“Hey, you know what we should have in here?” Romero called out, as he paused the game. “Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down! Heh heh! That would be fucking awesome!”
Adrian and Tom chuckled heartily beside him. Tom reached below his desk, then hurled one of his many wads of paper at Romero. Romero, who had his own stash, responded with three or four more. One or two sailed over the loft and hit Kevin, who, as usual, responded with his own litany of paper bombs. Carmack tried to focus. Paper fights. Nazi yells. Romero’s violent fantasies. They were becoming the norm since the guys had arrived in Mesquite. Carmack never participated in the revelry; no one expected him to. So far his powers of concentration were good enough to shut out the distractions so he could deal with his immediate problems: optimizing the Wolfenstein engine for maximum speed and stability.
Though he could tolerate the paper fights, the bigger annoyance was the push walls. Push walls were essentially secret doors in a game. The idea was that the player could run down against a wall and, if he pushed in the right spot, a portion of the wall would slide back, revealing a secret room full of goodies. Tom had been needling Carmack incessantly about adding this special feature. Secrets, he lobbied, were an essential part of every good game. There had been secrets in their early games—like the Vorticon alphabet in Keen or the spot where Keen would moon the player if the player paused too long without doing anything. Wolfenstein was in dire need of something like that. And creating a way for players to find secret rooms through push walls seemed like a natural.
But Carmack wasn’t biting. It was, he said, “an ugly hack.” This meant that it was an inelegant solution to an unnecessary problem. Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible. The Wolfenstein engine simply wasn’t designed to have walls sliding back into secret rooms. It was designed to have doors slide open and shut, open and shut. It was a matter of streamlining. The simpler Carmack kept his game, the faster the world would move, therefore, the deeper the immersion. Nope, he’d say, push walls were out.
Tom didn’t relent. He’d bring it up whenever he sensed an opening. Soon Romero joined Tom’s crusade. “We understand that you’re overloaded on programming stuff because of this new engine,” Romero told Carmack. “How about just this one thing? Put push walls there and we’ll be happy. We’ll put ’em fucking everywhere.” Carmack still said no. It was, notably, the first time since they had begun that the team experienced creative conflict.
During the day they took occasional breaks, playing football in the pool. One time, with Carmack out there, Romero pleaded Tom’s case again. “Dude,” he said, “we need push walls! You can’t just run down these hallways and not find secret stuff! Everything you’re doing is awesome. Just doing this one thing will make me and Tom really happy with the design. This is really simple design-wise.”
“Forget about it,” Carmack snapped.
More new tensions began to surface. With the extra levels ordered by Scott, the id guys were putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Kevin and Jay did ease the burden somewhat. Kevin was able to assist Adrian with the character work, as well as help out with some packaging and marketing designs. As CEO, Jay’s main asset wasn’t so much strategizing the company as being the office “biz guy.” He made sure there was enough computer paper, enough disks, enough toilet paper, enough pizza. He made sure bills got paid. One of the reasons he got the job was he was the only one who balanced his checkbook.
Despite the help of Kevin and Jay, though, nothing could dissipate the reaction everyone was having to the shenanigans of Romero and Tom. They were over the top with energy. They used to jump around, bleeping and blurting, imitating sounds and characters from Keen. But now they had a microphone. Literally. Bobby Prince, their freelance sound designer, had temporarily set up camp in the id apartment, turning the loft into a mini–sound studio. With an artillery of effects and mikes, Tom and Romero went overboard. They’d stay up well into the morning recording demented screeds.
One night they got the idea to record answering machine messages for the id phone. The first started with jazzy piano and Romero speaking over the music. “Id Software is brought to you today by the letter I and the number five,” he said, like at the end of Sesame Street. Tom followed by singing in a strange high voice, “Five strawberry pies!” Screams and thunderclaps followed into the beep. For another, they cranked up the distortion to make them sound like gravel-voiced demons. “Id Software is not available right now,” the demon belched, “because I’m eating them!” In a third, Tom began by saying that he was standing in the rubble of id Software. Suddenly, the demon appeared and said, “Are you in any way related to id Software?” Tom told the demon that he was just there doing the answering machine message. “Goodbye, ass!” the demon bellowed, followed by a blaze of thunder, fire and, at the end, Tom’s screams.
