The result was that they barely left their apartment. Though they were used to spending endless hours together in a small room, in Shreveport at least they had the opportunity to go outside and kneeboard around the lake. Here they killed even more time playing Dungeons and Dragons. In an effort to expand the game, they even drew up flyers that they posted around town.
At the top of the page, Adrian had drawn each of the id guys as his character in the game—Tom with a beard and a large ax, Romero with a huge sword, Adrian standing high with a belt that had the word die on a cloth, and Carmack, dressed as a wizard, holding the rule book. Next to them was a blank stick figure with a question mark for a head. The flyer read: “wanted: cleric and/or thief! Party playing in an awesome, character and event-driven campaign. . . . Just moved our business here, need one or two new players. . . . Things you will enjoy in this campaign: character interaction, good balance, cool stuff happening, pizza. Things you won’t be doing in this campaign: Dominating the world.”
Tensions began to rise, however, about who was trying to dominate the apartment. Adrian was fed up with Tom and Romero bopping around making alien noises and imitating the characters from Keen. Even Carmack was growing tired of their antics. Worse was the trouble with Jason, who was becoming something of a fifth wheel. Carmack was still defending him, though; so instead of firing him they assigned him to bang out a fast, easy game by himself that could fulfill an obligation on the Softdisk contract.
With the Softdisk game being handled by Jason and the second Keen trilogy wrapping up, id could focus on its next project for Apogee. At this point, a hierarchy had been established. Carmack was the technology leader, coming up with the latest engines with which they could construct a game. Tom, as creative director, was in charge of spearheading the game stuff that would go around Carmack’s technology. Romero fit nicely between the two, able to help Carmack with tools and at the same time goof around with Tom on creative ideas. Adrian would fulfill their orders for artwork, injecting, when he could, his own menacing visions.
When the four sat down late one night to discuss a new game, those roles unexpectedly began to shift. The trouble started with Tom. Buoyed by the blockbuster success of the first trilogy months before, he had long imagined doing three trilogies, similar to the plan his hero George Lucas had mapped out for the Star Wars films. But Carmack’s technology was clearly headed toward another idea: a fast-action, first-person game. Keen was neither fast-action nor first-person; it was a side-scrolling adventure like Mario. It was implicit that the next game, at least, would call for something else.
Tom was disappointed, but he shifted into high gear, brainstorming for a new first-person game. He had an immediate idea. “Hey,” he said, “remember in the movie The Thing when the guy comes out of the cage where the dogs are going insane from that alien, and everyone asks him what’s in there? And he says, ‘I don’t know, but it’s weird and pissed off’? Well, that’s just like a video game, because in video games you have no idea why you’re shooting the monsters other than that they’re green and pissed off. Why not do a game like that? Something about these mutant lab experiments you have to hunt down?” He started jotting down potential titles at his PC as he read them aloud to the group: “Mutants from Hell!” “Die, Mutants, Die!” “3-Demons!” “Texture-Mapped Terence and the Green Shits!” Or, he concluded, they could just cut to the chase and call the game “It’s Green and Pissed.”
Everyone laughed. “Yeah,” Romero said, “imagine some game dude wandering into a computer store and saying to the clerk, ‘Um, excuse me, but do you have It’s Green and Pissed?’” Despite their approval, Tom quickly retreated from his idea. He didn’t want to be controversial for controversy’s sake.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Romero said. “That’s so hackneyed. That’s something you always hear of. It’s like ‘yet again the mutated lab full of bullshit, blah blah blah.’ We need to do something cool. You know, it’d be really fucking cool if we made a remake of Castle Wolfenstein and did it in 3-D.”
Wolfenstein! It was a word that struck an immediate chord with both Carmack and Tom, who, like Romero and every other hard-core Apple II gamer, had grown up playing the classic action title created by the legendary Silas Warner in the early 1980s. They immediately got Romero’s vision. Wolfenstein was perfect for Carmack’s technology because it was, at its core, a maze-based shooter. The player had to run through all these labyrinths fighting Nazis and collecting treasure, then doing away with Hitler. Despite the game’s blocky, low-resolution graphics, it was unique in its implication of a larger virtual world. When Castle Wolfenstein was released, most games for computers or arcades, like Pong, existed on one static screen. But in Wolfenstein the conceit was that each screen the player saw represented one room of a large castle. Each room was a maze of walls. When the player ran through the maze, the screen would change, showing a new room. Though there was no scrolling, the feeling was one of true exploration. Part of the appeal was that the player never knew what awaited in the next room: often it was a Nazi screaming in German.
Encouraged by everyone’s sympathetic reaction, Romero exploded with ideas. In the original Wolfenstein, the characters could search the bodies of dead soldiers. “How cool would that be to have in first-person 3-D?” he said. “You could go through and, like, drag the bodies around a corner and rifle through their pockets! Prsshh prsshh prsshh!” he said, imitating the sounds. “We have this opportunity to do something totally new here, something fast and texture-mapped. If we can make the graphics look great and fast, and make the sound cool and loud, and make the game explosively fun, then we’re going to have a winner, especially with the theme.”
