Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  Born on August 20, 1970, John D. Carmack II—or Jondi as he was nicknamed—grew amid the fruits of his parents’ hard work. After his father became the nightly news anchor for one of the big three television stations in Kansas City, Missouri, the family moved to an upper-class suburb, where his younger brother, Peter, was born. There, Carmack went for the best education in town at a Catholic elementary school called Notre Dame. Skinny, short, with unruly blond hair and large glasses he had worn since before he was one year old, Carmack quickly distinguished himself. In second grade, only seven years old, he scored nearly perfect on every standardized test, placing himself at a ninth-grade comprehension level. He developed a unique speech impediment, adding a short, robotic humming sound to the end of his sentences, like a computer processing data: “12 times 12 equals 144 . . . mmm.”

  At home, he grew into a voracious reader like his parents, favoring fantasy novels such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He read comic books by the dozen, watched science fiction movies, and, most enjoyably, played Dungeons and Dragons. Carmack, more interested in creating D&D than playing, immediately gravitated to the role of Dungeon Master. He proved himself to be a unique and formidable inventor. While most Dungeon Masters relied on the rule book’s explicitly charted styles of game play, Carmack abandoned the structure to devise elaborate campaigns of his own. After school, he would disappear into his room with a stack of graph paper and chart out his game world. He was in the third grade.

  Despite his industriousness, there were some things Carmack couldn’t escape. When assigned to write about his top five problems in life, he listed his parents’ high expectations—twice. He found himself at particular odds with his mother, the disciplinarian of the family. In another assignment, he wrote about how one day, when he refused to do extracredit homework, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door.

  Carmack began lashing out more at school—he hated the structure and dogma. Religion, he thought, was irrational. He began challenging his classmates’ beliefs after mass on Wednesdays. On at least one occasion, the other kid left the interrogation in tears. Carmack found a more productive way to exercise his analytical skills when a teacher wheeled in an Apple II. He had never worked on a computer before but took to the device as if it were an extension of his own body. It spoke the language of mathematics; it responded to his commands; and, he realized after seeing some games on the monitor, it contained worlds.

  Until this point Carmack had been entranced by arcade games. He wasn’t the best player around, but he loved the fast action and quick payback of Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Battlezone. Battlezone was unique in its point of view: it was first-person. Instead of looking down on the action from the side or from overhead, Carmack was in the action, looking out from inside a tank. Though the graphics were crude, made up of green geometric lines, they had the illusion of being three-dimensional. The game was so compelling that the U.S. government took notice, requesting a customized version for military training. It didn’t take long for Carmack to want to customize games of his own. With a computer, it was possible.

  When Carmack was in the fifth grade, his mother drove him to a local Radio Shack, where he took a course on the TRS-80 computer. He returned to school with the programming book in hand and set about teaching himself everything he needed to know. He read the passage about computers in the encyclopedia a dozen times. With his grades on the rise, he wrote a letter to his teacher explaining that “the logical thing to do would be to send me to the sixth grade,” where he could learn more. The next year Carmack was transferred to the “gifted and talented” program of the Shawnee Mission East public school, among the first in the area to have a computer lab.

  During and after school, Carmack found other gifted kids who shared his enthusiasm for the Apple II. They taught themselves BASIC programming. They played games. Soon enough they hacked the games. Once Carmack figured out where his character in Ultima resided in the code, he reprogrammed it to give himself extra capabilities. He relished this ability to create things out of thin air. As a programmer, he didn’t have to rely on anyone else. If his code followed the logical progression of the rules established, it would work. Everything made sense.

  Everything, he thought, except for his parents. When Carmack was twelve, they suddenly got divorced. Tensions between Stan and Inga over how to rear their children had become too great. The aftermath for Carmack was traumatic, Inga felt. Just as he was finding himself in school, he was pulled out and separated from his brother. They alternated years between parents, switching schools in turn. Carmack hated being separated from his father. Worse, when he was living with his mother, he had to fend for himself alone.

  Despite his growing interest in computers, Inga didn’t see the point of all his games. In her mind, if a boy was interested in computers, he didn’t sit around playing Ultima; instead he worked hard in school, got good grades, then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—just the recipe for a job at IBM. She loved him and only wanted what she thought was best. But Carmack didn’t want any of it. All he wanted was his own computer with which to pursue his worlds. He became increasingly obstinate. Inga took him to psychologists to see why her once compliant boy was becoming so uncontrollable and dark.

  Carmack found reprieve when his mother decided to move to Seattle soon after to pursue a new relationship. His father took the teenage boys to live with him, his new wife, and her two kids. Though Stan was still making a decent living as a news anchor, the sudden doubling of family size was too great to maintain his former lifestyle. So he ventured into the nearby blue-collar neighborhood of Raytown, where he found an old farmhouse on two acres of land within city limits. Overnight, it seemed, Carmack was in a strange house, with a strange family, and going to a strange school, a junior high with no gifted program or computers. He’d never felt so alone. Then one day he realized he wasn’t.

