The end effect, Fisher wrote in 1989, is a “kind of electronic persona. For interactive theater or interactive fantasy applications, these styles might range from fantasy figures to inanimate objects, or different figures to different people. Eventually, telecommunication networks may develop that will be configured with virtual environment servers for users to dial into remotely in order to interact with each other’s virtual proxies. . . . The possibilities of virtual realities, it appears, are as limitless as the possibilities of reality. They can provide a human interface that disappears—as a doorway to other worlds.”
Carmack’s research into 3-D computer games was on a more intuitive level. Though he was a fan of science fiction, enamored of Star Trek’s Holodeck, his focus was not on chipping away at some grand design of such a virtual world but, rather, on solving the immediate problem of the next technological advance.
He had been experimenting with 3-D graphics since making his wire-frame MTV logos on his Apple II. Since then several games had experimented with first-person 3-D points of view. In 1980, Richard Garriott employed this perspective in his very first role-playing game, Akalabeth. Two years later an Apple II game from Sirius Software called Wayout wowed gamers and critics with a first-person maze game. But it was flight simulations, putting the player in the cockpits of a variety of airplanes, that exploited this kind of immersion. In 1990, Richard Garriott’s company, Origin, released a space-themed combat flight simulator called Wing Commander, which became a favorite around the id lake house.
Carmack figured he could do better. Flight sims, he thought, were painfully slow, bogged down by their heavy graphics and leaving the player to snail through the game play. What he and the others preferred was the fast action of arcade games like Defender, Asteroids, and Gauntlet. While the other guys worked on Rescue Rover and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Carmack tried to see how he might do something that hadn’t been done before: create a fast-action game in 3-D.
The problem, he found, was that the PC was not powerful enough to handle such a game. Carmack read up on the topic but found nothing adequate for his solution. He approached the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think outside the box. One of the reasons for a 3-D game’s slow speed was that the computer had to draw too many surfaces at once. Carmack had an idea. What if he commanded the computer to draw only a few surfaces at a time, the way one would put blinders on a horse? Rather than draw, in this case, arbitrary polygons, he designed a program that would draw only sideways trapezoids—in other words, walls but no ceilings or floors.
To get the computer to draw at the fastest possible speed, Carmack tried another nontraditional approach, known as raycasting. Instead of drawing out a large slab of graphics, which required a lot of memory and power, raycasting instructed the computer to paint a thin vertical strip of graphics at a time, based on the player’s point of view. The bottom line: raycasting meant speed.
Carmack’s final challenge was to add characters in the 3-D world. The solution was to incorporate simple though convincing graphical icons or sprites. Wing Commander had used a calculation that told the computer to reduce or scale the size of the sprite depending on the player’s location. By combining these so-called scaled sprites with his limited polygons and raycasting, Carmack was able to brew up a fast 3-D world.
Carmack emerged from his research after six weeks, two weeks longer than he had spent on any other game. When Romero saw the technology, he was once again impressed by the Whiz Kid. They discussed what kind of game could best exploit the new engine. They settled on a futuristic world in which the player, driving a tank, had to rescue people from nuclear Armageddon. Released in April 1991, Hovertank was the first fast-action, first-person shooter for the computer. Id had invented a genre.
Despite Hovertank’s innovations, it was no Commander Keen. The game looked rather ugly with its big, solid-colored walls. But it included id’s increasingly ghoulish touches. Adrian relished the chance to draw a cast of nuclear-mutated beasts reduced to puddles of blood. Like the Yorps in Keen, the puddles would linger through the game, so if a player returned to a spot he would see the remnants of his carnage.
