Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  From his own experience, of course, Romero had strong opinions about just how parents could screw up their kids. And now, at the age of thirty-one, with three kids of his own, he had become more self-aware of where the violence in his games came from and the effect the violent games could have. He was a fucked-up kid making fucked-up games to deal with the fucked-up physical and emotional violence he’d experienced when he was young. He liked the violence in his games, just as he liked the violence in his Melvin comics. There was no question—the violence in his games did have an impact on him at least: he’d scream and curse and break keyboards, but he never confused fantasy and reality. He didn’t even know how to fire a gun in real life.

  But because he thought violence in games could have an effect, Romero thought that even more responsibility should rest with the parent. For that reason, he supported ratings on games, as did most of his peers. Ultimately, the responsibility shouldn’t be the game makers’ or the politicians’. The parents should decide when their kids were mature enough to play a game like Doom. Romero had long relished the day he could sit down with his boys, Steven and Michael, and play through the worlds he created. They were ready for that day, Romero decided, when they were eight.

  After Columbine, though, Romero kept these opinions to himself. He wasn’t being sued like id, but why say anything anyway? You talk to journalists and they’re going to take what you say and twist it any way they want into their story and it will only end up looking bad. The last thing Romero wanted was more bad press. Even before Columbine, after all, he’d been getting more than his share.

  The avalanche of trash talking—in the press and in the community—broke the moment the eight members of the Daikatana team, or, as they became known, the Ion Eight, had walked out Ion Storm’s emerald doors a few months earlier, in November 1998. No sooner did Romero lose the core of his team than news broke that the Ion Eight had formed a new company, Third Law, which was under contract to create a first-person shooter based on the rock band Kiss for the Gathering of Developers—the independent-minded publisher started by Mike Wilson after his departure from Ion Storm. It was a double slap to Romero’s face. He felt backstabbed by Mike and burned by the team he trusted. It was like the Softdisk mutiny in which Romero and the rest had jilted Al Vekovius. Only this time Romero was the boss getting screwed.

  But Romero, as usual, didn’t wait long to change moods. And this time he had someone to help speed his recovery: Stevie Case. Throughout all the darkness at the company, Stevie had been a beacon. They had much in common: two misfit kids who’d found a home in the fantasy life of video games. And, like Romero, Stevie had radically reinvented herself. Inspired by Ion Storm’s creative atmosphere, the small-town girl with the student government bob had transformed her image. She stopped eating meat, went to the gym, lost fifty pounds, bleached her hair. She ditched the sweatshirts for midriffs, the baggy jeans for leopard pants. She used her video game salary to buy breast implants. In the space of a year, she had gone from model tomboy to Playboy model—the magazine, hearing her story, paid her to pose. After the Ion Eight left, she became Romero’s lead designer.

  She also became his girlfriend. Just as he engaged to get Ion back on track, he separated from his wife, Beth—not long after she had given birth to their daughter, Lillia. Once again Romero had grown dissatisfied with his marriage and overwhelmed by the pressures of being a Rich Person and Game God. After all the years of assuring everyone—his fans, his friends, his family—that he could do it all, he had finally realized he could not manage both an empire and a family. His ex-wife, Kelly, had made this point clear when, to Romero’s dismay, she moved back to California with his boys. Ultimately, he gave in to the truth: he was married to his games. With Stevie, the first woman in his life who shared the passion, it was a three-way affair.

  As his personal life changed, Romero put his energy into rebuilding his team, hiring a few old friends and picking up some help from Tom Hall’s squad. Though Daikatana was in need of an overhaul, the end was in sight. The Quake II engine conversion was complete, they announced in early January 1999. A producer Romero had hired to organize Daikatana proudly told the press that “come hell or high water, the game will be done on February 15, 1999.”

  Or so the team hoped. Days later they would receive the worst blow of bad press yet: a scathing cover story called “Stormy Weather” in the city’s free weekly paper, the Dallas Observer. The seven-thousand-word story explicitly detailed how “the place where the ‘designer’s vision is king’ has turned into a toxic mix of prima donnas and personality cults.” More shocking, the article was based on internal e-mails. They now appeared in print and online for the entire world to read.

