Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  “That,” Tom said, “would be a dream.”

  * * *

  [idsoftware.com]

  Login name: johncIn real life: John Carmack

  Directory: /raid/nardo/johncShell: /bin/csh

  Never logged in.

  Plan:

  This is my daily work . . .

  When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day.

  Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed.

  Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.

  —- John Carmack

  = feb 18 ====================================

  * page flip crap

  * stretch console

  * faster swimming speed

  * damage direction protocol

  * armor color flash

  * gib death

  * grenade tweaking

  * brightened alias models

  * nail gun lag

  * dedicated server quit at game end

  + scoreboard

  + optional full size

  + view centering key

  + vid mode 15 crap

  + change ammo box on sbar

  + allow “restart” after a program error

  + respawn blood trail?

  +**-1 ammo value on rockets

  + light up characters

  As life in the war room pressed on, Carmack took it upon himself to let gamers know that, yes, id really was moving along with its work on Quake. So he decided to upload his daily work log, or, as it was known, a .plan file, to the Internet. .Plan files were often used by programmers to keep each other informed of their efforts but had yet to be exploited as means of communicating with the masses. But id’s fans had suffered months, years, of Romero’s unsubstantiated hyperbole, Carmack felt, and it was time that they saw some hard data.

  After weeks of all-nighters, Carmack and his programming partner, Michael Abrash, had finally tackled the problem of Quake’s strange blue gaps. The world was coming together. Carmack would spend minutes on end just looking down into a corner of a room in the game, just walking around in the virtual world and feeling, The world is solid, it’s really there. On February 24, 1996, there was enough of Quake in place for id to upload a test deathmatch level to see how it worked on gamers’ various machines. Gamers had been clamoring online for months to get a taste of id’s new creation. There was so much anticipation and speculation, in fact, that websites specifically devoted to Quake news began to surface.

  After the test, however, the reviews were not entirely flattering. Players were keen on the prospects for deathmatching online but complained that the game was dark, sluggish, nothing like the fast-action world of Doom. The criticisms were not unfounded. These Doom-like features had had to be sacrificed in order to accommodate Quake’s meticulous 3-D rendering engine. But the gamers weren’t sympathetic. “While not bad for a ‘test’ version,” posted one player online, “there are still many rough edges that have to be worked out . . . there is still a *lot* missing that is needed to make this game truly rule.”

  Dejected by the response, the id team went about the laborious task of stitching together their disparate work. Over the sixteen months since the game began, the level designers and artists had been off in their own worlds, and the results showed. Romero’s levels looked medieval, American’s were futuristic, Sandy’s were strange gothic puzzles. Though there were many staples of id’s trademark dark humor—such as the zombies who would rip chunks of flesh from their asses and hurl them at the player—the game needed cohesion fast.

  Halfheartedly, the guys came up with a story they’d throw in Quake’s manual: “You get the phone call at 4:00 a.m. By 5:30 you’re in the secret installation. The commander explains tersely, ‘It’s about the Slipgate device. Once we perfect these, we’ll be able to use them to transport people and cargo from one place to another instantly. An enemy code-named Quake is using his own slipgates to insert death squads inside our bases to kill, steal, and kidnap. The hell of it is we have no idea where he’s from. Our top scientists think Quake’s not from Earth, but another dimension. They say Quake’s preparing to unleash his real army, whatever that is.’ ”

  Whatever, indeed—they all felt. But the vehicle was there, and they went about inserting slipgates throughout the game, little gray static doorways that would lead players through the strange different worlds. The final months of Quake became a blur of silent and intense all-nighters, punctuated by the occasional crash of a keyboard against a wall. The construction had turned the office into a heap. The guys were taking their frustrations out by hurling computer parts into the dry-wall like knives. Even good press couldn’t boost their spirits. Wired descended on the office for its highest honor: a cover story on id. But the guys could have cared less, showing up three hours late for the photo session. The cover showed Carmack in front of Romero and Adrian staring into strange colored light with the headline “The Egos at id.” The story ordained Quake “the most anticipated computer game of all time.”

