“Oh shit, man, I’m toast.” Adrian assumed something was wrong, that he was being fired. The two young programmers came up to him when they were through and introduced themselves as Carmack and Romero, his partners at Gamer’s Edge.
For the next Gamer’s Edge disk, they were going to make only one game. Al agreed to that plan, letting Romero and Carmack pursue their vision of making one big commercial game from scratch every two months—still a considerable feat. But with their roles in place—Carmack doing the engine; Romero, the software tools and game design; Adrian, the art; Lane, the management and miscellaneous coding—it seemed within their reach.
The idea for the next game came from Carmack, who was experimenting with a breakthrough bit of programming that created an illusion of movement beyond the confines of the screen. It was called scrolling. Again, arcade games were the model. At first, the action of arcade games all took place within one static screen: in Pong, players controlled paddles that could move only from the bottom to the top of the screen as they hit a ball back and forth; in Pac-Man, the character would chomp dots as he cruised within a confined maze; in Space Invaders, players controlled a ship at the bottom of the screen that would shoot at descending alien ships. There was never a sense of broad movement, as though the players or enemies were actually progressing outside the box.
All this changed in 1980, when Williams Electronics released Defender, the first arcade game to popularize the idea of scrolling beyond the scope of the screen. In this sci-fi shoot-’em-up, players controlled a spaceship that moved horizontally above a planet surface, shooting down aliens and rescuing people along the way. A tiny map on the screen would show the player the entire scope of the world, which, if stretched out, would be the equivalent of about three and a half screens. Compared with the other games in the arcade, Defender felt big, as if the player was living and breathing in a more expansive virtual space. It became a phenomenal hit—filling almost as many arcades as Space Invaders and beating out Pac-Man as the industry’s Game of the Year. Countless scrolling games would follow. By 1989 scrolling was the “it” technology, fueling in part the success of the bestselling home video game in history at the time: Super Mario Brothers 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
But at this moment, in September 1990, no one had yet figured out how to scroll games for the PC; instead, they would use lame trickery to make the player feel like the action was larger than the screen. A player might get to the right edge of the screen and then, in one clunky movement, see the panel from the right shift over into place. The reason, in part, was the PCs’ slow speed, which paled compared with those of arcade machines, the Apple II, or home consoles like the Nintendo. Carmack was determined to find a way to create a smooth scrolling effect, like the one in Defender or Super Mario.
The next Gamer’s Edge game would be a step in that direction. When the crew discussed ideas for the game, Carmack demonstrated a technology he was working on that could scroll the action down the screen. Unlike the more sophisticated scrolling games, this one was set up like a treadmill—the graphics would descend the screen on a steady, set path. There was no sense that the player was willfully moving up through the action. It was more like standing on a stage and having a rolling landscape painting move behind the actor.
Romero, the erudite gamer who had played nearly every available title for the PC, had never seen anything like it; here was a chance at being the first. They called the game Slordax; it would be a straightforward shoot-the-spaceships descendant of arcade hits like Space Invaders and Galaga. They had four weeks.
From the start of the work on Slordax, the team gelled. Carmack would bang away at his code for the graphics engine while Romero developed the programming tools to create the actual characters and sections of the game. As Carmack engineered breakthrough code, Romero designed gripping game play. Tom Hall even managed to sneak into the Gamer’s Edge office to create the creatures and backgrounds. Adrian, meanwhile, would sketch out the spaceships and asteroids on his screen. It was clear right away to Romero that the quiet intern was talented.
Though still new to computers, Adrian quickly assimilated with a palette on screen. Computer art at the time was almost like pointillism because game graphics were so limited. Most had only four colors, in what was known as Computer Graphics Adapter, or CGA; recently, games had evolved to allow sixteen colors in Enhanced Graphics Adapter, EGA. But that was still pretty tight for an artist. Adrian had only a few colors at his disposal. He couldn’t even push them together; he just had to bring the worlds to life with what he had. People in the business called this craft “pushing pixels.” And it was clear that Adrian could push pixels with ease.
It was also clear that Adrian liked to keep a profile so low it was almost subterranean. One reason he kept to himself was that he didn’t know what to make of these gamers. Carmack was like a robot, the way he spoke in little clipped sentences with the strange “mmm” punctuation at the end. He could sit there all day and code, not saying anything but turning out amazing work. Romero was just plain bizarre, making all these sick jokes about disembowelment and dismemberment, and all those twisted Melvin cartoons he still drew. Adrian thought he was pretty funny too.
Tom Hall was another story. The first time Adrian met him was when Tom came leaping into the room in blue tights, a white undershirt, a cape, and a big plastic sword. He stood there, raised his eyebrow, and made a strange alien beep, to which Romero responded with almost debilitating laughter. It was Tom’s costume for Halloween. Tom stayed, as he often did, helping out with the game design and tool creation. Adrian was thankful that he didn’t stick around much longer.
