Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  As the countdown on the screen began that day, Stevie slipped on her headphones and began nervously clicking her mouse. “You okay, honey?” asked her boyfriend, ready at a computer beside her; reflected in his screen, he resembled a hydrocephalic Emilio Estevez. Stevie gave him the thumbs-up and said, “I’m fine, hon.” Down the hall in the Ruthless Bastards’ room, _fo0k sucked the last of his cigarette and reached for the keyboard. “Okay, brothers,” he said, “let’s win.”

  But when the dust cleared, Stevie and her clan had clocked _fo0k’s Bastards, making Impulse 9 the undisputed champions. Leaning back at her PC, Stevie slipped off her headphones and ran her hand through her hair. Victory felt good. She was powerful, supreme, connected with the gamers of the world, even the baddest of them all—her hero, John Romero. I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a politician, I’m a gamer, she resolved. And I’m going to Dallas.

  The only place that wasn’t in the throes of Quake deathmatch as 1997 arrived, it seemed, was a tiny company in Texas: id Software. No one was screaming or cursing, or smashing keyboards into the ground. With the renovations complete, the war room was divided into a suite of small private offices. The pool table had been sold, the Foosball shipped away. Everything was, if not respectable, respectably quiet. And everyone in the company knew why: John Romero—Ace Programmer, Current Rich Person, Deathmatch Surgeon—was gone.

  American McGee felt Romero’s absence from the moment he walked by his old office and saw the empty chair. Romero, even with his problems, had always bridged the gap between the owners and the employees. And there was no one who could even remotely take his place. Carmack didn’t take into account that he had let go more than just John Romero, American thought. He had let go the soul of any video game company: the fun.

  American wasn’t the only one feeling gloomy. Quake’s shareware retail experiment had proved disastrous. In theory, id was going to cut out retailers by allowing gamers to buy the shareware and then call an 800 number to place an order and receive a password that would unlock the rest of the game. But gamers wasted no time hacking the shareware to unlock the full version of the game for free. Worse, all the mundane aspects of distribution and order fulfillment were spinning out of control. In a desperate measure, id tried to put the brakes on the retail shareware, but it was too late. They were stuck with almost 150,000 CDs sitting in a warehouse.

  Mike Wilson, id’s biz guy, put the burden on their publisher, GTI—forcing them not only to absorb the inventory but to increase id’s royalty before releasing the full version of Quake into the retail market. For GTI’s Ron Chaimowitz, it was just more of the kids’ audacity. Id had even made him wait to release the retail version of the game until it could rake in as many sales as possible through the shareware; Ron didn’t get the game until after the lucrative holiday season, and by that time the shareware debacle had left its scar. Sales were good—with 250,000 units shipped—but not a phenomenon like Doom II. Id decided its days with GTI were over. Ron was disappointed but, with his company doing fine without id, his attitude was Good riddance.

  Mike and his cohort Jay Wilbur had another plan: turn id into a publishing empire, beginning with their next game, a sequel to Quake called Quake II. “We don’t need GTI,” Jay said to the owners. “We don’t need Activision, we can do this all on our own. We can keep the benefit, but we need an organization to do that. In order to do that right, we need to hire more people. And that can be id publishing, here, there, or yonder. It can be a completely separate company whose charter is to completely handle our product.”

  Kevin and Adrian were intrigued by the idea but knew it was Carmack’s decision. Even though they were now the majority owners, there was no question about who was really in charge. Carmack’s technology had long been the heart of id—with Romero out of the way, it was completely unfettered. The last thing Carmack wanted to do now was spoil the company by turning it into an empire—that had been Romero’s wish, not his. Despite Carmack’s battles with his mother’s conservative fiscal ideals, he himself had become quite the conservative businessman. As long as he was in the company, he told Adrian and Kevin, id was going to stay small and let a new publisher, like Activision, handle their next game.

  With Romero gone, Carmack felt happier than he had in some time. No more grandiose statements about stuff they were working on. No more all-night deathmatching. No more poison. Now, with the other guys beginning work on Quake II, using the existing graphics engine, he was free to experiment—no deadlines, no pressure, just pure immersive learning.

  Carmack’s first project was to explore the burgeoning hardware for 3-D computer graphics. In the past, only arcade machines had been designed specifically to improve or accelerate 3-D graphics. With robust computer games like Doom and Quake, however, start-up companies saw an opportunity finally to bring 3-D acceleration to home machines. This would be done by putting powerful graphics processing chips onto special cards that could be inserted into an existing PC. One manufacturer, called 3Dfx, convinced Carmack to port a version of Quake in a programming language called OpenGL, which could run with its debut line of Voodoo 3-D accelerator cards. Carmack completed the task in a weekend and uploaded the OpenGL version to the Web for free.

  The hard-core gamers flipped at the results, which made the game at least 20 percent faster and smoother. Once they saw 3-D acceleration, they would never go back, and they eagerly spent the few hundred dollars to upgrade their machines. Other game programmers, as was becoming protocol, followed Carmack’s lead and programmed for 3Dfx’s cards. More card manufacturers jumped into the game. A new high-tech industry had begun. The success buoyed Carmack’s other pet project, Quakeworld, a free program he wrote and distributed to improve Quake’s multiplayer capabilities. With OpenGL improving Quake’s graphics and Quakeworld improving Quake’s networking, the game had never looked or played better.

