The festival was being held at a community college. All the out-of-town guests were staying in a school dormitory. Upon checking in, the id guys noticed a sign telling of a special guest speaker: Silas Warner. They looked at each and gasped. “No way!” Silas was the creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein. As far as they knew, he had no idea that they had remade his game. Nervously, they filed into the lecture hall, computer in tow, and waited for him to arrive.
Silas sauntered onstage like King Kong. He was a massive man: 320 pounds of gamer meat with fingers that could crush a computer mouse with a pinch. But he was funny and articulate, telling the story of his own start-up, Muse Software, the rollicking ride of its rise and fall. Silas was flocked by fans when it was over. The id guys stood in the back, holding their laptop, and waited their turn. “Hey, Silas,” Romero finally said breathlessly, “we’re id Software, and we just did a remake of Castle Wolfenstein and put it on the market and we brought it here so you can check it out and look at it and sign our manual!”
Silas looked at this motley group of programmers with the fancy PC laptop and raised his brow. “Oh yes,” he said slowly. “I remember that someone called me about it.” Eagerly, they fired up the laptop and showed him the game. To their relief, he complimented them on their work and signed autographs. Later that night they returned to the dorm. It was a memorable night. Everyone hung out in the hallways, talking about games, checking out Wolfenstein. There were even celebrities in the Apple II community, like Burger Bill, a programmer who was known to keep a hamburger in his desk and nibble on it occasionally for days on end. But with the crowd gathering around id’s laptop, it was clear that Burger Bill wasn’t the only game in town.
Id’s first taste of fame came the next month, during their first real company vacation. They had just completed all the remaining episodes of Wolfenstein and decided to celebrate by spending $5,000 each on a weeklong stay at Disney World. They spent the days riding Space Mountain over and over again, checking out the action. One night they regrouped in a hot tub at the Grand Floridian Hotel, right off the theme park. Life was good. So good, they decided, that they were going to give themselves raises when they got back: up to what, at the time, felt like a substantial amount of money, $45,000 per year. Wolfenstein, they cheered, had done them well.
“Did someone say Wolfenstein?” asked a guy in the pool nearby. He nudged his friend. “We love that game!”
The id guys looked at them dubiously. But the gamers were for real. They rushed over to the hot tub and began raving about the game. It was a striking moment, especially for Romero, who had spent so many years being a fan himself. Now here he was, sitting in a hot tub under giant palm trees, surrounded by a theme park, money flowing, being treated like a legend. He could deal.
As their success grew, Carmack’s and Romero’s personalities came into even sharper contrast. Carmack sank deeper into his technology; Romero, deeper into game play. Tom documented their differences in a hint manual he wrote for Wolfenstein 3-D. He characterized Romero as the ultimate player and Carmack the ultimate technician—or, as he put it, the Surgeon and Engine John.
“John Romero,” he wrote, “at this point in time, is the world’s best Wolfenstein player. His current record for getting through all of episode one in Bring ’Em On mode—five minutes, twenty seconds! That’s not going for anything but the shortest, fastest path to each elevator. We call him The Surgeon, after the way he surgically takes out guys and keeps going. He welcomes all challengers to his record. John’s advice: ‘Play with the mouse and keyboard and use the up arrow and right shift to run most of the time. Don’t sit and wait for the enemy to come—charge and lay waste to them before they know what hit ’em. There’s no room for wimps in World Class Wolfenstein play.’ ”
Further down he described the work of Carmack. “Engine John,” he wrote. “We call the part of a program that actually gets the graphics onto the screen ‘the engine.’ The cool, texture-mapped engine for Wolfenstein 3-D was written by our resident technical ‘soopah genius,’ John Carmack. However, he’s already disgusted with the technology. He’s excited about his new ideas on rendering holographic worlds.”
It was true, Carmack was over his previous accomplishment, just as he was over his past. Right now the next obvious step was for him to further enrich his virtual worlds. The spirit was in the air. In May 1992, when Wolfenstein was released, an author named Neal Stephenson published a book called Snow Crash, which described an inhabitable cyberspace world called the Metaverse. Science fiction, however, wasn’t inspiring Carmack’s progress; it was just his science. Technology was improving. So were his skills.
The opportunity to experiment came during the development of Spear of Destiny, the commercial spin-off of Wolfenstein that id was now making for FormGen. The game was named for the mythical spear used to kill Christ, an object later sought by Hitler for its supposed supernatural powers. In the game, Hitler steals the spear and B.J. must fight to win it back. FormGen’s original concerns over violence had faded with Wolfenstein’s success, so id was free to continue on its gory path.
Because Spear of Destiny was built using the original Wolfenstein engine, Carmack could work on new technology while the rest of the guys completed the game. At first, he fiddled with countless little experiments, using art resources from the existing games. He played around with making a racing game like F-Zero, the hovercraft title he played now and then with Romero. Carmack covered the floor of his computer screen with an angular blue matrix of lines. Then he started laying down images that together would make up roads. The only digital images around were big banners of Hitler from Wolfenstein, so he put those down back to back, making a highway of Hitlers surrounded by a sprawling web. Carmack could lose himself in the abstract mathematical imagery of this world, working on the acceleration of movement, the sense of speed, velocity, decline.
