Some time later Romero found Carmack leaning quietly against the kitchen wall. “Hey, man,” Romero said, “you feeling buzzed yet? You getting drunk, Carmack?”
“I am losing control of my faculties,” Carmack replied. “Mmm.” Then he stumbled away. Romero got a lot of mileage out of that response, repeating it robotically to everyone throughout the night. It was good to see Carmack loosen up.
Two weeks later, Jay walked out to the mailbox and came back brandishing an envelope. It was the first residual check from Apogee. “Pizza money!” they all said, as he opened it up. The check was for $10,500. With barely any overhead expenses, it was gravy. At this rate they’d be making more than $100,000 in their first year, more than enough for them to quit their day jobs at Softdisk.
Al Vekovius still had no idea that they were moonlighting on the Keen games, let alone doing it on the company computers. Gamer’s Edge was doing quite well, and their latest games, Catacomb II and Shadow Knights, were drawing raves. Softdisk had about three thousand subscribers who had paid $69.95 per year to receive Gamer’s Edge every month. They knew he was counting on them and weren’t sure how he’d react to their mass departure.
Carmack and Romero made it clear they didn’t care. This was their break, after all. Tom, by contrast, was nervous about the move. He was worried about getting sued by Softdisk, ruining their chances not only for making it on their own but for enjoying the fruits of Keen’s success. Romero scoffed at his worries. “Dude, what’s Al going to do if he sues you? You don’t have anything for him to get. All you have is a piece-of-shit couch,” he said, pointing to the broken sofa in the living room. “I mean, what the fuck? What are you worried about losing?”
Jay also expressed concern, urging the guys to handle this delicately with their boss. “Don’t drop a bomb on him,” he implored.
“Don’t worry,” Romero said with his characteristic optimism. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
However, Al’s suspicions began to mount when an employee mentioned something about the Gamer’s Edge guys moonlighting on their own games. Al confronted Carmack, who he knew had a tough, if not impossible, time telling lies. It was like feeding questions into a computer or adding numbers on a calculator—the answer always came out right. “I admit it,” Carmack said. “We’ve been using your computers. We’ve been writing our own games on your time.” Later he and Romero broke the news: They were going to leave, and they were taking Adrian Carmack, their art intern, with them.
Al felt like he’d walked into his house to find that someone had broken his windows and stolen his television. But he didn’t let himself get too far down. Immediately he tried to turn the situation around. “Look,” he said, “let’s try to salvage something out of this. Let’s go into business together! Let’s form a new company! I’ll support you. And you guys write whatever games you want and I’ll handle selling them. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty. And I won’t take any legal action against you.”
The offer caught them by surprise. They had assumed Big Al was going to sue them, not finance their business. Now there was a new golden opportunity. All they wanted to do was have their own business, and they had no interest in dealing with the hassles of taxes and distribution. If Al was going to handle that stuff, what the hell? They agreed.
But when Al returned to the Softdisk office, he walked into a mutiny. The entire company had gathered to demand an explanation. “Carmack and Romero came back from lunch and bragged about some big special deal they were getting,” one of the employees said. “What’s the deal? Here these jokers had cheated the company, used the company computers, and now you’re giving them half of a new company? Why are you rewarding them?”
“Because it’s good business!” Al said, “because these guys are good! They’re going to make money for the company. We’ll all be successful.”
No one was buying it. Either the gamers go, they said, or all thirty of them were going to quit. Al sighed deeply and walked back to the Gamer’s Edge office. “You guys went and told everyone about this and created a nightmare,” he said. “Do you realize what you have done?”
“Well,” Carmack replied, “we wanted to be truthful.”
“Yeah, but I could have positioned it a lot better,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose my staff. The deal’s off.”