As May began, id Software continued to innovate its games and expand its business, returning specifically to its first emerging brand, Commander Keen. To fulfill a game for Softdisk, id decided to make a new episode called Keen Dreams. Though they had experimented with first-person 3-D gaming in Hovertank, they wanted to preserve Keen’s side-scrolling integrity while adding something new. An obvious choice was to create a more compelling sense of moving through a landscape, for example, allowing the foreground and background to move at different speeds. This effect was known as parallax scrolling. In the past, a character might run past a static forest. In a parallax-scrolling game, the trees would move very slowly while the character ran past. It seemed more real.
Again Carmack was faced with the limits of PC technology. After a few attempts, he realized that there was no way to create parallax scrolling in a convincing manner. Since the computers were too slow to draw a moving foreground and background, Carmack decided to fudge it. He wrote a program that could temporarily save or cache an image on the screen so that it didn’t have to be redrawn every time a character passed by. To create the illusion of depth, he realized that he could temporarily save two images together, say, a little section of a sidewalk and a little chunk of a tree in the background, for quick recall. Once again he had pushed the graphics of the PC into a place no one had gone this quickly before. Keen Dreams was completed by the end of the month.
In June 1991, id began work on the next trilogy of games for Scott Miller and Apogee. Keen 4, 5, and 6 would be released in the same manner as the first set: one initial chunk uploaded as shareware to tease players into purchasing the whole group. At this point Apogee was comfortably ruling not just the shareware gaming world but the entire shareware world. The Keen games were at the top of the charts, bringing in close to sixty thousand dollars per month. If they followed the same plan, Scott assured them, they would earn at least as much.
Tom wrote the story line of this trilogy, Goodbye Galaxy. This time around, Commander Keen discovers a plot to blow up the galaxy and must head off in his Bean-with-Bacon MegaRocket to save the world. First, he has to tend to his parents, whom he temporarily immobilized with a stun gun. The stun gun was a new and necessary addition to the game, Tom thought. After the first Keen trilogy, Tom began opening letters of complaint from concerned parents who didn’t like the dead Yorps corpses hanging around on screen. Why couldn’t the characters just disappear when they die, like in most games? Tom still wanted kids to see the effects of their violence, but he didn’t want to stir up unnecessary controversy. He decided that, beginning with this game, the creatures would simply be stunned when hit. They wouldn’t die; they would just remain frozen, circles of stars surrounding their heads.
By August, id had a working prototype, or beta, of Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle. At the time Romero had met a smooth-talking gamer in Canada named Mark Rein. Mark had been a big fan of the first Keens and asked Romero if they needed anyone to play-test their next games. Romero said they did and sent Mark a beta of Keen 4. At the end was a teaser description of the next episode, “The Armageddon Machine,” which promised the game would be, among other things, “more fun than real life!”
Mark replied with a detailed list of bugs, impressing Romero. Mark wasn’t just a gamer, he was an aspiring businessman who was so sure he could get id some deals that he offered to fly himself down to Shreveport to meet with the guys. Romero, from the moment he saw the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement demo, had been looking for ways to expand the business. Maybe Mark could fill that void. Carmack was making this great technology, after all, so why not have someone in the company who would exploit it for all it was worth?
Carmack didn’t jump at the suggestion. As he was fond of pointing out, he wasn’t interested in runnin
g a big company, he just wanted to program games. But he recognized that without Romero id wouldn’t have been in the business in the first place. He agreed to bring Mark Rein on as id’s probationary president for six months.
Within weeks Mark had scored a deal to release a retail version of Commander Keen with a company called FormGen. He raved about the opportunity for id to cash in on the commercial marketplace. They were going to make three games anyway; all they had to do was take one of them and release it with FormGen as retail. For id, it seemed like a great idea, a second way to cash in. They could release one Keen in the shareware market and another in retail.
Id had no contract with Apogee, but they called Scott Miller to tell him of the opportunity. Their relationship was going well. Earlier in the summer, Scott had brought a coterie of game developers to visit at the boys’ invitation. Romero had decided to host a seminar to encourage other game developers to license id’s technology. Licensing made sense, Romero thought, because Carmack’s technology was clearly so impressive. Why not let others pay to use it themselves? Over a weekend the id guys showed how the Keen engine could be used by creating an impromptu PC version of Pac-Man that they dubbed Wac-Man. They completed it in a night and sold their first license to Apogee.