One night shortly after that, however, Tom stuck around long after Adrian, Romero, and the rest of the Softdisk employees had gone home. The only people left were he and Carmack. Slordax was wrapping up nicely, and Carmack was on to something else. A born night owl, he remained at the office into the wee hours of the morning. He liked the solitude, the quiet, and the chance to immerse himself even more deeply in his work. He was doing what he had always wanted to do: code games. And he was happy, in the moment as always, not thinking at all about what would come next. If he could be here working on games with enough money for food and shelter, that was good enough for him. As he told the other guys on one of his very first days, put him in a closet with a computer, a pizza, and some Diet Cokes, and he would be fine.
As Tom settled into a chair late this night, Carmack showed him how he had figured out a way to create an animating block or tile of graphics on the screen. The screen consisted of thousands of pixels; a group of pixels make up a tile. When making a game, an artist would first use pixels to design a tile, then place the tiles together to create the entire environment. It was like laying down a tile floor in a kitchen. With Carmack’s animation trick, a tile could have a little animating graphic on it too. “And,” he explained, “I’ll be able to make it so your guy can jump on the tile and something can happen.”
“Would it be easy to do that?” Tom asked.
“Sure, mmm,” Carmack said. He would just need to know what resulting action to program into the game when a player hit an animated tile. This was awesome, Tom understood, because games like Super Mario Brothers 3 were all about animated tiles; for instance, a player would jump up into a blinking block, which would then rain down a shower of golden coins. Tom was intrigued. But there was more.
Carmack punched a few buttons on his keyboard and showed Tom his other new feat: side scrolling. The effect, popularized by Defender and Mario, made it appear as if the game world continued when a character moved toward either edge of the screen. After a few nights of experimentation, Carmack had finally figured out how to simulate this movement on a PC. He had approached the problem, as always, in his own particular way. Too many people, he thought, went for the clever little shortcuts right away. That didn’t make sense. First, he tried the obvious approach, writing a program that would attempt to draw out the graphics smooth
ly across the screen. It didn’t work, because the PC, as everyone knew, was too slow. Then he tried the next step: optimization. Was there any way he could take greater advantage of the computer’s memory so the images would draw more quickly? After a few attempts, he knew there wasn’t a solution.
Finally then he thought to himself, Okay, what am I trying to achieve? I want the screen presented to move smoothly over as the user runs his character across the ground. He thought of his earlier game, The Catacomb. In that one, he’d created an effect that moved the screen over one big chunky strip at a time as a character ran toward the edge of a dungeon. It was a common trick called tile-based scrolling, moving the screen in the chunky way one set of tiles at a time. What he wanted now was to create an effect that would be much more subtle, if a character moved just a hair. The problem was that it simply took too much time and power for the computer to redraw the entire screen for every slight move. And that’s when the leap came.
What if, Carmack thought, instead of redrawing everything, I could figure out a way to redraw only the things that actually change? That way, the scrolling effect could be rendered more quickly. He imagined looking at a computer screen that showed a character running to the right underneath a big blue sky. If that character ran far enough, a white puffy cloud would eventually pass from off screen over his head. The computer created this effect in a very crude way. It would redraw every little blue pixel on the entire screen, starting at the top left corner and making its way over and down, one pixel at a time, even though the only thing that was changing in the sky was the white puffy cloud. The computer couldn’t intuit a shortcut to this drudgery just because a shortcut made sense. So Carmack did the next best thing. He tricked it into performing more efficiently. Carmack wrote some code that duped the computer into thinking that, for example, the seventh tile from the left was in fact the first tile on the screen. This way the computer would begin drawing right where Carmack wanted it to. Instead of spitting out dozens of little blue pixels on the way over to the cloud, the computer could start with the cloud itself. To make sure the player felt the effect of smooth movement, Carmack added one other touch, instructing the computer to draw an extra strip of blue tile outside the right edge of the screen and store it in its memory for when the player moved in that direction. Because the tiles were in memory, they could be quickly thrown up on the screen without having to be redrawn. Carmack called the process “adaptive tile refresh.”
In lay terms, as Tom immediately understood, this meant one thing: They could do Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC! Nobody, no one, nowhere had made the PC do this. And now they could do it, right here, right now, take their all-time favorite video game and hack it together so it could work on the computer. It was almost a revolutionary act of subversion, he thought, especially considering Nintendo’s stronghold on its own platform. There was no way to, say, copy a Nintendo game onto a PC as one would tape an album. But now they could replicate it tile for tile, blip for blip. It was the ultimate hack.
“Let’s do it!” Tom said. “Let’s make the first level of Super Mario tonight!”
He fired up Super Mario on the TV in the Gamer’s Edge office and started to play. Then he opened up the tile editor that they had running on their PCs. Like someone copying a famous painting, he re-created every little tile of the first level of Super Mario on the PC, hitting pause on the Nintendo machine to freeze the action. He included everything—the gold coins, the puffy white clouds; the only thing he changed was the character. Rather than re-create Mario, he used the stock graphics they had of Dangerous Dave. Meanwhile, Carmack was optimizing his side-scrolling code, implementing the features of the game that Tom barked out while he was pausing and playing. Dozens of Diet Cokes later, they finished the first level. It was 5:30 a.m. Carmack and Tom saved the level to a disk, set it on Romero’s desk, and went home to sleep.