After several weeks of negotiations and threatened lawsuits, it was agreed that they would contract with Softdisk to write one new game for Gamer’s Edge every two months. It was demoralizing, not only for the Softdisk staff but for Al. He saw that, despite their talent, the Gamer’s Edge guys really were just boys living by their own rules, and cheating when necessary. Worst of all, they had no sense of guilt. For them it was something to laugh about. They never considered the people who worked at Softdisk. Before Carmack left, Al pulled him aside and asked, “Did you ever think about the people who have worked so hard and supported you?”
Carmack listened, but Al’s words didn’t compute. He was looking into the face of the past, of opportunities unrealized, of all the old authority figures who had ever stood in his way. As always, he was blunt to a fault. “I don’t care about them,” Al would recall Carmack replying. “I’ll go back to making pizzas before I stay at this crummy place.”
On February 1, 1991, id Software was born.
FIVE
More Fun Than Real Life
Romero wanted to summon the demons. Or at least, he said, figure out how. It was four in the morning at the lake house. Empty soda cans littered the floor. Mitzi dozed on top of Carmack’s computer monitor. The smell of pepperoni lingered in the air. The guys sat around the large makeshift table in the living room, several hours into yet another round of Dungeons and Dragons. Since leaving Softdisk, they had more time to devote to their recreational D&D campaign. It was truly evolving into an alternate world, which, like all fiction, deeply reflected their own. It wasn’t just a game, it was an extension of their imaginations, hopes, dreams. It mattered.
The deepness of their Dungeons and Dragons adventure was due in no small part to Carmack. Whereas most Dungeon Masters would create small episodes that lasted for a few hours of play, Carmack’s world was persistent; players returned to it every time they regrouped. The game they played now was the same one he had been writing since he was a kid in Kansas City. It was as if a musician had been composing an opera for several years. The guys would pass Carmack’s room on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night and see him hunched over pages of notes, sketching out the details of their game.
Carmack’s D&D world was a personal masterwork of forests and magic, time tunnels and monsters. He had a fifty-page glossary of characters and items such as “Quake,” a fighter with a magical “Hellgate Cube” floating above its head, the “Chalice of Insanity . . . a chalice from which you get Jellybeans of Insanity which, if ingested, will cause you to go nuts and fight everyone around you” and the Mighty Daikatana sword. He relished the feeling of creating a place others could explore. The way D&D was played, he, as Dungeon Master, would invent and describe the set and setting. Then it was up to the players to dictate how they wanted to proceed.
In their game, the guys created an imaginary group of adventurers called Popular Demand: Romero named his character Armand Hammer, a fighter who liked to dabble with magic; Tom was a fighter named Buddy; Jay, a thief-acrobat named Rif; Adrian, a massive fighter named Stonebreaker. With each adventure, Popular Demand gained power and prestige. They were a living metaphor of id. As Carmack had said, the game had the power to bring out someone’s true personality. And on this fateful night, Romero wanted to make a deal with the devil.
In Carmack’s game, he had designated two different dimensions of existence: a material plane (which Popular Demand inhabited) and a plane of demons. After months traversing the material plane, however, Romero was getting bored. To spice things up, he wanted to retrieve the dangerous and powerful Demonicron, a magic tome that gave a knowledgeable user the power to s
ummon the demons to the material plane. Carmack consulted his D&D rule book. If used thoughtfully, he told them, the Demonicron meant enormous strength to the group, guaranteeing them all the riches of the world. With it, Romero thought, he might get his hands on an ultimate weapon like the Daikatana. But there were risks. If the Demonicron fell into the hands of a demon, it would cause the world to be overrun with evil. Even though Carmack had made up the game, he respected its limitations, its rules, its science. If a player did something that would destroy the world, then the world would die.
Romero and the rest discussed the options. Though Adrian and Tom were hesitant, Romero’s excitement and enthusiasm won them over once again. “Come on,” he said. “We can’t lose!” They decided to seize the Demonicron from its palace of supernatural beasts. Carmack rolled the die to determine the outcome of their battles: Popular Demand was victorious. The Demonicron was theirs. What they would do with it, they didn’t know. For the time being, there were others matters at hand. In the earthly dimension, it was getting late and there were other games to attend to: the ones by id Software.
