Romero couldn’t agree more, adding how, in addition to all that, there would be like tons of blood flying out from the beasts. They had a good laugh. Romero decided to probe the religious issues. “So,” he said, “you’re Mormon?”
“Yep,” Sandy replied.
“Well,” Romero said with a chuckle, “at least you’re like not a Mormon that keeps pumping out tons of kids and stuff.”
Sandy stopped typing. “Actually, I’ve got five kids.”
“Oh, okay,” Romero stammered. “But that’s not like ten or anything. But you know five’s a lot but, um, at least you’re not a really hard-core card-carrying Mormon.”
“Oh, I got my Mormon card right here!” Sandy pulled it out.
“Well, at least you don’t wear those garments and stuff, right?”
Sandy lifted his shirt. “Got my garments on right here!”
“Okay, okay,” Romero said, “I’m going to shut up.”
“Look,” Sandy said, “don’t worry. I have no problems with the demons in the game. They’re just cartoons. And, anyway,” he added, smiling, “they’re the bad guys.”
While id refined Doom in September 1993, two sons of a preacher from Spokane named Rand and Robyn Scott released Myst, a literary adventure computer game on CD-ROM. The game became an instant phenomenon, topping the computer game charts and eventually selling more than 4 million copies. It also popularized the burgeoning new format of CD-ROM. With the rise of CD-ROM drives on home computers, this spacious format (which could store hundreds of times more data than floppy disks) was becoming the “it” software for game developers. The extra space afforded better sound and even full-motion video—effects exploited in a horror CD-ROM game called 7th Guest, another chart topper.
Shot in a photorealistic manner, Myst set players on a mysterious abandoned island, where they were to explore strange rooms and machines and unlock the secret of their inventor, a man named Atrus. Like Doom, Myst unfolded from a first-person point of view. But in Myst, players didn’t run or, for that matter, crawl. They just slowly flowed; clicking a space or item before them would gracefully fade one setting into the next. “Its brilliantly designed and rendered 3-D images,” Wired magazine raved, “and its funhouse world of mazes, puzzles, and human intrigues will certainly set a new standard for this type of adventure game.”
Id hated Myst. It had none of the elements they liked: no real-time interaction, no pace, no fear, no action. If Myst was like Shakespeare, Doom was going to be Stephen King. With Carmack’s engine in gear, the rest of the team buckled down on finished elements of the game. Adrian and Kevin churned out dark, demonic art. They drew guys impaled, twitching on stakes (like the impaled farmer Adrian had seen at the hospital long ago), blood-spattered corpses chained to walls. The death animations were more elaborate than ever: monsters stumbling with their skulls ripped open, the Baron of Hell slumping forward with his intestines spilling onto the floor.
The weapons were falling into place: the shotgun, the pistol, the chain saw, a rocket launcher, and the affectionately named BFG, Big Fucking Gun. In Wolfenstein, if the player lost a gun, it would be replaced with the default weapon, a knife. In Doom, the player would be left to duke it out with his bare fists. They digitized Kevin’s hand, slugging punches against a blue screen. The killer weapons and monsters needed suitably killer sounds. The guys signed Bobby Prince up again to record the audio. Under Romero’s guidance, Bobby gave Doom a techno metal–style soundtrack. A puree of animal groans were used for the game’s beasts.
With the guns and monsters and gore, Sandy and Romero went to town on the levels. Romero had found his voice in Doom. He loved everything about the game, the speed, the fear, the suspense, and he tried to play it all up. Romero’s levels were deliberately paced. As level designer, he was responsible for not only designing the architecture of the environments but also choosing where to put monsters, weapons, bonus items and objects; it was like being a theater director and haunted-mansion creator all in one.
Romero relished the roles. In a level of his, a player might run into a room and see a window leading outside but wouldn’t know how to get there. So the player would run down a room, music pumping, looking for a way. A door would slide open and Boom! there’d be a howling Imp. Blast that monster down, run down a brown spotted corridor, open another door, and Blam! another herd of beasts. Romero had a knack for staging the battles, letting the player win one small round, then pummeling him with a storm of enemies.
While Romero was raw and brutal, Sandy was cerebral and strategic. One level was littered with green barrels that, when shot, would explode. Sandy made levels in which the only way to kill a monster was to shoot a barrel at the perfect moment. His levels were not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as Romero’s; in fact, some of the id guys thought they were downright ugly, but they were undeniably fun and fiendish. They complemented Romero’s well.
By the fall of 1993, the pressure was on as gamers began to clamor for Doom. A demonstration for the press leaked out onto the Internet, despite id’s best efforts. Small groups of die-hard fans began calling the id office or sending desperate e-mails for information. But the mainstream press didn’t seem to know or, for that matter, care. A community television program did a piece on the guys, filming them at work playing games, but that was about it. Calling the big papers and magazines, Jay found, was fruitless.
