Roberta and Ken were impressed and requested a meeting. The id guys were awestruck. They had grown up playing Sierra games; now they were being asked to visit the king and queen in their lair. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Wolfenstein was coming into shape. If Sierra made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, they might strike a deal. They decided to put together a short demo of the game to show the Williamses.
When the id guys showed up at Sierra’s offices, it was clear that they hadn’t left their apartments for a month. Romero had been growing out his hair. Tom had an unkempt beard. Carmack had holes in his shirt. They were all in ratty, torn jeans. Before they met with Ken and Roberta, they were given a tour of the offices. For the guys, particularly Romero and Tom, it was a tour of the gamers’ hall of fame. Back in a CD duplication room, they were introduced to Warren Schwader. Romero and Tom looked at each other and immediately fell to their knees, bowing. “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” they said. Schwader, they knew, had designed one of their favorite old Apple II games, Threshold. “Dude!” Romero beamed. “Threshold! You are the Daddy!”
But the allure soon wore off. Around the corner Carmack fell into a conversation with a programmer. As Romero, Tom, and Adrian watched, Carmack chipped away at the programmer’s work, challenging what to him was an obvious waste of time. When he was through, the Sierra programmer just sat there, completely belittled by Carmack’s superior skills. Romero patted Carmack on the back as they walked away. “God,” he said, “you just wiped them down.” Carmack shrugged modestly. Romero was proud.
The Williamses were not as impressed. The boys struck them as nothing more than highly talented and highly naÏve kids. When Ken Williams showed up at a fancy restaurant called Edna’s Elderberry House with this ragtag group of guys in shabby clothes, he was pulled aside by the maître d’. Williams had to explain that these were important guests before they were led to a private room with a long oak table and a burning fire.
The food came, and conversation flowed. Williams prided himself on discovering and nurturing young talent. But the inexperience of this group, he thought, was palpable. They didn’t seem to have a business bone in their bodies. When they told Williams how much they were making on Commander Keen, he blanched. “You’re telling me,” he said, “you’re making fifty thousand dollars a month just from shareware?”
They showed him the numbers. Scott had upped their royalty to 45 percent. There was virtually no overhead, they explained. The shareware model let Apogee keep ninety-five cents for every dollar that came in. “We make the best stuff in shareware,” Romero proclaimed, “that’s why we’re making so much money. If you think that’s awesome,” he said, “check this out.”
Tom took out a laptop, set it on the table, and urged Williams to hit the key. Wolfenstein came on the screen. Williams played the game with a poker face. The guys were dying with anticipation. Finally Williams said, “Ah, that’s neat.” He closed the program. A final screen came up, with the face of Commander Keen and a green monster from Aliens Ate My Babysitter. In big words in the middle it said: “id Software: Part of the Sierra Family?”
“Do you mind removing the question mark?” Williams said. Then he offered them $2.5 million.
The id guys returned to their snowed-in apartment to discuss the deal. Two and a half million dollars was a lot of money for four or five guys to split. But they didn’t jump the gun. They didn’t want just to do a stock deal, they wanted some up-front cash. So they returned to the approach they’d originally taken with Scott Miller. “Why don’t we do this?” Romero suggested. “Let’s ask for a hundred thousand down. If they’re interested, then we’ll sell. If they don’t, then we don’t do it.”
When presented with the request, Williams balked. Though he was impressed by their work, he wasn’t ready to fork over such a large chunk of cash. The deal was over. Clearly, id thought, he just didn’t get what they were doing. He didn’t understand the potential of Wolfenstein 3-D. If he had, he would have immediately handed over the cash. It was a disappointment, not so much because they missed out on the money but because their hero and his company had let them down. This game was going to change things, they knew; there was nothing on a computer like it. Fuck Sierra and their loser programmers, Romero told them, id would remain independent. And, independently, they would rule.
