Masters of Doom (10 page)

Al Vekovius still had no idea that they were moonlighting on the Keen games, let alone
doing it on the company computers. Gamer’s Edge was doing quite well, and their latest
games, Catacomb II and Shadow Knights, were drawing raves. Softdisk had about three
thousand subscribers who had paid $69.95 per year to receive Gamer’s Edge every month.
They knew he was counting on them and weren’t sure how he’d react to their mass departure.

Carmack and Romero made it clear they didn’t care. This was their break, after all.
Tom, by contrast, was nervous about the move. He was worried about getting sued by
Softdisk, ruining their chances not only for making it on their own but for enjoying
the fruits of Keen’s success. Romero scoffed at his worries. “Dude, what’s Al going
to do if he sues you? You don’t have anything for him to get. All you have is a piece-of-shit
couch,” he said, pointing to the broken sofa in the living room. “I mean, what the
fuck? What are you worried about losing?”

Jay also expressed concern, urging the guys to handle this delicately with their boss.
“Don’t drop a bomb on him,” he implored.

“Don’t worry,” Romero said with his characteristic optimism. “Everything’s going to
be fine.”

However, Al’s suspicions began to mount when an employee mentioned something about
the Gamer’s Edge guys moonlighting on their own games. Al confronted Carmack, who
he knew had a tough, if not impossible, time telling lies. It was like feeding questions
into a computer or adding numbers on a calculator—the answer always came out right.
“I admit it,” Carmack said. “We’ve been using your computers. We’ve been writing our
own games on your time.” Later he and Romero broke the news: They were going to leave,
and they were taking Adrian Carmack, their art intern, with them.

Al felt like he’d walked into his house to find that someone had broken his windows
and stolen his television. But he didn’t let himself get too far down. Immediately
he tried to turn the situation around. “Look,” he said, “let’s try to salvage something
out of this. Let’s go into business together! Let’s form a new company! I’ll support
you. And you guys write whatever games you want and I’ll handle selling them. We’ll
split everything fifty-fifty. And I won’t take any legal action against you.”

The offer caught them by surprise. They had assumed Big Al was going to sue them,
not finance their business. Now there was a new golden opportunity. All they wanted
to do was have their own business, and they had no interest in dealing with the hassles
of taxes and distribution. If Al was going to handle that stuff, what the hell? They
agreed.

But when Al returned to the Softdisk office, he walked into a mutiny. The entire company
had gathered to demand an explanation. “Carmack and Romero came back from lunch and
bragged about some big special deal they were getting,” one of the employees said.
“What’s the deal? Here these jokers had cheated the company, used the company computers,
and now you’re giving them half of a new company? Why are you rewarding them?”

“Because it’s good business!” Al said, “because these guys are good! They’re going
to make money for the company. We’ll all be successful.”

No one was buying it. Either the gamers go, they said, or all thirty of them were
going to quit. Al sighed deeply and walked back to the Gamer’s Edge office. “You guys
went and told everyone about this and created a nightmare,” he said. “Do you realize
what you have done?”

“Well,” Carmack replied, “we wanted to be truthful.”

“Yeah, but I could have positioned it a lot better,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose
my staff. The deal’s off.”

After several weeks
of negotiations and threatened lawsuits, it was agreed that they would contract with
Softdisk to write one new game for Gamer’s Edge every two months. It was demoralizing,
not only for the Softdisk staff but for Al. He saw that, despite their talent, the
Gamer’s Edge guys really were just boys living by their own rules, and cheating when
necessary. Worst of all, they had no sense of guilt. For them it was something to
laugh about. They never considered the people who worked at Softdisk. Before Carmack
left, Al pulled him aside and asked, “Did you ever think about the people who have
worked so hard and supported you?”

Carmack listened, but Al’s words didn’t compute. He was looking into the face of the
past, of opportunities unrealized, of all the old authority figures who had ever stood
in his way. As always, he was blunt to a fault. “I don’t care about them,” Al would
recall Carmack replying. “I’ll go back to making pizzas before I stay at this crummy
place.”