The computer game industry was still meek, after all. SimCity, a hit game, challenged players to build and micromanage a virtual town. Civilization, another success, was a heady Risk-like strategy game based on famous historical battles—blood not included. Wolfenstein could be like nothing the industry had ever seen. “It will be just shocking,” Romero concluded, “a totally shocking game.”
Carmack gave his blessing. Once behind an idea, Romero was always charismatically convincing. And Carmack was growing to appreciate Romero’s talent for taking his technology into a new world, a place he himself would never have conceived. Adrian, who wasn’t familiar with the original Wolfenstein, was eager to do anything other than Keen, and the idea of 3-D art intrigued him. Tom, though stung by the rejection of Keen, assumed that they would return to his games after this one. He was still the company’s game designer, after all. So, true to his conciliatory nature, he was willing to go along for the ride. It was a ride all the more immersive because of Carmack’s technology and all the more wild because, for the first time in id’s brief history, it was being steered by Romero.
On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he’d sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero’s antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.
Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier’s check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs’s earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack.
The NeXT computer wasn’t the only new spirit ushering in the new year. Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close
and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D.
The title came after much brainstorming. At first they assumed they had to use something other than the Wolfenstein name, which had been created by Silas Warner at Muse Software. Tom banged out a list of options from the strained—The Fourth Reich or Deep in Germany—to the absurd—Castle Hasselhoff or Luger Me Now. He even played around with some German titles—Dolchteufel (Devil Dagger), Geruchschlecht (Bad Smell). To their surprise and relief, they discovered that Muse had gone bankrupt in the mid-1980s and let the trademark on the Wolfenstein name lapse. It would be Wolfenstein 3-D.
When they ran the idea by Scott, he loved it. He had been pleading with them to do a 3-D shareware game for months. He too knew Castle Wolfenstein and cracked up at Romero’s plans for their version: loud guns, fast action, mowing down Nazis. Money was still rolling in from the Keen games. The second trilogy was out in the shareware market too. Its numbers were disappointing, about a third of the original, but Scott knew this was not so much a sign of the game’s appeal as verification of his original concern: that the retail release of a Keen game for FormGen would cut into his sales because it left him with only two episodes, not three. Nevertheless, the guys at id were his stars, and he believed wholeheartedly in their technology and vision. He guaranteed them $100,000 for Wolfenstein.
Id had no intentions to stop there. Mark Rein, still id’s probationary president, had scored with FormGen to release two more retail id products. Id was excited but concerned; FormGen’s first game with them, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Babysitter, didn’t sell well. Id blamed in part what they thought was a terrible box cover, designed by a company that had done packages for Lipton tea. But the prospect for another shot was enticing. Again, it would allow them to earn revenues from two lucrative markets: shareware and retail. No one, not even Origin and Sierra, was doing this. Though Mark and FormGen were reluctant to, as they said, “stir up the World War II stuff,” they agreed to take Wolfenstein retail. The id guys were growing accustomed to getting their way.
Mitzi enjoyed her new perch atop Carmack’s spacious black NeXT computer. She stretched out lazily on the monitor, letting her legs dangle over the screen. Surrounded by empty pizza boxes and Diet Coke cans, Romero, Carmack, Tom, and Adrian sat at their computers, working on Wolfenstein 3-D. The calmness of the outer world was in stark contrast to the world unfolding on the screens. Wolfenstein had taken on two imperatives: it would be brutal, as originally imagined by Romero, and it would be fast, as engineered by Carmack.
Carmack knew he could up the speed and, thus, the immersion—thanks to the leaps he had made by combining raycasting with texture mapping on Catacomb 3-D. For Wolfenstein, he didn’t so much take another leap as improve his existing code: cleaning up the bugs, optimizing the speed, making it more elegant. A key decision was to let the graphics engine focus on drawing only what the player needed to see. That meant, once again, drawing the walls but not the ceilings and floors. Also to speed things up, characters and objects in the game would not be in true 3-D, they would be sprites, flat images that, if encountered in real life, would look like cardboard cutouts.
Romero, in pure Melvin mode, imagined all the crazy stuff they could do in a game where the object was, as he said, “to mow down Nazis.” He wanted to have the suspense of an Apple II game pumped up with the shock and horror of storming a Nazi bunker. There would be SS soldiers and Hitler. Adrian hit the history books, scanning images of the German leader to include throughout the game.
