Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  The house amazed them. It was down a rocky road behind a pond with a twenty-foot fountain, a log cabin, a lagoon pool, waterfalls, a hot tub, and a peacock farm. It was perfect. They bought it. Romero renamed the peacocks after video games—Pong, Pooyan, and Phoenix—and transformed the home into the ultimate kid’s paradise: milk crates overflowing with games, crystal bowls of multicolored M&M’s, video game music blasting from the speakers. It was the kind of house he had dreamed of when he was a boy. Now he would do what his own father never could—sit down and play games with his sons when they came to town. He could even play with his biological dad, Alfonso Antonio Romero, for whom, after he fell on hard times, Romero had bought a house not far away in town.

  On the drive back from the Mexican restaurant, Romero and Stevie discussed the finishing touches for the estate: maybe a wooden sign on the gravel road with one board pointing to “The Cabin of Death” and the other to “Haunted Manor.” Or, even better, a stone arrow leading to the woods with the words “For People We Don’t Know or Trust.” They considered constructing a stone arch over the driveway with the words “Castle Wolfenstein.”

  But these were all just grand designs, and their new company, Monkeystone Games, was going to be everything but. This time it would be something small, something personal, something fun. “It will be just good friends,” Romero said, arriving home, “good friends making games.”

  For Carmack, the days of making games seemed like they might be numbered after all. The day after his contentious meeting with Kevin and Adrian, he uploaded his news. “It wasn’t planned to announce this soon, but here it is,” he wrote in his .plan. “We are working on a new Doom game, focusing on the single-player game experience, and using brand new technology in almost every aspect of it. That is all we are prepared to say about the game for quite some time, so don’t push for interviews. We will talk about it when things are actually built, to avoid giving misleading comments. [The decision] went smoother than expected, but the other shoe dropped yesterday. Kevin and Adrian fired Paul Steed in retaliation, over my opposition.”

  Not long after the Doom III announcement hit, the rumor in Silicon Alamo started to spread: this would be Carmack’s last game. And there seemed to be increasing evidence—tension between the owners and, more important, Carmack’s new hobby, building rocket ships. Real rocket ships.

  Carmack had rediscovered rocketry sometime during Quake III development. An interviewer had asked him about his childhood, and Carmack had related some stories about rockets, bombs, juvenile home, and being, as he now looked back, “an amoral little jerk.” After the conversation, Carmack idly surfed the Net to see what had become of the model rocketry world. What he wandered into was the increasingly competitive and sophisticated world of hackers, engineers, and fry cooks who were trying to build giant high-powered rockets they could ride into outer space. Carmack was intrigued.

  He ordered a few model rockets and shot them off at the end of his subdivision, moving up in power, week after week, until he got into the more impressive equipment. He began reading more about the amateur rocketry scene: the people who felt that NASA was nothing more than a trucking company, the ones who were competing for a $10 million “X Prize” to launch a ship into outer space with three people onboard. But what really appealed to him was the engineering.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Despite the opportunities to innovate on Doom III, Carmack felt, as he said, “near the peak of the existing bodies of knowledge in graphics.” Once he had made the leap into arbitrary 3-D with Quake, there wasn’t much further to go beyond optimizations. It was like that time he had come to Softdisk and found Romero, someone who knew more than he did, someone who could help him learn more. Now Carmack saw a similar opportunity in the world of rockets. Rockets weren’t just arbitrary things based on a market or a sanctioning body of rules or regulations. Here the goalposts were set by the way nature worked. It wasn’t him against the computer, it was him against gravity.

  Carmack bought thousands of dollars’ worth of rocket science research books and got to work. He placed an ad on the local amateur rocketry website soliciting members who would be interested in building a manned rocket ship or, as he called it, a “vertical dragster.” The group—a handful of low-key engineers—dubbed themselves Armadillo Aerospace. Bob Norwood volunteered his Ferarri shop for a work space. Before long they were meeting there every week.

  While working on Doom III, Carmack began spending more and more time immersed in rockets. His house was covered in rocket parts. His Ferrari trunk overflowed with motors. He was like the real-life manifestation of id’s old game character Billy Blaze—the boy who built a rocket ship in his backyard. Carmack, the programmer who had once spent a hundred hours per week hunched over his computer, was now spending nearly half his time with grease and soldering irons. He would test-fire his high-powered rockets—complete with a bucket seat for someone his size—in abandoned parking lots. Sometimes, he would wait for events where he could launch his big ships with a few hundred other serious enthusiasts. Sometimes, he’d just grab a few small model rockets and head out to a field like when he was a kid—for fun.

  On a gray afternoon in November 2001, Carmack loaded his car with a Day-Glo orange model rocket and headed east out of Mesquite until the buildings gave way to open pastures of grazing cows. He pulled in at Samuel Field, a browned patch of land that was used for radio-controlled planes and amateur rockets. A few picnic tables sat near a blue Porta Potti. An American flag fluttered on a rusty pole. A green garbage can spilled with debris; it looked like a can from Doom. “There are people who argue that you can just simulate reality,” he said, “but I think there’s value in coming out here and dealing with the wind.”