  By June, the endless days and nights finally gave way to a finished product. But the occasion of uploading the shareware to the Internet barely resembled the glory days of Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom. When Romero showed up to ready the game on Saturday, June 22, 1996, he was alone. He walked down the halls, past the old id awards, the Freddy Krueger mask, the Doom plastic shotgun. So it had come to this. No Carmack. No Adrian. No Kevin.

  Romero took refuge with the fans, heading into a gamers’ chat room that teemed with id fans. He phoned Mark Fletcher, a Doom addict who had become one of Romero’s friends. He wanted someone there with him that night who really understood the games, who would appreciate this moment. At 5:00 p.m. he tapped the button on his keyboard and sent Quake to the world. It felt weird, he thought, that none of the other guys were here with him, but it all added up. They weren’t gamers. They didn’t even play games anymore. They were broken.

  “Okay,” Carmack said, “we can’t put it off any longer.” Shortly after Quake’s release, he sat in a Mexican restaurant called Tia’s having lunch with Adrian and Kevin. Romero’s time was up. He was clearly not pulling his weight. It was time to let him go.

  The thought made Adrian physically sick. This is Romero we’re talking about. But he knew he was at a crossroads. Either Romero was going to have to leave or Carmack was going to dissolve the company. There was no middle ground. Kevin agreed. It was hard to let someone go, especially given that Romero was one of the founders of the company, someone who’d contributed so much to their success; but there was no alternative.

  The chasm between Carmack and Romero was too wide. Both of them had their views of what it meant to make games and how games should be made. Carmack thought Romero had lost touch with being a programmer. Romero thought Carmack had lost touch as a gamer. Carmack wanted to stay small, Romero wanted to get big. The two visions that had once forged this company were irreparably tearing it apart. And though Adrian and Kevin had, on so many occasions, sympathized with Romero’s goals, they had once and for all to choose which John to follow.

  Romero, unbeknownst to them, was making plans of his own. On the way to work that morning, he had dialed up Ron Chaimowitz at GTI to discuss a possible publishing deal for the company he wanted to start with Tom Hall. This wasn’t going to be any ordinary game company, he said, this was going to be a Big Company, unrestrained by technology; design would be law.

  The next day at id, Romero was beckoned to the conference room. Carmack, Adrian, and Kevin sat around the table. Adrian stared at the floor. Kevin was silent. Carmack finally spoke. “We’re still not happy with how everything’s going, you know,” he said. He reached for a piece of paper and handed it to Romero. “This is your resignation. You can sign it.”

  Romero, despite all the warnings, all his plans, felt nothing but shock. “Wait,” he said, “don’t you me
an a year ago that I wasn’t working? Because these last seven months I’ve been killing myself! I’ve been killing myself to make Quake!”

  “No,” Carmack said, “you’re not doing your work! You’re not living up to your responsibilities. You’re hurting the project. You’re hurting the company. You’ve been poisonous to the company, and your contribution has been negative over the past couple years. You needed to do better and you didn’t. Now you need to go! Here’s a resignation and here’s a termination! You’re going to resign now!”

  I don’t want to be here, Adrian thought, staring more deeply into the carpet, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here. Despite the fact that both Carmack and Romero were each somewhat justified, he knew there was no way out.

  But then everything stopped. Romero fell quiet. Deep inside him, the bit began to flip, as it had so many times in his life: he would not let this get him down just like he hadn’t let anything else—his father, his stepfather, his own broken families, and now his own broken company. I was making plans to go start a company with Tom anyway, he reminded himself. I guess I’ll go now. He wasn’t bowing out from a fight, he was starting his new life. Romero signed the form, handed it to Carmack, and headed out.

  By the time Romero got to the door, Carmack assumed his ex-partner had convinced himself that he had been planning on doing this for a long time, that he had been stifled creatively and was off to bigger and better things. In the space of forty feet, he thought, Romero had redesigned history. Carmack didn’t watch him go with sadness or nostalgia. He watched him go with relief.

