeking it out]. In Call of Cthulhu, fighting is the last event in the whole experience, so I had to find other things for players to do to make up for the fact that you weren't going into dungeons and fighting. That's where the library use came from. That's what you're doing: You're investigating, exploring, gathering information. How often do you get to do that?

I felt good about this because my logic was that if you wanted to have a game where you could go fight monsters to get stronger, most other roleplaying games did that. But if you wanted a game where your character felt helpless and the weakest monster, a cultist, is stronger than you are? Well, he's probably tougher than you because he's bloodthirsty and has an organization behind him. Call of Cthulhu did that. You're weak, but when you pull off a victory, it's great. Even if some of your guys died doing it, that's okay because you saved the world.

Now you can see that Chaosium is doing [revisions to] Call of Cthulhu. Everyone seems to get this idea the way to improve Call of Cthulhu is to make your characters tougher and able to fight monsters. I think, if my Call of Cthulhu had done that, it wouldn't be as popular as it is now. Because it was contrarian, it gave an alternative experience. This goes along with my theory that if you blend adventure and action with horror, you end up with an action story with horror elements; you don't have a horror story. Alien, the movie, is a horror story. Aliens is not. It's an action movie with horror elements. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not horror.

Seated at the head of the table, Sandy Petersen demoes his Cthulhu Wars tabletop game. Petersen published Cthulhu Wars through Petersen Games, his indie game company.

You mentioned that Chaosium was wise to hire you because you were a Lovecraft fan, but did being so contrarian to other RPGs make them skittish? Because once D&D took off, that's the type of game everybody wanted to make. Did you encounter any sort of resistance?

Sandy Petersen: In general, they got my vision. The only resistance was, in the original game, your sanity went down and never went back up again. They wanted to include a mechanism for your sanity to increase. We incorporated that, but it doesn't increase by much, though. If you win an adventure, your sanity goes up by an amount equal to the monsters you killed or something like that. It can help your character last a little longer, but I was fine with that.

They were a small, quirky group out in Berkeley that smoked a lot of weed. They were what they were, so they were okay with weird stuff. Of course, none of us had any idea that Call of Cthulhu was going to become by far the most long-lived and popular horror game. For years, it was Chaosium's flagship game. I guess it still is. Now they love it. No one there can say anything bad about Lovecraft now if you were to ask them.

How did that experience help you get a foot in the door in the videogame industry?

Sandy Petersen: It did lead to my job at id Software, but indirectly. Even though the game was a big success, pen-and-paper roleplaying games are not particularly remunerative. I was [making next to nothing] living out in California. I took a job to do computer games at MicroProse. There, probably the best-known thing I worked on was Sid Meier's Civilization. I was way down on the [credits], but I was still on the team. I did a bunch of other computer games.

When MicroProse started suffering its death by hubris—that a lot of software companies seem to succumb to—I was looking around for a new job. A friend put me in touch with id Software; they were looking for a designer. Or, to be more accurate, their artists were looking for a designer. What happened was that the programmers at id Software, John Romero and John Carmack—the Johns—they were pretty unhappy with Tom Hall's work [on Doom]. They decided that designers were bad and made games worse. This was all stuff I learned after the fact. They wanted to [replace game designers] with an artist to design levels. They brought in an artist; the artist designed a little level; but id wasn't too sure.

Then the artists, Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack, said, "No, the problem with Tom is he just isn't the type of designer we need." They looked at my work and their claim was this: "If there was a designer who would work for us, it'd be this guy. He's made a lot of stuff; he's worked in software; he's worked with horror properties. He should know his stuff."

So, they brought me in, and the first thing I did was I blew away John Romero at dinner by being the only guy he'd ever met who knew more about games than he did. I had no idea I was trying to do that, but apparently he was impressed. They said, "Here's our [editing] tool, make a level." I spent a few days putting together a level, and what the artists had done, apparently, was they'd done a stairway. I made part of a level with doors that opened and closed, secret panels, monsters, acid floors that would rise up—I did all this stuff. I was amazed their editor was that far along, but it was, so I put together this whole visual level.

