The game, he quickly realized, was going to be a greater challenge than he had anticipated. His objective was to create an arbitrary 3-D world with Internet play. Carmack began the project as he often did, by reading as much research material as he could gather. He paid thousands of dollars for textbooks and papers, but everything was purely academic. There was no such thing as a computer program that could create an interactive, real-time, fast-action, 3-D gaming world. To create such an experience would tax not only every ounce of his skills but every drop of power a modern PC could muster. To make matters worse, for the first time at such a crucial moment in a game’s birth, he felt his ally Romero was nowhere to be found.
It had been coming, of course, he thought. Though Carmack had considered Romero a better programmer when they met at Softdisk, he’d soon left Romero behind. At that point, Romero willfully took on other roles: developing the extraneous tools that he and Tom Hall could use to create levels of a game, conceptualizing design, plotting how id would rule the world. Through Doom, Romero had become the ideal collaborator for Carmack, someone who could sit by his side and knowledgably experiment with the new technology. With Quake, Carmack realized, he wanted both a programmer who could work with his engine and someone who could experiment with his early work. Romero had once assumed both roles. With the distractions of Doom’s success, it seemed to Carmack, he would assume neither.
But, as Carmack discovered, there were others who were more than ready to fill the spots. For the programming, there was no one better in Carmack’s mind than the veteran coder Michael Abrash. It was Abrash’s book on power graphics programming for computers that Carmack and Romero had used to learn how to program the graphics for their earlier games. Since then, Abrash had become something of an icon in the programming world. In recent years he had led graphics programming for Microsoft, where he worked on their Windows NT operating system. But, like anyone who lived for graphics, he knew there was no better place to see results than in games. And there was no game that impressed him quite like Doom.
On a trip to Seattle to visit his mother, Carmack took Abrash out to lunch to tell him about his plans for Quake. The challenge, as Abrash heard it, was to increase cyberspace through 3-D graphics and a persistent online world—an alternate world that would live and breathe around the clock, waiting for players to cohabit. Abrash’s blood pulsed. Like most graphics programmers, he often theorized about virtual worlds. When he read Snow Crash and the description of the Metaverse, he’d thought, I know how to do 80 percent right now—at least theoretically. There was no question in his mind that he was sitting across from a twenty-four-year-old who had the skills and confidence to make it happen. When Abrash mentioned how after a project he always wondered if he could do anything quite as good again, Carmack narrowed his brow and said, “I never wonder that. Mmm.”
Still, when Carmack asked him to come work for id, Abrash said he’d have to give it some thought, since it meant uprooting his family. Days later, he got an e-mail from his boss, Bill Gates. Gates had caught wind of the id deal and wanted to talk. Abrash was shocked; a meeting with Gates was like a meeting with the Pope. Gates was aware of id. His programmers had been talking with the company about creating a version of the game for the upcoming Windows platform. But id was just a small company down in Texas, he told Abrash. Microsoft had plenty to offer, he said, and regaled Abrash with the interesting research the company was planning to pursue in graphics. Gates also mentioned how a Microsoft employee had gone to work for IBM, only to return eight months later. “You might not like it down there at id,” he concluded.
Abrash chose Carmack over Gates. The potential at id was too great, he thought; he wanted to have a front-row seat to see that breakthrough virtual world, that networked 3-D world, evolve. Furthermore, he was touched by the subtext of Carmack’s invitation. Carmack seemed lonely, Abrash thought, like he didn’t have anyone who appreciated the beauty of his ideas.
Carmack soon expanded his own crew even more. He found an ambitious level designer who was especially eager to put his dreams into action. American McGee connected with Carmack not through games but through Carmack’s other fetish: automobiles. Carmack met him one day in his apartment complex while American was under the hood of a car. Skeletal, chain-smoking, with grease-speckled glasses and a badly grown beard, American was a tightly wound auto mechanic. He spoke in fast bursts, like a race car driver jumping the gates, rushing forth, then going back and blasting out again.
