When Carmack pulled up to Softdisk in his brown MGB, he had no intention of taking the job. But, then again, times were getting rough. Though he enjoyed the idea of the freelance lifestyle, he was having trouble making rent and would frequently find himself pestering editors like Jay to express him his checks so he could buy groceries. A little stability wouldn’t be bad, but he wasn’t eager to compromise his hard work and ideals to get there. It would take something significant to sway him.
When Al met Carmack, he was thrown off. This was the Whiz Kid he’d heard so much about? A nineteen-year-old in ripped jeans and a tattered T-shirt who, despite his muscles, seemed not to have reached puberty yet? But Carmack did pack plenty of attitude. When Al spelled out the plan for Gamer’s Edge, Carmack brushed off the tight deadline as no problem at all. He was brutally honest in his criticism of the current crop of games, including those being put out by Softdisk. Al showed Carmack to the other building, where Romero and Lane were eagerly waiting. On the way, Carmack was impressed to see a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals, the magazine for hackers, which grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club. But the strongest impression came when he met Lane and Romero, a meeting that bordered on the kinetic.
Within moments the three programmers were discussing the spectrum of game programming, from the challenges of double resolution 16-bit graphics for the Apple II to the nuances of 8086 assembly language. They talked nonstop, not just about computers but about their other common interests: Dungeons and Dragons, Asteroids, The Lord of the Rings. Carmack told them about how he never had the computers he wanted when he was growing up. Romero said, “Man, I would have bought you those machines.”
Carmack was unprepared to meet anyone who could keep up with him intellectually, particularly in programming. Not only could these two guys talk the talk but they actually knew more than Carmack himself. They weren’t just good, they were better than he was, he thought. Romero was inspiring, not only in his knowledge of programming but in his all-around skills: his artistry, his design. Carmack was cocky, but if someone could teach him, he wasn’t going to let his ego get in the way. On the contrary, he was going to listen and stick around. He was going to take the Softdisk job.
Before the Gamer’s Edge crew could get started, they needed one vital machine: a fridge. Making computer games required an accessible mound of junk food, soda, and pizza. And to eat this stuff, they’d need someplace convenient to stash it. Romero, Carmack, and Lane agreed to kick in $180 of their own money to buy a used refrigerator for their new office, a small room in the back of Softdisk.
But as they carried the appliance through the door, they felt the icy stares of the jealous employees around them. All week they had been coming into the office with accessories: a microwave, a boom box, a Nintendo. Fucking Romero even came in with a video game! It was, Romero told them, research. The other employees weren’t buying it. Worst of all was when they saw some workmen wheeling in a fleet of sparkling new 386 PCs—the fastest computers around—for the gamers. Everyone else in the company was stuck working on machines that were about one-fourth the power.
When the Gamer’s Edge guys had everything set up, they plugged in the microwave and popped in some pizza. But the moment they hit cook, all the lights in the office fizzled out. This was grounds for a revolt, the other employees decided. They went to speak with Big Al. Al was quick to quiet the storm. The Gamer’s Edge crew, he explained patiently, wasn’t just out to have a good time, they were out to save the company. Yes, he said, save the company. The boom of the recent years, he told them, was coming to a close. The company had sunk tremendous resources into the ill-fated Apple II line. Al had recently been forced to lay off twenty-five people in one day.
“Look,” he told the employees who were bemoaning the Gamer’s Edge project, “don’t complain. If these guys make a home run, we’ll all benefit from it. It’ll work. Don’t worry.” Truth was, Big Al was worried himself. He walked down to the Gamer’s Edge office and opened the door. It was pitch-black, except for the glow of the computer monitors. He went to flip the light switch, but nothing happened.
“Oh,” Romero said, “we took out the lights. They sucked.”
“Fluorescent,” Lane explained, squinting, “hard on the eyes.”
Al looked up. The light sockets were gutted of their tubes. The team had clearly made itself at home. He saw the microwave, the fridge, the junk food. Metallica played from a boom box. A dart-strewn poster of the hair metal band Warrant hung on the wall. Carmack, Lane, and Romero each sat at his own fancy machine. “Look,” Al said, “we can’t take two months to get out this first disk. We have to get it out in four weeks. And you have to have two games on it so we can entice people to subscribe.”
“One month!” they cried. Two months, the original deadline, was tight enough. There was no way they could come up with two games from scratch. They would have to port a couple of their existing Apple II games to PC—a specialty that both Carmack and Romero could handle. And they had just the titles: Dangerous Dave, an Apple II game of Romero’s, and The Catacomb, a title of Carmack’s. Romero had made his first Dangerous Dave back in 1988 for Uptime. It was a fairly straightforward adventure game, featuring a tiny little splotch of a guy with a purple bodysuit and green cap. The object was to run and jump through mazes and collect treasure without getting killed first. Donkey Kong, the arcade game from Nintendo, had a similar paradigm, one Romero admired.