That impressed John Carmack, that I was able to do so much compared to what the artists had done in their time. I'm not saying they were bad artists, but the whole job of "level designer" didn't even exist, right? No one had thought of that as a [position], but that's effectively what I was going to be. The artists felt justified, and I got hired. I did 20 levels in Doom, and 17 levels in Doom 2, and a fourth of the levels in Quake. I made stuff for Quake 2, but they did the Kremlin thing after I left and erased my history working on the game. They erased stuff that was mine, but I didn't really care; I was happy to get out of there.

Doom E2M6: Halls of the Damned was the first map Petersen made for Doom. He added wings, traps, and enemies over weeks of fine tuning. (Image credit: Strategy Wiki.)

Do you remember what knowledge specifically impressed John Romero?

Sandy Petersen: We were there just having dinner, and I was just being pleasant. I thought, We're having dinner, so let's talk. John would say, "Do you know about this game?" I said, "Oh, yeah," and talked about how much I liked it. I think we talked about Dungeon Master, and a little bit about the first Zelda game. Zelda II as well, and about how it was [worse]. We talked about D&D, and the differences between D&D and RuneQuest.

You've interviewed John Romero, so you know that he talks constantly, every single second. He was doing that, the John Romero charm thing, and that was fine; I was charmed. But I could do that, too. Afterwards I guess he told the others, "Wow, Sandy knows a lot about games," because I would say, "Oh, have you seen this game?" and he would say, "No, I haven't." As I recall, he brought up games I hadn't seen either, but he was more impressed by the games I brought up that he hadn't seen.

John Romero had what the other guys called the bit flip. Either you were the absolute bomb and he loved everything about you, or you were Satan and he hated everything about you. I triggered the bit flip off and on.

How did the skills you'd learned designing pen-and-paper games help with your work designing levels for video games? Or did they not translate?

Sandy Petersen: They translated to an extent. I'd been building D&D levels since I was 18. When you're a Game Master in Dungeons & Dragons, you create dungeons, lairs for players to go adventuring in. In the early days, they didn't have to make any sense. You'd put traps in them, and monsters, and have spooky things for them to see. All of that transferred 100 percent to making Doom levels, even the part about it not making sense.

Originally, there were two groups of levels I was doing. I was taking Tom's levels, which he had done a few of, and some of them were stubby. Sometimes they would have only one texture in the entire level. Everything was silver. To illustrate how amateurish id Software was, the reason his levels were all silver is because that was the first texture the artists had designed. It was everywhere because that was the only texture he had. When I did my levels, they weren't all silver, but occasionally I'd put in a silver plate somewhere. The programmers would say, "Don't use silver, it's overused." I'd say, "Dude this game isn't even out yet. It's overused because you saw a lot of it in Tom's early levels." They didn't really get that.

So, I took Tom's levels and added monsters and traps and other Doom stuff to bring them up to par. I spent weeks on all of Tom's levels, and when the game came out, id Software did its Kremlin thing where they said, "Let's take away all of Tom's credit in the game." I said, "You really shouldn't do that. Tom did a lot of this and that level." He also helped write what they called the Doom Bible. I insisted that his name go in on the levels. Then I did my new levels.

Doom E2M6: Halls of the Damned. This island in corridors flooded with acid provides a respite to players as they dash to safety. Petersen’s levels tended to be graphically unadorned; he added the cadaver hanging from the ceiling as a concession to another id designer who jokingly recommended he add something to give the corridor some color.

I've talked to other Doom and Quake designers, and they mentioned that everybody had trademarks, or signatures. What were some of yours?

Sandy Petersen: First, because I was never an artist, I was never a true level designer. My levels were often not very attractive, but they're often very striking. They would do things [with gameplay] that hadn't been done before. For example, I did the first outdoor level [in Doom], I did the first level that looked like a city [in Doom 2]. Then, after I'd done an outdoor level, John Romero would do one.

I also had a feature where I would try to have [the tone] be ominous. One signature move was you'd walk into a room, or there'd be a BFG on a pedestal with a spotlight on it. And you knew that the moment you touched the BFG, monsters would teleport in from everywhere and it would be hell on earth and they'd be all over you. One level was named after that signature: Tricks and Traps [level 8 of Doom 2].

I also was generally skimpier with ammo. I wanted you to use your brain on my levels. I don't know if that was good or bad. John Romero would give you all the ammo you wanted; you could blow up everything. That was his thing, and that worked because he had really fast-paced levels. I think, at his weakest, he would do a lot of meaningless things. For example, when you're about to be ambushed by a monster on one of my levels, I prided myself on you always kind of knowing that it was going to happen. Like, here's this long hall with lights flickering. You know something's up.