American’s blood was a strange fuel. Just twenty-one years old, he would often joke to his friends that he wanted to write an autobiography of dysfunction ironically titled “Growing Up American.” Born in Dallas, American never knew his father and was raised by his eccentric mother, a housepainter. He was a highly creative, if not odd, only child. At school he would talk vividly to imaginary friends. He would stop in his tracks to draw a doorway in thin air, which he would walk through to get to imaginary places. He was also gifted in math and science, and took an early interest in computer programming, eventually getting accepted to a magnet school for computer science.
After living with a flurry of stepfathers, American’s mother finally settled on a man who thought he was a woman. One day when American was sixteen, he came home from school to every kid’s nightmare: an empty house. The only things left were his bed, his books, his clothes, and his Commodore 64 computer. His mother had sold the home to pay for two plane tickets and the fee for her boyfriend’s sex change operation. American packed up his computer. He was on his own. To pay his bills, he dropped out of high school and took a variety of odd jobs, finally settling on a Volkswagen repair shop. In Carmack, he found someone who shared his interest in both cars and computers. When Carmack asked him if he wanted to work at id doing technical support shortly after Doom’s release, he jumped.
The id office was palpably awesome, American thought; he could feel the momentum, these irreverent young guys riding a tidal wave. Particularly impressive was Romero. There was a real sense of magic to his work; it was like he was an architect, an engineer, a lighting person, a game designer, an artist all in one. Romero had an intuitive sense of how to surprise the player and make the game flow. On top of that, he seemed just plain cool—living large, driving the hot car, always joking, and, unlike Carmack, actually enjoying his fame and fortune. American and Romero too became fast friends. American never wanted to go home.
With Doom II, Romero and Carmack agreed to promote American to level design. American repaid the favor by emulating both Carmack’s ruthless work schedule and Romero’s ruthless sense of fun. In turn, he became the ultimate id prodigy. As a level designer, he had a fine aesthetic sense as well as a natural feeling for entertainment. In one level of Doom II he called the Crusher, he placed a cyberdemon in the middle of the room; when the player approached, a giant upper section of the room would come mashing down like a hammer. Romero thought it was hilarious. Carmack was equally impressed by American’s long hours. By the end of Doom II, American had completed more levels than Romero himself.
As Quake’s development began, American was not only id’s hotshot young designer but Carmack’s best friend. With Romero off working on his various projects, it was American who experimented with Carmack late into the night. Carmack began to open up to American about Romero. He said he didn’t know what to do with Romero, whose passion for programming games seemed to be getting taken over by his passion for playing them.
Despite his empathy for Romero, American wanted to appease Carmack, so he said, “Yeah, I think Romero’s slacking off too.” As Carmack listened, his mood turned. Who did American think he was? He was no Romero. Carmack thought Romero, despite his flaws, was still the best level designer at the company. His levels were the best ones in Doom, and the best ones in Doom II. There was no reason he couldn’t still be the best one for Quake. “Romero is a really strong finisher,” Carmack said, “and until you see it, you’re not going to understand.”
Romero
knew Carmack. He knew that, at the beginning of a project, Carmack went into research mode, and there was nothing much for him to do but experiment with other things until the engine was done. As Romero had already noticed, American had taken on the role of experimenting with Carmack late at night. He didn’t think anything of it—better American than him.
Romero was too busy experimenting with the brave new world that Doom was continuing to spawn. DWANGO and deathmatching were in full tilt. Raven’s game Heretic was doing so well that Romero was already overseeing the sequel, Hexen. He had the big vision in his head: a trilogy of games from Raven based on the Doom engine, concluding with the final project, Hecatomb. He had also begun overseeing a Doom-driven game called Strife by a local group of developers called Rogue Entertainment.
These games were fitting nicely into what he wanted to be id’s master plan: squeezing every last drop of business and marketability out of Carmack’s engines. Carmack’s technology was getting more complicated and, as a result, taking longer to produce. Why not use that time to pursue other projects? Id didn’t have to just be a company, it could be a gaming empire. Though Carmack had been skeptical, Romero felt that Heretic’s success had proven his vision. As the Doom II phenomenon grew, the obvious way to build the company was to release more Doom product. The answer: cash in on the Doom mods.