On February 1, 1991, id Software was born.

FIVE

More Fun Than Real Life

Romero wanted
to summon the demons. Or at least, he said, figure out how. It was four in the morning
at the lake house. Empty soda cans littered the floor. Mitzi dozed on top of Carmack’s
computer monitor. The smell of pepperoni lingered in the air. The guys sat around
the large makeshift table in the living room, several hours into yet another round
of Dungeons and Dragons. Since leaving Softdisk, they had more time to devote to their
recreational D&D campaign. It was truly evolving into an alternate world, which, like
all fiction, deeply reflected their own. It wasn’t just a game, it was an extension
of their imaginations, hopes, dreams. It mattered.

The deepness of their Dungeons and Dragons adventure was due in no small part to Carmack.
Whereas most Dungeon Masters would create small episodes that lasted for a few hours
of play, Carmack’s world was persistent; players returned to it every time they regrouped.
The game they played now was the same one he had been writing since he was a kid in
Kansas City. It was as if a musician had been composing an opera for several years.
The guys would pass Carmack’s room on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the
night and see him hunched over pages of notes, sketching out the details of their
game.

Carmack’s D&D world was a personal masterwork of forests and magic, time tunnels and
monsters. He had a fifty-page glossary of characters and items such as “Quake,” a
fighter with a magical “Hellgate Cube” floating above its head, the “Chalice of Insanity
. . . a chalice from which you get Jellybeans of Insanity which, if ingested, will
cause you to go nuts and fight everyone around you” and the Mighty Daikatana sword.
He relished the feeling of creating a place others could explore. The way D&D was
played, he, as Dungeon Master, would invent and describe the set and setting. Then
it was up to the players to dictate how they wanted to proceed.

In their game, the guys created an imaginary group of adventurers called Popular Demand:
Romero named his character Armand Hammer, a fighter who liked to dabble with magic;
Tom was a fighter named Buddy; Jay, a thief-acrobat named Rif; Adrian, a massive fighter
named Stonebreaker. With each adventure, Popular Demand gained power and prestige.
They were a living metaphor of id. As Carmack had said, the game had the power to
bring out someone’s true personality. And on this fateful night, Romero wanted to
make a deal with the devil.

In Carmack’s game, he had designated two different dimensions of existence: a material
plane (which Popular Demand inhabited) and a plane of demons. After months traversing
the material plane, however, Romero was getting bored. To spice things up, he wanted
to retrieve the dangerous and powerful Demonicron, a magic tome that gave a knowledgeable
user the power to summon the demons to the material plane. Carmack consulted his D&D
rule book. If used thoughtfully, he told them, the Demonicron meant enormous strength
to the group, guaranteeing them all the riches of the world. With it, Romero thought,
he might get his hands on an ultimate weapon like the Daikatana. But there were risks.
If the Demonicron fell into the hands of a demon, it would cause the world to be overrun
with evil. Even though Carmack had made up the game, he respected its limitations,
its rules, its
science.
If a player did something that would destroy the world, then the world would die.

Romero and the rest discussed the options. Though Adrian and Tom were hesitant, Romero’s
excitement and enthusiasm won them over once again. “Come on,” he said. “We can’t
lose!” They decided to seize the Demonicron from its palace of supernatural beasts.
Carmack rolled the die to determine the outcome of their battles: Popular Demand was
victorious. The Demonicron was theirs. What they would do with it, they didn’t know.
For the time being, there were others matters at hand. In the earthly dimension, it
was getting late and there were other games to attend to: the ones by id Software.

When the guys
christened their company, they shortened the Ideas from the Deep initialism and simply
called themselves id, for “in demand.” They also didn’t mind that, as Tom pointed
out, id had another meaning: “the part of the brain that behaves by the pleasure principle.”
In early 1991 their pleasurable games were indeed in demand. Keen was number one on
the shareware charts, emerging as the first and only game to break the coveted top
ten. The first Keen trilogy was now bringing in fifteen to twenty thousand dollars
per month. It wasn’t just pizza money anymore, it was computer money. They used it
to outfit the lake house with a fleet of high-end 386 PCs. Carmack was only twenty
years old, Romero, twenty-three, and they were in business.