When the id guys told Scott later about the FormGen opportunity, he was dismayed. “This is a big problem,” he said to them. “You’re breaking the magic formula of the trilogy. If you release a shareware game and don’t let people buy the full trilogy, it’s not going to sell as well.” It’s too late, they told him. They had already signed the deal.
By August 1991, id Software’s growing ambitions were leading them not only into new business, new games, and new technologies but to a new home. Tom and Romero wanted out of Shreveport. Despite the fun days at the lake house, they were getting tired of the depressing environment. Romero hated driving past all the poor people fishing for food off the Cross Lake bridge. He had another motivation too: a girlfriend, Beth McCall.
Beth worked at Softdisk in the shipping department. A former debutante from New Orleans, she was bright and cheerful, and laughed at all Romero’s silly jokes. The relationship was light and fun, just the tonic Romero felt he needed after his divorce. Though his relationship with his ex-wife was strained, he still felt close to his sons. With Beth, he was able to fill a void. Best of all, she wanted out of Shreveport too.
Tom had an idea where to go. He missed the change of the seasons and culture of his college town and begged them to relocate to Wisconsin. Romero agreed to accompany Tom to check out Madison, a college town. They returned convinced that this was the place to go. Their other lake house roommate, Jason Blochowiak, had gone to school in Madison and quickly offered to leave Softdisk and come along. The other guys didn’t think Jason was quite motivated enough; he had once commented how he made more money from his investments than from his computer programming. He drove a van with a vanity license plate that read autocrat. But Carmack thought he was a smart, talented programmer and was happy to have him.
Carmack was fine with going to Madison; as he often told the others, he didn’t care where he was as long as he could code. Adrian was much more reluctant. Shreveport, after all, was his lifelong home. Though he explored dark worlds in his art, in real life he craved stability. Romero begged and pleaded, promising Adrian that their apartments would be only the best. After much convincing from his friends and family, Adrian agreed to go. Jay, however, to everyone’s disappointment, was not on board for this ride. Feeling obliged to complete his projects at Softdisk, and leery of risking a start-up venture, he chose to stay behind.
On a warm morning in September, the id guys loaded up their cars and drove away from the lake house one last time. The computers in their trunks were their own.
SIX
Green and Pissed
For once, reality didn’t live up to Romero’s hype. The id guys arrived at the apartment in Madison on a gray day in September 1991 to find it considerably less fun than he and Tom had described. They were in a sprawling complex in which every building looked the same. Compared with their Shreveport house, it was a dump: no lake, no yard, no boat. When they walked down the hall they didn’t pass trees, they passed two scary-looking guys dealing drugs.
At least they had some semblance of an id office: a three-bedroom apartment in the complex. Because Carmack didn’t care, he agreed to live in the upstairs bedroom while all the other guys got their own apartments elsewhere in the complex. Adrian, who was instantly miserable being out of his element, had even more problems because his apartment was on the far side of the development. While the other guys walked across a parking lot to get to the id office, Adrian had to drive.
But Romero was delighted. He was starting fresh: he had a new girlfriend and new games. Tom shared in the enthusiasm, happy to be back home, refreshed by the collegiate environment. The only real sore point for the two of them was Jason, who had become Carmack’s friend. He seemed to be on a completely different wavelength. Still, Carmack wasn’t ready to let him go.
Despite their mixed feelings about their new situation, the id team buckled down to finish the second Commander Keen trilogy. After their long months working together, the team had formed into a collective personality. Romero and Carmack were now in a perfect groove, with Carmack improving the new Keen engine—the code that made the graphics—while Romero worked on the editor and tools—the software used to create the game elements. Nothing could distract them. One night Beth and a few other women showed up at the apartment. The guys were hard at work. Beth did her best to attract Romero’s attention. When nothing elicited a response, she threw up her hands and said, “Why can’t we just have our men come home and have sex with us?”
