Finally, the clock struck midnight. They would have to wait no more. Jay hit the button to upload it to the world. Everyone in the office cheered. But Jay was silent. He sat wrinkling his forehead and tapping his keyboard. There was a problem. The University of Wisconsin FTP site could accommodate only 125 people at any given moment. Apparently, 125 gamers were waiting online. Id couldn’t get on.
Jay phoned David Datta in Wisconsin and hatched a plan. David would extend the number of possible users so Jay could upload Doom to the machine. And he would stay on the phone with Jay to tell him the precise moment, so Jay could be sure to get on. Everyone waited. They could hear the guy typing on the other end of the phone. Then he cleared his throat. Jay’s finger hovered over the upload key. “Okay,” David said, “now!” But Jay still couldn’t get on.
Jay booted up the chat channel, which was filled with gamers. “Look,” he typed to them, “I’m sorry, but we have to kick you all off of the Wisconsin site because I can’t get this uploaded. And your choices are either I kick you all off and I get this done. Or it doesn’t get uploaded at all.” They scurried off. Jay hit the button one last time and connected. Doom was finally on its way out.
Elated but exhausted, the team said their good-byes and went home for their first good night’s sleep in months. Only Jay stayed behind to watch the game finish uploading. After a half hour, the final bit of Doom data made its way to Wisconsin. The moment it did, ten thousand gamers swamped the site. The weight of their requests was too much. The University of Wisconsin’s computer network buckled. David Datta’s computer crashed.
“Oh my God,” he stammered to Jay over the phone. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Neither had the world.
TEN
The Doom Generation
Like a lot of parents in 1993, Bill Andersen knew exactly what his nine-year-old son wanted for Christmas: Mortal Kombat. The home version of the violent arcade fighting game was the hottest thing going, eclipsing even Street Fighter II with over 6.5 million sales. Andersen lamented about the game to his boss, an ambitious Democratic senator from Connecticut named Joseph Lieberman. Senator Lieberman listened intently to his chief of staff. He wanted to see the game for himself.
Mortal Kombat defied his imagination. Secret moves let players rip the spines from their opponents in gushes of blood on screen. More distressing to the senator, gamers seemed to prefer the brutality; the more graphically gory version of Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis home video game system was outselling a blood-free version for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System three to one. The success of the Sega version had dealt a staggering blow to Nintendo, which had demanded that the developer of the game, Acclaim, remove the controversial “death moves” to adhere to the company’s family values. By choosing to release the blood-and-guts version, Sega became the new must-have system, racking up nearly 15 million units in sales. Nintendo’s squeaky clean perch, for the first time in the industry’s history, was gone.
And this wasn’t the only such game. Senator Lieberman came across Night Trap, a big-budget title for the new Sega system that included live-action footage of scantily clad sorority girls—including one portrayed by Dana Plato, former child star on the TV show Diff’rent Strokes—being attacked by vampires. Violent films like Reservoir Dogs and Terminator 2 had conquered Hollywood; now an edgier, more aggressive video game age seemed to be dawning too. On December 1, 1993, Senator Lieberman called a press conference to blow the whistle.
Beside him sat Democratic senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, chairperson of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice and chair of the Subcommittee on Government Regulation and Information. Senator Lieberman was also joined by a somber Captain Kangaroo, the children’s television host Bob Keeshan. Kohl said, “The days of Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars” had been replaced by “video games complete with screams of pain [that] are enough to give adults nightmares.” Keeshan warned of “the lessons learned by a child as an active participant in violence-oriented video games . . . lessons the thinking parent would shun like a plague. Indeed it could become a plague upon their house.” He urged game developers to “understand their role in a nurturing society.”
Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. “After watching these violent video games,” he said, “I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them.”
This wasn’t the first time that America’s political and moral establishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as “Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new corrupter of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; MAD magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons, with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanism, particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock ’n’ roll—dangerous and uncontrolled.
This sentiment was a long time coming. The roots were in the thirties, when pinball arcades were thought to be havens for hoodlums and gamblers. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia placed a ban on pinball that lasted until the mid-seventies. By then the controversial arcade game Death Race, which featured players driving over pedestrianlike stick figures, had made headlines. As the golden age of arcade and home video games exploded into a $6 billion industry in the early eighties, concerns over the potential ill effects on children exploded.
In 1982 the national Parent Teacher Association issued a statement decrying game arcades. “The PTA is concerned over the increasing number of video game sites which may have an adverse effect on many of the young people who frequent such establishments. . . . Initial studies have shown that game sites are often in close proximity to schools. In many cases there is not adequate control of access by school-age children during school hours, which compounds the problem of school absenteeism and truancy. Where little or no supervision exists, drug-selling, drug use, drinking, gambling, increased gang activities and other such behaviors may be seen.”