Despite the success and the fact that Romero, Carmack, and Adrian had decided to leave
Softdisk immediately that February, Tom and Jay chose to stay behind. In Tom’s case,
it was a temporary solution. Always conscientious, he felt bad about leaving the company
high and dry and was more comfortable waiting until they found a replacement for him.
Jay felt an obligation to fulfill his duty at Softdisk, which included the completion
of an important Apple II product. But he would stay at least a friendly part of the
id group, D&D campaign included, for some time.

Heading into the spring of 1991, id rode on the high of its newfound freedom. Though
under contractual obligation to Softdisk, they now could work on the games completely
in the comfort of their lake house. Carmack immersed himself in programming what he
wanted to be the next generation of his graphics engine. The first engine had enabled
the primary breakthrough of side-scrolling action; now he wanted to create more elaborate
and immersive effects. He methodically researched while the rest utilized the existing
technology to create their first freelance games for Softdisk.

The freedom from Softdisk and the success of Keen were inspiring new kinds of games.
Rescue Rover was about a young boy who had to rescue his dog, Rover, after the dog
had been kidnapped by aliens. A clever maze game, it challenged the player to maneuver
a series of mirrors to reflect deadly rays being cast by alien robots so the boy could
find and save his dog. It combined what was emerging as something of an id formula:
humor plus violence, the more over the top, the better. The title screen for Rescue
Rover showed the slaphappy pooch with a wagging tail surrounded by sinister alien
weapons aimed at his skull.

While Rover took one step in the dark humor direction, their next game, which they
began working on in March, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, broke more sinister
ground. For this one Romero wanted to recast his most beloved character in a more
gothic situation. Using the Keen graphics engine, they set about putting together
a more realistic looking Dave. This time they wanted him to pull up to a wretched
Shreveport-style house in a pickup truck, decked out in a hunting cap, jeans, and
brandishing a shotgun, which he would use to rid the house of zombies and ghouls.

Of all the id guys, Adrian was particularly juiced over the grisly theme. It was a
chance for him to exorcise all the gore he had seen when he worked at the hospital.
Though he didn’t tell the group, he still hated Commander Keen. If they were going
to make a kids’ game, he thought, they should be doing something gross and funny in
the spirit of a popular TV series at the time,
Ren and Stimpy.
With Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Adrian finally found an outlet. While
Tom and Romero worked at their machines, Adrian, unbeknownst to them, began creating
what he called “death animations”: three or four tiles that would play in rapid sequence
after Dave died. In most games, characters would simply vanish or, as Tom had instructed,
Keen floated up the screen to heaven, presumably. Adrian had other ideas.

Late one night Romero hit a button and watched Adrian’s animation play: Dave took
a zombie fist to the face, which smashed out his eyes in a bloody pulp. Romero almost
hyperventilated with laughter. “Blood!” He cackled. “In a game! How fucking awesome
is that?”

Violent fantasy, of course, had an ancient history
. Readers had been fascinated by the gore of
Beowulf
for over a thousand years (“The demon clutched a sleeping thane in his swift assault,
tore him in pieces, bit through the bones, gulped the blood, and gobbled the flesh”).
Kids played cops and robbers, brandishing their guns and flying backward in imagined
bursts of blood. As the id guys came of age, in the 1980s, the action movie genre—with
films like
Rambo, The Terminator,
and
Lethal Weapon
—conquered the box office, just as horror movies like
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and
Friday the 13th
had done in the recent past.

Violence in games was nothing new either—even the very first computer game, Spacewar,
was about destruction—but
graphic
violence certainly was. In the past graphical violence was always limited, partly
because of the inability of technology to render detail and, mainly, because game
developers avoided it. Back in 1976, an arcade game called Death Race had caused a
ruckus. The object was to drive a car over a bunch of crudely drawn stick figure blips.
When the player hit the screaming figures, they were replaced by crucifixes. The cabinet
was painted with skulls and grim reapers. It was a far cry from the big hit of the
day, Pong. It was also the
first video game to be banned
.

