Romero and Stevie showed up at E3 in May 1999 looking the part of gaming’s rock-and-roll royalty. Romero was in black leather pants, mesh black shirt, long silver chain. Stevie’s bleached blond hair spilled over a skintight baby blue shirt and black pants. Despite the bad press, they were besieged by the usual hordes of lustful boys and autograph-seeking Doom fanatics. When the disk of Daikatana’s demo arrived, however, they didn’t like what they saw. Bugs in the program were causing the game to chug slowly across the screen. Romero flew back to Dallas and stormed into the office of John Kavanaugh, the Eidos representative who had been stationed to keep an eye on the company.
“I’m fucking leaving,” he told Kavanaugh. “If Todd’s going to stay here, I’m fucking gone. I can’t work with this guy, he’s ruining everything.” Kavanaugh told Romero a meeting would be called with Charles Cornwall, the owner of Eidos. “All you have to do,” Kavanaugh said, “is nod your head.”
In June, the Ion Storm partners—Romero, Tom Hall, Todd Porter, and Jerry O’Flaherty—flew to Los Angeles, ostensibly to talk with Eidos about buying out the majority of the company to relieve the owners’ $30 million debt. Todd and Jerry quickly learned otherwise. “I’m sick of all this bullshit!” Romero burst out. “Either Todd goes or I go.”
Kavanaugh feigned incredulousness. “That’s bullshit, John,” he said. “You are Ion Storm. There’s no decision here.”
Jerry knew what this was all about: control. Romero wanted total control over his game. He tried haplessly to offer a solution: “If your problem is Todd working on your project,” he said, “can we give Todd a project? Does anyone have a problem with that?”
“Look,” Romero said, “this is not a fun place to work anymore, and I think we need to take a partnership and go in a different direction.”
Before Jerry could suggest another option, to his surprise, Todd agreed. “Look,” he said quietly, “you’re right, John. It’s no fun for me either. It’s clearly no fun for Jerry.” Jerry acquiesced. They would go. The four owners walked out into a flash of lightbulbs. But this time it wasn’t for them. It was for actors Heather Graham and Rob Lowe, who were there for a photo shoot.
Ultimately, Todd and Jerry were happy to be getting what would surely be a healthy buyout for a company that seemed to be going down the tubes. Romero and Tom were relieved to have a new beginning. Maybe the company would be saved by the games, but either way they all still believed in their original vision: that design, that the games could be law. The problem, as Romero said, was that the design didn’t take into account technology and it didn’t take into account that the designer doesn’t necessarily know how to manage.
In October, after reporting a loss of $44.8 million, Eidos announced that it was purchasing 51 percent of Ion Storm. Romero spent the fall buckling down on the game. The interview requests were turned away. Tekken 3 remained unplugged. Though the monsters, levels, sound, and art were nearing completion, there was a formidable task ahead: burning through the remaining bugs—all five hundred of them—in time for their promised December 17, 1999, release. But Eidos was confident enough to schedule a release party for that day, despite Romero’s objections.
The party came, but without a finished Daikatana game. Not until April 21, 2000, would Romero finally feel ready to release it. The next day he sat down at his computer and typed a message for readers on the Internet. “My god, it’s finally finished,” he wrote. “And I thought working on a game for 1.5 years was long. . . . Wow. I wish everyone would take a nice, objective look at the game and not base their criticisms on hype, but on play value and what we’ve worked to achieve: a really fun single-player experience.” Romero tried to dissuade the inevitable comparisons with his former company. “We did not,” he wrote, “develop Daikatana to take on Quake 3.” But the final score was out of his hands.
SIXTEEN
Persistent Worlds
By the end of 2000, Carmack didn’t just have a new game release to celebrate, he had a marriage: his own. A couple of years earlier he had received an e-mail from a young businesswoman and Quake fan in California named Anna Kang. She wanted to start an all-female Quake tournament. Carmack said that’d be fine, but she’d probably get only twenty-five people. She got fifteen hundred. He respected anyone who could prove him wrong. Who was Anna Kang?
