Masters of Doom (16 page)

“Well,” Carmack said, “I can make it dynamic.”

“Cool, then let’s have strobes! You know, you’re fucking running through a room and—
bzzzz! bzzzz! bzzzz!
—the lights flash off!”

Romero raced back to his office. He booted up the map editor—the programming template
he and Tom would use to create the Doom worlds. Using it, again, was very much like
designing architecture for a house. On screen Romero would look at something resembling
a flat overhead blueprint. By clicking his mouse and dragging down a line, he could
draw a series of walls. With another click he could switch the point of view to look
at his creation from
within
the space. Adrian and Kevin, meanwhile, would provide the texture images, essentially
the wallpaper, which a level designer could use to decorate a room’s walls.

With those map-editing tools available, Romero was eager to use Carmack’s innovations
to bring Doom to realization. Carmack was doing amazing work; Romero knew this on
two counts—as a programmer who appreciated Carmack’s ingenuity and, just as important,
as a gamer who had never played through such worlds on a PC, or any other platform
for that matter. He played around with rooms that flashed strobe light, with walls
that soared and receded at different heights. Every decision he made was based on
how he could best show off Carmack’s technology. Carmack couldn’t have been happier;
what more could someone want, after all, than to be both appreciated
and
celebrated? Romero was just as energized; with Carmack’s innovations, he too could
reach new heights.

Tom, by contrast, felt himself sinking. Since their initial meeting about the game,
he had been on his own writing up a treatment, known in the game industry as a design
document, for Doom, fleshing out the characters, motivations, story. The game would
begin, he wrote, with the player assigned to a military base conducting experiments
on a distant moon. The experiments go awry, however, when the scientists accidentally
open a portal to hell, releasing an onslaught of beasts—much like what happened with
Romero in their Dungeons and Dragons game. The action would start with the player
engaged in a game of cards with some other soldiers. Suddenly a burst of light would
flash and the demons would come, ripping the player’s best friend to shreds. Tom wanted
to create an immediate sense of terror as the player watched his pal die a terrible,
instant death. He named the doomed character in the game Buddy—the same name as that
of the Dungeons and Dragons character he’d played.

But his work fell flat among his own friends. The first blow came when Carmack casually
announced that he was no longer interested in pursuing a seamless world for Doom.
The game could return to a more traditional level design. “But I’ve spent the last
two months writing a design document based
entirely
on that seamless world
you
wanted!” Tom exclaimed. Carmack’s remark meant that Tom had to revise everything
he’d done.

“This Doom Bible is not helping us get the game done,” Carmack said. Id had never
written down anything in the past, why start now? Doom didn’t need a back story. It
was a game about fight or flight. The player just needed to be scared all the time;
he didn’t need to know why. Carmack told Tom to drop the Bible and start playing around
with the technology, like Romero was doing. “I’m still working on this technology,”
he explained, “but please
experiment.
Figure out what can be done with this.” He suggested Tom go to the library and check
out some books about military bases to get some ideas.

Romero agreed. Though he liked much of what Tom had put into the Doom Bible, a character-driven
story was clearly not going in the same direction as Carmack’s technology. There was
no time for guys to sit around and play cards in Doom. Not only was the game going
to be brutal and fast, like Wolfenstein, but it was going to be even
more
brutal and fast.

Tom gave up the story once and for all. But another story was falling into place for
id. In the company’s brief history, a pattern was emerging that emulated Carmack’s
programming ideology: innovate, optimize, then jettison anything that gets in the
way. It happened in their games: how Keen was killed for Wolfenstein, how floors and
ceilings were sacrificed for speed. And it happened in their lives: Al Vekovius, Scott
Miller, and even Mitzi the cat had all been abruptly deleted from the program. It
was impossible to know who or what could be next.

Romero marched into the kitchen
at id, waving a crudely drawn caricature of Burger Bill, the renowned gamer rumored
to keep hamburgers for days in his desk. Tom, Kevin, and Adrian followed, cackling.
Romero stapled Bill’s picture to the chair, then grabbed a steak knife from the drawer.
It was time for revenge.