When the guys christened their company, they shortened the Ideas from the Deep initialism and simply called themselves id, for “in demand.” They also didn’t mind that, as Tom pointed out, id had another meaning: “the part of the brain that behaves by the pleasure principle.” In early 1991 their pleasurable games were indeed in demand. Keen was number one on the shareware charts, emerging as the first and only game to break the coveted top ten. The first Keen trilogy was now bringing in fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per month. It wasn’t just pizza money anymore, it was computer money. They used it to outfit the lake house with a fleet of high-end 386 PCs. Carmack was only twenty years old, Romero, twenty-three, and they were in business.
Despite the success and the fact that Romero, Carmack, and Adrian had decided to leave Softdisk immediately that February, Tom and Jay chose to stay behind. In Tom’s case, it was a temporary solution. Always conscientious, he felt bad about leaving the company high and dry and was more comfortable waiting until they found a replacement for him. Jay felt an obligation to fulfill his duty at Softdisk, which included the completion of an important Apple II product. But he would stay at least a friendly part of the id group, D&D campaign included, for some time.
Heading into the spring of 1991, id rode on the high of its newfound freedom. Though under contractual obligation to Softdisk, they now could work on the games completely in the comfort of their lake house. Carmack immersed himself in programming what he wanted to be the next generation of his graphics engine. The first engine had enabled the primary breakthrough of side-scrolling action; now he wanted to create more elaborate and immersive effects. He methodically researched while the rest utilized the existing technology to create their first freelance games for Softdisk.
The freedom from Softdisk and the success of Keen were inspiring new kinds of games. Rescue Rover was about a young boy who had to rescue his dog, Rover, after the dog had been kidnapped by aliens. A clever maze game, it challenged the player to maneuver a series of mirrors to reflect deadly rays being cast by alien robots so the boy could find and save his dog. It combined what was emerging as something of an id formula: humor plus violence, the more over the top, the better. The title screen for Rescue Rover showed the slaphappy pooch with a wagging tail surrounded by sinister alien weapons aimed at his skull.
While Rover took one step in the dark humor direction, their next game, which they began working on in March, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, broke more sinister ground. For this one Romero wanted to recast his most beloved character in a more gothic situation. Using the Keen graphics engine, they set about putting together a more realistic looking Dave. This time they wanted him to pull up to a wretched Shreveport-style house in a pickup truck, decked out in a hunting cap, jeans, and brandishing a shotgun, which he would use to rid the house of zombies and ghouls.
Of all the id guys, Adrian was particularly juiced over the grisly theme. It was a chance for him to exorcise all the gore he had seen when he worked at the hospital. Though he didn’t tell the group, he still hated Commander Keen. If they were going to make a kids’ game, he thought, they should be doing something gross and funny in the spirit of a popular TV series at the time, Ren and Stimpy. With Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Adrian finally found an outlet. While Tom and Romero worked at their machines, Adrian, unbeknownst to them, began creating what he called “death animations”: three or four tiles that would play in rapid sequence after Dave died. In most games, characters would simply vanish or, as Tom had instructed, Keen floated up the screen to heaven, presumably. Adrian had other ideas.
Late one night Romero hit a button and watched Adrian’s animation play: Dave took a zombie fist to the face, which smashed out his eyes in a bloody pulp. Romero almost hyperventilated with laughter. “Blood!” He cackled. “In a game! How fucking awesome is that?”
Violent fantasy, of course, had an ancient history. Readers had been fascinated by the gore of Beowulf for over a thousand years (“The demon clutched a sleeping thane in his swift assault, tore him in pieces, bit through the bones, gulped the blood, and gobbled the flesh”). Kids played cops and robbers, brandishing their guns and flying backward in imagined bursts of blood. As the id guys came of age, in the 1980s, the action movie genre—with films like Rambo, The Terminator, and Lethal Weapon—conquered the box office, just as horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Friday the 13th had done in the recent past.