Cities including Mesquite, Texas; Bradley, Illinois; and Snellville, Georgia, began to restrict or ban access to arcades. “Children are putting their book fees, lunch money, and all the quarters they can get their hands on into these machines,” said Bradley’s mayor in 1982 after he saw “hundreds of teenagers smoking marijuana in a video arcade in a nearby town.” Though the Supreme Court overturned the bans following the Mesquite incident, countries including Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia not only banned video games but shut down arcades.
The media began to stoke the flames with headlines like “Video Games—Fun or Serious Threat?” in U.S. News & World Report and “Video Game Fever—Peril or Payoff for the Computer Generation” in Children’s Health. “The video game craze,” said the newscaster Robert MacNeil on PBS, “is it warping young minds or educating them for the future?”
Scientists, academics, and various pundits struggled to come up with the answers. C. Everett Koop, the U.S. surgeon general, fired a sensational salvo when he stated that video games were causing “aberrations in childhood behavior. Children are into the games body and soul—everything is zapping the enemy. Children get to the point where they see another child being molested by a third child, they just sit back.”
Newsweek reported on others following suit: “Dr. Nicholas Pott, who treats two such patients at a clinic at North General–Joint Disease Hospital in New York, says disturbed youths may dodge reality and human contacts as well as meteorites. The clinic director, Dr. Hal Fishkin, objects to
the repeated kill-or-be-killed theme. ‘We don’t need more fodder for the violence mill,’ he says. Others worry about subliminal messages that the medium may transmit. ‘The more you can titillate your emotions, the less tolerant and patient you are going to be for things that don’t deliver as fast,’ says Fred Williams, professor of communications at the University of Southern California.”
Despite the assertions, not all academics found substantiation for the damaging effects of video games. “There is no evidence to indicate that the games encourage social isolation, anger, antisocial behavior, and compulsivity,” concluded the Journal of Psychology. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, praised video games’ ability to provide encouragement to emotionally disturbed or retarded children. “A lot of kids who are good at this are not good at other things,” she said. “This mastery experience is very important.” But when the video game industry bloated and crashed in 1983, so did the rhetoric—for the time being.
Ten years later, on the morning of Thursday, December 9, 1993, Senator Lieberman reignited the cause with the first federal hearings on violent video games. The hearings were filled with impassioned statements by expert witnesses who decried the new scourge. Dr. Eugene Provenzo, a professor who authored a book called Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, proclaimed that “video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist.” Robert Chase, president of the National Education Association, suggested that games incite real-life violence. “Because they are active rather than passive, [video games] can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence,” he said. “They actually encourage violence as the resolution of first resort by rewarding participants for killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable.”
Later, Howard Lincoln, the executive vice president of Nintendo of America, and William White, vice president of marketing and communications for Sega of America, took their brawl over Mortal Kombat to the stage. Lincoln portrayed Nintendo as the martyred defender of family values. White argued that the industry was simply growing up, with more and more games being played by people over the age of eighteen. Lincoln bristled at that notion. “I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the video game business has been transformed today from children to adults,” he said to the panel. “It hasn’t been.”
After much debate and media fanfare, the hearings ended at 1:52 p.m. on December 9. Senator Lieberman declared that the video game industry had one year to develop some kind of voluntary ratings system or the government would step in with its own council. He would call a follow-up meeting in February to determine how the publishers and developers were coming along. The gamers had been warned. It was time to change their ways.
The next day, id Software released Doom.
Two hundred feet under Waxahachie, Texas, inside the U.S. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory, Bob Mustaine flew back in his chair. The government man was terrified. He wasn’t the only one. Across the room, his colleagues also twitched and screamed. This had become a daily occurrence at lunchtime. In all their days studying particle physics at the country’s most ambitious research facility, they had never seen anything quite as shocking as the fireballs erupting on their computer screens. Nothing—not even the multibillion-dollar subatomic shower of colliding protons—blew them away like Doom.
Several states away, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a crowd of students convulsed in the computer lab of Taylor University. Brian Eiserloh, a gifted math student who worked as the lab supervisor, had once again unlocked the doors earlier that night to let the mob of gamers in. The lab, like most around the country, sported the fastest computers available. As a result, he and the other computer enthusiasts had been skipping sleep, class, and food to sit in front of their PCs playing the game. As programmers, they were awed by the graphics, the speed, the three-dimensional views. And as regular dudes, they had never chased each other down with shotguns before. “Oh my God!” Brian exclaimed, checking the clock. “It’s seven a.m. again!” That semester, Brian, previously an A student, would get all F’s.
