Masters of Doom (18 page)

Instead, Jay—determined to make id’s business style as innovative as its games—focused
on setting up the company’s distribution and marketing. He established a toll-free
number to field orders and set up a deal with a fulfillment house. Since they were
self-publishing Doom, they would be getting twice the earnings they had on Wolfenstein.
Games distributed through the regular retail channels would bleed cash to middlemen.
Every time someone bought a game at CompUSA, the retailer would take money, then pay
the distributor, the distributor would take money, then pay the publisher, the publisher
would take money, then pay the developer. By going shareware, id was cutting them
all out, taking eighty-five cents for every dollar sold; the game would be listed
at around forty dollars. Jay figured Doom, like Wolfenstein, would rely on word of
mouth. While big guns like Nintendo were spending millions on marketing and advertising,
id would take out only one small ad in a gaming magazine for Doom. The goal, then,
was to get the Doom shareware into as many hands as possible.

At the time, retail stores were selling shareware disks and being forced, by the authors,
to cough up a high royalty. Id, which had made some of the most successful shareware
games yet, had a different approach: give the Doom shareware to retailers for free,
no fee, no royalty, and let them keep all the profits from the sale. The more shareware
was distributed, the more potential customers id would be able to collect.

“We don’t care if you make money off this shareware demo,” Jay told the retailers.
“Move it! Move it in mass quantities!” The retailers couldn’t believe their ears—no
one had ever told them
not
to pay royalties. But Jay was insistent. Take Doom for nothing, keep the profit!
My goal is distribution. Doom is going to be Wolfenstein on steroids, and I want it
far and wide! I want you to stack Doom deep! In fact, I want you to do advertising
for it too, because you’re going to make money off it. So take this money that you
might have given me in royalties and use it to advertise the fact that you’re selling
Doom.” Jay got plenty of takers.

The buzz around Wolfenstein and Doom brought back old characters. Al Vekovius contacted
the boys to see if they wanted to rerelease some of their old Softdisk games. The
company, he told them, was having trouble recovering since their departure. They turned
him down. More notably, the game turned out Romero’s stepfather, John Schuneman. On
a trip to Dallas, Schuneman sat across the table from Romero at a dinner at Outback
Steakhouse and, for the first time, opened his heart. “You know, I’ve been a bear
sometimes,” he said, “but I’m a man, and I remember telling you if you were going
to make your mark you had to do business applications. Well, I want you to know that
I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. I think this is great. And I want you to
know I was wrong.”

Romero accepted the apology. Times were moving on, and there was no reason to hold
a grudge. Doom was about to be finished. The best was yet to come.

It was Halloween 1993,
and Romero was inside Doom. He stood in a small room with gray walls stained in brown
sludge, staring down the barrel of his pistol. An ominous, deep synthesizer chord
buzzed, giving way to the eerie plucking of a guitar and, finally, a death-rattle
drumbeat. A shotgun lay on the floor. Romero ran forward, grabbing it and storming
through a door that slid open to the ceiling. The snarls resounded from everywhere—hideous
snorts and belches and groans. Suddenly there were fireballs, big, red, explosive
bursts hurling in flames through the air. He had to act fast.

Romero spun once, unleashing his shotgun blast into the chest of a Former Human, who
went flying back in a spray of blood. A fireball sailed into Romero’s side, bleeding
his vision red until he could hear himself wheezing and panting. Another blast, Romero
spun. But he couldn’t see anything. A blast again, more wheezing. A shadowy beast
the color of television static hurled forward. Romero fired once to no avail. Then
he saw the barrels, two green heaps of waste. The beast was heading right for them.
At the perfect moment, Romero fired into the barrel, leaving the monster in a bloody
pile of gibs.

A door opened—the one in Romero’s office. Romero snuck a peek over his shoulder and
kept playing as Carmack walked in. Carmack liked what he saw on screen. Romero had
a real sense of grandeur, he thought, the way his levels were so diverse, so varied
in elevation, so
deep.
He made his technology sing.

