No regrets at all!

I bought our first NeXT (a ColorStation) just out of personal interest. Jason Blochowiak had talked to me about the advantages of Unix based systems from his time at college, and I was interested in seeing what Steve Job’s next big thing was. It is funny to look back – I can remember honestly wondering what the advantages of a real multi process development environment would be over the DOS and older Apple environments we were using. Actually using the NeXT was an eye opener, and it was quickly clear to me that it had a lot of tangible advantages for us, so we moved everything but pixel art (which was still done in Deluxe Paint on DOS) over. Using Interface Builder for our game editors was a NeXT unique advantage, but most Unix systems would have provided similar general purpose software development advantages (the debugger wasn’t nearly as good as Turbo Debugger 386, though!). Kevin Cloud even did our game manuals, starting with Wolfenstein 3D, in Framemaker on a NeXT.

This was all in the context of DOS or Windows 3.x; it was revelatory to have a computer system that didn’t crash all the time. By the time Quake 2 came around, Windows NT was in a similar didn’t-crash-all-the-time state, it had hardware accelerated OpenGL, and Visual Studio was getting really good, so I didn’t feel too bad moving over to it. At that transition point I did evaluate most of the other Unix workstations, and didn’t find a strong enough reason not to go with Microsoft for our desktop systems.

Over the entire course of Doom and Quake 1’s development we probably spent $100,000 on NeXT computers, which isn’t much at all in the larger scheme of development. We later spent more than that on Unix SMP server systems (first a quad Alpha, then an eventually 16-way SGI system) to run the time consuming lighting and visibility calculations for the Quake series. I remember one year looking at the Top 500 supercomputer list and thinking that if we had expanded our SGI to 32 processors, we would have just snuck in at the bottom.