Adrian got so fed up with their noise that, on the night of the answering machine revelry, he simply left. Carmack, for the time being, would stay behind.
Tensions were building outside the office too. One day Scott received a call from FormGen, with whom he had been in contact since the company decided to do a retail version of Wolfenstein. FormGen would often appeal to Scott when they were having difficulty negotiating with id. Scott had had some concerns of his own: most notably that Wolfenstein was nothing more than a maze game, Pac-Man with guns. He wondered if people would see it for what it was. FormGen’s latest concern, however, was even bigger.
“Look, Scott,” an executive said, “we don’t think they should be showing blood and stirring up the World War II stuff. We’re really worried about this. It’s too realistic. We’re going to make a lot of people upset. There’s never been a game like this.”
“Let me see what I can do,” Scott replied. He dialed id. “Hey,” he said, “FormGen thinks the game needs to be toned down.” He could hear the guys huffing on the other end of the line. It was time for id to do something about the violence, he conceded. “Beef it up!” he said. They wholeheartedly agreed.
Adrian filled the game with all kinds of gruesome details: skeletons hanging by their wrists from chains, corpses in jail cells slumped against the bars, blood and flesh chunks randomly spotting the labyrinthine walls. It was a welcome change from the art Tom was having him create for the game, novelistic elements like pots and pans hanging in the kitchen and still-life plates of turkey dinners. Adrian, who was growing to despise the game’s realism, was longing for more splatterpunk, demonic gore. He pumped in as much blood as he could.
Tom and Romero upped the shock value in other ways, most notably the screams. They stayed up late into the night, recording hellish German commands and orders: “Achtung!” and “Schutzstaffel!” They recorded last words for dying Nazis: “Mutti!” (Mommy), and, for Hitler himself, a final good-bye to his wife: “Eva, auf Wiedersehen!” To cap it off, they used a digital version of the Nazi party anthem, “Horst Wessel Lied,” to open the game.
They also threw in something they called a Death Cam. After the final enemy, known as “the boss” of an episode, got killed, a message would appear on the screen saying, “Let’s see that again!” Then a detailed animation would slowly play, showing the big, bad boss meeting his grisly demise. This Death Cam was id’s version of a snuff film. They decided to include a screen at the beginning of the game that would say, “This game is voluntarily rated PC-13: Profound Carnage.” Though tongue-in-cheek, it was the first voluntary rating of a video game.
With the game nearing completion, there was one major issue left unresolved: the push walls. Romero and Tom figured it was worth one last try and asked Carmack to put them in. To their surprise, he spun around in his chair and said it was already done. Carmack, in the end, agreed that it was, as he was fond of saying, the Right Thing to Do. Secrets were fun. Tom and Romero were right. I
t was striking, they thought, and worth remembering. Carmack was stubborn but, if someone argued a point strongly and convincingly, he was willing to give in.
Tom and Romero went to town putting in all the secrets. A player would run up to a section of a wall, say, a banner of Hitler, and push, by hitting the space bar on the keyboard. Then—blam!—the wall would creak back. They filled rooms with treasures and health items, turkey dinners and ammo. They even made a completely secret level, based on a first-person 3-D version of Pac-Man, ghosts and all.
There was a psychology and a philosophy to video game secrets. Secrets rewarded the player for thinking outside the box, pushing a wall that should be solid to see if it would open. This principle also applied to cheating. Many games included what were known as cheat codes, little commands the player could type in that would give him added health items or weapons. But there was a price to pay. If a player cheated, he was disabled from posting a high score. Behavior in games, as in life, had consequences and rewards.