Violence in games was nothing new either—even the very first computer game, Spacewar, was about destruction—but graphic violence certainly was. In the past graphical violence was always limited, partly because of the inability of technology to render detail and, mainly, because game developers avoided it. Back in 1976, an arcade game called Death Race had caused a ruckus. The object was to drive a car over a bunch of crudely drawn stick figure blips. When the player hit the screaming figures, they were replaced by crucifixes. The cabinet was painted with skulls and grim reapers. It was a far cry from the big hit of the day, Pong. It was also the first video game to be banned.
Adrian’s macabre work was too good to pass up. Fueled by Romero’s enthusiasm, he added more and more gruesome details, including chunks of bloody flesh that would fly off a zombie’s body when it was shot. When the guys at Softdisk saw the gore, however, they didn’t get the joke and insisted that id redraw the death animations—sans blood. “Maybe one day,” Adrian said, “we’ll be able to put in as much blood as we want.”
While the other guys were pushing their envelopes, Carmack was pushing his own, specifically, into 3-D. Because he was a craftsman engineer, 3-D was the obvious next step for him. Three-dimensional graphics were the holy grail for many programmers as well. To split hairs, the games weren’t really three-dimensional in the 3-D movie sense of the term; the term meant that graphics had a real sense of solid dimensions. Often these games were created from the first-person point of view. The whole idea was to make the player feel as if he were inside the game.
Though Carmack was not aware of it, he was joining a pursuit that had begun thousands of years before. The dream of a realistic, immersive, interactive experience had consumed humankind for millennia. Some believed it to be a primal desire. Dating from 15,000 b.c.e., cave paintings in Lascaux, in the south of France, were considered to be among the first “immersive environments,” with images that would give the inhabitant the feeling of entering another world.
In 1932, Aldous Huxley described a futuristic kind of movie experience called feelies in his novel Brave New World. Combining three-dimensional imagery as well as olfactory and tactile effects, the feelies, he wrote, were “dazzling and incomparably more solid looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality.” Ray Bradbury imagined a similar experience in his 1950 short story “The Veldt,” which presented, essentially, a view of the first virtual reality room. A fa
mily has a special room that can project any scene they imagine on the surrounding walls. Problems arise when an African vision becomes entirely too real.
Soon technologists began efforts to realize these immersive environments. In 1955, the Hollywood cinematographer Morton Heilig described his work on “the Cinema of the future,” which, he wrote, “will far surpass the Feelies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” With a novelty machine called the Sensorama, which combined sights, sounds, and smells of urban landscapes, Heilig’s aim was to create an illusion considerably more immersive than those of the tacky 3-D movies of the time. The goal, he said, was a situation “so life-like that it gives the spectator the sensation of being physically in the scene.”
Convincing immersion was not just a matter of multimedia preening, it was a matter of interactivity—an essential ingredient and allure of computer games. Interactive immersive environments were the pet project of a University of Wisconsin computer artist named Myron Krueger. Throughout the 1970s, Krueger created Veldt-like experiences, sometimes achieved by projecting the images of audience members—even those in remote locations—on giant landscape screens. “The environments,” he wrote, “suggest a new art medium based on a commitment to real-time interaction between men and machines. . . . This context is an artificial reality within which the artist has complete control of the laws of cause and effect. . . . Response is the medium!” One such project, called MAZE, let audience members try to navigate through an image of a maze that was projected in a room.
By the 1980s interactive immersions had taken on a new name: virtual reality. The author William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his influential 1984 novel, Neuromancer, to describe an interactive online world that existed between computer networks. In the late 1980s, Scott Fisher, an engineer at the NASA–Ames Research Center, combined a head-mounted display and data-transmitting hand gloves in what became the archetype of the virtual reality interface. Through these tools, users could enter a virtual world in which they could manipulate objects and proceed in a first-person three-dimensional point of view.
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