  The book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was a revelation. Carmack had heard about hackers: In 1982 a Disney movie called Tron told the story of a video game designer, played by Jeff Bridges, who hacked himself into a video game world; in a 1983 movie called WarGames, Matthew Broderick played a young gamer who hacked into a government computer system and nearly triggered Armageddon. But this book’s story was different—it was real. Written by Steven Levy in 1984, it explored the uncharted history and culture of the “Whiz Kids Who Changed Our World.” The book traced the rise of renegade computer enthusiasts over twenty-five rollicking years, from the mainframe experimentalists at MIT in the fifties and sixties to the Homebrew epoch of Silicon Valley in the seventies and up through the computer game start-ups of the eighties.

  These were not people who fit neatly into the stereotypes of outlaws or geeks. They came from and evolved into all walks of life: Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who would write the first BASIC programming code for the pioneering Altair personal computer and form the most powerful software company in the world; game makers like Slug Russell, Ken and Roberta Williams, Richard “Ultima” Garriott; the Two Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—who turned their passion for gaming into the Apple II. They were all hackers.

  “Though some in the field used the term hacker as a form of a derision,” Levy wrote in the preface, “implying that hackers were either nerdy social outcasts or ‘unprofessional’ programmers who wrote dirty, ‘nonstandard’ computer code, I found them quite different. Beneath their often unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists . . . and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool.”

  This Hacker Ethic read like a manifesto. When Carmack finished the book one night in bed, he had one thought: I’m supposed to be in there! He was a Whiz Kid. But he was in a nowhere house, in a nowhere school, with no good computers, no hacker culture at all. He soon found others who sympathized with his anger.

  The kids from Raytown he liked
were different from the ones he had left behind in Kansas City—edgier and more rebellious. Carmack fell into a group who shared his enthusiasm for games and computers. Together they discovered an underworld: an uncharted world on the emerging online communities of bulletin board systems, or BBSs. While an international network of computers known as the Internet had been around since the seventies, it was still largely the domain of government defense scientists and university researchers. By contrast, BBSs were computer clubhouses for the people—people just like Carmack.

  Bulletin board systems came about in 1978, when two hackers named Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss wrote the first software to transmit data between microcomputers over telephone lines. The result was that people could “call” up each other’s computers and swap information. In the eighties the systems quickly spawned what were essentially the first online communities, places where people with the will and skills could trade software and “talk” by posting text messages in forums. Anyone with a powerful enough computer system and a setup of phone lines and modems could start a BBS. They spread across the world, starting in dorm rooms, apartment buildings, computer labs. Systems such as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a.k.a. the WELL, in San Francisco and Software Creations in Massachusetts became hotbeds for hackers, Deadheads, and gamers.

  Carmack didn’t go on BBSs only for games. Here, he could research the most thrilling and illicit strains of hacker culture. He learned about phone phreaking: a means of hijacking free long-distance telephone service. He learned about MUDs: multiuser dungeons, text-based role-playing games that allowed players to act out D&D-type characters in a kind of real-time masquerade adventure. And he learned about bombs.

  For Carmack, bombs were less about cheap thrills than about chemical engineering—a neat way to play scientist and, for good measure, make things go boom. Before long he and his friends were mixing the recipes they found online. They cut off match heads and mixed them with ammonium nitrate, made smoke bombs from potassium nitrate and sugar. Using ingredients from their high school science class, they brewed thermite, a malleable and powerful explosive. After school, they’d blow up concrete blocks under a bridge. One day they decided to use explosives for a more practical purpose: getting themselves computers.

  Late one night Carmack and his friends snuck up to a nearby school where they knew there were Apple II machines. Carmack had read about how a thermite paste could be used to melt through glass, but he needed some kind of adhesive material, like Vaseline. He mixed the concoction and applied it to the window, dissolving the glass so they could pop out holes to crawl through. A fat friend, however, had more than a little trouble squeezing inside; he reached through the hole instead and opened the window to let himself in. Doing so, he triggered the silent alarm. The cops came in no time.

  The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.” At one point the man twiddled his pencil and asked Carmack, “If you hadn’t been caught, do you think you would have done something like this again?”

  “If I hadn’t been caught,” Carmack replied honestly, “yes, I probably would have done that again.”

  Later he ran into the psychiatrist, who told him, “You know, it’s not very smart to tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.”

  “I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!” Carmack replied. He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.

  If life felt structured and unyielding when Carmack lived with his mother, it was nothing compared with the life he found in the juvenile home. Everything took place during its allotted time: meals, showers, recreation, sleep. For every chore completed, he would receive a point toward good behavior. Each morning he was herded into a van with the other kids and carted off to his old school for classes. The van would pick him up at the end of the day and return him to the home.

