Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  Stevie and the other gamers weren’t the only ones enamored. The press rejoiced over the vision of Ion Storm. Anyone who visited the temporary office was treated to the spirit of a real game company. Deathmatching wasn’t just permitted, it was celebrated. At any given moment, Romero and dozens of others would be screaming obscenities while hunting each other down in Quake. Working with id’s former PR company in New York, Mike regaled the press about an office that, when built out, would be “the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of Gaming!”—complete with an in-house movie theater, a massive game room, and a specially designed area of networked computers made specifically for deathmatching. Time named Romero among the country’s top fifty “cyber elite.” Fortune anointed Ion Storm one of the country’s twenty-five “cool companies.”

  Eidos sent the Ion Storm owners on a whirlwind champagne and limousine press tour, which Mike cheekily dubbed the “No Excuses” tour, since these were game designers who were finally in the position essentially to put up or shut up. Mike described the group as the “Fab Four” of gaming, which pleased the guys to no end. Todd even suggested they take a picture of them crossing Abbey Road. But, behind the scenes, everyone knew who this company was about: John Romero.

  Ion painted itself as the place of freedom and dreams, while id was the out-of-touch oppressor. It was about not just two companies but two visions: design versus technology, art versus science, Dionysus versus Apollo. “Id is a technology-oriented company,” said Mike Wilson, “whereas our main focus is to indulge our artistic sensibilities. At id, by the time the 3-D engine was finished, there wasn’t enough time to work on aspects of the game. We didn’t think this was a well-balanced approach.”

  Romero agreed. “After I left,” he told Wired News, “the mood at id turned dark and gloomy. . . . No more plans to expand the company; no one to confront Carmack on important issues. I want to create more types of games with no limits on creativity, and I want as many resources (i.e., people) as I need to get the job done. That is why I left.” Romero told The Times of London that within two years Ion Storm would surpass id as the market leader. “It’s going to happen,” he said, “and it’ll be great.”

  Carmack was pulling into the parking lot of id’s black cube office building when he heard the crash. It was a terrible sound, the sound of his cherry-red Ferrari F40 getting swiped by a pickup truck. No sooner could he react than the truck peeled out of the lot and into the blur of traffic nearby. Carmack inspected the gruesome damage, then stomped upstairs and vented in a .plan file. “Words cannot do justice to how I feel right now,” he typed. “If anyone knows a tall white male in the dallas [sic] area that now has red paint and carbon fibre [sic] on their tan pickup truck, turn the bastard in!”

  Among the respondents was John Romero. “The F40 got hit,” Romero posted online. “Carma.”

  This wasn’t the first snipe from Romero. Every day, it seemed, someone from the office would wander in with some new outrage Romero had told the press. It was bad enough that he kept deriding id as an out-of-touch technology company. Worse, the id guys thought he was claiming sole credit for their success. Even Romero’s official press release broadly credited him with being “responsible for the programming, design, and project management of the [id’s] games.” And journalists eagerly and lazily picked up the refrain, calling Romero “the creative talent behind [id]” and “the man responsible for creating the blockbusters Doom and Quake.”

  Such comments were becoming the talk of id. Though they knew the press was often misleading, Romero sure didn’t seem to be taking an active role in trying to correct the misconceptions. It quickly became fashionable in the office to bash Romero and Ion Storm. American posted a .plan file mocking Romero’s claim of having made id. Adrian and Kevin grumbled about how they were going to sink Romero’s ship. But no one took up the war like id’s new artist and Carmack’s new friend, Paul Steed.

  Paul was the antithesis of a computer game geek. Tough, muscular, inscribed with tattoos, Paul had been abandoned by his father and spent a transient childhood up and down the Eastern Seaboard. He had an early interest in computers but gave it up for other pursuits. “Either you stay up all night chasing that program you want to write,” he said, “or you stay up all night chasing girls. For me, women won out.” Though talented, he grew into a volatile, confrontational personality, eventually getting thrown out of military school for a classroom brawl. He retreated to the computer world and took a job as an artist for Origin. The job at id was a dream, Paul thought, when he was presented with the offer. He didn’t know he’d be walking into a war.

