Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  On cue, they were off—blasting rocket launchers at each other through the halls. No sooner had it begun than Romero, the Surgeon, made giblets of Engine John. This match was over. The next one would take place in an even more challenging arena: the one where Quake II and Daikatana were destined to meet. And this world guaranteed competition—and surprises—of its own.

  FOURTEEN

  Silicon Alamo

  Brother Jake stood behind the bar of the Horny Toad Cantina in Mesquite mixing up another Big Fucking Gun. One part Rumplemintz, one part Midori, with a splash of blue curaçao, the BFG was a drink he’d concocted in honor of his favorite weapon from Doom. It was the least he could do, considering the cantina was right across the highway from id’s office. The toxic green cocktail was the unofficial toast of Dallas, the new capital of the video game gold rush.

  By the summer of 1997, Dallas had become to gamers what Seattle was to musicians in the early 1990s; id was Nirvana. In the five years since the Two Johns had rolled into town with a Pac-Man machine in the back of their truck, the game developer community there had more than tripled. The growth extended to Austin, where just as many were popping up around Richard Garriott’s flagship company, Origin. Time called the Texas gamers the “New Cowboys.” Wired called them “Doom babies.” The Boston Globe dubbed the state’s video game renaissance “the new Hollywood.”

  A more appropriate name would have been Silicon Alamo, because the crux of the rush was first-person shooters. Between Doom, Quake, and Scott Miller’s hit Duke Nukem 3D, shooters had spawned a multimillion-dollar cottage industry and dominated the video game charts. This fulfilled the dream that id had set out to accomplish back at Softdisk: to make the PC a viable gaming platform. Of the $3.7 billion generated in 1996 from interactive entertainment software, nearly half—$1.7 billion—was from PC games alone. “The PC gaming boom,” declared USA Today, “has helped the industry bounce back.”

  With the prospects of id’s and Ion’s fame and fortune, a new generation of companies were arising around Dallas. Rogue and Ritual, spawned respectively from id and 3D Realms, specialized in making so-called mission packs, add-on levels for Quake. Ensemble Studios, empowered by the addition of id’s Sandy Petersen, created one of the bestselling strategy games of all time, Age of Empires. Terminal Reality, founded by ex-Apogee members and the creator of Microsoft’s groundbreaking Flight Simulator engine, devoted itself to a range of multiplatform gaming products. The Cyberathlete Professional League was trying to turn live deathmatching events into the gaming version of the NFL.

  Id did much to increase the community by licensing out its technology. In addition to Ion Storm, other companies were now paying close to $250,000, as well as royalties, to use the Quake engine. Though id would profit from some of its competition, there was more on the rise. Soon the gaming press began speculating about the “Quake killers” that would or could knock id from its perch. Duke Nukem 3D had already received much acclaim. Valve, a Seattle-based company founded by some former Microsoft employees, had licensed the Quake engine to make Half-Life, a game that had previewed at E3 to a favorable response. Unreal, a shooter created by Epic, the North Carolina company discovered by Scott Miller years before, had demoed as well to laudable reviews. Then, of course, there was Daikatana. With all these games due sometime over the next year, as well as id’s own Quake II, the Silicon Alamo showdown promised to be one of the best shoot-outs in years—if only those involved could survive the battles brewing in their own companies.

  The race was on. Carmack was behind the wheel of his Ferrari F40, burning down the drag strip as the Porsche 911 stormed up behind him. It was a bright sunny day in Ennis, Texas. Carmack had decided to rent out this country racetrack for a little company competition. It was a fun way for everyone to flex the power of the sports cars the games had afforded them. This wasn’t the only track they had been visiting of late. In a pinch, Carmack had once called the mayor of Mesquite and asked him if he would shut down the local airport long enough for the company to have a few little drag races. The mayor was happy to oblige. Carmack, after all, had donated tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, including bulletproof vests (which some gamer on the force stitched with Doom patches), to the local police. He deserved consideration.

