Masters of Doom (19 page)

Jay booted up the chat channel, which was filled with gamers. “Look,” he typed to
them, “I’m sorry, but we have to kick you all off of the Wisconsin site because I
can’t get this uploaded. And your choices are either I kick you all off and I get
this done. Or it doesn’t get uploaded at all.” They scurried off. Jay hit the button
one last time and connected. Doom was finally on its way out.

Elated but exhausted, the team said their good-byes and went home for their first
good night’s sleep in months. Only Jay stayed behind to watch the game finish uploading.
After a half hour, the final bit of Doom data made its way to Wisconsin. The moment
it did, ten thousand gamers swamped the site. The weight of their requests was too
much. The University of Wisconsin’s computer network buckled. David Datta’s computer
crashed.

“Oh my God,” he stammered to Jay over the phone. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Neither had the world.

TEN

The Doom Generation

Like a lot of parents
in 1993,
Bill Andersen knew exactly what his nine-year-old son wanted for Christmas: Mortal
Kombat. The home version of the violent arcade fighting game was the hottest thing
going, eclipsing even Street Fighter II with over 6.5 million sales. Andersen lamented
about the game to his boss, an ambitious Democratic senator from Connecticut named
Joseph Lieberman. Senator Lieberman listened intently to his chief of staff. He wanted
to see the game for himself.

Mortal Kombat defied his imagination. Secret moves let players rip the spines from
their opponents in gushes of blood on screen. More distressing to the senator, gamers
seemed to
prefer
the brutality; the more graphically gory version of Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis
home video game system was outselling a blood-free version for the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System three to one. The success of the Sega version had dealt a staggering
blow to Nintendo, which had demanded that the developer of the game, Acclaim, remove
the controversial “death moves” to adhere to the company’s family values.
By choosing to release the blood-and-guts version
, Sega became the new must-have system, racking up nearly 15 million units in sales.
Nintendo’s squeaky clean perch, for the first time in the industry’s history, was
gone.

And this wasn’t the only such game. Senator Lieberman came across Night Trap, a big-budget
title for the new Sega system that included live-action footage of scantily clad sorority
girls—including one portrayed by Dana Plato, former child star on the TV show
Diff’rent Strokes
—being attacked by vampires. Violent films like
Reservoir Dogs
and
Terminator 2
had conquered Hollywood; now an edgier, more aggressive video game age seemed to
be dawning too. On December 1, 1993, Senator Lieberman called a press conference to
blow the whistle.

Beside him sat Democratic senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, chairperson of the Subcommittee
on Juvenile Justice and chair of the Subcommittee on Government Regulation and Information.
Senator Lieberman was also joined
by a somber Captain Kangaroo, the children’s television host Bob Keeshan. Kohl said,
“The days of Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars” had been replaced by “video games complete
with screams of pain [that] are enough to give adults nightmares.” Keeshan warned
of “the lessons learned by a child as an active participant in violence-oriented video
games . . . lessons the thinking parent would shun like a plague. Indeed it could
become a plague upon their house.” He urged game developers to “understand their role
in a nurturing society.”

Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. “After watching these violent video games,”
he said, “I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry
to produce them. I wish we could ban them.”

This wasn’t the first time that America’s political and moral establishment had tried
to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious
leaders assailed pulp novels as
“Satan’s efficient agents
to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” In the twenties, motion pictures
were viewed as the new corrupter of children, inspiring sensational media-effects
research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from
the waist up on television;
MAD
magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, was brought before Congress. In the seventies,
Dungeons and Dragons, with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanism,
particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels
of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and
Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide.
In the nineties, video games were the new rock ’n’ roll—dangerous and uncontrolled.

This sentiment was a long time coming. The roots were in the thirties, when pinball
arcades were thought to be havens for hoodlums and gamblers.
New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia
placed a ban on pinball that lasted until the mid-seventies. By then the controversial
arcade game Death Race, which featured players driving over pedestrianlike stick figures,
had made headlines. As the golden age of arcade and home video games exploded into
a $6 billion industry
in the early eighties, concerns over the potential ill effects on children exploded.