  Paul didn’t know much about John Romero, other than that id’s estranged cofounder kept making surprise visits to Suite 666, as if he still wanted to be friends. Romero’s visits angered the staff, particularly Kevin and Adrian, who resented him behaving as if he were not trashing id in the press. “Why is that fucker coming over here all the time?” Paul would hear them complain. Finally, Paul spoke up. “Fuck Romero and his company!” he said. “Let’s just show up in his office and see what happens!”

  The next day Paul, Adrian, and Kevin paid a visit to Ion Storm’s temporary office space near downtown Dallas. Romero was surprised to see them but showed them around nonetheless. Paul noticed that one of Romero’s artists seemed to be using an antiquated program to create his animations. So he came back to id and questioned Ion’s direction in a public .plan file. The comment ignited what became known as the .plan wars. Id and Ion employees began disparaging each other on a daily basis. Romero eventually jumped in, sending Paul a cheeky e-mail asking him if he’d endorse Daikatana on the back of the game’s box. Paul showed Adrian the e-mail and suggested he retaliate. Adrian was more than happy to give Paul his blessing. “Dude,” Paul wrote to Romero, “don’t fuck with me because I’ll grab you by your ludicrously long hair and kick your ass back into the Doom days where you wish you were.”

  Carmack, up until this point, had stayed aloof. But as the competitive bile built in the office, even he felt himself getting swept up in the fervor. So, in what he described as “an experiment in mood manipulation,” Carmack decided to feel what it was like to take the gloves off. He chose quite a forum for his first public salvo: Time magazine. In an interview for a two-page profile of Romero, Carmack set the record straight that, contrary to his ex-partner’s frequent assertions, Romero didn’t quit, he was fired. “After he got rich and famous, the push to work just wasn’t there anymore,” Carmack said. “He was handed his resignation.” He scoffed at Romero’s ambitions for fame and fortune, saying, “There’s only so many Ferraris I want to own.” And he added that there was “no chance” Romero would fulfill his promise of finishing Daikatana in time for Christmas.

  Romero retorted in the same story that “id was too limiting, too small, small thinking,” which did little to quell the id-Ion deathmatch. The skirmish became even more public with the approach of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game industry’s massive annual convention, where companies demo their latest, greatest games. Id had every confidence that its showing, Quake II, would not only outshine John Romero’s Daikatana but crush it.

  Since work had begun on Quake II in September 1996, it had been shaping up to be the most cohesive and technologically impressive id game yet. The idea had come from a 1961 World War II movie called The Guns of Navarone, in which the heroes must take out two giant enemy guns that reside in a mountain fortress on a remote island. It was the perfect theme, the guys at id thought, something that could give their game not just a militaristic milieu but a narrative, a purpose—which had never really been in an id game before. In Quake II, players would be cast as marines doing battle on the evil planet of Stroggos, where mutant Stroggs have been hoarding human limbs and flesh to build a lethal race of cyborgs. The object: take out the Stroggs before they conquer humankind. To do this, players would have to take out the weapon protecting the alien species, the Big Gun.

  The technology would bring this
world to life. Though Carmack didn’t consider his new engine nearly as great a leap as Quake, it was still going to be formidable. Most significant, Quake II would run with either software or hardware acceleration. This meant that someone running a new 3Dfx card could get exceptional special effects—colored lighting, smoother surfaces, a more fluid, cinematic feel.

  Under the leadership of Kevin Cloud, who was always the most diplomatic and organized of the owners, id’s troop took on its own militaristic approach. With the deathmatching days over, the long hours proceeded with quiet intensity. The Shreveport swamp band of the past—Tom, Romero, Jay, Mike—was replaced with a regime that fulfilled Carmack’s conservative vision, including a new CEO—Todd Hollenshead, a former tax consultant at Arthur Andersen—and Tim Willits, the company’s new lead designer.