In some of John's maps, you walk down to a place, and then [monsters] would teleport in behind you. I usually didn't do that kind of thing; it was more like a story for me, I guess.

On that note, probably my favorite level in all of Doom is E2M8, the Tower of Babel. What I really liked about it is it sets a scene perfectly. The first thing you see is these Barons of Hell impaled on the wall. When you go out, you see an enemy, you shoot, and you hear this roar, and you realize you just woke something up.

Sandy Petersen: That level was really fun because that level was an example of me at my best. What you got was this huge, outside, open area with these big pillars and an ominous sky. As I've said, it wasn't the most beautiful level, but it was striking. The Barons impaled against the wall was a clue that something really bad was there, and then you heard the roar, which of course is the Cyberdemon. You know something really terrible is around there.

I wanted [the atmosphere] to be ominous as you worked up to that confrontation. Something was going to come and be really nasty, and you'd have to run around this giant, open level. Part of where that came from was from playing the very last level in Wolfenstein [3D]. There's a giant hall lined with pillars, and then a boss comes out and fights you. Of course, the pillars in the Tower of Babel serve the same function, which is you can hide behind them. But that worked in another way: You couldn't always see the monster because sometimes he would be behind them.

Like most of Petersen’s Doom and Quake maps, E2M8: Tower of Babel was aesthetically simplistic, but every piece of architecture served a purpose: to pull players into a fight against the Cyberdemon, and give them places to regroup during the fray.

That stood out to me because up until that point, the Barons of Hell had been at the top of the food chain. As a kid, I knew that any monster that could make short work of four of them, let alone one, had to be even worse.

Sandy Petersen: That was the genius of Adrian Carmack. He gave me those Barons, and I knew just where I wanted to use them. He said, "Can you use this art anywhere?" I said, "Oh, boy, can I. I know exactly where I want it." I knew it would set the tone. People would go, "Uh-oh, something killed Barons of Hell?"

I think E3M6: Mount Erebus, which was another one of your maps, was the largest level in Doom.

Sandy Petersen: Yeah, I was constantly breaking their level-making engine. That always made John Carmack mad. He wanted things to be smaller, lighter, easier to handle. He always cared about speed of programming, and I was making these sprawling levels that went all over the place.

What was the process of designing a level that big? Because the first time you play it, you think, Oh, wow. There's so much here. Where do I even go? I'm curious how you map out, and set a pace for, a level that huge and intricate.

Sandy Petersen: In every case, the way I did all my levels was I would start with a section of the dungeon. Often that would be the starting area, though not always. It was always what I thought might be the start. I would think, What would be a cool theme for this [level]? For example, there was one level [E3M4: House of Pain] that was based on a pair of lungs and an intestinal track. I think E2M3 was the warehouse level; I modified that from one of Tom Hall's. I'd figure out a theme and try to work around it. If I got tired of a theme partway through, I'd add to it. Like, "Oh, this part of it should be absolute hell."

So, I would do a little part of a level. Then I would test that part out to make sure it worked. Then I would add another section to it and test that part out. It was almost episodic: I'd go through each part and the level would get bigger. Then I'd say, "Okay, I've come to the end of this section. Here, I'll get the blue key, and I'll put a blue door near the start so I have to go back and open it." The blue door would lead somewhere, and maybe I'd give you some [item] to send you back to another part. I'd want to add a clue to that part, so I'll make sure you can see a chainsaw or something sitting behind a window, so you know you'll want to get there eventually. Their desire became to get the chainsaw, which let me draw them toward it.

Then I'd say, "You know what? This starting area isn't working for me. I've got to add an annex to it, so before you get to it you have to go through this long hallway full of scary things." Sometimes I would get [assets]. John Carmack would come and say, "I've put in this new functionality that lets the lights flicker, so do that in your levels." I'd have to figure out a way to use that, because that was the order from on high.

I did the level that was a big cathedral [E3M5], which had a huge pentagram in the middle. Levels would just grow as I added on to them, but eventually I'd feel that a level was big enough. I played through my levels every time [I added to them], so I'd eventually say, "There's enough stuff in this now. I'm having fun playing this level and feel like I've accomplished something. It's good to go." I'd put it aside and go to the next level, then later I'd go back to an earlier level and play it again, and I'd look for cracks, things I could add. Like, "You know, this would be a great place for a sniper to sit." I'd pop one of those in. Or, "I want a big surprise here."