  The result, inside and outside the company, was devastating. Suddenly all of Ion’s internal affairs—from Mike Wilson’s BMW financing to Romero’s interest in “burning” through Eidos’s options—was public. Internet sites traded the story as fast as Doom shareware, reveling in how the Surgeon of deathmatch, the one who was going to make them his bitch, was finally getting his due. Romero tried fitfully to determine the source of the leak. He blocked access to game gossip sites and even tried, though unsuccessfully, to sue the Observer to reveal its sources. All he found was that his partner Todd Porter had accidentally posted his e-mail file on the company computer network and that anyone within Ion could have copied them.

  By the time the Columbine blow came, a few months later, Romero couldn’t have been beaten down any worse. His company was a laughingstock. His game was once again delayed, with no end in sight—having sailed past the promise for a February 1999 release. It now was in danger of buckling to technology once and for all, with id Software already deep into the Quake III engine. When a deathmatch demo of Daikatana was released in March, gamers thought it looked dated.

  The dream of the Big Company seemed to be proving too big after all, too loose, too high, too ambitious. All those things Carmack had berated him about—the hyperbole, the lack of focus, the dangers of a large team—had come back with a vengeance. Even Eidos, Romero’s publisher, agreed. In return for their sinking by now nearly $30 million into the company, Romero had to change his ways once and for all. As the Eidos president, Rob Dyer, put it: “Shut up and finish the game.”

  Id Software was once again in the spotlight at the E3 convention in Los Angeles in May 1999, but this time for all the wrong reasons. Coming only one month after the Columbine shootings and the Paducah lawsuit, the show became a feeding ground for the media’s increasingly sensational investigation of video game violence. Of all the companies the reporters wanted to interview, there was none higher on the list than the creators of Doom and Quake.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. No one, it seemed, wanted to talk about the events. In his opening remarks, Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association—the group that was created in response to Senator Lieberman’s 1993 hearings on game violence—tried to set the tone. He pointed out that only 7 percent of the five thousand games released were violent enough to be rated Mature. Nevertheless, he added, the game industry was in fact growing up. This was not for kids. The IDSA reported that 54 percent of video gamers were over eighteen, with 25 percent of these older than thirty-six; the age of computer gamers was even higher, with 70 percent over eighteen and 40 percent of them over thirty-six. Together, U.S. gamers were spending nearly $7 billion that year alone—more than Americans spent on movie tickets. “For those of you who are here to focus on violence,” Lowenstein said, “I submit that you’re missing a much bigger story about what it is that makes interactive entertainment the fastest-growing entertainment industry in the world.”

  The reporters responded by rushing over to id’s booth for comments on Columbine, to no avail. Any journalist who muscled up to one of the gamers from id was abruptly intercepted by a PR representative, who would refer him or her to the publisher, Activision, who would refuse to say anything at all. These weren’t the only gamer
s laying low. Raven, id’s old friends from Wisconsin, showed their violent shooter, Soldier of Fortune, only behind closed doors; the same was true for one of the year’s other hotly anticipated shooters, Kingpin. For id, however, the controversy was the least of their difficulties. With Quake III Arena, the game they had come to demonstrate, they were having enough problems.

  The trouble started the moment Carmack had announced the previous year that the game’s design would be deathmatch only. In light of the success of Half-Life, a shooter in which story was everything, the free-for-all plan sounded heretical, if not out of touch. Others bristled at the notion that id’s next title would be, essentially, its most elitist ever: not just suggesting that a player had a high-end machine but requiring it by making the game compatible only for players who had 3-D graphics cards installed.