“What’s up?” Romero asked.

Carmack told him that he had enough stuff done to be able to get to the networking
part of Doom. Oh yeah, Romero thought,
the networking.
They had mentioned this in their press release in January, the fact that Doom would
have a multiplayer component, which would let players compete with and against each
other. But after all the other work, the networking had become almost an afterthought.

Carmack told Romero about what he thought were somewhat modest technical challenges.
“So what I have to do is write the setup stuff to figure out how to communicate over
the IPX properly,” he said, “and getting the serial stuff going may be a little bit
of work . . .” Romero nodded as Carmack spoke. How incredible networking would be,
he mused. There had been other games that let players compete head-to-head: side-by-side
fighting games like Street Fighter II and this new game called Mortal Kombat were
already the rage. And there were seemingly ancient games like the multiplayer colonization
game M.U.L.E., or Multiple Use Labor Element, and the early
Star Trek–
inspired modem-to-modem game, NetTrek. But there had been nothing like a multiplayer
Doom—first-person, fast-action, immersive, bloody. Romero’s heart raced.

He nailed the key on his keyboard and ran through the level on his screen, E1M7, or,
Episode 1, Map 7. He came to an area down one hall that had a long window opening
up to an outside platform oozing with green plasma. Romero imagined two players shooting
rockets at each other, their missiles sailing across the screen. Oh my God, he thought,
no one has ever seen that in a game. Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately
these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer. Now gamers could play against
spontaneous human beings—opponents who could think and strategize and scream.
We can kill each other!

“If we can get this done,” Romero said, “this is going to be the fucking coolest game
that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”

Carmack couldn’t have said it better himself.

Within two weeks,
Carmack had two computers networked to each other in his office. One represented his
first-person point of view, the other represented the other player’s. On cue, he hit
the button on his keyboard; his character moved forward on the computer in front of
him. He pictured the little packets of data traveling across the network line flowing
into the computer across his office, translating instantly into the space marines
on screen. The computers were talking to each other. And Carmack knew the result.
He glanced over at the computer to the right and saw his character, now represented
in third-person, running across that screen. He had made a consensual virtual world,
and it was alive.

Romero flipped when he came into the office. “Oh my God,” he screamed, “that is sooooo
awesome!” He dashed back into his office, and Carmack started the game again, this
time with Romero connected from his own machine. Romero watched as the space marine
Carmack controlled ran down a hall. Romero chased after him, unleashing a shot from
his gun—
boom!
—sending Carmack flying back through the air in a spray of blood and screams. “Suck
it down!” Romero cried.

Soon everyone in the company was taking turns in multiplayer mode, chasing each other,
hurling off explosions. The office filled with screams, not just digital screams,
but real screams, human screams. It was an arena, and they were all in it, competing,
running, escaping, killing. They began playing one-on-one matches as well, keeping
score manually to see who racked up the most kills. And that was not all, Romero realized.
Since they could have four people in a game at one time, why not have them playing
cooperatively, moving through a level of monsters as a team? Carmack said it was possible.
Romero couldn’t contain himself. “Don’t tell me you can have a four-people co-op game
in here mowing through the monsters?” He gasped. “That is the shit!”

Romero paced. This was big—bigger than the Dangerous Dave moment, bigger than anything
he’d seen. He made his way down the hall, the yelps and screams coming from inside
the rooms. There was Adrian, twitching and convulsing as he played against Kevin and
Carmack and Jay. What
was
this? Romero thought. It was like a match, like a boxing match, but the object wasn’t
just to knock the other guy out or some wimpy shit like that. This was, like, kill
the guy! This was a match to the death. He stopped cold. “This,” he said, “is deathmatch.”