One of the things I'd do while playing a level is I'd run around and look for things that caught my eye that, if I was a player, I'd expect something to be there. Maybe a secret door. Like, "There's a big expanse of [bare] wall. There should be something here." If something didn't work, I'd delete it and save it for a later level.

Actually, open a Web browser and pull up the map of E2M6. That was the first map I did.

Doom 2 Map 23: Barrels of Fun throws the player from the frying pan into the fire right from the start.

Oh, Halls of the Damned. Yeah, I love that level.

Sandy Petersen: This was the map that got me my job at id. It was the first level I ever did. Now, of course, it wasn't complete. What happened was I made the start area and a door to open. You go into that room, and I said, "Oh, I should have a secret behind the other door and have a monster in there." That's where that came from.

Then you walk into that initial hall with all the pillars, and there's a stairway. That section in the middle was the stuff that got me my job. You're fighting, and there's a hall off to the side; you could run in there really quick and get a treasure [large medkit], and if you didn't get out fast enough you'd die in the acid, so it was a little treat you could get if you ran quickly. Then there was a surprise when the bridge started to lower [Berserk pack].

You need all three colored keys to get out, so you have to go running through the dungeon looking for them. There are essentially three sections you go to in order to get all the keys. The lower left is the section that has all the dark rooms that are spooky and hard to see things in. When you go down the hall, you hear monsters growling. The three areas where you get the keys are very different from each other. It's [the level] really like four mini levels: the starting area, the blue-key area, the red-key area, and the yellow-key area. They have almost nothing in common with each other, because at that time I hadn't learned how to integrate [chunks of] levels. Not that you necessarily have to.

Another feature of my map is that they don't always lend themselves well to deathmatch. This map [E2M6], for example, is a terrible deathmatch map. If you run down into the dark halls, you have to hope someone wanders down there after you. Deathmatch maps are better if there's some [quick] way to run through the level. I didn't have that, but of course, no one was thinking about that at that time.

The eerie music for that level fit in so well, too. Did level designers have any input on the music that would be used for their maps?

Sandy Petersen: I did not have any input, no. None of us really did. We just had Bobby Prince do them, a guy from Florida. He wrote all our music for us. I thought he did a really great job, but eventually the other id guys did their bit-flip routine. That's why we got Trent Reznor for Quake. I thought his music was great, too. I wasn't particularly a fan. They said, "We got Trent Reznor!" and I said, "Who's he?!" and they said, "Nine Inch Nails?" And I said, "What's that?!" I was 10 years older than all the other [id] guys, so Trent Reznor wasn't on my radar as an artist.

He came by, and I met him, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, actually. They all went to dinner with him. I didn't go; I had something else I was doing because I wasn't super excited about it. Someone at the dinner put PCP in American McGee's drink, and he got really sick for several days. We thought we knew who did it, but weren't sure. But we knew it wasn't Trent [Reznor].

So, you see, we were so innocent. When I worked at Chaosium, they would openly smoke weed. When making business decisions, they'd sit in the back and say, "I'm going to go cook up some hash for us." I'd always think, Oh, hash, that sounds yummy. No. Not that kind of hash. But they were very open about it. I'd be there, and they'd pass the [pipe] around, and they'd always politely pass it to me, just to give me a chance. I would never take it. I'm sure I got plenty of second-hand [exposure], but that's all right; what are you gonna do?

But at id, they weren't even hard drinkers. Those guys were amazingly clean cut. They had to figure out [American had been given] PCP from what the doctors said. Maybe some of them smoked dope at home, but if they did, they didn't talk about it.

Deceptively compact, Doom E3M5: The Unholy Cathedral uses teleporters to send players back and forth to new sections.

I'm interested in your take on Doom versus Doom 2. Many fans point to Doom 2 as their favorite, but I prefer the original because it had a mix of horror and action. Halls of the Damned is a perfect level to demonstrate that. I just wondered if you had a preference between the two games, as someone who made so many levels for each of them.