  The drag races weren’t the only contests in town. Though Quake II was the favorite shooter at E3, the pressure inside id was mounting. Carmack had absolved himself of his competitive mood manipulation test—determining that such motivation didn’t suit his circuitry—but the rest of the guys were hardly resigned. Other companies’ shooters, even id’s own licensees, became regular subjects of ridicule. When the first demo of Half-Life came through the doors, many insisted it would do nothing less than fail.

  The company, like Quake II, had grown militaristic and serious. For some, all the fun and humor seemed to have been sucked out of id, not just figuratively but literally—with the most fun people—Romero, Mike, Jay, Shawn—all out the door. In place was real-life competition that had begun against Romero and now spread among themselves. American and others blamed Carmack, who sequestered himself in his office, for passive-aggressively encouraging the conflict.

  One of the main sources of distrust among the employees was id’s competitive bonus structure. Every quarter or so the owners would meet to assign a dollar amount to each employee. They would then split up a bonus payment based on those decisions. One quarter someone might get $100,000; the next, $20,000. The owners admitted that it was an arbitrary and imperfect plan, but it was the only one they could surmise. As a result, the employees realized that the easiest way to get the higher bonuses was to outwit, outplay, and outsmart each other. It was a business deathmatch.

  With Romero out of the picture, the competition had only grown more fierce. Though American had been the golden boy during the early days of Quake, those days were over. Carmack had turned cold, American thought, making him feel like he was never sure if they were really friends. For Carmack, American was just another casualty of self, someone with talent who’d lost his drive and focus, like Romero. As a result, Tim Willits, American’s old adversary, swiftly moved into favor, triggering rampant infighting.

  More and more, Carmack wanted to grab his laptop and disappear into a hotel room in some strange state. All he wanted to do was code. That was all he had ever wanted. The problems at id, he thought, were precisely the kinds of problems that he could avoid by keeping the company small, the team tight. “For any given project,” he posted in his .plan file online, “there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for id is very small.”

  With Romero gone, Carmack’s life could aspire to the elegance of his code: simple, efficient, lean. This was how he would lead his company. This was how he would make his games. He would not succumb to internal pressures or grand aspirations that would lead to infinite delays. He would deliver. And on December 9, 1997, he did just that.

  “Oh my god. Quake 2 is the most impressive game I’ve ever played on a computer. . . . What game have you played lately that was better than Quake 2? I predict the answer is none.” Among the most gushing reviews—and there were many—of Quake II was this one from Romero. He posted it on December 11 in his .plan file two days after the game was released. Romero had burned through nonstop for forty-eight hours, completing the entire game in one long twitch. He had reason to be excited.

  By licensing the Quake II engine, Romero was assured that he could implement all the tricks of the game—including colored lighting—in Daikatana. Not only was he making what he thought was the most ambitious shooter ever created but he would be able to do it using the most ambitious engine ever created. It was finally like the ultimate collaboration—a marriage of technology and design that Romero could never
achieve at id. And now, best of all, no one—not Carmack, not anyone—could get in the way.

  Or so he thought. The burgeoning troops of Ion Storm were grumbling with discontent. It had begun when Ion released the “bitch ad” in April. Just as that backlash was stinging, the company went to E3 in June 1997 with what many thought to be a shabby demo of Daikatana. Romero seemed more interested in playing games and courting the press, they thought, than in telling them what they needed to do to realize his game. And the game, as a result, was feeling further and further from completion.

  Unlike Romero, most on his staff didn’t like the idea of switching Daikatana to the Quake II technology. In fact, they hated it. Romero seemed to have no idea how much work it was going to take just to implement the bare essentials of his four-hundred-page Daikatana design document. He wanted sixty-four monsters! Four time zones! A game four times the size of Quake! They’d have trouble meeting the new March 1998 deadline without the pressure of switching technologies. Now how were they going to handle this?