In 1982 the national Parent Teacher Association issued a statement decrying game arcades.
“The PTA is concerned
over the increasing number of video game sites which may have an adverse effect on
many of the young people who frequent such establishments. . . . Initial studies have
shown that game sites are often in close proximity to schools. In many cases there
is not adequate control of access by school-age children during school hours, which
compounds the problem of school absenteeism and truancy. Where little or no supervision
exists, drug-selling, drug use, drinking, gambling, increased gang activities and
other such behaviors may be seen.”

Cities including Mesquite, Texas; Bradley, Illinois; and Snellville, Georgia, began
to restrict or ban access to arcades.
“Children are putting their book fees
, lunch money, and all the quarters they can get their hands on into these machines,”
said Bradley’s mayor in 1982 after he saw “hundreds of teenagers smoking marijuana
in a video arcade in a nearby town.” Though the Supreme Court overturned the bans
following the Mesquite incident, countries including Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,
and Indonesia not only banned video games but
shut down arcades
.

The media began to stoke the flames with headlines like
“Video Games—Fun or Serious Threat?”
in
U.S. News & World Report
and
“Video Game Fever—Peril or Payoff for the Computer Generation”
in
Children’s Health.
“The video game craze,”
said the newscaster Robert MacNeil on PBS, “is it warping young minds or educating
them for the future?”

Scientists, academics, and various pundits struggled to come up with the answers.
C. Everett Koop
, the U.S. surgeon general, fired a sensational salvo when he stated that video games
were causing “aberrations in childhood behavior. Children are into the games body
and soul—everything is zapping the enemy. Children get to the point where they see
another child being molested by a third child, they just sit back.”

Newsweek
reported on others following suit:
“Dr. Nicholas Pott
, who treats two such patients at a clinic at North General–Joint Disease Hospital
in New York, says disturbed youths may dodge reality and human contacts as well as
meteorites. The clinic director, Dr. Hal Fishkin, objects to the repeated kill-or-be-killed
theme. ‘We don’t need more fodder for the violence mill,’ he says. Others worry about
subliminal messages that the medium may transmit. ‘The more you can titillate your
emotions, the less tolerant and patient you are going to be for things that don’t
deliver as fast,’ says Fred Williams, professor of communications at the University
of Southern California.”

Despite the assertions, not all academics found substantiation for the damaging effects
of video games.
“There is no evidence
to indicate that the games encourage social isolation, anger, antisocial behavior,
and compulsivity,” concluded the
Journal of Psychology.
Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, praised
video games’ ability to provide encouragement to emotionally disturbed or retarded
children.
“A lot of kids who are good
at this are not good at other things,” she said. “This mastery experience is very
important.” But when the video game industry bloated and crashed in 1983, so did the
rhetoric—for the time being.

Ten years later, on the morning of Thursday, December 9, 1993, Senator Lieberman reignited
the cause with the first federal hearings on violent video games.
The hearings were filled with impassioned statements
by expert witnesses who decried the new scourge. Dr. Eugene Provenzo, a professor
who authored a book called
Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo,
proclaimed that “video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist.” Robert
Chase, president of the National Education Association, suggested that games incite
real-life violence. “Because they are active rather than passive, [video games] can
do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence,” he said. “They actually
encourage violence as the resolution of first resort by rewarding participants for
killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable.”

Later, Howard Lincoln, the executive vice president of Nintendo of America, and William
White, vice president of marketing and communications for Sega of America, took their
brawl over Mortal Kombat to the stage. Lincoln portrayed Nintendo as the martyred
defender of family values. White argued that the industry was simply growing up, with
more and more games being played by people over the age of eighteen. Lincoln bristled
at that notion. “I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the video
game business has been transformed today from children to adults,” he said to the
panel. “It hasn’t been.”