Adrian’s macabre work was too good to pass up. Fueled by Romero’s enthusiasm, he added
more and more gruesome details, including chunks of bloody flesh that would fly off
a zombie’s body when it was shot. When the guys at Softdisk saw the gore, however,
they didn’t get the joke and insisted that id redraw the death animations—sans blood.
“Maybe one day,” Adrian said, “we’ll be able to put in as much blood as we want.”

While the other guys
were pushing their envelopes, Carmack was pushing his own, specifically, into 3-D.
Because he was a craftsman engineer, 3-D was the obvious next step for him. Three-dimensional
graphics were the holy grail for many programmers as well. To split hairs, the games
weren’t really three-dimensional in the 3-D movie sense of the term; the term meant
that graphics had a real sense of solid dimensions. Often these games were created
from the first-person point of view. The whole idea was to make the player feel as
if he were
inside
the game.

Though Carmack was not aware of it, he was joining a pursuit that had begun thousands
of years before. The dream of a realistic, immersive, interactive experience had consumed
humankind for millennia. Some believed it to be a
primal desire
. Dating from 15,000 b.c.e.,
cave paintings in Lascaux
, in the south of France, were considered to be among the first “immersive environments,”
with images that would give the inhabitant the feeling of entering another world.

In 1932, Aldous Huxley described a futuristic kind of movie experience called feelies
in his novel
Brave New World.
Combining three-dimensional imagery as well as olfactory and tactile effects, the
feelies, he wrote, were
“dazzling and incomparably more solid
looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than
reality.” Ray Bradbury imagined a similar experience in his 1950 short story “The
Veldt,” which presented, essentially, a view of the first virtual reality room. A
family has a special room that can project any scene they imagine on the surrounding
walls. Problems arise when an African vision becomes entirely too real.

Soon technologists began efforts to realize these immersive environments. In 1955,
the Hollywood cinematographer
Morton Heilig
described his work on “the Cinema of the future,” which, he wrote, “will far surpass
the Feelies of Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World.
” With a novelty machine called the Sensorama, which combined sights, sounds, and
smells of urban landscapes, Heilig’s aim was to create an illusion considerably more
immersive than those of the tacky 3-D movies of the time. The goal, he said, was a
situation “so life-like that it gives the spectator the sensation of being
physically
in the scene.”

Convincing immersion was not just a matter of multimedia preening, it was a matter
of interactivity—an essential ingredient and allure of computer games. Interactive
immersive environments were the pet project of a University of Wisconsin computer
artist named Myron Krueger. Throughout the 1970s, Krueger created Veldt-like experiences,
sometimes achieved by projecting the images of audience members—even those in remote
locations—on giant landscape screens.
“The environments,” he wrote, “suggest a new art medium
based on a commitment to real-time interaction between men and machines. . . . This
context is an artificial reality within which the artist has complete control of the
laws of cause and effect. . . . Response is the medium!” One such project, called
MAZE, let audience members try to navigate through an image of a maze that was projected
in a room.

By the 1980s interactive immersions had taken on a new name: virtual reality. The
author William Gibson coined the term
cyberspace
in his influential 1984 novel,
Neuromancer,
to describe an interactive online world that existed between computer networks. In
the late 1980s,
Scott Fisher
, an engineer at the NASA–Ames Research Center, combined a head-mounted display and
data-transmitting hand gloves in what became the archetype of the virtual reality
interface. Through these tools, users could enter a virtual world in which they could
manipulate objects and proceed in a first-person three-dimensional point of view.

The end effect, Fisher wrote in 1989, is a
“kind of electronic persona
. For interactive theater or interactive fantasy applications, these styles might
range from fantasy figures to inanimate objects, or different figures to different
people. Eventually, telecommunication networks may develop that will be configured
with virtual environment servers for users to dial into remotely in order to interact
with each other’s virtual proxies. . . . The possibilities of virtual realities, it
appears, are as limitless as the possibilities of reality. They can provide a human
interface that disappears—as a doorway to other worlds.”