Fueled by the trip to Sierra, id’s burgeoning egos exploded into their Dungeons and Dragons fantasies. Games, once again, had become expressions of their own inner worlds. In recent rounds Romero had been toying with the Demonicron, the darkly powerful book he had encouraged them to seize from the demons. It was a dangerous move, one that would either help them rule or destroy the world. Carmack grew increasingly distressed at Romero’s recklessness. He didn’t want to see the game he had spent so long creating get ruined. In a desperate move, he called Jay Wilbur back in Shreveport, asking him if he could fly up to Madison to reprise his D&D character and help stop Romero. But Jay couldn’t make the trip. Ultimately, Carmack decided to test Romero’s resolve, to see just how far his partner was willing to go.
Late one night Carmack the Dungeon Master brought the devil in to play. He told Romero that a demonic creature in the game had a bargain to make: Give him the Demonicron and he will grant you your greatest wishes. Romero said, “If I’m going to give you this book, then I want some really kick-ass shit.” Carmack assured him the demon would oblige with the Daikatana.
Romero’s eyes widened. The Daikatana was a mighty sword, one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Despite the pleas of the others, he told Carmack he wanted to give the demon the book. It didn’t take long to find out the consequences. As the rules of the game dictated, Carmack rolled the die to randomly determine the strength of the demon’s response. The demon was using the book to conjure more demons, he told the group. A battle of epic proportions ensued until Carmack declared the outcome. “The material plane is overrun with demons,” he said, flatly. “Everyone is dead. That’s it. We’re done. Mmm.”
No one spoke. They guys couldn’t believe it. After all those games, all the late nights around the table in Shreveport, the adventures here that cured all the cold nights of Madison, it was over. A sadness filled the room. Romero finally said to Carmack, “Shit, that’s fun playing that game. Now it’s ruined? Is there any way to get that back?” But he knew the answer. Carmack was always true to himself and to his game. “No,” he said, “it’s over.” There was a lesson to be learned: Romero had gone too far.
With the D&D world destroyed, the Sierra deal blown, and Madison growing even colder, the id guys turned up the heat literally and figuratively. They needed help to get Wolfenstein done, they decided, and they knew just the person to call: Kevin Cloud.
Kevin was the editorial director at Softdisk and had been acting as an informal liaison between id and their former home. Artistic, diligent, and well organized, he seemed like the perfect complement to their team. Born in 1965 to a teacher and an electrician, Kevin grew up in Shreveport reading comics and playing in arcades. While pursuing a degree in political science, he took a job as a computer artist at Softdisk. It ended up changing his life.
Kevin immediately struck up a friendship with the Gamer’s Edge guys, emerging as one of their few allies during the rising mutiny. He spoke in a slow southern drawl and was partial to cowboy boots and blue jeans. He was polite and laid-back, but he could also be darkly funny, enjoying scatological humor and riffing just as sickly as Romero and Tom. Unlike them, though, Kevin could tether it all in on a dime, returning to a steady focus that their creative giddiness didn’t seem to allow. After they left the company, Kevin distinguished himself for his diplomatic skills—able to keep Softdisk at bay, letting id maintain maximum freedom.
The id guys called him from Wisconsin and said they’d like him to join their team. There was only one condition. He had to move to Madison. Kevin didn’t hesitate. He was growing tired of Softdisk. He had also just gotten married and
was ready to begin a new life. So he packed up all his belongings and hit the road with his wife for a nineteen-hour drive. He arrived early the next morning and knocked on id’s apartment door. After a minute or so, Carmack appeared in his underwear, bleary-eyed, his hair matted. “Come back later,” he said, and shut the door, leaving them standing with their bags in the cold.
Kevin turned to his wife. “Um, let’s go get some coffee.” Later he came back and met with the guys. The deal was made, Kevin would join the team. Elated, he told them that he had already found an apartment and would sign the lease the following morning. Inspired, id decided it was time for them to move too. So Romero and Tom went out in search of spacious new digs. That night they reported back to Carmack and Adrian. They had found a stylish new apartment complex, but Romero’s bit, it seemed, had flipped. “Yeah, we can move across town,” he said, “but I’m telling you, this fucking snow and ice, this shit sucks. I hate it here.”
“Yeah!” Adrian said.