But that wasn’t enough. “How about,” Romero suggested, “we throw in guard dogs? Dogs that you can shoot! Fucking German shepherds!” Adrian cracked up, sketching out a dog that, in a death animation, could yelp back. “And there should be blood,” Romero said, “lots of blood, blood like you never see in games. And the weapons should be lethal but simple: a knife, a pistol, maybe a Gatling gun too.” Adrian sketched as Romero spoke.
Tom came up with ideas for objects the player could collect through the game. In a paradigm dating back to the early text-based adventures, the gamer had two essential missions: to collect and to kill. Tom came up with treasures and crosses for players to find. There was also the issue of health items. A player would begin with his health at 100 percent. With every shot, the health would decrease until, when it hit 0 percent, the player would die. To survive, a player could pick up so-called health items. Tom wanted these items to be funny; he said, “Why not turkey dinners?”
“Yeah,” Romero agreed, “or even better, how about dog food?” They were having German shepherds in the game, so what the hell? Tom began cackling at the thought of a player slurping up dog food. “Or how about this?” Tom added. “When the player gets really low on health, at like 10 percent, he could run over the bloody guts of a dead Nazi soldier and suck those up for extra energy.” “Flllippp slrrrrrp,” Romero said, making the sounds and wiping his chin while cracking up. “It’s like human giblets, you can eat up their gibs!”
The work would go late into the night. Carmack and Romero perfectly embodied the two extremes. While Carmack tweaked his code, Romero experimented with the graphics and new ways to exploit the tools. Carmack was building the guitar that Romero would bring to life. But their friendship was not traditional. They didn’t discuss their lives, their hopes, their dreams. Sometimes, late at night, they would sit side by side, playing a hovercraft racing game called F-Zero. For the most part, though, their friendship was in their work, their unbridled pursuit of the game.
Carmack and Romero shared a vision the others didn’t possess. Tom, deep down, was still closer to Keen, concerned about violence, about being too controversial, too bloody. Adrian liked the gore; he sketched out dead Nazis lying in pools of blood. But he still harbored a desire to get back to something more gothic and horrific, like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion.
Carmack and Romero, however, were in sync. Carmack didn’t so much care about the accoutrements of the game as he enjoyed Romero’s passion for showing off what his engine could do. Romero got what he was doing—trying to make a sleek, simple, fast game engine. And he was the one who dreamed up the sleek, simple, fast game to go around it. Romero even began excising parts of the game just to adhere to that dictum. At first they had programmed the game so that players could drag and search dead Nazis, as in the original Castle Wolfenstein. But they didn’t like the outcome.
“Ugh.” Romero groaned as he watched Tom drag a body across the screen. “That’s not going to help the game be bad ass, it’s slowing the game down. It’s a neat idea, but when you’re running down hallways and blowing down everything you see, who cares if you drag shit? We gotta rip that code right out of there. Anything that’s going to stop us from mowing shit down—get rid of it!”
The brutality was not just a graphic and game play concern, it had to be a matter of sound too. Id had developed a relationship with an out of town computer game musician named Bobby Prince. Bobby had worked with Apogee and come highly recommended by Scott Miller. He had done some work on the Keen games. For Wolfenstein, they needed him even more badly. The weapons had to sound suitably killer. To accomplish this, they would, for the first time, use digital sound. Bobby came up with a few suggestions, including a staccato rip for the machine gun.
Late one afternoon Romero got ready to play the sound effects for the first time. The game had really taken shape. On the suggestion of Scott Miller, Carmack had gone from the 16-color palette of EGA graphics to the new Video Graphics Adapter or VGA, which allowed 256 colors. Adrian to
ok full advantage of the expanded color range. He had drawn out soldiers with little helmets and boots. He created a special animation sequence that would show the soldiers twitching back in pain, blood spurting from their chests, when they were shot.
Romero loaded up the test portion of the game. He looked down the barrel of his chain gun as the Nazi approached him. He hit the fire button, and the roaring fire of the machine blast Bobby had programmed tore through the speakers as the Nazi went flying back. Romero flew back himself, hands off the keyboard, and fell to the floor laughing, holding his stomach. It was another moment, a variation on when he saw Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement for the first time.
“You know,” he said, as his laughter finally subsided, “there’s never been another game like this.”
On screen, the little Nazi bled.
One afternoon in February 1992, Roberta Williams opened a package. She and her husband, Ken, were sitting in a gorgeous office in Northern California atop one of the largest empires in the business, Sierra On-Line. They were among the leaders in the computer game industry, which had grown from $100 million per year in 1980 to nearly $1 billion. Their early graphical role-playing games had given way to a slew of titles, all created around Sierra’s inherent philosophy: building brands by making game designers into celebrities.
Sierra, as a result, received submissions for games all the time. This day the contents of the package would catch Roberta’s eye. There was a cover letter from a young programmer named John Romero. He had heard that she was becoming interested in children’s games and was including one he and his friends had made. It was doing rather well in the shareware market, he wrote. It was called Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy!
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