Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  It would get worse. Employees began walking out the door, not to return. The deal with Eidos fell apart just as it was about to be signed, due, in no small part, to the increased delays and chaos within the glass walls. With the failure of Dominion and the need to keep Ion afloat, Todd relinquished plans to work on Doppelganger and immersed himself in his new position as CEO. Romero, he thought, was too nonconfrontational. So Todd hired an auditing firm to make sense of Ion’s hemorrhaging financials. Despite knowing that his own aggressive style could alienate those around him, he felt obliged to get the Daikatana team back into shape. But it was to no avail. Romero refused his suggestions to cut the game. And the employees only became more embittered at Todd’s increasingly vocal lashings. They resented the fact that one day, while they watched a building go down in flames nearby from their perch, Todd exclaimed, “We’re not paying you to watch a building burn.”

  By the fall, Ion was headed for a conflagration of its own. On the evening of the November 18, Romero was taken out to P. F. Chang’s for dinner by Stevie Case and a couple of other trusted employees. Since Stevie was hired, she had remained loyal to Romero, providing solace and perspective during the increasingly hard times. “We heard a rumor,” she said, “that your entire Daikatana team is going to leave tomorrow.” Romero remained defiant. “Fuck them if they’re going to leave,” he said.

  The next day Romero and Tom were called into the conference room, where they found the Daikatana team waiting. “We can’t keep working under these conditions,” they were told by Will Loconto. “We don’t think this game is ever going to get done, so we’re going to go and start our own company.”

  Romero wandered back through the maze of cubicles and sat down at his desk, where he would remain long after the sun came down on the glass tower. Everything is bullshit! he thought. Why did I hire these people? It shouldn’t have been this big. This was too many people, too much money. It should have been just me and Tom and a small team of people with a common goal. It should have been like the way it was when we weren’t biz guys. We were just gamers.

  FIFTEEN

  Straight out of Doom

  As gamers came, RebDoomer wasn’t unique. He loved first-person shooters, especially Doom and Quake. He stayed up late at night, deathmatching over the Internet. He made amateurish mods—an arena space based on a hockey rink; a boxing ring for hand-to-hand combat—and traded them with friends online. “Whatsup all you doomers out there!” he typed to them. “REB here, bringin you another kick-ass doom2 wad! This one took a damn long time to do, so send me some bloody credit man!”

  Offline, he wasn’t finding much camaraderie at all. He was deeply troubled at school: the jocks, the jokes, the feeling of being a pariah. He began keeping increasingly angry journals, venting his desires for revenge. Finally, one day he set up a video camera in his basement, then sat in a reclining chair holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. Looking into the camera, he described his plan to go on a shooting spree through his high school. “It’s going to be like fucking Doom,” he said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick. Ha! That fucking shotgun is straight out of Doom!”

  On the morning of April 20, 1999, Eric “RebDoomer” Harris and his best friend, Dylan “Vodka” Klebold, strapped themselves with bombs and shotguns and went on a rampage through their Littleton, Colorado, school, Columbine High, leaving fifteen people, including themselves, dead. The event, which played out on live television, galvanized the country. Parents, teachers, politicians, and children wanted to make sense of the ultimate senseless act. They were looking for something to blame.

  At 5:15 p.m. on April 21, 1999, Steve Heaslip, the editor of a game news site called Blue’s News, uploaded a message. “Several readers have written in reporting having seen televised news reports showing the Doom logo on something visible through clear bags containing materials said to be related to the suspected shooters. . . . There is no word yet of what connection anyone is drawing between these materials and this case.” As the killers’ Doom books, Doom games, and Doom fantasies surfaced, the connection was made soon enough.

  In the weeks following the tragedy, Doom became emblematic of how violent media were inspiring real-life violence. The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a report suggesting the Eric Harris had reconfigured Doom in a “dry run” of the real-life killings. Similarly without substantiation, others began reporting that Harris had created a mod based specifically on Columbine High. The Washington Post described the world of Doom deathmatching as a “dark, dangerous place.” Newsday wrote about how playing Doom can “widen the hole in any kid’s soul.” David Grossman, a former army ranger, became a media darling for his views on games as “murder simulators.” Even President Clinton chimed in, quoting Grossman in a radio address and adding that “Doom . . . the very game played obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make[s] our children more active participants in simulated violence.”

  Once again, violent games and their associated pop culture—black clothes, heavy metal, gory films—were under attack. The mayor of Denver asked promoters to cancel a concert by Harris’s and Klebold’s alleged favorite band, Marilyn Manson. Schools banned trench coats. Disney World and Disneyland pulled violent games from their arcades. But none took the call to arms like the senator who had initiated the country’s first investigation into violent games six years earlier: Senator Joseph Lieberman.

  In an April 28 statement, he called for a new investigation into the scourge. “My hope,” he said, “is that such a summit would persuade the nation’s top cultural producers to call a cease-fire in the virtual arms race, to stop the release of ultraviolent video games and movies and CDs that romanticize and sanitize extreme forms of violence and teach our children that killing is cool—the very material, such as Doom . . . that several of the school gunmen murderously mimicked down to the choice of weapons and apparel.”