  The fans weren’t the only ones in doubt. After the office dysfunction that had surrounded Quake II, the energy level heading into Quake III was at an all-time low. The old battles that Carmack had endured with Romero had been supplanted by the rest of the team. Inspired by Half-Life, everyone, it seemed, wanted a more ambitious design. But no matter what they came up with, Carmack shot it down. For Adrian, it was just more of the same: further proof that after all these years since their lake house in Shreveport, id had become Carmack’s company. Adrian felt frustrated, wanting to do something, anything, that was different. It was a criticism that was starting to bubble up in the community as well: id was rehashing the same game over and over without any consideration for story and design. But Adrian resigned himself to go along. What was he going to do, he thought, fire John Carmack?

  As work began on the project, the dissolution only festered. Carmack’s intention to create a game that allowed the members of his company to work in, essentially, isolation proved a bit too isolationist. As he churned out early versions of the Quake III engine, the mappers and artists felt adrift, with no direction on what to pursue. Left to their own devices, they simply created their own little worlds, worlds that clearly didn’t relate to or complement each other.

  Carmack grew increasingly frustrated. Here he was, creating the most powerful graphics engine the company had ever seen, and no one on his staff seemed to be taking advantage of the opportunities. No one was pushing the technology, pushing the design, pushing him. Though Carmack never came out and said that he pined for the days of Romero’s giddy experimentations, it was clear to him that something was missing. The magic of the self-motivated id Software team was gone.

  By February 1999, the staff had had enough. Carmack clearly had no interest in managing the day-to-day affairs of the game. They wanted a producer. So Carmack called Graeme Devine. Graeme was a prodigy in gaming history. At sixteen he was expelled from high school in England because he was spending too much time programming games for Atari. He later moved to the United States to cofound Trilobyte, the company that produced one of the bestselling and most technologically impressive CD-ROMs of the early nineties, 7th Guest. Graeme and Carmack had struck up a programmers’ relationship along the way, corresponding often about the latest in coding. Now that it was time to bring on help for Quake III, Carmack thought of Graeme, whose own company had recently gone under. Graeme was more than happy to come on board, but he was surprised at what he found.

  When he asked the fourteen people what they thought the direction of the project was, he got fourteen different answers. The night before his first day, three of the newer guys took him out for a coffee at Starbucks in Mesquite to prepare him for the bloody arena he was about to try to tame. “They are going to tell you that you have power,” one explained, “but you will not have any power. They may say something’s okay, but they will override your decisions.” They warned Graeme of what to watch out for: the mind games, the politics, the people to distrust. Graeme wasn’t swayed. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he assured them. “Don’t worry. Things will change.”

  Nothing did. Graeme discovered that the egos at id were stronger than he’d surmised. Though people felt like they were working without direction, at the same time no one wanted really to be told what to do. To make matters worse, a fundamental ingredient of the game—the bots—was missing. Bots were characters controlled by the computer. A good bot would blend in with the action and flesh out the scene like a robotic extra, as well as interact with the player. For Quake III, a deathmatch-only game, bots were essential for single-player action. They were implicitly complex because they had to behave like human beings.

  Carmack had decided, for the first time, to delegate the job of creating these bots to another programmer in the company. But he failed to follow up. Once again, Carmack incorrectly assumed that everyone was as self-motivated and adept as he was. He was wrong. When Graeme struggled to rein in the work, it was discovered that the bots were completely ineffective. They didn’t behave at all like human beings. They behaved, basically, like bots. The staff began to panic. By March 1999, they had reason to be scared.

  At the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, id employees got their first look at Unreal Tournament, a new game by Epic, the creators of the 1998 shooter Unreal. Epic had quietly become formidable competition. Tim Sweeney, Epic’s lead programmer, was revered. The company had even employed two former id guys: Jay Wilbur and Mark Rein—the “probationary president” from the Wolfenstein days—to handle business affairs. Unreal was a surprise hit, bringing, like Half-Life, more of a cinematic story feel to the genre. But their new game took id by even greater surprise. Unreal Tournament was a deathmatch-only multiplayer game, just like Quake III.

  Epic, some thought, had flat out stolen id’s idea. They resented the fact that Carmack, as usual, had been so open about the company’s direction in his .plan file. But Epic denied stealing anything, saying that they had been on that track long before Carmack had announced it in his plan. The animosity and competition nevertheless remained. And, with Quake III so disorganized, not to mention the heat of Columbine, there was no reprieve.