  Carmack set up his launch rod, a red-and-black frame that splayed on the ground with a long rod pointing toward the clouds. He laid out his rockets and assessed the wind. One of the first times he’d launched out here, the strong wind had lifted the ship until it disappeared. Carmack had since been working on a solution: a hot-wired global position system controlled by a radio modem and laptop. It would be, by all definitions, something of a hack—a piece of creative engineering that he’d invented to solve a problem. For now, he would be relying on an old-fashioned radio beacon that would beep a little distress signal when the rocket touched ground.

  Carmack set up the first rocket, fitting it down on the metal pole, adjusting it for the wind. He clipped the wires to the bottom with rusty little clips. Stepping back, he pressed a small plastic button and—swooooooosh—the rocket spiraled into the air with a trail of smoke. When it reached about three hundred feet, it arced down and the chamber popped open, so the clear plastic tube became a helicopter blade. Carmack jogged stiffly through the field to retrieve it.

  “Okay,” he said, “now let’s try this one.” He twisted open the base of the orange rocket. He’d made this rocket himself, starting with the main tube, scaling the fins in the slots, fixing the right epoxy, painting the body Day-Glo orange. He put in a G-80 engine, sixteen times more powerful than that of the last rocket. Carmack opened the cone and pushed in the purple-and-white parachute and the audio beacon, mashing the stuff down with a three-foot dowel.

  These rocket motors were kids’ stuff, he said. His high-powered rockets, by contrast, required high-grade hydrogen peroxide—something difficult to acquire. To get the dangerous stuff, an inspector has to make sure a rocketeer has enough room to house it. Also, it cost about twelve hundred bucks for a drum. Rather than deal with these hassles, Carmack and his rocket group started making moonshine rocket fuel, buying 70 percent grade hydrogen peroxide and distilling it to 90 percent. It was a dangerous brew; a mistake could shatter nearby glass or cause explosions. Carmack soon nixed the plan.

  “We’ll need to step a little further back for this one,” he said, once the orange rocket was ready. Carmack rolled out the wires, attached them to the base, and hit the button. This time there was a boomswooshboom at blas
toff, a puff of light and smoke. But the rocket was too low. It was heading off into the horizon over the trees. “Oh boy,” he said, “hope we can find it.” Carmack jogged off toward the woods. Down the path were broken propellers, loose bits of plastic hanging from trees like the membranes of robot intestines. Carmack stopped cold, hearing the shrill squeal of the beacon. The rocket was safe.

  Though the cold wind was picking up, Carmack was not about to head home. He was just starting to have fun. He was talking a lot. Smiling. Ready for more. It was time to try a new engine, something with a little more oomph: an engine that was twice as powerful as what was meant for this size ship. He twisted off the old engine, dumped it out, and reached for the new one. He adjusted the rod, aimed straight for the clouds.

  Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would allow at least one thought on his own. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

  Without warning he pressed the launch button, unleashing a thick black trail of smoke with a bang. High above the cows, the rocket soared.

  EPILOGUE

  It took a decade after the Two Johns met for their industry to come of age. Video game sales hit a record $10.8 billion in the United States, once again surpassing box-office receipts. With the emerging multibillion-dollar market for games on cell phones, games would outsell music too.

  Gamers were also growing up. Far from being pimply boys, their average age was twenty-eight. Their diversity reflected the new range of game themes: from baseball to bridge, ancient Rome to future Japan, Mickey Mouse to David Bowie. An estimated 60 percent of all Americans—145 million people, including 62 million women and the U.S. president (who admitted to daily rounds of computer solitaire)—played. In countries such as Japan, Germany, and South Korea, games were already national pastimes.

  As games seized the mainstream, some of the tremors over first-person shooters began to subside. Senator Lieberman praised the game companies’ efforts in informing parents about mature content. And while there were continued efforts by politicians to legislate violent games, the courts sent a message by throwing out the multimillion-dollar lawsuits that alleged the teenage shooters at Columbine and Paducah were influenced by Doom. “This was a tragic situation,” a U.S. district judge declared, “but tragedies such as this simply defy rational explanation and the courts should not pretend otherwise.”

  The time also proved the end of an era, particularly for the extended family of Silicon Alamo. Dallas, once home to at least a half dozen game companies, saw some of its most ambitious start-ups—including Romero’s Ion Storm and Mike Wilson’s Gathering of Developers—close their doors. A golden age seemed to have passed, when rebellious outsiders could independently rule a multibillion-dollar industry. But the spirit remained. Even the largest companies now emulated the innovations of id (such as online play, giving away demos, and encouraging game modification), but they called it viral marketing. And with new platforms like mobile phones emerging, maybe the next great gamers were waiting to rise from the swamps. The world would always be ready for the next great games.