Instead, Jay—determined to make id’s business style as innovative as its games—focused on setting up the company’s distribution and marketing. He established a toll-free number to field orders and set up a deal with a fulfillment house. Since they were self-publishing Doom, they would be getting twice the earnings they had on Wolfenstein. Games distributed through the regular retail channels would bleed cash to middlemen. Every time someone bought a game at CompUSA, the retailer would take money, then pay the distributor, the distributor would take money, then pay the publisher, the publisher would take money, then pay the developer. By going shareware, id was cutting them all out, taking eighty-five cents for every dollar sold; the game would be listed at around forty dollars. Jay figured Doom, like Wolfenstein, would rely on word of mouth. While big guns like Nintendo were spending millions on marketing and advertising, id would take out only one small ad in a gaming magazine for Doom. The goal, then, was to get the Doom shareware into as many hands as possible.
At the time, retail stores were selling shareware disks and being forced, by the authors, to cough up a high royalty. Id, which had made some of the most successful shareware games yet, had a different approach: give the Doom shareware to retailers for free, no fee, no royalty, and let them keep all the profits from the sale. The more shareware was distributed, the more potential customers id would be able to collect.
“We don’t care if you make money off this shareware demo,” Jay told the retailers. “Move it! Move it in mass quantities!” The retailers couldn’t believe their ears—no one had ever told them not to pay royalties. But Jay was insistent. Take Doom for nothing, keep the profit! My goal is distribution. Doom is going to be Wolfenstein on steroids, and I want it far and wide! I want you to stack Doom deep! In fact, I want you to do advertising for it too, because you’re going to make money off it. So take this money that you might have given me in royalties and use it to advertise the fact that you’re selling Doom.” Jay got plenty of takers.
The buzz around Wolfenstein and Doom brought back old characters. Al Vekovius contacted the boys to see if they wanted to rerelease some of their old Softdisk games. The company, he told them, was having trouble recovering since their departure. They turned him down. More notably, the game turned out Romero’s stepfather, John Schuneman. On a trip to Dallas, Schuneman sat across the table from Romero at a dinner at Outback Steakhouse and, for the first time, opened his heart. “You know, I’ve been a bear sometimes,” he said, “but I’m a man, and I remember telling you if you were going to make your mark you had to do business applications. Well, I want you to know that
I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. I think this is great. And I want you to know I was wrong.”
Romero accepted the apology. Times were moving on, and there was no reason to hold a grudge. Doom was about to be finished. The best was yet to come.
It was Halloween 1993, and Romero was inside Doom. He stood in a small room with gray walls stained in brown sludge, staring down the barrel of his pistol. An ominous, deep synthesizer chord buzzed, giving way to the eerie plucking of a guitar and, finally, a death-rattle drumbeat. A shotgun lay on the floor. Romero ran forward, grabbing it and storming through a door that slid open to the ceiling. The snarls resounded from everywhere—hideous snorts and belches and groans. Suddenly there were fireballs, big, red, explosive bursts hurling in flames through the air. He had to act fast.
Romero spun once, unleashing his shotgun blast into the chest of a Former Human, who went flying back in a spray of blood. A fireball sailed into Romero’s side, bleeding his vision red until he could hear himself wheezing and panting. Another blast, Romero spun. But he couldn’t see anything. A blast again, more wheezing. A shadowy beast the color of television static hurled forward. Romero fired once to no avail. Then he saw the barrels, two green heaps of waste. The beast was heading right for them. At the perfect moment, Romero fired into the barrel, leaving the monster in a bloody pile of gibs.
A door opened—the one in Romero’s office. Romero snuck a peek over his shoulder and kept playing as Carmack walked in. Carmack liked what he saw on screen. Romero had a real sense of grandeur, he thought, the way his levels were so diverse, so varied in elevation, so deep. He made his technology sing.
“What’s up?” Romero asked.
Carmack told him that he had enough stuff done to be able to get to the networking part of Doom. Oh yeah, Romero thought, the networking. They had mentioned this in their press release in January, the fact that Doom would have a multiplayer component, which would let players compete with and against each other. But after all the other work, the networking had become almost an afterthought.
Carmack told Romero about what he thought were somewhat modest technical challenges. “So what I have to do is write the setup stuff to figure out how to communicate over the IPX properly,” he said, “and getting the serial stuff going may be a little bit of work . . .” Romero nodded as Carmack spoke. How incredible networking would be, he mused. There had been other games that let players compete head-to-head: side-by-side fighting games like Street Fighter II and this new game called Mortal Kombat were already the rage. And there were seemingly ancient games like the multiplayer colonization game M.U.L.E., or Multiple Use Labor Element, and the early Star Trek–inspired modem-to-modem game, NetTrek. But there had been nothing like a multiplayer Doom—first-person, fast-action, immersive, bloody. Romero’s heart raced.
He nailed the key on his keyboard and ran through the level on his screen, E1M7, or, Episode 1, Map 7. He came to an area down one hall that had a long window opening up to an outside platform oozing with green plasma. Romero imagined two players shooting rockets at each other, their missiles sailing across the screen. Oh my God, he thought, no one has ever seen that in a game. Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer. Now gamers could play against spontaneous human beings—opponents who could think and strategize and scream. We can kill each other!
“If we can get this done,” Romero said, “this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”
Carmack couldn’t have said it better himself.