A few thousand miles away, Nine Inch Nails’ rock star Trent Reznor sauntered off a concert stage as the crowd roared. Security guards rushed to his side. Screaming groupies pushed backstage. Trent nodded and waved, heading back through the crowd. He didn’t have time for this. There were more important things waiting. He stepped onto his tour bus, forsaking the drugs, the beer, the women, for the computer awaiting him. It was time again for Doom.
Scenes like these had spread around the world since the game crashed the University of Wisconsin’s network on December 10. Without an ad campaign, without marketing or advance hype from the mainstream media, Doom became an overnight phenomenon in an online domain that, as fate would have it, was simultaneously beginning to explode.
Though a global network of computers had been around since the 1970s—when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, linked networks of computers (the DARPAnet and, later, the Internet) together around the world—it was just starting to seep into the mainstream. This evolution began in 1989, when a computer researcher in Europe named Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program that linked information on the Internet into what was called the World Wide Web. Four years later, in 1993, two University of Illinois hackers named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created and released Mosaic: a free “browser” program that transformed the Web’s unseemly data into more easily digestible, magazinelike pages of graphics and text. With this new user friendliness online, commercial services such as CompuServe and America Online helped court the masses. Among the earliest pioneers, not surprisingly, were gamers—the same ones who had been on online discussion groups and bulletin board systems like Software Creations for years. And all of them, it seemed, wanted to play Doom.
Schools, corporations, and government facilities blessed with fast computers, high-speed modems and, most important, people familiar enough to make them work were overtaken by the game—sometimes literally. Over the first weekend of Doom’s release, computer networks slowed to a crawl from all the people playing and downloading the game. Eager gamers flooded America Online. “It was a mob scene the night Doom came out,” said Debbie Rogers, forum leader of AOL’s game section. “If we weren’t on the other side of a phone line, there would have been bodily harm.”
Hours after the game was released, Carnegie-Mellon’s computer systems administrator posted a notice online saying, “Since today’s release of Doom, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt. . . . Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do not play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom in network-mode causes serious degradation of performance for the player’s network and during this time of finals, network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing the game in network-mode. Again, please do not play Doom in network-mode.”
Intel banned the game after it found its system swamped. Texas A&M erased it from its computer servers. Doom was such a problem that a computer lab supervisor at the University of Louisville created a special software to remedy the problem. “People sprint in here falling all over each other to play the game,” he said, “[so] we have a nice little program that goes through the system and deletes Doom.”
Early reviews echoed the gamers’ glee. PC Week called Doom a “3-D tour de force.” Compute said it signaled a new era in computer gaming: “The once-dull PC now bursts with power. . . . For the first time, arcade games are hot on the PC . . . the floodgates are now open.” Others expressed a mix of shock and allure at the game’s unprecedented gore and brutality. “The follow-up to Wolfenstein 3-D is even more brilliant, but even more disgusting,” wrote a reviewer for The Guardian of London. “This is not a game for children or anyone sensitive to violence.” As another explained, “This game is so intense, and so genuinely frightening that the deeper you venture into these shadowy chambers the closer yo
ur nose gets to the screen—an indication, I believe, of how much you, the player, enter this adventure game’s other reality.” Despite the pleas of his wife, the reviewer couldn’t keep himself away; Doom was, he confessed, a “cyberopiate.”
It was also a cash cow. The day after Doom’s release, id saw profit. Even though only an estimated 1 percent of people who downloaded shareware bought the remaining game, $100,000 worth of orders were rolling in every day. Id had once joked in a press release that they expected Doom to be “the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.” The prophecy was true everywhere, it seemed, including their own.
“Good night, monkey!” Romero yelled. “You better fucking hop down! Fuck you, motherfucker! Suck it down!” Shawn Green hunched over his computer at id, his sweaty hand twitching his mouse as this barrage of insults screamed through the wall. Ostensibly Shawn had been hired to handle tech support for Doom, but it wasn’t long before a more demanding job—sparring partner—took over. With the bordering office, he was regularly challenged by Romero—the ultimate gamer: the Surgeon, as Tom Hall had christened him back in the Wolfenstein days—to a round of Doom deathmatch. Shawn had quickly subsumed and surpassed Tom’s role as Romero’s sidekick and gaming pal. And now, to his shock, he was paying the price.
“Come on, monkey fuck!” Romero screamed, pounding his fist on the wall. “Who’s your fucking daddy? Let’s go!” Shawn checked his watch. It was 8:00 p.m. again. Holy shit! he thought. Another day wasted playing deathmatch. The games with Romero were taking over everything—work time, playtime, mealtime, bedtime. And now Romero was turning this into a deranged sport, hurling insults like a trash-talking jock after school. The most aggressive thing people usually did when they played video games was roll their eyes. But Doom, Shawn realized, called for something more. After winning the next round, he punched the wall back and screamed, “Eat that, motherfucker!” Romero cackled approvingly. This was how games were meant to be played.
Masters of Doom Page 18