  Carmack uncharacteristically effused. “I doubt I can convey just how well things are going here,” he posted on June 16, 1997, in his .plan file, just before attending the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a.k.a. E3. “Things probably look a little odd from the outside, but our work should speak for itself. I have been breaking into spontanious [sic] smiles lately just thinking about how cool things are (of course, that could just be a sleep deprivation effect . . .). We have a totally kick-ass team here. We are on schedule. (no shit!) We are doing a great product. Everyone watch out!”

  The 1997 E3 convention in Atlanta was not just devoted to video games, it was a video game. Stepping inside the main floor was like walking into the heart of a machine: flashing lights, pounding rock, skateboarders, and the ubiquitous “booth babes”—actresses, models, and strippers who dressed up like video game vixens and pressed the gamers’ eager flesh. The babe of the moment was Lara Croft, protagonist of Tomb Raider. As lines of attendees with plastic bags of giveaway toys lined up to play games, the Laras worked the floor. But they couldn’t compete with the real star of the show, the long-haired guy walking through the halls and leaving a trail of bowing gamers in his wake.

  “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” the gamers cooed to John Romero or, as he was lately referring to himself, God. Romero had accepted the divine moniker as a tongue-in-cheek descriptor of himself in his .plan file, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. As far as the press and fans were concerned, Romero was a rock god. He was everywhere: Computer Gaming World, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune—on covers, in color, regal. In an ad for a joystick, Romero wore a crown and flowing red robe to give, as the tag line declared, “The Royal Seal of Approval.” “If you want to crack skulls with the big boys,” Romero’s quote read, “the Panther XL is the weapon of choice.” His publicity stills featured him sitting in a nine-thousand-dollar medieval chair he had bought for his Tudor mansion.

  Romero looked more royal than ever. He was dressing in tight-fitting designer shirts, jewelry. He had let his hair grow out so that it flowed to the middle of his back. His mane had become so renowned that, in an online interview, he dispensed his own ten-step plan for grooming: “I always flip my hair over in front of my face and look at the floor while using a brush and hair dryer to slowly dry all my hair. Brushing downward while drying will help straighten your hair and completely drying it will make sure it doesn’t kink up or curl up.”

  Walking through the kaleidoscopic floor show of E3, Romero buzzed and beamed as brightly as the games around him, but he was not there to preen. He was there, as everyone in attendance was keenly aware, to unveil a demonstration of Daikatana. From the day production began in March 1997, Romero had promised the game for a Christmas 1997 release, which meant that, by now, it would be nearly halfway to completion. Romero thought this was more than doable since he had assembled such a large team—eight artists versus id’s two, for example—to get the job done. Though Carmack had publicly expressed skepticism, the gamers and press were frothing at the bit. They had reason to feel piqued. Between the rock ’n’ roll showmanship of Mike Wilson, the hyperbolic confidence of Romero, and the multimillion-dollar vested interest of Eidos, Ion Storm had pulled out all the stops to hype the game. And, with one ad in particular, a lot of people thought they had finally gone too far.

  Earlier in the year, on the suggestion of Mike Wilson, Romero had agreed to an ad that would emulate the cheeky bravado of deathmatch smack-talk—the very language Romero had helped define. But when he saw the words in print, he felt a tinge of hesitation. “Are you sure about this?” he asked Mike.

  “Yeah,” Mike said, “don’t be a pussy.”

  Romero agreed. The ad ran in all the major gaming publications in April with simply these words written in black against a red background: “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.” Underneath was the tag line “Suck It Down!”—a phrase Mike had recently trademarked. The ad achieved its intended effect and then some. Gamers were not only provoked, they were pissed. Who did Romero think he was? Had all this fame gotten to his head? But they were willing to give him a chance, to see if his game would really be, as he was promising, the coolest one planet Earth had ever seen. Since it was coming from the ego at id, the Surgeon of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, they certainly wanted to believe. At E3 they were ready for their first chance.