She was a strong-willed woman on a lifelong quest for respect. As an Asian American growing up in Los Angeles, Katherine Anna Kang was called a banana, a slur given to Asian American women who were thought to be white on the inside and yellow on the outside. Anna didn’t let the insults sway her beliefs that, as she said, “women don’t need to be subservient to males, that marrying outside their own race shouldn’t be a sin, and that in general, capitalism isn’t evil and socialism isn’t ideal.” One of her greatest role models was the author Ayn Rand; Anna wanted to be a powerful person like Gail Wynand, a character from The Fountainhead. She never felt as fierce as when she played Quake.
After successfully hosting the tournament, she stayed in correspondence with Carmack. He was intriguingly selfless—the way he shared his code and his knowledge. Even though she sometimes teasingly called him Spock, she believed he had a deep and generous soul. Carmack was equally impressed by her, talking at great length about Ayn Rand, philosophy, and games. He liked the way she challenged him.
They began a long-distance romance. Carmack ended up, with his staff’s approval, offering Anna a job in business development so that she could have a reason to move to Dallas. She came, but the days at id wouldn’t last. Her relationship with Carmack would. They wed in Hawaii in front of a small crowd of family and friends. It was one of the only vacations Carmack had taken in his life. And, like the other times, he brought his laptop. There was work to be done.
In Carmack’s opinion, Quake III was—like all his other games—ancient history compared with what he was ready for now. Online games had become successful. The most ambitious existed as persistent worlds, which remained accessible over the Net around the clock for players to visit and explore. Medieval-themed titles like EverQuest and Ultima Online, based on Richard Garriott’s early hits, had sold millions of copies, forging a genre called “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” which could support thousands of international players at a time. Players lived in these digital landscapes, spending dozens of hours per week exploring, battling, and building their game characters; EverQuest was nicknamed Evercrack. Some had even taken to selling coveted virtual objects—weapons and accessories—accumulated in the game for real money on auction sites like eBay.
For Carmack, this phenomenon fulfilled an ideology that harked back to the populist dreams of the Hacker Ethic. “It allows us to have virtual resource,” he said. “Any of these digital resources allows us to create wealth from nothing, to be able to replicate wealth freely. . . . Unlike most fundamental physical objects, with the digital stuff there really is this possibility of wealth replication. The world can be a richer place.”
Upon returning to Dallas, he decided to unveil his new direction to the rest of the team. “We should focus on doing a generalized infrastructure,” he told them, “and doing a game as one element of this generalized infrastructure which can have a lot of the 3-D web environment that people always are thinking about and wishing about. We can do it now.” This was it—the culmination of his work, his engineering, the dreams of science-fiction writers from Aldous Huxley to William Gibson. The Holodeck, Cyberspace, the Metaverse, the Virtual World, it had been called by many names, but the technology was never ready to bring a true glimpse of that place—however primordial—to life. That time, Carmack concluded, had come.
He looked around the conference room and waited for the response. All he got were blank stares. “But we’re a game company,” Adrian said, “we make games.” Carmack sighed. He knew that despite his power and prestige, he couldn’t do this alone. He needed an experimenter who could use his technology to paint the new world. He needed a person who was
so blown away he couldn’t speak, someone who committed every cell of his body to bringing Carmack’s visions to life, someone who understood that this was the coolest fucking thing planet Earth had ever seen! He needed Romero. The meeting was done.
The question of what id would do next remained unresolved. Though no one wanted to do the Metaverse, there was growing feeling in the company that they wanted to do something different. Graeme Devine came up with a proposal for a game called Quest: a multiplayer role-playing game, a far cry from a first-person shooter. Adrian and Kevin were excited about the possibility of a totally new kind of game. They weren’t the only ones. With the community accusing id of going back to the well one too many times, this was a chance, it seemed, for a break. As Graeme proclaimed, “No more rocket launchers!” It was agreed. Quest would be id’s next game.