Bill had been contracted by id to convert or port Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo.
But with the deadline approaching, he still hadn’t delivered an iota. He finally admitted
that there was a problem: he had made the mistake of signing id’s contract while employed
by the game publisher Interplay. His contract with Interplay stipulated that any work
an employee did was property of the company; the Super Nintendo port, therefore, was
now owned by Interplay.

The id guys flipped. “See,” Romero said, “this is just the kind of bullshit you get
when you rely on other people.” Tom took out a pencil and sketched a hideous caricature
of Bill with burger meat dripping from his greasy mouth. Romero swiped it from his
hands and said it was time for Bill to pay the price. In the kitchen, they took turns
stabbing the picture, yelling and laughing and egging each other on. They began attacking
the chair, knifing it, stomping it, trashing it. Days later, when Bill came to visit,
the ruins were still on the floor. He took one look at the knife with his name scrawled
on the blade and asked meekly, “Um, what’s this?” Then they fired him. Carmack would
do the port himself.

Such shenanigans were becoming par for the course. The guys had long engaged in a
kind of competitive, creative hazing ritual known as the Rip-A-Thon. They would take
turns humiliating each other in some artistic way. Adrian programmed a screen opening
so that when Romero turned on his computer he’d see a doctored picture of himself
engaged in compromising sexual acts. After Tom had some glossy headshots made of himself
following Wolfenstein’s success, Romero and Adrian went to town defacing them; the
most elaborate example involved a bratwurst, clay testicles, and a can of whipped
cream.

Id’s frat house even had its own house mother in the form of their office manager,
Donna Jackson. Donna had a syrupy southern accent and big teased hair, and was partial
to bright pink business suits and matching rouge. She quickly took to the role of
company matriarch. She made sure everyone was fed and happy and healthy, offering
to get more junk food or soda whenever someone was down. When she arrived, her hobby
was gambling in Shreveport casinos; she soon became an expert sharpshooter in id’s
games. She called the id guys, still in their early twenties, “my boys.” The boys
called her Miss Donna or, sometimes, the id mom.

But since Miss Donna was a mom for hire, no one was in fear of being reprimanded for
their outbursts. Office destruction became sport. The office was strewn with broken
keyboards, smashed monitors, broken disks. Romero might just walk up to Kevin and
joke, “Hey, Kevin, that garbage can is calling you a sad motherfucker.” Kevin would
reply dryly, “It is?” before pummeling the can into the ground.

More darkness was coming from the art room. Doom was precisely the kind of game Adrian
had always wanted to do: something that could allow him to exorcise his most nightmarish
visions. Along with the others, he and Kevin dreamed up the most hideous creatures
they could imagine: the Imp, a red-eyed Bigfoot-like beast with brown fur covering
his muscles and metal spikes protruding from his shoulders and arms; the Demon, a
snorting pink bull with bloodstained teeth and horns; and, meanest of all, the Cyber
Demon, with a gun for an arm and a ripped-open torso.

This time around, the monsters would look even more lifelike, thanks to a new animation
technique. For Wolfenstein, Adrian had had to draw every frame, showing each character
in several walking and running positions. Now they decided to try a mixed media approach.
They would sculpt the characters in clay, then shoot them in different positions on
video. The video frames would then be scanned into the computer, colorized, and programmed
as moving digital characters using a program Carmack wrote called the
Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop
.
“The overall effect is distorted,”
Kevin said, “but that’s Doom.”

Adrian and Kevin had so much fun they even began scanning themselves into the game.
One day Kevin rolled up his sleeve and stood behind the video camera with his arm
extended in front of the lens, taking turns firing toy weapons: a plastic shotgun
and pistol from Toys “R” Us; a chain saw—like the one used by the hero of the movie
Evil Dead II
—borrowed from a woman Tom had been dating. The video images would then be placed
in the lower center of the game’s frame, looking like the player was sighting down
the length of his forearm or, in actuality, Kevin’s. Inspired, Adrian scanned a pair
of his snakeskin boots, which he used to create a serpentlike texture for one level
of the game. When Kevin came to work with a bloody wound on his knee, they scanned
that in too, to use as a wall texture. In the strange emerging world of Doom, anything
could go.