  Without any sensible counterpoint, the press and politicians—many of whom had never played such games—were left to draw their own conclusions. Ellen Goodman, in her nationally syndicated column, asked, “How many of us accept as ‘normal’ boy stuff the video games that we are now told are virtual training sessions for military de-sensitization?” She didn’t seem to know or care that the military didn’t use the games to desensitize, they used them for team building.

  Good Morning America corralled a friend of the teenage killers who led the viewers through a game of Doom. “There’s more to learn from Eric Harris’s computer game,” the reporter intoned. “Watch closely as we enter the secret rooms he created.” There were bodies hanging from the ceiling, images, he implied, that Harris had created; in fact, they were the original B-movie effects of the game. “This is like walking through somebody’s nightmare,” the reporter declared. “Did it ever strike you that, Hey, this is a little strange, this guy really likes all this blood and shooting and violence?” His friend replied, “Never.” He was just a gamer.

  And these were just games. It was an obvious point among the people who actually played Doom and Quake but one that seemed strangely to elude everyone else: games were make-believe. In video games, no one really got hurt. But when it came to violent play, people had a history of linking fantasy with reality, as the author Gerard Jones explored in his book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence.

  As Jones noted, an influential study in 1963 found that children who watched films of a person punching an inflatable clown doll later beat up such a clown toy more aggressively than kids who hadn’t watched the film. The conclusion: exposure to violent media caused real-life violence. In reality, of course, the kids were just punching inflatable clowns; they were not running to the local circus and pummeling Bozo. Rather than blame violent media, Jones argued, adults needed to understand the role make-believe violence plays in human development: “Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden . . . is
a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.”

  Researchers since the 1980s had been finding positive effects of video games; a report in the Journal of American Academic Child Psychiatry argued that games not only didn’t inspire aggression, they released it. An academic study in England would find that gamers “seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge similarity with top-level athletes. The skills they learnt on computers seem to transfer to the real world.” In Finland, researchers used computer games to help treat children with dyslexia.

  And, despite all the studies that attempted to link violent media with aggression, the conclusions remained suspect. “Violence in film, in video games, in music lyrics is disturbing to us all,” Dr. Stuart Fischoff, founder of the Media Psychology lab at California State University in Los Angeles, said in an address to the American Psychological Association later in 1999, “but because two phenomena are both disturbing and coincident in time does not make them causally connected . . . There is not, I submit, a single research study which is even remotely predictive of [events like] the Columbine massacre.”

  Murderers, after all, had proven that they could find inspiration in anything—the White Album, Taxi Driver, Catcher in the Rye. How many acts of violence had the Bible inspired? After Columbine, however, few had the nerve or the knowledge to defend games. Jon Katz, a writer for Rolling Stone and the tech community Slashdot, posted several essays that assailed the media’s stereotypes of geeks and gamers. “This is so crazy and hysterical,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “The real issue should be how teenagers get their hands on machine guns and bombs—not about a Web site and video games.” Others offered backhanded defense at best. “Violence has always been a big thing in the U.S.,” wrote Time, “and there are good constitutional reasons why we can’t legislate that out of our entertainment products. But the video-game industry makes only what it can sell. And as long as gore is what we’re buying—for our kids and for ourselves—gore is what they’ll give us.”

  The politicians, however, weren’t going to wait for the people to decide matters for themselves. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, made a speech on the Senate floor, saying, “The video game ‘Quake,’ put out by . . . id Software, the same company as the producer of ‘Doom,’ consists of a lone gunman confronting a variety of monsters. For every kill, he gets points. As he advances in the game, the weapons he uses grow more powerful and more gory—he trades in his shotgun for an automatic and later gets to use a chain saw on his enemies. The more skilled the player, the gorier the weapons he gets to use. Bloodshed his reward.”

  By June 1999, the White House had stepped up to the plate. During a press conference in the Rose Garden, a dour-faced President Clinton stood holding up an ad from a gaming magazine that promoted a game as “more fun than shooting your neighbor’s cat.” “We ought to think twice,” he said, “about the impact of ads for so-called ‘first person shooter video games,’ like the recent ad for a game that invites players to—and I quote—’Get in touch with your gun-toting, cold-blooded murdering side.’ ”

  With that, he ordered a federal investigation to determine whether gaming and other entertainment companies were guilty of marketing violent products to children. The industry’s assertions that games were being made, in part, by and for adults didn’t ring true. “It’s hard to argue with a straight face that the games were made for adults in the first place,” he said. Three days later Senators Lieberman and John McCain announced a solution: the Twenty-first Century Media Responsibility Act, a formidable bill that would establish a standardized rating system for movies, music, and video games. If the bill passed, retailers who sold violent games to minors would face ten-thousand-dollar fines. No one in the games industry opposed ratings; they already had their own voluntary Entertainment Software Rating Board. But, of course, they bristled at standardization and government involvement. The message from Washington was loud and clear: Rethink violent games or else.