  As for id, the company’s decision to revisit its former hits met with mixed results. The id-developed mission pack Quake III Team Arena was both a critical and a commercial disappointment, viewed by many as a lackluster attempt to answer the success of Unreal Tournament. A Game Boy Advance version of Commander Keen, produced but not developed by id, met a similar reception. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, however, proved to be both a critical and a commercial smash even though the title bore little resemblance to its predecessor (aside from a few turkey dinners on the tables).

  This period saw John Carmack elevated to legendary status. His innovations in graphics programming were among the reasons why, as MIT’s Technology Review magazine put it, “video games drive the evolution of computing.” And his philanthropy—including the source code he continued to give away for free online—was surpassed by none. At an annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose, a twenty-nine-year-old Carmack became the third and youngest person ever inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame—the Oscars of the gaming business. After a videotaped congratulations from Bill Gates (who joked, “I just want you to know that I can write slicker and tighter code than John”), Carmack took the stage and endured a standing ovation from peers—comparable to that received by the industry’s first inductee, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the very Mario game Carmack had replicated on the PC that fateful night at Softdisk.

  The question on many gamers’ minds was whether Carmack would be done with games after Doom III. Carmack himself wasn’t sure. Between game and engine license sales, he felt he had more than enough money and, in fact, was giving frequently to charities. Plus, after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he had achieved an almost Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. “These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,” he said. “I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.”

  He immersed himself more deeply in a new source of learning: his rockets. On Saturdays he met with his team of rocketeers, including Ferrari whiz Bob Norwood, to work on what he called his vertical-landing hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles. Carmack fashioned a Lunar Lander–style craft complete with a bucket seat in the middle for him or his wife, Anna. Next up: maybe a shot at the $10 million X Prize, which required the winner to launch three people into orbit and back two times within fourteen days. Those who knew Carmack expected him to have a decent shot.

  John Romero, meanwhile, was happy to set his sights closer to home. Living with Stevie Case in their sprawling house in the Dallas countryside, he decided to get back, as he said, to his roots: designing and programming games. After some brief attempts at a traditional publishing deal, Romero, Stevie, and Tom Hall—despite good reviews of Anachronox—decided to forgo the route of ambitious computer games for the uncharted territory of games for pocket computers, cell phones, and other handheld devices. As the first well-known developer to embrace this new area of gaming, Romero became a cheerleader for mobile games much the way he once was for PC games.

  True to their original vision of a small team turning out small games with short development cycles, Monkeystone completed their first title, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, in a matter of months. Working with three other developers late into the night at Romero’s country house, Tom and Romero designed and programmed the entire game—just like the old days. The game cast players as Guy Carrington, an interstellar courier whose job was “to deliver the universe’s most important parcels!” One reviewer called Hyperspace Delivery Boy one of the few pocket PC games worth buying. Next up: maybe a new version of Commander Keen, thanks to a license purchased from id. Tom was happy to have his boy, Billy Blaze, back home.

  For Romero, the fun at Monkeystone wasn’t just a new beginning, it was a break from the past. Shortly after his thirty-fourth birthday, he followed Tom’s lead and cut off the notorious hair he’d been growing since 1991, leaving him with a close-cropped coif that was as easy to manage as his new company. Never one to let things go to waste, Romero wrapped the long black mane in a package and donated it to Locks of Love, a nonprofit group that supplies hairpieces for sick and needy children. His trademark hair wasn’t the only thing to go. Now that he was living amid the trucks and dirt roads of the country, Romero found little
use for his once prized possession: the Ferrari that Doom bought.

  He lovingly photographed the car from a variety of angles in his front yard and uploaded the pictures with a description to eBay, the popular online auction depot, with the headline “Brutal Luxury.” His opening price of $65,000 was well worth it, he explained, considering the more than $100,000 of modifications he’d installed, from the turbo system to the custom engine. “The sound that comes out of this car is completely amazing and destructive,” he wrote. “Going down the street, you will sound like an Indy car when you hit the gas. . . . All you can do is laugh, it’s so awesome.” “It was,” he promised, “the most awesome Ferrari Testarossa you’ll ever see.” The buyer who drove it away for $82,500 agreed.

  Another Ferrari would bring Romero and Carmack back together. It happened outside a Quake III tournament in Mesquite. In previous years, the Two Johns all but ignored each other here. But this time was different. The games had been played. The scores had been settled. And a friend was in need. Carmack was in the parking lot having trouble starting his engine. Hearing a rumble, he looked up into the headlights of a fly yellow Hummer. Romero stepped from the car, jumper cables at the ready. There was work to be done.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like a lot of people in their thirties, I grew up in the same nascent gamer culture as the Two Johns. My favorite birthday present was a paper bag filled with tokens from Wizards, my neighborhood arcade. Wizards was the place: dark and windowless like a casino, lined with all the latest games flashing and beeping along the walls. I dumped a sizable portion of my lawn mowing money there. I owned the high score on Crazy Climber. And, after a challenging night with a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine, I triumphantly vomited on a game called Omega Race. I was only a kid, but I sure felt free.