  Two days later, Romero posted his first and last .plan file at id. “I’m going to jump on this .plan bandwagon just this once,” he wrote for all the world to read online. “I have decided to leave id Software and start a new game company with different goals. I won’t be taking anyone from id with me.”

  The next day, Carmack posted a .plan file of his own. “Romero is now gone from id,” he typed. “There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects. I can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am trying to acomplish [sic], but all I promise is my best effort.”

  The old deathmatches were over. A new one had begun.

  THIRTEEN

  Deathmatch

  In a dark room pulsing with blood red shadows, Stevie “Killcreek” Case sat at her computer, twitching her body as if she were repeatedly and intentionally sticking her toe in a light socket. “Doh!” she yelped, leaping her soldier on the screen through a static-filled teleporter gate, only to see him rematerialize in an unanticipated blizzard of nails. Or, as she described the style of this particular death, “Telefragged!”

  It was January 1997, minutes away from the online gaming underground’s unofficial Super Bowl. Like the few dozen others convulsing throughout this University of Kansas flophouse, Stevie—an ebullient twenty-year-old with a short brown bob—had been practicing two sleepless nights for the match between her team, Impulse 9, and their rivals, who had driven eight hours from Michigan, the Ruthless Bastards. Their contests were part of the burgeoning international subculture of clans: organized groups of gamers who played—and lived—Quake. Like those of the hundreds of thousands of other Quake addicts, their wars were usually over the Internet. But on this tornado gray day in Lawrence, Kansas, the country’s best were settling the score in the flesh.

  On one level such passion came down to the beautiful nightmare of the game itself. Despite id’s internal problems during the game’s development, Quake was heralded for its breakthrough graphics and visceral experience. USA Today gave Quake four out of four stars, calling it “bloody amazing.” A reviewer for Computer Gaming World gave it ten out of ten, saying it was “a towering programming feat that goes beyond immersive to make you feel like you’re there in a combat environment.” Entertainment Weekly said, “Quake delivers the most carnage you can revel in without having to deal with actual jail time. No wonder bored office workers across the country love it.” Even the actor Robin Williams praised Quake on the David Letterman show.

  Though gamers enjoyed the single-player experience—hunting down monsters through the twisting 3-D mazes—what they really enjoyed was deathmatch. As the first game designed specifically for multiplayer team competition over the Internet, it allowed up to sixteen people to compete in paintball-like teams, hunting each other down in a wild panic to kill or be killed. “Football with guns,” as a player named Dr. Rigormortis put it. In addition to competing over the Internet, gamers schlepped their computers to each other’s homes and wired them together into a local area network, or LAN, so they could fight in person. These so-called LAN parties—which began casually with Doom—became the offline social nexus for the online gaming world.

  Within days of Quake’s release, fans in chat channels and newsgroups began forming clans with names like the Breakfast Club, the Revolting Cocks, Impulse 9, and the Ruthless Bastards. By August there were about twenty clans with up to twenty players each. Two months later there were close to a thousand. A group of women calling themselves the Clan Widows started a webpage support group. It was the dawn of cybersports.

  And it didn’t take long for the moguls to cash in. “Electronic games are the extreme games of the mind,” said an entrepreneur behind a chain of virtual reality arcades in New York, Chicago, and Sydney, “so, let’s bring the cyberathletes into arenas and elevate this to a spectator sport”: big screens, Quake matches networked from around the world, beer, prizes, the works. His prediction of star players competing with Nike logos tattooed across their knuckles wasn’t crazy. One clan, Dark Requiem, hustled a webpage ad from a joystick maker. Thresh, winner of the Judgment Day tournament, received a sponsorship from Microsoft. The kids who were always the last ones picked in gym class lineup could be the next Michael Jordans. Michael Jordans who might look something like _fo0k (pronounced “fook,” like “spook”), the coleader of the Ruthless Bastards.