But before long Carmack grew to hate it. It seemed murky, at best, like a three-year miasma waiting to happen. There was another idea, one that had surfaced again and again over the years: a new Doom. Carmack didn’t exactly love the thought, but he didn’t hate it either. Under id’s supervision, another company, Gray Matter, was already working on a new PC game based on Wolfenstein 3-D called Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and the anticipation among gamers was high. For Doom III, Carmack could incorporate ideas he’d been kicking around for a next-generation graphics engine, something that could dynamically exploit the world of lights and shadows. Second-generation id guys like Tim Willits and Paul Steed, who got into the game business because of the original Doom, frothed at the opportunity to do a new installment. Carmack even kicked the idea around with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who had done the Quake audio, to see if he would be interested in doing the sound for Doom III. Trent said yes. But others were less than intrigued.
Kevin, Graeme, and Adrian, in particular, disliked the idea. “It’s like some old band going back and remaking their first album because they can do a better job now,” Adrian said. “What the hell’s the point in that? It’s, like, make something new with your time! Instead of dedicating two years to making something you’ve already done, why not try and push this genre that we created further?”
To bide time, it was decided that the company would work on an add-on pack for Quake III called Team Arena. This game was a clear reaction to the success of Unreal Tournament and the criticism that id had not provided enough team play in their own title. The work on the mission pack, however, began to idle as people wondered what direction the company was going to take. While the prospect of Quest became all the more grim in Carmack’s mind, he hatched a plan to get his way once and for all.
He walked into Paul’s office one night and said, “Trent Reznor wants to do sounds for Doom.”
“Doom?” Paul said. “We’re not doing Doom, we’re doing Quest.”
“Well, I decided that I want to do Doom. Are you on board?”
“Fuck yeah!” Paul said. Tim agreed.
The next day Carmack walked into Kevin and Adrian’s office and said, “I want to do Doom. Paul wants to do Doom. Tim wants to do Doom. If we don’t do Doom, I’m leaving.” Then he turned and walked out the door.
Kevin and Adrian couldn’t believe it. But what could they do, fire Carmack? What was id without the Whiz Kid? They discussed the possibility of splitting the company in two teams or maybe, as Adrian thought, just throwing in the towel altogether. Carmack had threatened to quit before. And Adrian was beginning to feel like maybe the time had really come, maybe Carmack was through. Later he approached him and asked what was preventing him from just walking out the door once they started working on a new project. Carmack said, “Nothing.” A decision was made. Carmack sat down at his computer the next day and told the world his plan.
“How’s the Hummer?” How’s the Hummer? How’s the Hummer? That question again. At this moment in the summer of 2001, it was coming from a crew-cut teenage boy with a greasy face and a handful of Mexican menus at Temerararia’s Restaurante and Club, the self-proclaimed “finest in Mexican Dining” in Lake Tawakoni, Texas; then again, it was the only Mexican dining here in this tiny strip of country thirty miles east of Dallas. Romero and Stevie Case had become regulars since escaping to the country a few months earlier. Now they were known around town less for their rock-star looks than for their fleet of expensive sports cars. After the hell of Daikatana, it was a welcome change.
The game was brutalized—critically and commercially, selling only 41,000 copies in the United States. With the exception of a few favorable reviews, the fans and media tore the game apart. Entertainment Weekly called it “a disaster of Waterworld-ian proportions,” referring to the epic failure of Kevin Costner’s notorious film. PC Gamer said the game “signals nothing more remarkable than the end of an era in fandom.” Computer Gaming World was more succinct. “Yep,” the headline declared, “it stinks.”