  But Carmack’s hard work couldn’t save id from the reverberations of Quake’s stressful development. Before long, id began to hemorrhage employees. It started with biz guy Jay Wilbur, who quit after his four-year-old son asked him, “How come all the other daddies go to the baseball games and you never do?” Programmer Michael Abrash soon followed suit, returning to the structure and sanctity of Microsoft. Level designer Sandy Petersen, who had been on the skids with the management since clashing over Quake’s design, was let go. Mike Wilson, marketing whiz, and Shawn Green, tech supporter and deathmatch fiend, gave notice: they were going to work for Romero.

  The gaming community, already reeling from the split of Carmack and Romero, became ablaze with speculation until Carmack finally addressed them in an unusually personal and lengthy e-mail interview. “Lots of people will read what they like into the departures from id,” he wrote, “but our development team is at least as strong now as it has ever been. Romero was pushed out of id because he wasn’t working hard enough. . . . I believe that three programmers, three artists, and three level designers can still create the best games in the world. . . . We are scaling back our publishing biz so that we are mostly just a developer. This was allways [sic] a major point of conflict with Romero—he wants an empire, I just want to create good programs. Everyone is happy now.”

  Romero hit the highest button inside the gilded elevator of the Texas Commerce Building—fifty-five floors of bankers, lawyers, and oil moguls in the heart of downtown Dallas; now a twenty-nine-year-old gamer was bound for the top. Romero had been called here abruptly late one night by his real estate agent, who said he had to see this amazing penthouse that had become available. He was skeptical. Since leaving id to open his own company, he had seen dozens of spaces, but nothing was right. And there was everything at stake.

  Romero was essentially starting from scratch. Though he’d received an undisclosed multimillion-dollar buyout from his partners at id ( Time magazine estimated his net worth to be $10 million), the terms required that he relinquish all rights to id products and royalties—no more money from Doom or Quake. More importan
t, Romero was on a mission. After years of feeling repressed by Carmack’s shackles, he was finally free to pursue his vision of what a game, a game company, and, ultimately, a life could be. Not only was that vision big but it was everything that id Software was not.

  “At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls,” Romero lamented. “It was the whole Carmack idea of ‘I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair’ instead of ‘Okay we’ve got a lot of money, why not make it a really bad-ass office?’ ” Romero’s new office wouldn’t only be a fun place to work, it would be where a gamer could show the press, family, and friends that games had built an empire and that the empire would be the ultimate place to make more games.

  When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling. Anywhere Romero spun, he saw the kaleidoscopic twinkle of lights—evening lights from below, the celestial bodies up high. It was raw, waiting to be designed. Romero imagined a room full of pillows, a Vegas room with slot machines, a “Break Shit” room where you could just go around destroying things!

  But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition. It was also expensive: $15 per square foot, or roughly $350,000 per month. For these reasons and the fact that the space was just too weird for tenants like Paine Webber, Texas Commerce Bank, or the Petroleum Club, the penthouse remained empty. No more, Romero said, eyes gleaming. “This is amazing. There is nothing like this. This is it,” he declared. “This is a game company.” He named it Dream Design.

  With his old friend and sidekick Tom Hall, Romero pitched the Dream to eager publishers. Neither technology nor Carmack would be his ruler. In fact, he would simply license the Quake engine—which id had agreed to do—and make a game around it. He would have three designers, working on three games at a time in different genres. And he would give each designer a large enough staff to get the jobs done quickly. It wouldn’t be just a game company, it would be an entertainment company. And the mantra of anything they produced would be loud and clear: “Design is law,” Romero said. “What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.”

  His terms for publishers were brash: $3 million per game with a 40 percent royalty, plus, he wanted to keep all the intellectual property rights as well as rights to port his company’s games to other platforms. Companies balked but didn’t back away. This was the age of vanity game development houses. Sid Meier, legendary designer of Civilization strategy games, had his own company, Firaxis. Will Wright, creator of the bestselling SimCity series, had his company, Maxis. Richard Garriott had Origin; a former employee of his named Chris Roberts would spawn off his own, Digital Anvil. After the success of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, Romero was not just famous, he was bankable. Publishers flew him and Tom out first-class, putting them up in thousand-dollar-a-night suites in Beverly Hills and whisking them around in limousines to the best restaurants in town. The two felt giddy with the freedom and sense of possibilities. They washed away id’s baggage with champagne.

  With Romero planning to do a shooter and Tom a role-playing adventure game, Dream Design needed one other designer for balance. That person would be Todd Porter, who was then heading up a Dallas developer called 7th Level. Todd, whom Romero had met through an old Softdisk friend, seemed energetic, upbeat, and, most important, a gamer, a real gamer—a veteran Apple II guy. The thirty-six-year-old had originally gone to school to be a minister. But preaching, he discovered to his dismay, was as much about business as it was about spirituality. He didn’t like the pressure he felt to have to land a sweet spot in some big church. So he dropped out of school and used the money to buy a computer.