Within two weeks, Carmack had two computers networked to each other in his office. One represented his first-person point of view, the other represented the other player’s. On cue, he hit the button on his keyboard; his character moved forward on the computer in front of him. He pictured the little packets of data traveling across the network line flowing into the computer across his office, translating instantly into the space marines on screen. The computers were talking to each other. And Carmack knew the result. He glanced over at the computer to the right and saw his character, now represented in third-person, running across that screen. He had made a consensual virtual world, and it was alive.
Romero flipped when he came into the office. “Oh my God,” he screamed, “that is sooooo awesome!” He dashed back into his office, and Carmack started the game again, this time with Romero connected from his own machine. Romero watched as the space marine Carmack controlled ran down a hall. Romero chased after him, unleashing a shot from his gun—boom!—sending Carmack flying back through the air in a spray of blood and screams. “Suck it down!” Romero cried.
Soon everyone in the company was taking turns in multiplayer mode, chasing each other, hurling off explosions. The office filled with screams, not just digital screams, but real screams, human screams. It was an arena, and they were all in it, competing, running, escaping, killing. They began playing one-on-one matches as well, keeping score manually to see who racked up the most kills. And that was not all, Romero realized. Since they could have four people in a game at one time, why not have them playing cooperatively, moving through a level of monsters as a team? Carmack said it was possible. Romero couldn’t contain himself. “Don’t tell me you can have a four-people co-op game in here mowing through the monsters?” He gasped. “That is the shit!”
Romero paced. This was big—bigger than the Dangerous Dave moment, bigger than anything he’d seen. He made his way down the hall, the yelps and screams coming from inside the rooms. There was Adrian, twitching and convulsing as he played against Kevin and Carmack and Jay. What was this? Romero thought. It was like a match, like a boxing match, but the object wasn’t just to knock the other guy out or some wimpy shit like that. This was, like, kill the guy! This was a match to the death. He stopped cold. “This,” he said, “is deathmatch.”
By the first week of December 1993, the work on Doom was hurtling to a close. People had stopped going home, choosing instead to sleep on the couch, the floor, under desks, in chairs. Dave Taylor, hired to help with supplementary programming, had developed quite a reputation for passing out on the floor. But it wasn’t happening just because he was tired, he said. Doom was having some kind of greater effect on him, some biological effect. The longer he played, the faster he cruised through the streaming corridors, the more his head would spin. After a few minutes, he would have to lay down on the floor to steady himself. Sometimes, he’d just end up falling asleep. It got to be such a frequent display that, late one night, the rest of the guys took a roll of masking tape and taped a body outline around him.
The pressure mounted as they felt the game approach completion. Random gamers began calling the office and leaving messages like “Is it done yet?” or “Hurry up, motherfuckers!” Others spewed resentment at id for not meeting its originally promised release date of the third quarter of 1993. “You started posting hype about Doom several months ago,” one gamer posted on an online newsgroup. “You’ve been encouraging [us] to go ballistic over how great Doom is going to be. And you’ve told a lot of people that the third quarter of 93 was the date. Now all that anticipation is going to backlash in a massive spurt of flames and ranting against id.”
Some posted more forgiving tales of anticipatory dreams based on early screenshots released of Doom. “I was firing the shotgun at a pixelated (yes, my dream was pixelated) demon,” wrote one gamer, “when my alarm clock went off (well, it turned the radio on:) . . . Time to schedule an appointment with a local shrink. I can’t imagine what shape I’ll be in once the game is actually released:).”
Another wrote a poem called “The Night Before Doom”: “ ’Twas the night before Doom, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that Doom, / soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision he printed in an editorial called “A Paren
t’s Nightmare Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums, they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.”
On Friday, December 10, it was finally Doom time. After working for thirty straight hours testing the game for bugs, id was ready to upload the game to the Internet. A sympathetic computer administrator at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, named David Datta volunteered to let id upload the Doom shareware to a file transfer site he maintained on the school’s network. It was a good deal. The university, like most, had high-speed bandwidth for the time, which meant it could accommodate more users. The plan was that id would upload the shareware on cue, then the gamers could download it and transfer it around the world. So much for high-priced distribution. The gamers would do all the work for id themselves. Jay had announced the day before in the chat rooms that Doom would be available at the stroke of midnight on December 10.
As the midnight hour approached, the id guys gathered around Jay’s computer. The office was littered with the debris of Doom’s creation. Adrian and Kevin’s clay models sat on the shelves. Heaps of broken chairs and keyboards were strewn on the floor. A busted garbage can crumpled in the corner. The taped outline of Dave Taylor’s body collected dust bunnies on the floor. Jay had the Doom file ready to go.
Online, the Wisconsin file transfer protocol (FTP) site teemed with gamers. Though there was no way for them to communicate through a discussion board or chat room, they had ingeniously found another way to talk. The system had a means that allowed a person to create and name a file that would join another list of files on screen. Someone got the bright idea to talk simply by creating a file and assigning a name like “WHEN IS DOOM” or “WE ARE WAITING.” Hundreds more waited in a special channel of Internet Relay Chat (through which people could have real-time discussions in text), where Jay was dropping clues about Doom’s coming arrival.
Masters of Doom Page 17