At 4:00 a.m. on May 5, 1992, the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3-D was complete. Id had wrapped up all the little finishing touches. Tom typed the back story: “You’re William J. ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz, the Allies’ bad boy of espionage and terminal action seeker. . . . Your mission . . . to infiltrate the Nazi fortress.” In most games, players could choose from difficulty levels, such as easy, medium, and hard. In Wolfenstein, a player would boot up the game and see the question “How Tough Are You?” Below were four responses; each had an accompanying image of the player’s imagined face, ranging from the hardest (“I Am Death Incarnate”), with the face of a snarling, red-eyed B.J., to the easiest (“Can I Play Daddy?”), which showed B.J. with a baby’s bonnet and pacifier. In that spirit, they added taunts that would appear on the screen when the player tried to quit. “Press N for more carnage; Press Y to be a weenie” or “For guns and glory, press N; For work and worry, press Y.”
Details done, errors or bugs checked, the game was ready to be uploaded to Software Creations, id’s adopted home BBS online community in Massachusetts. Gamers, already hooked on Keen, waited anxiously for the newest title to arrive. “Who knows?” Tom said. “If gamers like this, Wolfenstein might do twice as well as Keen.” Keen was currently number one on the shareware market.
Carmack, Adrian, Romero, Jay, Kevin, and Scott gathered around the computer that was connected, by modem, to the Software Creations BBS. Crickets chirped outside. The Pac-Man machine blinked in the corner. With the hit of a button, the data file labeled Wolf 3-D split into abstract bits and streamed through the telephone line out of Mesquite, out of Dallas, up through Texas, heading for New England.
Okay, the guys all agreed, it was time to go to bed. They’d see what happened tomorrow.
“Pizza money!” Jay hollered, opening up the first royalty check for Wolfenstein 3-D. They really had no idea what they would make. Keen was bringing in about $30,000 per month; they expected, at best, to double that. Wolf, after all, was still being distributed through the relative underworld of shareware catalogs and BBSs, without advertising. The closest thing to marketing were the BBS techies who wrote little teasers of text about the game on their computers. But the guys certainly expected, at least, to break even rather soon. The game had cost, if one considered id’s only overhead—the rent of the apartments and their $750 per month salaries—roughly $25,000 to make.
The check was for $100,000. And this reflected only the first month. Together with the continued sales of the Keen games, id was heading for annual sales in the millions. By releasing the first episode as shareware, they’d instantly hooked the gamers, leaving them craving more. It defied logic—the thought of giving something away for free. But Scott’s plan had worked.
Wolfenstein evolved into an underground sensation. Before the press picked up on it, the gamers online were abuzz about the game’s immersive blend of high technology and gruesome game play—the synthesis of Carmack’s and Romero’s personal passions. Forums on the various BBSs and on the emerging commercial online services—Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online—brimmed with discussion about the game. The Internet’s discussion forum, Usenet, was on fire. E-mails poured in to the office.
“There’s no surprise that this game is the hottest download on many BBS systems and the talk of Usenet,” wrote one fan. “I love this game. The feeling as you round a corner at full speed and blow away three guards and an SS who are firing at you, then quickly pivot to take out the guy coming up from behind is indescribable. The anticipation as you open each door and wonder what’s waiting behind it is intense.” One employee at Microsoft raved about “how popular Wolf 3-D is here at Microsoft. It seems like I can’t walk down a hall without hearing ‘Mein Leben’ from someone’s office.” He also mentioned how he hoped id would port a version of the game for Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows.
By summer, the press was echoing the praise. One shareware magazine gushed that the game was “more like an interactive movie than an arcade game.” Another said it was “single-handedly justifying the existence of shareware.” Even Computer Gaming World, the industry’s veteran publication, picked up on the craze, saying that this was “the first game technologically capable of . . . immersing the player in a threatening environment . . . a peek at part of interactive entertainment’s potential for a sensory immersed virtual future.” Virtual reality, now a buzzword in the mainstream press, was a term being applied to Wolfenstein. Shareware magazines were dubbing it a virtual reality game. A Kentucky entrepreneur hooked up a version of Wolfenstein to virtual reality goggles and brought in five hundred dollars a day at the Kentucky State Fair.