Romero came in the next morning at ten and found the floppy disk on his keyboard with a Post-it note that read merely, “Type DAVE2.” It was in Tom’s handwriting. Romero popped the disk into his PC and typed in the file location. The screen went black. Then it refreshed with the words
DANGEROUS
DAVE
IN
“COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”
On one side of the words was a portrait of Dangerous Dave in his red baseball cap and green T-shirt. On the other was a dour looking judge with a white wig, brandishing a gavel. Romero hit the spacebar to see what would come next. There it was, the familiar milieu of Super Mario Brothers 3: pale blue sky, the puffy white clouds, the bushy green shrubs, the animated tiles with little question marks rolling over their sides and, strangely, his character Dangerous Dave standing ready on the bottom of the screen. Romero tapped his arrow key, moved Dave along the floor, and watched him scroll smoothly across the screen. That’s when he lost it.
Romero could hardly breathe. He just sat in his chair with his fingers on the keys, scrolling Dave back and forth along the landscape, trying to see if anything was wrong, if somehow this wasn’t really happening, if Carmack had not just figured out how to do exactly what the fucking Nintendo could do, if he had not done what every other gamer in the universe had wanted to do, to break through, to do for PCs what Mario was doing for consoles. On the strength of Mario, Nintendo was on the way to knocking down Toyota as Japan’s most successful company, generating over $1 billion per year. Shigeru Miyamoto, the series’s creator, had gone from being a poor country boy in Japan to being the gaming industry’s equivalent of Walt Disney. Super Mario Brothers 3 sold 17 million copies, the equivalent of seventeen platinum records—something only artists like Michael Jackson had pulled off.
Romero saw it all come pouring down in front of him: his future, their future, scrolling across the room in brightly colored dreams. The PC was hot. It was heading into more homes each day. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t be just a luxury item, it would be a home appliance. And what better to make it a friendly part of life than a killer game. With such a hit, people wouldn’t even have to buy Nintendos; they could just invest in PCs. And here Romero was sitting in his crappy little office building in Shreveport looking at the technology that could make the first big league games for the PC. He saw their destiny, their Future Rich Personages. It was so devastating that he found he couldn’t move, couldn’t get up out of his seat. He was destroyed. And it wasn’t until Carmack rolled back into the office a few hours later that Romero was able to muster the energy to speak. He had only one thing to tell his friend, his genius partner, his match made in gamer heaven.
“This is it,” he said. “We’re gone!”
FOUR
Pizza Money
An early and apparent difference between the Two Johns’ internal human engines was the way they processed time. It was the kind of difference that made them perfect complements and the kind that could cause irreparable conflict.
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web of problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past—no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.
Romero, by contrast, was immersed in all moments: past, future, and present. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast, as passionate about the present as about the time gone and the time yet to come. He didn’t just dream, he pursued: hoarding everything from the past, immersing himself in the dynamism of the moment, and charting out the plans for what was to come. He remembered every date, every name, every game. To preserve the past, he kept letters, ma
gazines, disks, Burger King pay stubs, pictures, games, receipts. To inflate the present, he pumped up any opportunity for fun, telling a better joke, a funnier story, making a crazier face. Yet he wasn’t manic, he knew how to focus. When he was on, he was on—loving everything, everybody. But when he was off, he was off—cold, distant, short. Tom Hall came up with a nickname for the behavior. In computers, information is represented in bits. A bit can be either on or off. Tom called Romero’s mood swings the bit flip.
That fateful morning of September 20, 1990, Romero’s bit flipped right on. It was a date he seared into his memory and Carmack would soon forget, but it was equally important to both. Carmack had used his laser focus to solve an immediate challenge: how to get a PC game to scroll. Romero used Carmack’s solution, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, to envision what would come. Carmack had created a palette that Romero used to paint the future. And the future, it became clear, had nothing to do with Softdisk.
After seeing Carmack, Romero couldn’t contain his excitement. He darted around the office, pulling others to come in and check out the game. “Oh my God, look at this,” he said, as a couple of employees watched the demo play. “Is that the fucking coolest thing on the planet or what?”
“Oh,” one of the guys replied lethargically, “that’s pretty neat.”
“That’s pretty neat?” Romero responded. “Wait a minute: this is like the fucking coolest thing ever! Don’t you understand?”
The guys shrugged and said, “Whatever,” then returned to their offices.
“Fucking idiots!” Romero declared. By the time everyone else arrived, he was on the verge of exploding. Tom, Jay, Lane, and Adrian were all in the Gamer’s Edge office, watching amusedly as Romero held court, playing the demo. “Oh my God,” Romero said, “this is the fucking coolest thing ever! We are fucking gone! We have to do this! We have got to start our own company and get out of here with this, because Softdisk ain’t doing anything with it! No one’s going to see this! We need to do this on our own! This is too big to waste on this company!”
Masters of Doom Page 6