By the new year, there was enough coming together that Tom typed up a press release.
“Dallas, Texas, January 1, 1993—Heralding another technical revolution in PC programming,”
he wrote, “id Software’s Doom promises to push back the boundaries of what was thought
possible on a computer. . . . In Doom, you play one of four off-duty soldiers suddenly
thrown into the middle of an interdimensional war! Stationed at a scientific research
facility, your days are filled with tedium and paperwork. Today is a bit different.
Wave after wave of demonic creatures are spreading through the base, killing or possessing
everyone in sight. As you stand knee-deep in the dead, your duty seems clear—you must
eradicate the enemy and find out where they’re coming from. When you find out the
truth, your sense of reality may be shattered!”

He touted the game’s new, improved technologies: texture-mapped worlds, nonorthogonal
walls, and diminished lighting. For the hell of it, they threw in a teaser about multiplayer
gaming, something they had yet to implement. “Up to four players can play over a local
network,” Tom wrote, “or two players can play by modem or serial link. . . . We fully
expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the
world.”

With the bar set, Tom, Romero, Adrian, Carmack, and Kevin had arrived at a genuine
look and feel for the game. The player would progress while staring down the barrel
of a shotgun jutting out in the lower center part of the screen. The rooms would unfold
dark, foreboding, mainly in grays, blacks, and browns, with an occasional royal blue
floor. As originally intended, the walls were anything but ninety degrees; they were
octagonal, tiered, with steps leading from one room to the next. Carmack had also
devised a way to create windows within walls, so a player could look from one room
into another, though not know how to get inside. There were actual light sources in
the games—strips of fluorescence on the floor or above. But the realism was punctuated
by demonic monsters. In one section a player would progress through a locker room,
only to find a pink demon floating in the showers.

By the spring, several of these levels were collected into an early demonstration,
or alpha, of the game, which was distributed to friends, testers, and select members
of the press.
Computer Gaming World
published a glowing preview:
“We don’t know what nasty sludge
is seeping into the Texas water table,” it read, “but whatever it is has given these
boys some strange visions, and what’s worse, the programming sorcery to carry it out.
Doom
is the name of their next creation, and unbelievable graphics technology is their
game.”

Despite the enthusiasm, the Two Johns were still not happy with Tom’s work. Tom had
taken Carmack’s advice to study military architecture too much to heart. The levels
he created had the banality of a real-life military base. He stuck stubbornly close
to the scenario of his Doom Bible, creating a room, even, that showed a group of soldiers
sitting around a table playing cards. Many of the rooms looked like actual offices:
with gray walls, brown-tiled floors, and even office chairs and file cabinets. Tom
was trying to appease Carmack at the expense of the game, Romero thought. So he decided
to show how the design should be done, even if that meant Carmack would have to make
his code faster.

Romero retired to his office, cranked up Dokken, and got to work. Hours into the night,
he pointed and clicked, dragged and dropped, creating lines on his map editor, switching
back and forth into the first-person point of view. He knew what he was going for:
to break out of the concrete box–like military bunkers and into something else, something
big, expansive, twisting, weird, and abstract. After a series of late nights, the
world emerged just as Romero wanted it. And when he pulled the others into his office,
they stepped inside.

It began in a room with a low gray ceiling but angled walls. Walking to the front
right, they came to a wall with slats in it, open spaces that revealed an outdoor
vista, a sky, but no apparent way to get out. Two large lights stripped the opening
of a hallway. It seemed like the way to go. As one walked down the hall, the rooms
opened up to a plank leading outdoors. There was a gray sky overhead. Mountains off
in the distance. But as one moved, the path only led back inside, now into a room
with higher walls than the first. Lights flashed from overhead as a flurry of Former
Humans—zombie soldiers possessed by demons—unleashed rounds of fire, emerging from
the shadows with bloodstained chests. When Romero was through, everyone agreed. Tom’s
banal levels were out. Romero’s were in. This was the design.
This
was Doom.