After much debate and media fanfare, the hearings ended at 1:52 p.m. on December 9.
Senator Lieberman declared that the video game industry had one year to develop some
kind of voluntary ratings system or the government would step in with its own council.
He would call a follow-up meeting in February to determine how the publishers and
developers were coming along. The gamers had been warned. It was time to change their
ways.

The next day, id Software released Doom.

Two hundred feet
under Waxahachie, Texas, inside the U.S. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super
Collider Laboratory, Bob Mustaine flew back in his chair. The government man was terrified.
He wasn’t the only one. Across the room, his colleagues also twitched and screamed.
This had become a daily occurrence at lunchtime. In all their days studying particle
physics at the country’s most ambitious research facility, they had never seen anything
quite as shocking as the fireballs erupting on their computer screens. Nothing—not
even the multibillion-dollar subatomic shower of colliding protons—blew them away
like Doom.

Several states away, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a crowd of students convulsed in the
computer lab of Taylor University. Brian Eiserloh, a gifted math student who worked
as the lab supervisor, had once again unlocked the doors earlier that night to let
the mob of gamers in. The lab, like most around the country, sported the fastest computers
available. As a result, he and the other computer enthusiasts had been skipping sleep,
class, and food to sit in front of their PCs playing the game. As programmers, they
were awed by the graphics, the speed, the three-dimensional views. And as regular
dudes, they had never chased each other down with shotguns before. “Oh my God!” Brian
exclaimed, checking the clock. “It’s seven a.m. again!” That semester, Brian, previously
an A student, would get all F’s.

A few thousand miles away, Nine Inch Nails’ rock star Trent Reznor sauntered off a
concert stage as the crowd roared. Security guards rushed to his side. Screaming groupies
pushed backstage. Trent nodded and waved, heading back through the crowd. He didn’t
have time for this. There were more important things waiting. He stepped onto his
tour bus, forsaking the drugs, the beer, the women, for the computer awaiting him.
It was time again for Doom.

Scenes like these had spread around the world since the game crashed the University
of Wisconsin’s network on December 10. Without an ad campaign, without marketing or
advance hype from the mainstream media, Doom became an overnight phenomenon in an
online domain that, as fate would have it, was simultaneously beginning to explode.

Though a global network of computers had been around
since the 1970s—when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or DARPA, linked networks of computers (the DARPAnet and, later, the Internet) together
around the world—it was just starting to seep into the mainstream. This evolution
began in 1989, when a computer researcher in Europe named Tim Berners-Lee wrote a
program that linked information on the Internet into what was called the World Wide
Web. Four years later, in 1993, two University of Illinois hackers named Marc Andreessen
and Eric Bina created and released Mosaic: a free “browser” program that transformed
the Web’s unseemly data into more easily digestible, magazinelike pages of graphics
and text. With this new user friendliness online, commercial services such as CompuServe
and America Online helped court the masses. Among the earliest pioneers, not surprisingly,
were gamers—the same ones who had been on online discussion groups and bulletin board
systems like Software Creations for years. And all of them, it seemed, wanted to play
Doom.

Schools, corporations, and government facilities blessed with fast computers, high-speed
modems and, most important, people familiar enough to make them work were overtaken
by the game—sometimes literally. Over the first weekend of Doom’s release, computer
networks slowed to a crawl from all the people playing and downloading the game. Eager
gamers flooded America Online.
“It was a mob scene
the night Doom came out,” said Debbie Rogers, forum leader of AOL’s game section.
“If we weren’t on the other side of a phone line, there would have been bodily harm.”

Hours after the game was released, Carnegie-Mellon’s computer systems administrator
posted a notice online saying,
“Since today’s release of Doom
, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt. . .
. Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do
not
play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom in network-mode causes serious degradation
of performance for the player’s network and during this time of finals, network use
is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing
the game in network-mode. Again, please do
not
play Doom in network-mode.”