Catacomb was Carmack’s latest spin on the role-playing worlds he’d first explored with Shadowforge and Wraith. This one would show an even stronger influence from Gauntlet, the popular arcade game in which characters could run through mazes, shooting monsters along the way, casting spells. It was like Dungeons and Dragons with action. This was also a key point of communion for the Two Johns: their admiration for fast-action arcade games, their desire to emulate them, and, most important, their unbridled confidence in their abilities. They turned up the stereo. There was work to be done.
Romero gleefully referred to the ensuing experience as “crunch mode” or “the death schedule”—a masochistically pleasurable stretch of programming work involving sleep deprivation, caffeine gorging, and loud music. For pure sportsmanship, Carmack and Romero had a little contest to see who could port a game the fastest. It didn’t take long for the Ace Programmer to see just how fast the Whiz Kid was, as Carmack fairly easily pulled ahead. It was all in good fun. And Romero was full of admiration for his new friend and colleague. They coded late into the nights.
There was a bitter reason for Romero’s increased freedom. He was getting a divorce. Being a twenty-two-year-old Future Rich Person was challenging enough, without the demands of husbandry and parenthood. His wife didn’t share his love for games and, in Romero’s mind, was becoming even more depressed. She wanted family dinners, church, Saturday barbecues—things that Romero was feeling increasingly ill-equipped to provide.
For a while he had tried to make both worlds work, even leaving the office early while the others stayed behind. But it was never enough. The truth was, Romero didn’t know if he had enough to give. Though part of him wanted to have the family he never had as a child, he sometimes felt that he wasn’t programmed to be that kind of husband and dad. It would be best for everyone, they agreed, if they split up. But Kelly didn’t just want this; she wanted to split to California to be closer to her family. Romero felt crushed. At the same time, he knew that he couldn’t handle having the boys live with him. Instead, he convinced himself he could make long-distance fatherhood work. Even with several states between them, they would be closer than he ever was with his dad.
Rather than dwell on his family life, Romero immersed himself in Gamer’s Edge. Working on the ports had helped Carmack and Romero realize how they could best work together given their strengths and weaknesses. Carmack was most interested in programming the guts of the game—what was called the engine. This integral code told the computer how to display graphics on the screen. Romero enjoyed mak
ing the software tools—essentially the palette they would use to create characters and environments or “maps” of the game—as well as the game design—how the game play would unfold, what action would take place, what would make it fun. It was like yin and yang. While Carmack was exceptionally talented in programming, Romero was multitalented in art, sound, and design. And while Carmack had played video games as a kid, no one had played as many as Romero. The ultimate coder and the ultimate gamer—together they were a perfect fit.
But Lane wasn’t fitting in at all. He was still serving as editor of the Gamer’s Edge project but becoming more distant. Unlike Romero, Lane was not enthused about the PC. Romero could tell that his old friend was not up to the task. And, as quickly as he had once decided to befriend Lane, Romero shut him out. In Romero’s eyes, Lane wasn’t up to the rigors of the death schedule. And Romero didn’t want anything standing in the way of the team’s profitability. With Carmack, he had everything he needed. One time when Lane left the room, Romero spun around and told Carmack, “Let’s get him out of here.”
At the same time, there was someone Carmack and especially Romero wanted in: Tom Hall. Tom was a twenty-five-year-old programmer who had been working in the Apple II department since before Romero arrived. He was also, in Romero’s mind, fucking hysterical. Tall and witty, Tom existed in an accelerated state of absurdity, as though nothing could keep up with the creative output pouring from his mind. His office was covered in yellow Post-it note reminders and doodles. Every day he had a ridiculous new message on his computer screen, such as “The Adventures of Squishy and the Amazing Blopmeister.” When Romero would pass him, Tom would frequently raise an eyebrow and emit an alienlike chirping sound, then continue on his way. And: he was a gamer.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Tom didn’t have to work nearly as hard as Romero or Carmack to get into games. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a journalist whom Tom described as “the Erma Bombeck of Milwaukee,” provided their youngest son with all the ammunition he needed to pursue his early obsession: an Atari 2600 home gaming system and, shortly thereafter, an Apple II.
Tom was charmingly odd. He would parade around the house in a Green Bay Packers helmet and red Converse sneakers. At school, his security blanket came in the form of a brown paper grocery sack filled with all his drawings and eight-millimeter films. He carried it everywhere, keeping it beside his desk during class. Eventually he weaned himself down to a satchel and then, in high school, a small bag. A Star Wars nut, he saw the film thirty-three times. He was just as passionate about quirky sports. He was the state Frisbee golf champion. He also loved origami and domino construction, building elaborate mazes around his parents’ house. While other kids worshiped pop stars and athletes, Tom’s hero was Bob Speca: the world domino toppling pro.
When Tom got his Apple II, it became an infinite world into which he could explode. Like Carmack and Romero, Tom taught himself to make games as quickly as he could. By the time he entered the University of Wisconsin to study computer science, he had made almost a hundred games, most of them imitations of arcade hits like Donkey Kong. Unlike Carmack and Romero, Tom enjoyed being a student. He immersed himself in cross-disciplinary studies, ranging from languages to physics and anthropology. The computer game, he believed, was a unique medium into which he could incorporate those disciplines. He could invent a language for aliens in a game. He could program realistic physics. He could write stories, invent characters.