  It was 1:34 a.m. in Suite 666, days after the Columbine shootings. Carmack sat at his desk behind the black windows in the black night, cursor blinking on his computer, awaiting a response. He thought over his words carefully. Writing his .plan updates was becoming increasingly laborious because, as Carmack knew, everyone seemed to be hanging so much on what he said. “Some of you,” he finally typed, “are busy getting all bent out of shape about this.”

  Carmack was talking about the gaming community’s reaction to id’s announcement that the first test of their next game, Quake III Arena, would be released for Macintosh, not Windows. In the gaming world, this was usually as big as the controversies got. But while Carmack turned his attention to his plan, describing the pros and cons of the new Macintosh systems, he couldn’t avoid the other controversy. Finishing his update, he pushed himself away from his desk and walked down the hall to get a Diet Coke and a snack. “Hey,” he said, passing the police officers in his lobby, “do you guys want anything to eat?”

  The cops were the most obvious sign of Columbine’s impact on id. They had been hired to stand guard shortly after the first wave of hate calls and hate mails started flaming into the office. Miss Donna, receptionist and id mom, would pick up the phone to find a raging protester on the other end of the line asking what in God’s name this company had done. Soon there were journalists hanging around outside, trying fruitlessly to get a word from one of the many long-haired guys walking from their sports cars into the jet black cube. After a hateful protester was found outside screaming, a few of the newer members of the id staff pleaded for security during the late hours. Carmack and the other owners relented but felt it was an overreaction. “Oh,” they said, “this happens all the time.”

  In fact, it had happened only eight days before the Columbine shootings. On April 12, 1999, the parents of three students killed in a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, had leveled a $130 million lawsuit against entertainment companies, including id Software, whose violent products, they said, had inspired the fourteen-year-old murderer, Michael Carneal—a fan of Doom and Quake. And, of course, it had happened long before that: the Wolfenstein controversies in 1992, the Mortal Kombat hearings in 1993, the Doom bans to follow—not to mention the Death Race arcade outrage in the 1970s, or the Dungeons and Dragons hysteria in the eighties.

  As long as these guys had played games, there had been the detractors, the lawsuits, the sensationalism, but nothing quite as powerful as the one-two punch of Paducah and Columbine. Because of the Paducah lawsuit, id’s lawyers strongly advised the owners and employees to remain quiet. The staff obliged, but Carmack felt frustrated that he couldn’t tell the world what he thought. As a result, the media storm brewed and brewed, with no word from the people who had made the games. But Carmack knew exactly what he would say.

  “The succession of the two events did not necessarily mean that something more significant was happening or the trend was increasing. It was just the odds. This life event, like every other, could be broken down to mathematics. If you’ve got any event that has this random chance of happening, eventually after a certain time, there are going to be multiple occurrences of it quickly after another.” Carmack wasn’t worried that there was suddenly going to be some secret link exposed between games and murder; disturbed people are disturbed people, pure and simple.

  Id’s games weren’t about really killing someone, Carmack knew, they were just extensions of childhood play. “Deathmatch was tag,” he said. “Doom was cowboys and Indians with better special effects. We build games that we think are going to be fun. All the games we enjoyed like Defender and Robotron were all about running around and blasting things. The gore and graphics just make an already challenging and interactive game more visceral
. It makes people jump and sweat and be tense. It’s an okay game if you’re sitting saying, ‘Okay this is fun.’ But our definition of a good game is something that’s going to be gripping and exciting.”

  Were these violent games being marketed to kids? “Of course teenagers like our games,” Carmack said. “To say that our games are targeted only for eighteen-year-olds and older is ludicrous.” But the thing that people weren’t getting, he thought, was that id wasn’t targeting anyone. All the way back to Softdisk, they had made games not for an audience but for themselves. They made games they wanted to play that no one else was making, games that, as fate would have it, would appeal to millions of others. As Carmack returned to his desk, he went back to work on a game that was going to be id’s most gleeful shooter yet: Quake III Arena. But, after Columbine, would people want—would the market allow—his or Romero’s games again?

  John Schuneman gripped his bowling ball tighter as the talk turned to Doom. Romero’s stepfather, now in his sixties, had been coming to this bowling alley more frequently since retiring, and he could usually count on relaxing with a good game. But not today. The people next to him, like millions across the country, were talking about the horrific events at Columbine High School. Kids today, they’re being corrupted by these violent video games like Doom. Schuneman’s heart raced again as they spoke. He stepped over to the group. “We can take it outside anytime you want,” he said, curling the ball at his side. He didn’t want to hear any more trash about Johnny’s games.

  He wasn’t the only one. Romero himself couldn’t believe the way people were harping on Doom, a game that was six years old. It just showed how clueless the politicians had become. It was just the same old crap from the same old people. And Romero was tired of the blame. Those kids were defective, he thought, so don’t blame it on my game. Don’t blame the games. Blame the fucking parents.