  The Daikatana demo was front and center in the Eidos booth, right alongside promos for the much-anticipated Tomb Raider sequel. The demo of the game’s Norway level was made especially for this event. And gamers crowded around the screens to see it. Gone were the dark mazes of Doom and Quake. Instead, scenes were outdoors, with blankets of snow covering little Norwegian cottages, teasing glimpses of ancient Greek temples. Gamers were complimentary but not ecstatic. When Romero wandered over to id’s booth, he found out why.

  He pushed his way through the crowd to see the demo of Quake II. His face filled with yellow light as his jaw slackened. Colored lighting! Romero couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The setting was a dungeonlike military level, but when the gamer fired his gun, the yellow blast of the ammunition cast a corresponding yellow glow as it sailed down the walls. It was subtle, but when Romero saw the dynamic colored lighting, it was a moment just like that one back at Softdisk when he saw Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement for the first time. “Holy fuck,” he muttered. Carmack had done it again.

  Romero thought Quake II was the best thing he had ever seen on a computer. By programming the game specifically to take advantage of hardware acceleration, Carmack had forged a true thing of beauty. Colored lighting brought the world magnificently to life. This was the next wave, Romero knew; Carmack’s game was also, alas, his competition. The difference between his game and id’s was like that between a piece of paper and a color TV set, Romero thought. There’s no way in hell Daikatana can come out against this, not the way this looks.

  Part of Romero’s license deal with id was that he could upgrade to use their next engine, but he’d never anticipated the leap would be so great. Now he knew he had to scrap all the existing work on Daikatana and redo the game using the Quake II engine. But there was a problem: id’s contract specifically stipulated that a licensee couldn’t use the new engine until id’s game was on the shelves. This meant that Romero would not get the Quake II engine until after Christmas. He would have to finish Daikatana using the existing technology, then spend about a month, he estimated, converting it when he got the Quake II engine.

  Carmack’s technology had once again forced him to change his plans.

  Later in the show, the gamers made their way to the other main event: the Red Annihilation deathmatch tournament sponsored by id. In the middle of the floor was the grand prize: Carmack’s cherry-red Ferrari 328. “I bought my first Ferrari after the success of Wolfenstein 3-D,” Carmack told the press. “Doom and Quake have bought three more. Four Ferraris is too many for me. Rather than sell off one of them or stick it in a warehouse, I’m going to give it back to the gamers that brought it to me in the first place. The king of this Quake deathmatch is going to get a really cool crown.”

  More than two thousand gamers had been
competing online for the right to be one of the sixteen flown to E3 to compete. Everyone was gathered for the finals, which came down to Tom “Entropy” Kizmey, the sharpshooting clan member of the University of Kansas’s Impulse 9, and Dennis “Thresh” Fong, winner of the first official deathmatch event, Microsoft’s Judgment Day. The two sat onstage in front of Carmack’s car, which bore the license plate idtek1. With the crowd cheering, they battled as their match played out on a large overhead screen. Thresh could see the reflection of the Ferrari in his monitor as he closed in for his final slaying, winning the deathmatch thirteen kills to one.

  Carmack walked onstage and handed Thresh the keys. “So how are you planning on getting the car home?” he asked. “I don’t know,” Thresh said. “I guess I’ll ship it.” Carmack came back a half hour later and handed Thresh five thousand dollars in cash to cover the costs.

  As the crowd cleared, Romero wandered up to see who was around from id. Just because they were competitors didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends. He found Carmack and a couple of other id guys gathered near some computers. They talked about the event, and then it was suggested that they have a go at deathmatching each other. Romero beat everyone until it came down to just him and Carmack.

  The Two Johns sat at their machines and faced off. It was funny how the games had taken on such different meanings over the years. They’d played Super Mario back in Shreveport, when the world was full of possibilities and id was just an idea from the deep. They’d played F-Zero, the hovercraft racing game, in Wisconsin to escape the cold and dream of the race cars they could someday afford to own. They had played Doom, that very first deathmatch, which foretold the fame and fortune to come. And now they were competing for the first time in Quake—the game that had finally torn them apart. In all those long months of development, they had never played each other.