  They weren’t the only ones with suspicions after E3. Eidos was not pleased to find out that Ion Storm’s flagship title was now going to miss the Christmas season. But the Eidos executives were willing to give Romero the benefit of the doubt. Romero assured them, as he assured his staff, that the game would be pushed back only a few months. “Bodies plus manpower,” he said, was going to be the formula of success. The company already had eighty people, and it was still growing. With all those people at work, of course the work would get completed. Just look at what we did at id with barely thirteen guys! Eidos had no choice but to take his word, since he was managing the development of the game without intervention on their part. For all they knew, the game really was just a few months from hitting the shelves. And they were willing to do whatever it took to help make that happen.

  What that took was money. After less than a year, Eidos’s original $13 million deal—which was supposed to fund all three games—was starting to dwindle away. Eighty people on staff meant eighty salaries and, with two computers per person, 160 state-of-the-art machines with twenty-one-inch monitors. The office renovations were now approaching the $2 million mark. In all, there was no end in sight. Something had to be done. Mike Wilson, Ion’s marketing whiz, had a plan.

  Ever since his days at id, Mike had dreamed of running his own publishing company. And he’d made this dream clear to Romero and the other owners of Ion the moment he came on board. They even nicknamed the plan Ion Strike, which would be the self-publishing wing they’d start once they finished their obligation to Eidos. Mike couldn’t believe that Romero, unbeknownst to him, had signed not a three-game deal with Eidos, as he had expected, but a deal that gave them the option on three more. This meant that Ion received $13 million for its first three games and, when presented with the next three game ideas, Eidos could decide whether to fund them as well. The faster they burned through the options, the faster they’d get their cash and be on their way to Ion Strike. The time now was to burn.

  The first deal made to cash in on this plan was to acquire Dominion, which Todd Porter had begun at 7th Level. The game was languishing at Todd’s former company, and he convinced the other owners that it was the perfect fit for Ion. They could simply buy it for $1.8 million, and it would take him only six weeks or so to get it out the door. Then he’d finish the game he was originally planning to do, Doppelganger. They made the deal. But it was only the beginning.

  In September 1997, Romero had heard through the grapevine that a game designer named Warren Spector was looking for somewhere to go. At forty-one years old, Warren was a well-regarded veteran of the industry. The son of a dentist and a reading teacher in New York, he had grown up intellectual and academic. While pursuing a doctorate in radio, television, and film at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, Warren fell in with the town’s burgeoning community of science-fiction authors and gamers, eventually taking a job with Richard Garriott’s company, Origin. Games, for him, were not just diversions, they were the closest thing to artificial reality.

  “There’s never been a medium in the history of mankind that can literally put you in another world,” he said, “we’re stuck here.” But, with the right balance of story and technology, a good game can get close. “This is the only medium ever that lets ordinary people travel to other worlds. . . . I am never going to fly a World War I biplane. I’m never going to visit a space station. I’m never going to be a super spy. But when I play one of these games, I am.”

  As id popularized what he thought were mindless first-person shooters, Warren worked on more literary first-person games, which he termed “immersive simulations.” Titles like Ultima Underworld, Thief, and System Shock relied more on a player’s intellect and stealth than on the trigger finger. Romero thought he’d be a perfect fit. Warren signed on to head up his own development team in what would become Ion Austin. He set to work on an idea for his own dream product—a sci-fi counterterrorist game that would be a most realistic and gripping immersive simulation. The title was Deus Ex. When Romero’s public relations company tried to pull Warren into the fray, however, he was quick to draw a line in the sand. “I will never say the words ‘suck it down,’ ” he told them, “and I don’t want to make anybody my bitch. We’re going to be the classy part of this company, just get ready for it.”

  Mike Wilson was less than concerned about how he himself was coming off. At a video game industry trade show in England in September, he called a meeting with the executives of Eidos and presented them with an outline of Ion Storm’s next three games. “Here they are,” he said, “take them or leave them.” Mike had squeezed publishers in the past, particularly with the Quake shareware deal that essentially cut out GTI and the retailers. The Eidos executives didn’t even discuss the plan. Who the hell did Mike think he was? Ion Storm was already behind on their first three titles, and now they wanted to talk about their next three? No deal was struck.