By the first week
of December 1993, the work on Doom was hurtling to a close. People had stopped going
home, choosing instead to sleep on the couch, the floor, under desks, in chairs. Dave
Taylor, hired to help with supplementary programming, had developed quite a reputation
for passing out on the floor. But it wasn’t happening just because he was tired, he
said. Doom was having some kind of greater effect on him, some
biological
effect. The longer he played, the faster he cruised through the streaming corridors,
the more his head would spin. After a few minutes, he would have to lay down on the
floor to steady himself. Sometimes, he’d just end up falling asleep. It got to be
such a frequent display that, late one night, the rest of the guys took a roll of
masking tape and taped a body outline around him.

The pressure mounted as they felt the game approach completion. Random gamers began
calling the office and leaving messages like “Is it done yet?” or “Hurry up, motherfuckers!”
Others spewed resentment at id for not meeting its originally promised release date
of the third quarter of 1993.
“You started posting hype
about Doom several months ago,” one gamer posted on an online newsgroup. “You’ve
been encouraging [us] to go ballistic over how great Doom is going to be. And you’ve
told a
lot
of people that the third quarter of 93 was the date. Now all that anticipation is
going to backlash in a massive spurt of flames and ranting against id.”

Some posted more forgiving tales of anticipatory dreams based on early screenshots
released of Doom.
“I was firing the shotgun
at a pixelated (yes, my dream was pixelated) demon,” wrote one gamer, “when my alarm
clock went off (well, it turned the radio on:) . . . Time to schedule an appointment
with a local shrink. I can’t imagine what shape I’ll be in once the game is actually
released:).”

Another wrote a poem called
“The Night Before Doom”
: “ ’Twas the night before
Doom
, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with
a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that
Doom,
/ soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision
he printed in an editorial called
“A Parent’s Nightmare
Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums,
they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.”

On Friday, December 10, it was finally Doom time. After working for thirty straight
hours testing the game for bugs, id was ready to upload the game to the Internet.
A sympathetic computer administrator at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, named
David Datta volunteered to let id upload the Doom shareware to a file transfer site
he maintained on the school’s network. It was a good deal. The university, like most,
had high-speed bandwidth for the time, which meant it could accommodate more users.
The plan was that id would upload the shareware on cue, then the gamers could download
it and transfer it around the world. So much for high-priced distribution. The gamers
would do all the work for id themselves. Jay had announced the day before in the chat
rooms that Doom would be available at the stroke of midnight on December 10.

As the midnight hour approached, the id guys gathered around Jay’s computer. The office
was littered with the debris of Doom’s creation. Adrian and Kevin’s clay models sat
on the shelves. Heaps of broken chairs and keyboards were strewn on the floor. A busted
garbage can crumpled in the corner. The taped outline of Dave Taylor’s body collected
dust bunnies on the floor. Jay had the Doom file ready to go.

Online, the Wisconsin file transfer protocol (FTP) site teemed with gamers. Though
there was no way for them to communicate through a discussion board or chat room,
they had ingeniously found another way to talk. The system had a means that allowed
a person to create and name a file that would join another list of files on screen.
Someone got the bright idea to talk simply by creating a file and assigning a name
like “WHEN IS DOOM” or “WE ARE WAITING.” Hundreds more waited in a special channel
of Internet Relay Chat (through which people could have real-time discussions in text),
where Jay was dropping clues about Doom’s coming arrival.

Finally, the clock struck midnight. They would have to wait no more. Jay hit the button
to upload it to the world. Everyone in the office cheered. But Jay was silent. He
sat wrinkling his forehead and tapping his keyboard. There was a problem. The University
of Wisconsin FTP site could accommodate only 125 people at any given moment. Apparently,
125 gamers were waiting online. Id couldn’t get on.

Jay phoned David Datta in Wisconsin and hatched a plan. David would extend the number
of possible users so Jay could upload Doom to the machine. And he would stay on the
phone with Jay to tell him the precise moment, so Jay could be sure to get on. Everyone
waited. They could hear the guy typing on the other end of the phone. Then he cleared
his throat. Jay’s finger hovered over the upload key. “Okay,” David said, “now!” But
Jay still couldn’t get on.