  With his parents divorced, Todd had to do what he could to provide for the family. He moved to Iowa to study business. He took a brief stint as an exotic dancer with the stage name Preacher Boy. With the money he saved, Todd refined his programming skills and eventually landed a job with Richard Garriott’s Origin company in Austin. He soon left to found his own company with an artist, Jerry O’Flaherty, in Dallas. Tough times forced him to sell out to 7th Level, however, and his dreams of his own company seemed dashed. That was, until Romero walked in. Todd told Romero he had the business sense that would round out the team. Romero felt Todd indeed had a knack for selling the company. Plus, he could bring on Jerry, who could head up the art department. Over lunch at McDonald’s, the four gamers agreed to join forces. They took notes on a napkin.

  All they needed was a name. Dream Design wasn’t good enough, Romero decided; he wanted something more original, something short, punchy, powerful, scientific, intelligent. Tom suggested Ion. The competition had better watch out, a friend quipped, “or they’re going to get caught up in an Ion storm.” Ion Storm it would be.

  On Christmas Eve, Ion Storm closed a publishing deal with Eidos Interactive. Eidos was a British company that had been founded on the riches of South African gold mines and had recently scored a hit with a female-led shooter, kind of a sexy variation of Indiana Jones, called Tomb Raider. They were looking to develop more brand names; Romero was already among the biggest. They agreed to almost all Ion’s terms: $3 million per game, but they offered to pay another $4 million for console rights. They also wanted to have an option on Ion’s next three games, making it potentially a six-game deal. In total, it valued Ion Storm at $100 million.

  With the money in place, Romero, Tom, and Todd sketched plans for their dream games. Tom began cobbling together ideas for a sprawling and comedic intergalactic adventure game called Anachronox. Todd announced plans for a strategy title about body-snatching slugs called Doppelganger. And Romero outlined his ultimate title ever, an epic first-person shooter that would take its name from the mystical sword Carmack had tantalized him with in their Dungeons and Dragons game long ago. It was the weapon for which Romero had risked everything—the dreams of his partners, the fate of Carmack’s game; he had made a deal with the demons to get the sword Daikatana. That time, it led to the end of the world. This time, it would lead to his conquering it.

  In Daikatana, the player would become Hiro Miyamoto, a Japanese biochemical student in twenty-fifth-century Kyoto who must save the world from Kage Mishima, an evil scientist who has stolen the Daikatana (Japanese for “big sword”)—a magical blade invented by Miyamoto’s ancestors. Using the sword’s time-traveling powers, Mishima is altering history to his own corrupt ends, such as hijacking the cure for an AIDS-like disease. Faced with Hiro’s threat, Mishima sends the young warrior on a wild, time-traveling goose chase between Kyoto, ancient Greece, dark-ages Norway, and post-apocalyptic San Francisco. For added drama, Hiro is teamed with sidekicks, the Shaft-like Superfly Johnson and the beautiful, brainy heroine Mikiko.

  Daikatana embodied Romero’s greatest ambitions. Every polygon of these grandiose worlds would have to be coded from scratch, interacting seamlessly with the characters and action. In addition to the complex nuances of the artificially intelligent characters, the game would require over one hundred unique levels and monsters spread throughout what were essentially four games—roughly four times the size of Quake. Romero had spent years making games almost completely on his own. But for John Romero’s Daikatana, as the game was officially named, there was no way to do everything himself, as he would have preferred.

  Romero proceeded to fill the ultimate gaming company with the ultimate gamers. Mike Wilson hoped finally to exercise all the outlandish marketing schemes he could never pull off a
t id. Shawn Green, Romero’s old deathmatch partner from id, was ready to help with coding. After Romero put the word out on the Internet, rabid Doom and Quake fans swamped Ion Storm’s e-mail server with résumés and mods. Romero handpicked his favorites, figuring that any who could wow him with a fresh character or monster or level had a place in his dream posse. Romero, after all, was once just like them: flipping burgers, eschewing sleep, school, and relationships to make and play games. So what if all these young dudes never actually worked in the business before? If they had the passion, the predisposition for crunch, that was qualification enough.

  By early 1997, hard-core gamers who had been living and breathing Romero’s games for years were road-tripping to Ion Storm’s temporary offices to work—and deathmatch—with their mentor. Brian Eiserloh, who had achieved notoriety in college for his nude Doom hacking parties, took a job after sending in an application essay written in the form of a medieval short story. Will Loconto gave up his gig in the industrial band Information Society to be Ion Storm’s sound designer. Sverre Kvernmo, a star mapper from the Doom community, left his home country of Norway to become Romero’s lead level designer. These weren’t hard sacrifices for them to make. “We were all starstruck by the Romero phenomenon,” Sverre said.

  Few were more struck than Stevie Case. Stevie was the University of Kansas Quake fan who had become known as one of the sharpest-shooting players on the scene. During a pilgrimage to Dallas, she’d managed to score a deathmatch with Romero. She lost, but just barely, and challenged him to a rematch. The next time around, Romero got clocked. As penance, he uploaded a Web shrine in Stevie’s honor. Later he offered her a job.