“Because we’re working,” Romero said. Carmack laughed.
Tom was just as dedicated, feeling particularly giddy about the success of the project, which inspired him to new heights of creative design. He populated Keen’s world with gun-toting potato men, tongue-wagging poisonous mushrooms and, his favorite, the Dopefish—a green fish with big dopey eyes and giant front teeth.
Adrian, as usual, didn’t share Tom’s glee. But he put all his efforts into bringing the silly characters to life. His artwork was taking on more color and precision, rivaling that of the best games on the market. He was also finding a way to vent his mounting frustrations with Tom, Keen, and Madison. One time he played around with the Commander Keen image, creating a graphic of Keen with his eyes gouged out and his throat ripped open. Adrian had a good laugh switching between the images of Keen all happy and chipper and Keen sliced and diced.
With the work on the new Keens progressing and checks continuing to pour in, Carmack was able to go back to his pet project: 3-D first-person shooters. The latest step was inspired by something he had heard from Romero. Carmack and Romero had developed another aspect of their collaboration. Though Carmack was gifted at creating game graphics, he had little interest in keeping up with the gaming world. He was never a player, really, he only made the games, just as he was the Dungeon Master but not a player of D&D. Romero, by contrast, kept up with everything, all the new games and developers. It was through one of these developers that he first learned about an important new development called “texture mapping.”
Texture mapping meant applying a detailed pattern or texture to a tile of graphics on the computer screen. Instead of drawing a solid color on the back wall of a game, the computer would draw a pattern of bricks. Romero heard about texture mapping from Paul Neurath, whose company, Blue Sky Productions, was working on a game called Ultima Underworld, which would be published by Richard Garriott’s Origin company. Neurath told Romero that they were applying texture mapping to shapes or polygons in a three-dimensional world. Cool, Romero thought. When he hung up the phone, he spun his chair to Carmack and said, “Paul said he’s doing a game using texture mapping.”
“Texture mapping?” Carmack replied, then took a few seconds to spin the concept around in
his head. “I can do that.”
The result was Catacomb 3-D, which incorporated texture-mapped walls of gray bricks covered in green slime. To play, the gamer ran through the maze, shooting fireballs out of a hand that was drawn in the lower center of the screen, as if one was looking down on one’s own arm, reaching into the computer. By including the hand, id Software was making a subtle but strong point to its audience: You are not just playing the game, you’re inhabiting it.
The game ended up being published six months before Neurath’s Ultima Underworld. Though Ultima Underworld, a role-playing adventure, received more attention because of the Garriott connection, together the games took the 3-D gaming experience to a new, more immersive place. When Scott Miller saw Catacomb 3-D, he had one thing to say: “We need to do something like this as shareware.”
As Thanksgiving 1991 neared, life in Madison was turning increasingly ugly. The drug-dealing neighbors had been arrested after the cops pounded down their door. Someone siphoned gasoline from their cars. Adrian was particularly miserable because he lost the cap to his water bed and couldn’t find a replacement. He spent months in a sleeping bag on the floor. Carmack had been sleeping on the floor for months too, though by choice. He simply didn’t feel he needed a mattress. Finally Romero got fed up with the situation and bought his partner a mattress, leaving it for him on his floor. “Dude,” he said, “it’s time you got a good night’s sleep.”
Madison was growing cold—really, really cold. Snow dumped from the sky. The entire parking lot of the complex was glazed over in ice. Every afternoon when he’d wake up, Adrian would have to sit in his car for twenty minutes warming the engine so he could drive to the other side of the development. One time they all went out to buy a pizza but ran back to their cars without the pie. They were so cold they decided to leave the pizza and drive home. No one was willing to run back inside.
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