  The twenty-seven-year-old with a tiny soul patch beard led his clan to the top of the ClanRing league, a feat accomplished by only one other team at that point, Impulse 9. Since Quake’s debut, _fo0k had been spending his evenings in East Lansing, Michigan, buried in his parents’ basement, a windowless computer game mission control filled with twisted piles of joysticks and keyboards, mammoth speakers, a scattering of NBA video game cartridges. The only art on the walls was a black velvet portrait of Jesus, which _fo0k found funny because the nose resembled the end of a double-barrel shotgun, one of the weapons in Quake.

  Video game images had been burning into _fo0k’s consciousness ever since Space Invaders, he said, “first melted my mind.” At the time, _fo0k was just Clint Richards, a competitive new kid on the block escaping into the fantasy worlds of sci-fi novels and the Atari 2600. After seeing Star Wars a few dozen times, he decided his life’s ambition: “to fly to other planets and battle aliens.” Contrary to most kids, he never gave up. Following a stab at rock god fantasy in a “disco punk” band called Shampoop, Clint found a more stimulating environment to live out his childhood dream: Quake.

  Using the handle _fo0k (a satire of self-conscious hacker typescript) and a high-speed modem hustled from his job as a cable installer, he cofounded the Ruthless Bastards, a team of Doom junkies who became his closest friends. Though _fo0k said he probably wouldn’t be hanging out with some of the younger, geekier clan members if it wasn’t for the game, their friendships, he said, ran deep. The last time he stopped to check the clock, he was plugging in six hours a night.

  Despite the camaraderie, _fo0k, like most players, rarely spoke to his “brothers” in person or on the phone, preferring instead the anonymity of the Internet’s chat channels, the locker rooms of Quake. At any time, day or night, he could log on and trash-talk his way into a pickup game. “The Internet is my real home,” he said. “At work, I’m sentient, but I find myself walking around in a daze, because I’m so bored with the usual stuff: my job, meeting people who aren’t interesting. When I get home and
start shooting the shit with the guys and start playing, that’s when I get excited.”

  Although he was well known online for his wit and skills, _fo0k readily acknowledged the absurdity of being underappreciated, if not unknown, everywhere else. “The mainstream just sees them as little games,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’m wasting my time, but I guess this is my chance to play rock god for five minutes. Everyone wants to be remembered. I’m really good at video games, so maybe this is how I can do it. . . . In some future Olympics,” he joked, “the weight-lifting team will be standing there and right next to them: a bunch of weird-looking guys with big bulging foreheads.”

  _fo0k wasn’t the only id fan with big dreams. One of his chief competitors in Impulse 9, the legendary game grrrl Stevie Case, was just beginning to transform her life through Quake. Stevie was among the leaders of a new generation of young women who were defying the stereotype of the adolescent boy gamer. Raised in the small town of Olathe, Kansas, the daughter of a social worker and a schoolteacher, she’d always had a strong competitive nature. She took to sports early on, becoming the first and only girl on the neighborhood T-ball team—much to the distress of the local dads, whose boys she regularly beat. By high school, Stevie had been voted athlete of the year and parlayed her popularity into becoming student government president. An exceptional student, she was among those flown to the White House to meet President Clinton. She wanted to be a politician.

  Once enrolled at the University of Kansas, she overachieved even more—committing herself on the fast track to law school. She earned straight A’s, ran for student government. She became a member of Mensa. Then Quake took hold. She was dating a guy, Tom “Entropy” Kizmey, who was deep in the throes of the game’s grip. But unlike the women online who despaired over their men’s obsessions, Stevie was eager to compete. Quake was everything that a woman was not supposed to be: loud, violent, aggressive. It was also creative: programmed to be even more extensible than Doom, thus giving rise to even more elaborate modifications. Stevie wanted it all. Soon enough she found herself at the top of her boyfriend’s clan, Impulse 9, facing off in the ultimate showdown with their rivals, the Ruthless Bastards.