  Carmack emerged hardened, cynical, and burning to hack. His parents agreed to get him an Apple II (though they didn’t know he used the money to buy a hot one from a kid he had met in the juvenile home). He found he most liked programming the graphics, inventing something in a binary code that came to life on screen. It gave him a kind of feedback and immediate gratification that other kinds of programming lacked.

  Carmack read up on 3-D graphics and cobbled together a wire-frame version of the MTV logo, which he managed to spin around on his screen. The real way to explore the world of graphics, he knew, was to make a game. Carmack didn’t believe in waiting for the muse. He decided it was more efficient to use other people’s ideas. Shadowforge, his first game, resembled Ultima in many ways but featured a couple of inventive programming tricks, such as characters who attacked in arbitrary directions as opposed to the ordinary cardinal ones. It also became his first sale: earning a thousand dollars from a company called Nite Owl Productions, a mom ’n’ pop publisher that made most of its income from manufacturing camera batteries. Carmack used the money to buy himself an Apple II GS, the next step up in the Apple’s line.

  He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills. Other times Carmack fought back with his intellect. After being partnered with him for an earth science project, a bully demanded that Carmack do all the work himself. Carmack agreed. They ended up getting an F. “How could you get an F?” the bully said. “You’re the smartest guy around.” Carmack had purposely failed the project, sacrificing his own grade rather than let the oaf prevail.

  Carmack’s increasingly cocksure attitude was not going over well at home. After he became more combative with his stepmother—whose vegetarianism and mystical beliefs incensed the young pragmatic—his father rented an apartment where Carmack and his younger brother, Peter, could live while they finished high school. The first day there, Carmack plugged in his Apple II, tacked a magazine ad for a new hard drive to his wall, and got to work. There were games to make.

  One night in 1987, Carmack saw the ultimate game. It occurred in the opening episode of a new television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the captain visited the ship’s Holodeck, a futuristic device that could simulate immersive environments for relaxation and entertainment. In this case, the door opened to reveal a tropical paradise. Carmack was intrigued. This was the virtual world. It was just a matter of finding the technology to make it happen.

  In the meantime, Carmack had his own games to pursue. Having graduated high school, he was ready to cash in the trust fund that his father, years before, had told him would be available when he turned eighteen. But when he went to retrieve the money, he found that his mother had transferred it to her account in Seattle. She had no intention of letting her son use the fund for some ridiculous endeavor like trying to go into business making computer games. Her philosophy had not wavered: if you want to go into computers, then you need to go to college, preferably MIT, get a degree, and get a job with a good company like IBM.

  Carmack fired off a vitriolic letter: “Why can’t you realise [sic] that it isn’t your job to direct me anymore?” But there was no swaying his mother, who argued that her son had yet to balance his checkbook, let alone manage his finances. If Carmack wanted the money, he would have to sign up for college, pay for the courses himself, and then, if he earned grades that she deemed worthy, he would be reimbursed.

  In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the c
lasses, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting. “Why can’t you just give us a project and let us perform it?” Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. “I can perform anything you want me to!” After enduring two semesters, he dropped out.

  Much to his mother’s chagrin, Carmack took a part-time job at a pizza parlor and immersed himself in his second game, Wraith. It was an exhausting process that required him constantly to insert and eject floppy disks in order to save the data because his Apple II GS didn’t come with a hard drive. He labored over a story included in the game’s “about” file:

  WRAITH

  “THE DEVIL’S DEMISE”

  For a long while all was peaceful on the island of Arathia. Your duties as protector of the temple of Metiria at Tarot were simple and uneventful. Recently things have changed. An unknown influence has caused the once devout followers of the true god Metiria to waver in their faith.

  Corruption has spread through the island, with whispers of an undead being of great might granting power to those who would serve. The lords of the realms fell to him one by one, and monsters now roam the land. The temple at Tarot is the last outpost of true faith, and you may be Arathia’s last hope for redemption.

  Last night, as you prayed for strength and guidance, Metiria came to you in a vision, bestowing upon you the quest to destroy the Wraith. She spoke solemnly, alerting you to the dangers which lay ahead. The only way to reach the hell that the Wraith rules from is by way of an interplanar gate somewhere in Castle Strafire, stronghold of his most powerful earthly minions.

  Although the castle is only a short distance away from Tarot, on an island to the northeast, a terrible reef prevents it from being reached by conventional means. You only know that monsters have come from the castle and turned up on the mainland. Remember, although many have been seduced by the power of the Wraith, greed still rules their hearts, and some may even aid your quest if paid enough gold. As the vision fades, Metiria smiles and says, “Fear not, brave one, my blessing is upon you.”