He began volunteering around campus, eventually making games for learning-disabled kids. Tom relished their enjoyment of his work, the looks on their faces when they escaped into the worlds he created. He wasn’t just making games for himself, he was making them for this audience. Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels.
After graduating college, Tom found his dreams dashed. When his résumés to game companies went unanswered, he did what most college graduates did with their dreams—gave up and applied for “real jobs.” Every time he put on his suit and went for an interview, the person on the other side of the desk would ask him the same exact question: “Is this really what you want to do?” Finally Tom listened to the answer he gave in his head and said no. Shortly thereafter, he got a job at Softdisk.
Tom took an instant liking to Romero, who came on more than a year after he had started. Romero loved one of the games Tom had recently made called Legend of the Star Axe. It was clearly descended from Tom’s favorite book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—a kind of Monty Python meets Star Wars romp by the British cult author Douglas Adams. The game featured an intergalactic ’57 Chevy and a host of quirky characters like the Blehs—green creatures with two big eye sockets who went around trying to scare people by saying, “Bleh! Bleh! Bleh!”
As much as Romero and Carmack connected as programmers, Romero and Tom connected as comedians. They were always riffing off each other, transforming Tom’s alien chirps into an elaborate language of blips and bleeps. They shared a love of dark comedy. Tom might say something like “go press your man-beef in a sheep’s musky hollows” and Romero would respond by telling Tom to “go slice open a goat and tie the warm, wet intestines around you for a cock ring.” They were never at a loss for sick jokes.
While Carmack and Romero were working on Catacomb and Dangerous Dave, Tom would frequently drop by to help. With Lane slipping, Romero decided to recruit Tom officially as the new managing editor of Gamer’s Edge. Tom was as eager to work on games full-time as the other guys. Plus, he too realized that the days of the Apple II were numbered. Games for PCs were the future, his future. But Al Vekovius wasn’t having any of it. Tom was already managing editor of the Apple II disk, and that was where he would stay.
Though disappointed, Romero and Carmack knew they could survive for the time being without Tom; what they couldn’t survive without was an artist. Up until then the game programmer was responsible for doing his own artwork. But as Romero and Carmack envisioned making more ambitious games, they wanted to have someone who was as skilled in and focused on art as they were on programming and design. Though Romero was a more than competent artist—he had done the art for all his old Apple II games—he was ready to leave those responsibilities to someone else, specifically a twenty-one-year-old intern named Adrian Carmack.
Coincidentally, Adrian shared John Carmack’s last name though they were not related. With dark hair down to his waist, Adrian stood out in the straitlaced art department from the moment he arrived. That department, Romero lamented, was as sluggish as the rest of the company. They weren’t gamers, they didn’t even think about games. All they did was churn out little blocks of graphics for check-balancing programs and clocked out at the end of the day. Adrian had a spark—plus, an awesome collection of heavy metal T-shirts.
But Adrian, unbeknownst to Romero, wasn’t much of a gamer—not anymore, at least, though games had lured him to art. Growing up in Shreveport, Adrian went through the arcade phase, spending his afternoons playing Asteroids and Pac-Man with his friends. He so liked the artwork on the cabinets that he began copying the illustrations, along with Molly Hatchet album covers, in his notebooks during class. As an adolescent, Adrian found himself sinking more deeply into his art, leaving even video games in the past. There were other things weighing on his mind.
When Adrian was thirteen, his father—who sold sausages for a local food company—died suddenly of a heart attack. Adrian, already quiet and sensitive, fell deeper into withdrawal. While his mother, a loan officer, and two younger sisters tried to cope, Adrian spent more time illustrating. Not surprisingly for a teenage boy with a pet scorpion, the ideas and subject matter that most compelled him were dark. In college the inspiration turned grimly real.
To earn money for school, Adrian worked as an aide in the medical communications department of a local hospital. His job was to photocopy pictures
taken of patients in the emergency room, the most graphic images of fatality and disease. He saw bedsores so terrible the skin was falling from the bone. He saw gunshot wounds, severed limbs. One time a farmer came in with a wooden fence post driven through his groin. The pictures took on an almost fetishistic quality, as Adrian traded them with his friends.
His artwork became not only darker but more skillful. His college art mentor, Lemoins Batan, recognized Adrian’s talents, his ability to draw with precise and seemingly effortless detail. When Lemoins asked Adrian what he wanted to do, his student told him that he’d like to work in fine art. In the meantime, he was looking for experience. His teacher had heard through the grapevine of somewhere he might start: Softdisk.
When Adrian found out that the company was looking for people to do art for computer software, he was less than intrigued. He was partial to pencil and paper, not keyboard and printer. But the Softdisk internship paid better than the hospital, so he agreed, laboring at the innocuous work until one day he returned to find his boss arguing loudly with two young programmers. One of the other artists came over to Adrian and said, “You know what’s going on?”
“No,” Adrian replied quietly, “I have no idea.”
“They’re talking about you.”
Masters of Doom Page 5