“I really don’t want to stay here anymore,” Romero said. “I didn’t know it’d be this bad in Wisconsin. Wouldn’t it be cool to go to California, mountains and trees? You know, that’s what I like—a place where a human can be outside around the year and live, not die if he has nothing. I’m into that. It’s like, okay, heat versus freezing winter? I choose heat! I’d rather not have to bundle up, slide around, crack my skull open, and not be able to move my fingers. I’d rather be sweating my ass off in a fucking tank top out by the lake! We’re a developer, we don’t have to be in any one location. We can be anywhere.” Wherever he went, he knew, his girlfriend, Beth, would be happy to come along.
As the midnight hour passed, they stretched a map across a table and discussed all the places they could move: “Jamaica!” Tom suggested. Adrian spoke: “How about Dallas?” How about Dallas! It had a lot going for it. It was warm, in the South. And Apogee was there. Scott Miller, in fact, had long raved about the city, telling the guys how there was a huge lake, just like the one in Shreveport, where they could go skiing and maybe even get a house. Still better, Tom added, Texas had no state income tax, which meant they could make even more money. Dallas it would be.
There was only one problem: Kevin Cloud. He was about to sign a lease for an apartment, which would commit id to staying in Madison for at least another six months. He had to be stopped. It was 3:00 a.m. In a panic the id guys left a flurry of messages at Kevin’s hotel. He woke up a few hours later and got the messages: “Don’t sign the lease! Call immediately! We are the wind! We are the wind!”
“Oh my goodness,” he said to his wife, “they must have looked at their budget and realized they can’t hire me.” He was relieved to hear the real news. Despite the long drive, he agreed to head with the guys down to Dallas, closer to home. “We are the wind,” they repeated, as if it summed up everything about them: their spontaneity, their speed, their elusiveness.
A few weeks later, a moving truck backed up to their apartment. The guys waited as the driver went to open the back of the truck. The gate slid up. Their jaws dropped in disbelief. Sitting alone in the back of the truck, like a vision, like an omen, was a Pac-Man machine. Here it was: the game they had all grown up with, the one Romero had plastered with his high scores all around Sacramento, the one they had copied in Shreveport in their Wac-Man demo. Romero gulped and asked the driver, “Is that your machine?”
“It’s mine now, I guess,” the driver said. “Someone left it on my truck. They didn’t want it in their house.”
The id guys looked at each other, nodding. “Hey, dude,” Romero said, “can we buy it from you?”
The driver looked at these kids with long hair and torn jeans. They didn’t look like they could afford a haircut, let alone a fancy arcade machine. “Sure,” he said brashly, “for a hundred and fifty bucks!”
Carmack reached into his pocket. “No problem,” he said, peeling off the cash from a fat wad of bills. “Leave it on the truck.” The game was coming to Texas.
SEVEN
Spear of Destiny
In Texas video games made the long list of evils. Games were bad, corrupting the kids, causing them to blow their milk money on nonsense. So the upright citizens of Mesquite, a small town just southeast of Dallas, took their cause to the courts. They wanted the games banned. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, ultimately, shot the Texans down. This was in 1982. The games at the center of the debate were arcade hits like Pac-Man, the very machine that arrived on the truck when id Software, Mesquite’s first gaming company, pulled into town on April Fool’s Day 1992.
Carmack and Romero couldn’t have been happier to be in the heat again. Everything in Dallas was big. The highways were big. The trucks were big. The car dealerships were big. Even the people were big, from the towering cowboys to the statuesque blondes. Id settled on Mesquite to be near Scott Miller, who ran Apogee from his hometown of Garland, just a few minutes up the road. Mesquite, as it so happened, had what the guys considered a suitably killer place to live. La Prada Apartments, off Interstate 635, boasted sprawling lofts with ten-foot black windows overlooking crystal blue swimming pools and gardens. When id arrived, women in bikinis lounged by the pools, the sweet, tangy smell of barbecue floated up from the grills, water polo balls flew over the nets. They were home.