  Despite positive reviews of the game at E3, id began to fall apart. Two respected young employees—Brandon James, a level designer, and Brian Hook, a programmer—quit in frustration. Adrian separated from his wife, whom he had married during the height of Doom’s success. Kevin, always the conciliatory owner, sensed that something had to be done. He asked Carmack to move out of his own office and share space with him and Adrian in hopes of improving communication. The move only intimidated the other employees, who couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with their owners behind closed doors. What was going on, in fact, was nothing much. Instead of talking, the co-owners worked in silence. The only sound came when Carmack left and Adrian and Kevin turned up their stereo.

  By the end of the project, Graeme wasn’t producing, he was programming. The bots were farmed out to a well-known mod maker in the Netherlands, who heroically brought them to life. The levels were stitched together in some sensible sequence. In November 1999, the game was close enough to completion that some members of the company went on a promotional bus tour for the release. The fun was cut short, however, when they discovered that their competitor, Epic, had one-upped them again, releasing Unreal Tournament just a week before Quake III hit shelves in early December.

  At the wire, the question remained: Would players go with Carmack’s—or Epic’s—vision of a plot-free, deathmatch-only online world, or would they stand by Romero, the beleaguered designer who was hoping to prove that Daikatana, in all its wild ambition, would save the story after all? Romero weighed in on the matter in a business preview of Quake III that appeared in Forbes. “Online gaming is still a small segment of the market,” he told the magazine. “And the people who play over the Web are the ones most likely to find sites where they can download the game for free.” The magazine offered its own verdict of who would ultimately win the battle of the Two Johns. “It’s quite possible,” the story concluded, “that id’s far less grandiose strategy is the better one.”

  “Aa
aaarrggggggggh!” Shawn Green screamed as he thrashed his computer keyboard against the floor. It was midnight in the coders’ cove of Ion Storm, and the cubes were as dark as the city below. Dressed in a black T-shirt, Romero’s old friend hunched like an ape at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey as he whacked keys across the floor. A skinny programmer stretched his neck out of a nearby cube to observe the tantrum, then nonchalantly returned to his work. Shawn brushed his hair back as a smile crept across his face. “Nothing like a little stress relief,” he said, tossing the battered keyboard down the hall.

  Shawn, like the others on the Daikatana team, was deep into crunch mode. Despite Romero’s pledge years before to Carmack that his death schedule days were over, he had upped the team’s core hours to include weekends; the staff was now elbowing for bed space in the lounge. Brian “Squirrel” Eiserloh had recently spent eighty-five out of ninety days without leaving the office. Several others were crawling to sleep under their black-shrouded cubicles, nestling on floors covered in loose M&M’s and pizza box pillows. Stevie Case was stuck home sick with a kidney infection. Romero had even taped a sign to the office’s most popular arcade game that said, “No More Tekken 3 Until Daikatana Ships!”

  Shawn himself was about to take his first and only break in weeks, heading off to an abandoned abortion clinic to unwind with his death metal band, Last Chapter. After staring at lines of code all day and sucking down a half case of Mountain Dew, he was always looking for new ways to blow off the steam and caffeine. He and Romero joked about making a life-size porcelain doll that would stand in the office holding a baseball bat. The punch line was that it held its own demise.

  So did Ion Storm by the fall of 1999. Romero’s ship wasn’t just off course, it was perched on a rock in a violent sea with a steady flow of crew members leaping—or pushing each other—off board. Reeling from the Ion Eight departures, the Dallas Observer story, and the Columbine controversy, the company had suffered yet another blow as a result of that year’s E3 convention. The pressure going into the convention had been enormous, especially with the game promised, this time, for a December release. Todd confronted Romero before the event. “Look,” he said, “Eidos is significantly concerned, and we need to have some sort of oversight; I need to make sure that things are coming along the way they’re supposed to come along.” He would get the game ready and send it to them at E3.