Every home, office, or school had someone in the back who worked on computers; now that person was working on Doom mods. Since Doom II, thousands of gamers had begun modifying id’s products and making them available for free online. Doom fans would communicate entirely over the Internet to create mods of the game—often never even meeting in person or, for that matter, talking on the phone. It was a virtual company complete with job descriptions, responsibilities, and monikers like Team TNT and Team Innocent Crew.
As a result, the mods were growing in sophistication. Among the most popular was a so-called total conversion of Doom II to make it look like the movie Aliens. There were deathmatch mods based on schoolyard games like Freeze Tag or King of the Mountain. People were replicating their offices, their homes, their schools. A student in England made a photorealistic version based on Trinity College. Another released one simply titled School Doom. “School is a hell,” read the introductory text. “Nobody really understands why you spend your time by the computer. . . . You are being mocked. . . . You think about committing suicide, but then you realize it’s not what you want to do. You should make the others suffer rather than yourself! . . . You will kill them all! You will burn the school building out of the map as if it never has existed. . . . Who cares if you are right or wrong! It’s your destiny . . . it’s your hell . . . it’s your SCHOOL-DOOM!”
Such mods were taken to be all in good fun—it was just a game, after all. But some people were beginning to feel that the game had real-life applications. In Quantico, Virginia, in 1995, a project officer in the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office named Scott Barnett created a modification called Marine Doom—complete with realistic military soldiers, barbed-wire fences, and marine logos. The game was perfect for training real-life soldiers in teamwork, Barnett’s supervisors agreed. Barnett contacted id, who gave their blessing, though they thought the idea of someone using their game to train soldiers was a joke. But it was the real deal. The game made its way across the Net and would be used by the marines for years.
Id decided to jump into the game after discovering that WizardWorks, a publisher in Minnesota, had released D!Zone—a collection of nine hundred user-made Doom mods (which id obviously did not own); the D!Zone CD-ROM had, remarkably, surpassed Doom II to top the PC games sales charts, earning millions of dollars. It was a source of great consternation in the office—this was exactly what people like Kevin Cloud had been afraid would happen. In response, Romero initiated deals with a variety of mod makers to put out id-approved collections called The Master Levels for Doom II as well as one sprawling team project, Final Doom. They also put out a retail version of the shareware product Ultimate Doom.
As the other projects grew, one question lingered on everyone’s mind: What about Quake? Many had gotten caught up in the hype; American McGee, Dave Taylor, and Jay Wilbur had even been talking up the game themselves online. An industrious fan began collecting any sly comment made by a member of id and began putting them together in an online newsletter called QuakeTalk. Romero uploaded early pictures to the Net showing how the world was shaping up. “In the screens where you see some pink/purple sky,” he wrote in an explanatory note, “you can just imagine the wind whistling in your ears. . . . You should see these screens in action.:)”
But back in the office by the middle of 1995, there was little to see. Work was proceeding chaotically at best. With Carmack and Abrash working on the engine, and Romero spending more and more time on other projects, the others were left to their own devices. After having found happiness in a recent marriage, Adrian Carmack was growing impatient with the lack of stability at work. He and Kevin, his now close friend and fellow artist, began churning out textures for the games based on gothic, medieval schemes as well as Aztec designs for a time-traveling portion of the game. Kevin also used the time to start learning how to create characters in 3-D, something they had never done before. Adrian, frustrated by the increased game technology, left the character work to Kevin, who began to wear down from the mounting challenge.
The newer ranks felt frustrations of their own. American and the other guys thought Quake was beginning to flounder. Romero, their project leader, seemed more interested in leading his own life than in leading them. When pushed at one point to create a design document for Quake, he grudgingly responded with a two-page sketch. The rest thought it was a lazy attempt. But, as Romero was quick to explain, independence had long been id’s modus operandi. They never had a design document, never wrote anything down; the only person who’d tried was his old cohort Tom Hall, and it got him fired.