Scott was thrilled to have his star gamers as neighbors. He and his partner, George Broussard, took them out for a big Tex-Mex dinner of burritos and nachos, then off to SpeedZone, a big arcade, for go-cart racing and games. The id guys chased each other around the tracks in their Formula One model cars. Afterward they admired the authentic sports cars being driven by Scott and George. Apogee was clearly reaping the rewards of Keen’s continued success. “Oh man,” Romero told Carmack, “they’re driving bad-ass cars while we drive ass cars. It’s time for us to kick ass.”
There was plenty of reason for them to succeed. In addition to the guarantee of a hundred thousand dollars, Scott upped their royalty to 50 percent—unheard of in the industry. He was eager to keep the boys happy. He had made other concessions too. He knew they hated their obligation to Softdisk. In order to let id focus on Wolfenstein, he told them that Apogee would create a game to fulfill the Softdisk contract. Unbeknownst to Softdisk, the next game they received, ScubaVenture, came not from id Software but from Apogee.
Scott had increasingly big plans for Wolfenstein. At the moment, the idea was to follow their existing shareware formula: release one episode, containing ten levels, for free, then charge gamers to receive the remaining two episodes. After talking with Romero and Tom, Scott learned that it was taking the group only about one day to make a level of the game. Ka-ching! Dollar signs! Instead of just three episodes, why not have six? Scott said, “If you can do thirty more levels, it would only take you fifteen days. And we could have it where people could buy the first trilogy for thirty-five dollars or get all six for fifty dollars, or if people buy the first episode and later want the second episodes it will be twenty dollars. So there’s a reason to get them all!” After some consideration, id agreed.
Not everything about the future was looking up. The guys abruptly decided to part ways with their president, Mark Rein, after a difference of opinion. “That’s fucking it,” Romero declared. “Boom! He’s gone.”
But gone too was id’s one and only biz guy. Official biz guy, at least. Unofficially, of course, Carmack and Romero had been running businesses for years. Though coders by trade, they’d been working for themselves since they were teenagers. Carmack had put a team of his friends together to make Wraith, then he managed his own freelance programming career. Romero had grown up as a one-boy band, churning out dozens of titles and pawning them off to small publishers. Like most artists or programmers, however, they enjoyed doing their craft more than cutting a deal.
And the more immersed they became at id, the less interested they were in handling the mounting production tasks: paying bills, ordering supplies, fielding calls. They needed someo
ne who could be a front man for the company, someone as brash and iconoclastic in business as they were in game development. There certainly were plenty of candidates, as budding executives across the country began sniffing out id. But id didn’t want just anyone. They wanted their old friend Jay Wilbur.
Here’s the deal, they told Jay on the phone: as id’s new chief executive officer, he’d get 5 percent of the company and full reign to run the business side of things. All he had to do was say yes and drive the few hours from Shreveport to Dallas. Tired of Softdisk and feeling that he had fulfilled his obligation to Al Vekovius, Jay agreed. Fire up the barbecue, he told them, he was coming to Mesquite.
“Dance, motherfuckers!” Romero screamed. “Lay down! Brrrrrschh! Brrrrrschh! Brrrrrschh!” The SS guards were everywhere—down the hall, under the Hitler portrait, careening by the shit buckets. And Romero was there—dude, fucking right there—storming down the hall with the chain gun, mowing down Nazis and running over their bloody, bony chunks of gibs.
It was well past midnight at the id pad in the La Prada Apartments. Romero was at his perch on the second floor of the loft, Adrian to his right, Tom behind him. To his left was a snarl of cables and controllers; at the moment, the office’s favorite new obsession, a one-on-one brawl game called Street Fighter II, was jammed in the Nintendo. Downstairs by the kitchen, Carmack sat at his stealth black NeXT machine. Kevin sat to his right, Jay behind them. The floor was piled with pizza boxes. Carmack sat above a pile of empty Diet Cokes. It had been only days, and id had settled in.
Romero had been growing more and more enthused over Wolfenstein’s progress. This was easy to tell; all one had to do was listen to the volume of his screams. Game playing, everyone was beginning to notice, was more than just a part of work for Romero, it was a part of life. He was spending much of his time testing out Wolfenstein. When he wasn’t testing it himself, he was contacting gamers across the BBS world who were play-testing it for him.
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