But players didn’t need virtual reality goggles to feel immersed. In fact, the sense of immersion was so real that many began complaining of motion sickness. Calls were coming in even at the Apogee office saying that people were throwing up while playing the game. Wolfenstein vomit stories became items of fascination online. Theories abounded. Some players thought the game’s animation was so smooth that it tricked the brain into thinking it was moving in a real space. Other gamers thought it had something to do with the “jerkiness” of the graphics, which induced the feeling of seasickness. Some felt it was simply disorienting because there was no acceleration involved; it was like going from zero to sixty at light speed. Gamers even exchanged tips for how to play without losing one’s Doritos.
The motion sickness wasn’t the only source of controversy. The violence was another. “This game certainly goes heavy on the ketchup,” wrote one reviewer. “Enemies spurt great gobs of blood as you mow them down. If you’re sensitive to violence in video games, this is a game to avoid at all costs.” Most people weren’t protesting much about shooting human beings; they were upset that players could shoot dogs. Nevertheless, it was gore they delighted in. “Wolfenstein 3-D may have no socially redeeming value,” one magazine wrote, “but we couldn’t stop playing it.”
If the violence could be stomached, for some, the enemies couldn’t. Jay received a letter from the Anti-Defamation League protesting the game’s inclusion of swastikas and Nazis. An even bigger problem was Germany itself. Wolfenstein had made its way there online, as it had to other countries, through CompuServe, which had an international presence. It didn’t take long for the game to come to the attention of the German government. Germany, after World War II, had forbidden the inclusion of Nazis in popular entertainment. So Wolfenstein was banned. Apogee began receiving unopened packages containing the game. Soon Scott started fulfilling orders by sending the games in nondescript packages.
When CompuServe learned of the German ban, it pulled Wolfenstein from its service until it heard from German counsel. The move gained attention from pundits and lawyers because it was one of the first examples of the emerging legalities of cyberspace: what happens when a game, or any item—image, book, film—is uploaded in one country but breaks the law of another? The Wolfenstein case prompted one lawyer to publish an article, “Nazis in Cyberspace
!” He found it “intuitively wrong” for the game to be taken down. Cyberspace, he argued, should be treated as its own “independent nation.” The article was illustrated by a flag with a coiled, snakelike mouse cord and the dictum: “Don’t Tread on Our BBS.”
Wolfenstein began empowering gamers in creative ways as well: they started making modifications, or mods. People, including Carmack and Romero, had been hacking into games for years. There had even been some computer games, such as the 1983 game Lode Runner, which had special programs, level editors, to allow users to create their own versions of the game. That same year three fans of Silas Warner’s original Castle Wolfenstein programmed a parody called Castle Smurfenstein—with Smurfs substituted for the Nazis.
A game as sophisticated as id’s Wolfenstein 3-D was considerably more difficult to hack—requiring someone to effectively write over the original content. But not long after Wolfenstein came out, the guys at id booted up a modified version. It seemed the same except for one notable difference. The music had been replaced by the “I Love You, You Love Me” theme song from the children’s show Barney. And instead of killing the SS boss at the end of the episode, players had to destroy the smiling purple dinosaur.
Carmack and Romero couldn’t have been more pleased. Others didn’t feel that way. Kevin, always business minded, was concerned over copyright issues, over the thought of people messing with their content. Scott agreed. What if people started making their own versions of the game and tried to sell them? It would cut into everyone’s profits. But, with Carmack and Romero wholeheartedly behind the idea of open, free, fun hacking, the issue was temporarily pushed aside.
Despite their success, id didn’t rest on their laurels. The work ethic, if anything, got more intense. Immediately after the Wolfenstein shareware was uploaded, the guys buckled down to complete the remaining five episodes. The pressure was palpable. Thousands of gamers were sending in their checks; id had to deliver the goods. When they did take a break, it was several weeks later and the occasion was significant. Kansas City was hosting a big Apple II festival. For the id guys, weaned on Apple II, it seemed like the perfect respite. An Applefest, after all, was kind of where Romero had met Jay. Now they could return to show off how far they’d come. So they piled into Tom’s Toyota and drove thirteen hours, a brand-new seven-thousand-dollar laptop with Wolfenstein in the trunk.
Masters of Doom Page 13