Soon his experiments became part of a deal for a game called Shadowcaster, an upcoming title from a small game development company named Raven. The id guys had met the owners of Raven while living in Wisconsin because they were the only other game company in town. Run by two brothers, Brian and Steven Raffel, Raven had started making games for the Amiga game console. Romero was so impressed by their work that he wanted to cofinance their development of a PC game for Apogee. Raven turned him down, saying that they weren’t interested in the PC at the time. But they stayed in touch. Now they had a contract with Electronic Arts to make a PC game after all. Id suggested a deal: let Carmack make the engine for a cut of the profits. Everyone agreed. Carmack got busy.
Others in the office weren’t quite as immersed. Everyone but Romero, it seemed, was burned out on Wolfenstein. Adrian was tired of churning out realistic Nazi images. He began hanging out more with Kevin, who was now collaborating with him. Tom, meanwhile, was getting increasingly frustrated with the design direction of the games. On occasion he would pull Romero aside and ask him when they were going to start working on the next Keen trilogy. Romero would tell him that it was still on the table, but privately he was getting tired of the badgering. Tom was clearly not motivated to work on Spear. Romero tried to motivate him as best he could, telling Tom to think about that nice new Acura he was going to buy when all the money rolled in. Other times they’d just take the easy way out: leaving their work altogether to kick-punch each other in Street Fighter II.
The more bored Tom got, the more they played. And since Tom was bored much of the time, the games were lasting longer into the night. Downstairs, Carmack was trying to focus on Shadowcaster. He was really on to something here, he could see it, the Right Thing, something different unfolding on his screen, but the distractions were getting worse. After months of shutting out the paper fights and answering machine messages and assorted screams, he finally gave way. Carmack stood up and began to unplug his machine. Everyone else stopped what he was doing and watched. “I think I’m going to get more done doing this by myself in my apartment,” Carmack said. He picked
up his stealth black NeXT machine and walked out the door. He wouldn’t return for weeks.
When Spear of Destiny came out, on September 18, 1992, it further cemented id’s fame and fortune. Once again they won the shareware awards for best entertainment software. They were also winning continued accolades from the press as well as their peers. At the annual Computer Game Developers Conference, an executive from Electronic Arts spoke at a marketing workshop about how Wolfenstein had become such a sensation with no marketing at all. Scott Miller was the first to agree. But the orders were rolling in. The conventional wisdom, at the time, was that at best 1 to 2 percent of the people who downloaded the shareware version would actually pay for the game. To make matters worse, there was nothing stopping someone from buying the game and simply copying it for friends. Despite all these forces, the sales continued to soar. Id was getting checks totaling $150,000 per month.
And the opportunities were coming in from really unlikely places. The most unlikely of all: Nintendo. Despite having turned id away when they tried to sell Nintendo on a PC version of Mario, the company had changed its tune. Id was paid $100,000 to port Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo machine. But Nintendo had one condition: tone the game down. Nintendo was a family system, and they wanted a family version of the game. This meant, first of all, getting rid of the blood. Second, they didn’t like the fact that players could shoot dogs. Why not substitute something else, Nintendo suggested, like rats? This being Nintendo, id agreed.
Even more ironic was an offer from a company called Wisdom Tree, makers of religious-themed games. One day a representative called Jay to inquire about licensing the Wolfenstein engine to make a game based on the story of Noah’s Ark. They wanted a first-person 3-D version in which the player was running around the ark and hurling apples and vegetables to keep the animals in order. Jay had a good laugh. Nintendo, he knew, didn’t allow any kind of religious imagery in a game, whether Satan or Noah. But Wisdom Tree had plans of its own: putting the game out independently as a rogue title for the Super Nintendo. Jay agreed to license them the technology.
For the time being, though, there was something more important to attend to: Carmack’s technology. He returned to the id apartment with the results of his labors on the Shadowcaster engine. It was, everyone immediately saw, quite a leap. There were two noticeable firsts: diminished lighting and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. Diminished lighting meant that, as in real life, distant vistas would recede into shadows. In Wolfenstein, every room was brightly lit, with no variation in hue. But, as any painter knows, light is what brings a picture to life. Carmack was making the world alive.
For greater immersion, he had also learned how to apply textures to the floors and ceilings, as well as add variable heights to the walls. The speed was about half that of Wolfenstein, but since this was an adventure game, built on exploration, it seemed appropriate to have a steadier pace. The leaps didn’t come easily to Carmack. It took a hefty amount of time for him to figure out how to get just the right perspective down for the floors. But his diligence and self-imposed isolation had paid off in a big way. He even had slopes on the floors, so the player could feel like he was running up or downhill. Kevin spent about twenty minutes just running up and over a little hill in the game. It was incredible. And, it was clear, it was time for id to turn this technology into their next game.
With Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny done, everyone, particularly Tom, was ready to move on to different subject matter. The last two games had drained him. Blocky maze games and shooters were nothing like Keen, and he was anxious to return to his pet project, to finish his long-awaited third trilogy. Carmack, to his delight, seemed to go along with the idea. He even described how great it’d be to see the Yorps dancing around in three dimensions.
There was another idea on the table too: Aliens. Everyone at id was a huge fan of this sci-fi movie. They thought it would make a great game. After some research, Jay found that the rights were available. He thought they could get a deal. But then they decided against it. They didn’t want some big movie company telling them what they could and couldn’t put in their game. The technology Carmack had come up with was way too impressive to compromise, they thought. So it was back to the brainstorming.
To Tom’s dismay, the Keen 3-D argument didn’t go far. Carmack’s technology was too fast and brutal for another kids’ game, they all said. Tom looked to Romero, his friend and sidekick, but even he clearly didn’t want to do the game. The computer bit in Romero’s head flipped off for Keen. It wasn’t surprising. Wolfenstein, after all, had originated with Romero, and clearly he preferred its gore to the cutesiness of Keen. Tom knew how Adrian felt. Even Carmack, who had once shown interest in Keen 3-D, had moved on to another idea, something about as far removed from Keen as possible: demons.
Carmack, of course, had a long history with demons. There were the demons of Catholic school, the demons Romero had summoned in their Dungeons and Dragons game, the demons who’d destroyed the D&D world. Now it was time for them to make another appearance. Here was this amazing new technology, so why not have a game about demons versus technology, Carmack said, where the player is using high-tech weapons to defeat beasts from hell? Romero loved the idea. It was something no one had done before. Kevin and Adrian agreed, snickering at the potential for sick, twisted art, something in the spirit of their favorite B movie, Evil Dead II. In fact, they all agreed, that was what the game could be like: a cross between Evil Dead II and Aliens, horror and hell, blood and science.
All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks.
Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world.
“In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
EIGHT
Summon the Demons
“Ggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwlllll!!”
It was a scream from hell—a throaty cry, desperate, almost underwater, like somebody gargling blood. Worse, it was coming from right next door to the new office the id guys had christened Suite 666.
Once id had decided to spring upon the world with Doom, they’d relocated to this suitably dark workplace: a seven-story, black-windowed, cube-shaped building called the Town East Tower. The Tower was, like the gamers themselves, an anomaly in the suburban cowboy domain of Mesquite. On either side of the bordering Lyndon B. Johnson Highway were the consumer biospheres indigenous to the area: Big Billy Barrett’s Used Cars, Sheplers Western Store, and the city’s biggest attraction, the Mesquite Rodeo. Though the Tower housed ordinary offices of lawyers and truck driving schools, compared with the rest of town, the stealth cube looked like it had dropped from outer space.
And now it sounded like someone was birthing an alien in the dentist’s suite next door. In actuality, it was a patient who needed an emergency tracheotomy—which the dentist had performed himself. The screams of patients and drills would become a regular backdrop of life at id. For a group of guys making a game about demons, they sounded just right.
In fact, everything felt right for id that fall of 1992. Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny were the talk of the computer and shareware magazines. Such accolades positioned id, and its publisher, Apogee, as nothing less than the heroes of the shareware movement. The two companies dominated the shareware charts with two Commander Keen titles, Wolfenstein 3-D, and Apogee’s own original game—a side-scrolling shooter starring a brash, Schwarzenegger-style hero called Duke Nukem—occupying the top four positions. The press declared Apogee one of “the most remarkable, if unheralded success stories in the entertainment software industry. . . . [Apogee]
is ready to confront the Big Boys.”
One of the only companies, it seemed, not caught up in the fanfare over Apogee was id. The guys believed that Scott Miller, despite their friendship, had not been fulfilling his responsibilities. This information came from Shawn Green, an Apogee employee whom Romero had befriended since Keen’s release. Shawn was a hard-core gamer and aspiring programmer from Garland, Texas. With long hair and a lust for loud rock music, he’d grown up as an outcast in his conservative town—required to attend night school because he refused to cut his hair. At Apogee, Shawn toyed with people who would call in to complain about killing dogs in Wolfenstein by explaining that “you can kill people too.”
He told Romero that there were more serious complaints—calls from people who could not get through to order id’s games. Apparently, many of the Apogee lackeys spent their days engaged in rubber band fights. Many were simply young students Scott had hired by putting up flyers in computer stores that said, “Do you like to play games? Can you handle talking on the phone and playing games all day for six bucks an hour?” To make matters worse, there was no computer network. Orders were scrawled on scraps of paper and then jammed on metal spikes.
Kevin Cloud, who was emerging as one of the more business-minded members of id, tried calling Apogee himself and found that he couldn’t get through. Something had to be done. Sure Scott was their friend, and he’d given them their start, but now he was unnecessary. Why give up 50 percent of their sales when they could do the self-publish completely on their own? Doom would surely be as big as, if not bigger than, Wolfenstein. Jay, Tom, Adrian, and especially Romero—who, from the moment he suggested they leave Softdisk, had always been looking for ways to grow the business—agreed. The only dissonant voice was Carmack’s.
Masters of Doom Page 14