The guys at id responded by resenting both Romero and Carmack. Romero was off being a rock god. Carmack was off being a tech god. And everyone else was left out to dry. Something had to change. Months were passing, and Carmack’s engine was nowhere close to being done. The Wolfenstein engine had taken only a couple of months. Doom had taken six. Already Quake’s engine was passing a half year of development with no end in sight. Forget about the promised re-lease date of Christmas 1995, they resolved. From now on if people wanted to know the completion date of an id game, the reply was “When it’s done!”
TWELVE
Judgment Day
Alex St. John was sitting at his desk at Microsoft when he got the e-mail from Bill Gates about Doom. Word had it that that there were 10 million copies of the shareware installed on computers—more than the company’s new operating system, Windows 95. Microsoft had spent millions to promote the Windows 95 release in August 1995, blanketing the country with ads that asked “Where do you want to go today?” Gates wondered how this little company in Mesquite—the same one that had seduced Michael Abrash—was outperforming him with some game.
In the e-mail, Gates asked Alex, the chief strategist for Microsoft’s graphics division, if he thought he should buy id Software outright. Alex, a large redheaded man with a quick wit and easy laugh, couldn’t help but chuckle. By 1995 everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of id.
Doom imitations were flooding the shelves and topping the sales charts: Dark Forces, a Star Wars–themed shooter from LucasArts; Descent, a free-flying shooter from Interplay; Marathon, a Macintosh game from a small company called Bungie. Even Tom Hall, who had always wanted to do deeper games at id, had been corralled into doing a shooter called Rise of the Triad for Scott Miller’s company, Apogee. The games were now a part of the cultural lexicon. Doom was featured on television shows like ER and Friends. It was in a Demi Moore movie. It was novelized in a series of books. Hollywood was developing a Doom movie. The marines were making a Doom training mod. Even Nintendo—the goody-goody empire that had long battled over v
ideo game violence—was porting the gory hit to its new home video game platform, the Nintendo 64. Yet all the while id had developed the enigmatic reputation of being staunchly independent. “I don’t think you’ll be able to pull off buying id,” Alex wrote back to Gates, “but Doom could certainly be valuable to us.”
Alex had been addicted to id’s games ever since Wolfenstein 3-D hit the Microsoft campus in 1992. Doom was being played so frequently around the company that he equated it with a religious phenomenon. Microsoft’s employees worshiped the game, not only for its addictive qualities but for its enviable technical feats. The buzzword in the industry was multimedia, and no one had seen a multimedia display for the computer quite as impressive as Doom. Since Microsoft was embarking on a battle to rule the emerging age of multimedia with its new operating system Windows 95, Alex thought it was time to enlist Doom in the fight.
But a game, as he knew, was far from his boss’s idea of what multimedia really meant; in Gates’s mind, multimedia meant video. Apple was gaining ground with its QuickTime video-playing software, and Gates wanted Microsoft to respond with a similar program. Alex didn’t agree with this direction. The real multimedia applications of the future, he argued, were in games. Another competitor, Intel, he pointed out, was pursuing its own solutions, and if Microsoft wanted to maintain its foothold, it needed to prove that Windows 95 would be the best game platform in the business.
Earlier attempts at games for Windows, however, had left Gates with a bad taste. For Christmas 1994, the company had shipped a game based on Disney’s The Lion King with one million Compaq computers. At the last moment, Compaq had changed its hardware, which caused the million games to trigger a million system crashes. The problem, Alex surmised, was that there was no technical solution that would allow a game in all its multimedia splendor to play safely and effectively on a variety of machines. As a result, game developers were steering clear of Windows in favor of DOS, the old operating system that Microsoft was trying to put out to pasture. If Microsoft was going to convince the masses to upgrade to Windows 95, it needed the game developers to come on board.
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