  Todd Porter told the other owners that after the meeting he received a call from the Eidos CEO threatening to strangle Mike. Todd, who had long been against the idea of burning through the Eidos options, complained to Romero and Tom, but to no avail. They were too immersed in their games, he thought, to tend the store. So he decided to tend it himself. He didn’t like what he found. Mike and the chief operating officer, Bob Wright, he thought, were recklessly spending cash without keeping clear tabs.

  But while Todd was moving in against them, Mike was taking similar steps against Todd. Easygoing and fun-loving, Mike had quickly become something of a mentor to the young gamers at Ion Storm. And they were opening up to him about their increased dismay. Todd and his Dominion team were a pain in the ass, they said; so were Jerry’s artists. A culture clash was emerging. While Romero’s team was composed of young gamers from the Doom community, Todd’s and Jerry’s teams were older and more removed. Todd had hired a few PhDs; few of Romero’s gamers had even graduated from college. Worse, Todd’s guys didn’t know the game that had made Ion Storm possible. Romero’s crew was shocked that a guy from Todd’s team didn’t even recognize Doom when it was being played on someone’s machine.

  After hearing these complaints daily, Mike decided something had to be done. In October he took Romero and Tom to a bar and told them the things that their own staffs had been afraid to say: everyone hated Todd. Dominion, despite his assurances, was taking longer than six weeks and wasn’t looking too impressive. Todd didn’t fit in with the company. He was wearing business suits to work, for Christ’s sake. They agreed to let Todd go.

  The next week, on the elevator to tell Todd the news, however, Romero backed down. “Man, I can’t do it,” he told Mike. “I don’t feel like we’ve given him a chance, and we’re just firing him because everybody hates him. We should just talk to him and lay down some ultimatums and offer to help him.” Mike was shocked. Romero had flipped his bit again. But Mike didn’t realize just what the implications of that flip would mean. The next month M
ike was called into a meeting himself. The owners, particularly Todd, had had enough with him. Eidos was calling every day and saying how much they couldn’t stand working with him. And they had discovered some problems: without the owners’ knowledge, Wilson had borrowed company money to buy a new BMW. Furthermore, the self-publishing deal was just too out of focus. Ion Storm didn’t need to publish games, Romero said, it needed to make games. And if Mike was dead set on being a publisher, then Mike would have to go. He went.

  With Mike out of the picture, Romero could buckle down and lead his team to the completion of the task at hand. By February 1998, he got what he had been waiting for: the Quake II code. It was the stuff that would enable them to put the completion of Daikatana into high gear. But when Romero opened the file, he took one look at the code and froze. Oh my God, he thought, what had Carmack done?

  “Do you have some aspirin?” Carmack asked his friend, as they walked into a casino in Las Vegas.

  “Do you have a headache?”

  “No,” Carmack said, “but I will soon.”

  It was February 8, 1998, and Carmack was about to put his brain to the test: counting cards in blackjack. This had become something of a new fascination of his. “Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack,” he wrote in a .plan file. “Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard part is making yourself consistantly [sic] behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your ‘gut instincts.’ ” To refine his skills before the trip, Carmack applied his usual learning approach: consuming a few books on the subject and composing a computer program, in this case one that simulated the statistics of blackjack dealt cards.

  His research proved successful, netting him twenty thousand dollars, which he donated to the Free Software Foundation, an organization of like-minded believers in the Hacker Ethic. “Its [sic] not like I’m trying to make a living at [blackjack],” Carmack wrote online after his trip, “so the chance of getting kicked out doesn’t bother me too much.” It didn’t take long for him to find out just how he’d feel. On the next trip, Carmack was approached by three men in dark suits who said, “We’d appreciate if you’d play any other game than blackjack.”