Romero thought anyone who actually played the game would be hard pressed to not have a good time. But most people were hard pressed to play the game much at all. The opening level, with its swarm of mosquitoes and squishy stampede of robotic frogs, struck players as annoying. Many would not get past the pests. Romero was the first to say in interviews how much he enjoyed the game—despite its grueling development. He insisted that it broke even through all its license deals and foreign sales. In addition, Warren Spector’s Deus Ex had proven a great success for Ion Storm, being voted computer game of the year by several publications. In his mind, no matter Daikatana’s sales, Deus Ex had proven Romero’s vision of a gaming empire with multiple titles right.
But Romero’s enthusiasm, for once, couldn’t stave off the inevitable. After Daikatana, he began sketching out ideas for a prototype of a follow-up game. Before long he had to help Tom Hall complete Anachronox after many on the team had departed in frustration. Tom’s sci-fi role-playing game, which followed the trail of a down-and-out space detective who must thwart a mysterious alien oppressor, had become, like Daikatana, truly epic: employing hundreds of creatures, an arsenal of customizable weapons, and numerous games within games. But by early 2001, the work was near completion.
It wasn’t the only thing coming to an end. One day, word spread that Eidos was going to be terminating some Ion Storm employees after Anachronox was complete. Curious, Romero walked over to the CFO’s office to see who was on the list. He picked up the sheet of paper. It listed everyone’s name in the Dallas office, including Tom’s and his own. Warren Spector’s team in Austin, however, would remain. Romero returned to his desk, sat in his chair with the highway behind him, and dialed Stevie. “That’s it,” he told her. “It’s done.” Romero was never one to mull, but this time it did actually stir his feelings. It was fucked up, he thought, that the vision, the dream design, didn’t pan out like he had hoped. It was even . . . sad. But the sadness, as always, wouldn’t stay long. He called Tom. It was like the clocks were rolling back and Romero was back at id, calling Tom at the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
Before long Romero, Tom, and Stevie hatched plans to start a new company. They sketched out ideas for games: maybe one about a ten-year-old kid, not unlike Commander Keen, who has to get through life, do his chores, and get along with his family, maybe an Old West shooter, or a game based on Madonna. They also talked about doing games specifically for mobile platforms—Pocket PCs, cell phones— an estimated $6 billion history by the year 2006. And Romero had an idea for a new game based on the Quake franchise. One afternoon he took the long drive to Mesquite to talk it over with id.
Id was no longer in its notorious black cube. The company had moved offices the year before to afford everyone more space. The new digs, Romero found, were even more plain than the last: just an ordinary office building across from a Hooters and an Olive Garden. Though Romero had seen Carmack around town occasionally, it had been years since he had come to him with a business idea, a creative idea, a game, not since Quake, five years before. Carmack was at his computer, optimizing his new Doom engine, when Romero wa
lked in. The office was bigger, cleaner, but minimalist as ever. Carmack sat before a large monitor angled in the corner. Through the blinds, he could keep a watchful eye on his Ferrari out back.
“Hey,” Romero said.
“Hey,” Carmack said.
Romero told him the reason for his visit and gave a brief pitch: “How would you feel about me licensing the Quake name to develop a game based on the franchise but set in a persistent world?”
Carmack nodded. “Sure, why not.” He had already been kicking around the idea of getting the original team—Romero, Tom, Adrian, and himself—back together to do a version of Commander Keen for the Nintendo Game Boy, the handheld gaming device. Though he and Romero both knew they would probably not be in the same company again, that didn’t mean they had to work apart.
Romero left and was on his way, on to the next thing, the flipped bit, the new vision. It all started with a house. Romero knew that he wanted a company like the early id, something intimate, something communal. And for that he needed just the right environment, like the lake house in Shreveport. Stevie saw something advertised online that she thought could fit the bill. They hopped in the Hummer and drove out past id, past Rockwall, down a long country road with strange country-road establishments: trading post, abandoned school buses, and a rusty flying saucer the size of a bus in the middle of a field. When they asked about the spaceship, locals joked that it had just appeared there a few years ago; now someone was trying to turn it into a hot-dog stand.
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