Sandy Petersen: We learned a lot on Doom 1. With Doom 2, we weren't constrained by the episode [format]. But I always have to go for the first one. Everything was fresh and new. No one had seen anything like it. It was cool and exciting. I did do new things in Doom 2, like the city levels. But everything was new in Doom 1.

I don't know which one is more fun to play. It took about six weeks to do a level and get it to where I felt it was polished and finished. Now, that wasn't six weeks only on that level. I spent probably two weeks only on one level, and then there were four weeks where I'd work on other levels, try new things out, get an idea and go back to an older level. So, I played all those levels a lot.

In fact, I'm often asked this question of my modern games, "What's your favorite civilization in the Cthulhu Wars?" The answer is always the same: The level, or the feature of the game that's getting the most love and attention for me at any given time, is the one that isn't fully working. It's broken, or something doesn't feel right about it, so I spend all my time playing and focusing on the things that are the worst in order to make them good and bring them up to [the standard of] the other levels. So, my favorite thing is always the worst thing, which I know doesn't make logical sense to most players.

That said, some of the levels were super fun and easy to design. Tricks and Traps was super fun in Doom 2.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite Doom 2 levels. When I wanted to play for a few minutes, I'd load Doom 2, jump to that level, give myself all the weapons, and then go into the room with all the Barons and the Cyberdemon and just watch them fight.

Petersen: Isn't that a great fight? I love that fight. You have to be careful not to participate or they'll turn on you. That level was an octagon with eight different places, each of which is a prank. That was really fun to design for me. Another big thing about Doom 2 was I no longer had any of Tom Hall's levels that I had to adapt to my way of thinking. A lot of levels in Doom 1 were mine from the start, but I think the combination of what he'd done and my trying to adapt it often led to interesting results. They weren't all mine, which was kind of fun. I'm not saying my way was better or worse; I was just different.

I named all the levels, is another thing.

That you worked on, or in the entire game?

Sandy Petersen: All the levels in the game were named by me. John and American didn't name their levels. I had to name them; that was part of my job.

When he talks to me, John Romero usually refers to levels by their episode and map numbers.

Sandy Petersen: Yeah. Oh, Barrels of Fun [Doom 2, Level 21] was really fun to design, too. I love the opening to that level. You have to charge down the hall through barrels and dodge backward at just the right moment so you don't get exploded.

Like all boss levels in Doom, E1M8: Phobos Anomaly offers little in the way of distractions. Petersen wanted players to engage the episode’s twin bosses, Barons of Hell, as soon as possible.

That seems to be another signature of yours: The first thing you see at the start sets the tone for your levels.

Sandy Petersen: Yes. I like to let players know what's in store for them. I telegraph things. I think that's more fun for the player. Also, you get that in E1M8, which is one of the two levels I did for Episode 1. You start off and see the barrels below, with all the demons around, and if you hit the barrels just right, you can [explode] all the demons.

That was interesting, too, because it's sort of a gimme. You see a big pack of monsters, but you can kill all of them with a single bullet by shooting a barrel. From there, the progression takes you from that, an easy challenge, to a more significant challenge, the first fight against Barons of Hell.

Sandy Petersen: Yeah. You know, I think Map 10 of Doom 2—and I could be wrong because this was 23 years ago—I think that was the original boss level for Episode 1 of Doom. Tom Hall started it, and I ended up building one from scratch, which became E1M8. But then I said, "Maybe this map [Map 10] isn't so bad, but just not a boss level." I took elements of it—going through this big underground base, and then at the end was the Baron of Hell—but I just said, "This isn't a boss level. A boss level should be themed around the boss. It's the boss's house." That was my feeling. The boss levels in Doom and Doom 2 weren't ordinary levels, or in Quake. The boss levels were [unique].

They also had a much tighter focus. You didn't have to worry about going through a labyrinth.

Sandy Petersen: Yeah, and even if you didn't want to get to the boss, you were forced to fight it. I did get assistance from John Romero on E1M8. I wanted to have this giant, star-shaped [interior] and for all the walls to lower after you killed the Barons of Hell. John Carmack didn't want to do it, so Romero went to bat for me.

Cthulhu Wars.

Sandy Petersen continues to venture further beyond the veil. In the summer of 2017, he crowdsourced Cthulhu Wars Onslaught 3, smashing through his Kickstarter goal of $100,000 by raising over $1 million.

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