Masters of Doom (22 page)

This was as much the others’ doing as it was his. The other owners had no interest
in courting the fans or the press. Jay, id’s “biz guy,” did his share, but that came
with the territory. When the press wanted to strut out one of the Doom gods, one of
the guys who Wrote It, Romero fit the bill. And as Carmack, Adrian, and the rest readily
acknowledged, Romero was
good
at it—funny, likable, bouncing off the walls with energy. He had been the company’s
biggest cheerleader from the moment he saw the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement
demo. When he hyped the company, it wasn’t merely the hype of an owner, it was the
hype of id’s biggest fan.

The language of that hype was the language of deathmatch: confident to the point of
egotism, inspired to the point of confrontation. Id was the ruler of the world, and
Romero was quick to make everyone aware of just how great they were and how much greater
they would become. “
The Plan,
” he posted online, “[is] to get the entire world running NeXTSTEP for development,
get everyone connected on the Internet, and own a Testarossa TR512.” Romero lashed
out at the popular and emerging operating systems. “DOS blows. DOS-Extenders create
developer
Hell.
Windows sux.”

By the time he showed up in Austin for the Doom deathmatch in the summer of 1994,
Romero was exuding white-hot game-god heat. With the fans bowing, a reporter descended
on him and asked why he had come to this tournament. Romero puffed out his chest and
said,
“So we can beat everybody!”
Romero and Shawn found their seats while others played. It was silent except for
the sounds of fingers rattling on keys. But all that changed as the id guys began
to play.

Romero hurled a few shotgun blasts into an opponent and yelled, “Eat that, fucker!”
The sheepish guy on the other computer looked up in fear. Shawn knew that look—the
look of gamer who had never heard true, unbridled smack-talk, just like he’d been
the first time he had heard Romero insult him during a game. But now Shawn was a pro
and joined right in. “Suck it down, monkey fuck!” he called, after firing a few blasts
from his BFG. The gamers cowered. They would learn.

Romero savored
the long drive back to Dallas in his Ferrari. Life was good for the twenty-six-year-old.
He had been beaten down by his father and stepfather, picked himself back up, and
now, after all this time, finally arrived. He really was the Ace Programmer, the Future
Rich Person. He had mended his relationship with his parents, who now had a new perspective
on their son’s wayward days at the arcades. He loved his new wife, Beth, and sons,
Michael and Steven, who, though still in California, could proudly call him their
dad. He had become the man he had envisioned all those years before.

One night back at the office, Romero decided to share his feeling of success. He stepped
into Carmack’s office to find his partner, as usual, sitting at his PC with a Diet
Coke. Since Doom’s release, Carmack had immersed himself in side projects: programming
conversions or ports of Doom for other game platforms, including the Atari Jaguar
and the new console from Sega. Id was getting good money for the gigs, $250,000 from
Atari alone. But for Carmack it wasn’t the cash that was intriguing, it was the opportunity
to get back into the trenches.

This
was what he truly loved: the work, the rolling up of the sleeves, the challenging
of his intellect. And he at least somewhat appreciated the rush of fortune and fame;
on a recent trip home he told his father, the renowned Kansas City anchorman, that
he would soon be as famous as he was. Like Romero, Carmack had found peace with his
parents, who now admired and supported his work—his mother played Commander Keen in
her spare time. He had even gone out on a few dates with a woman whose parents owned
a Chinese restaurant he frequented. Still, he was spending the majority of his days
and nights at id. Nothing pleased him quite like sharpening his chops with low-level
programming work. He would need the skills, he knew, when he went off to create his
next big game engine.

But while he had been here, he was beginning to notice, Romero was gone: deathmatching,
doing interviews, corresponding with fans online. Something was changing, slipping
away. And the work, Carmack thought, was beginning to suffer. Doom II was falling
behind schedule. While Romero was out being the company rock star, the levels that
he had promised to create were not getting done. In fact, the company was now relying
on other level designers—Sandy Petersen and a new employee, American McGee—to get
the majority of the levels done. Out of the thirty-two levels of Doom II, Carmack
noted, only six were shaping up to be Romero’s.

Romero had his explanation—the levels he made simply took more time. But Carmack suspected
something else: Romero was losing his focus. In addition to the interviews and the
deathmatching, Romero was now acting as executive producer on an upcoming game by
Raven, the company they knew from Wisconsin. Romero had approached Carmack at one
point with the idea to milk the Doom engine for all it was worth. “Let’s make some
more games using our technology,” he said. “Let’s get some stuff out there because
we can get some money off of this. And Raven’s a good group that would be perfect
for licensing the engine and making a great game that we can publish.” Carmack agreed
but without enthusiasm. How much bigger did they need to get?

For Romero, though, it wasn’t just about getting bigger, it was about fun. He loved
playing games. He lived for playing games. And there was no game that was more fun
than Doom. The deal with Raven would give him more games to play. This night in Carmack’s
office, Romero spelled out his new life code: It was time to enjoy id’s accomplishments.
No crunch mode. No more bloodshot nights. “No more death schedules,” he happily said.

Carmack remained quiet. The cursor on his monitor pulsed. In the past, Romero would
have stayed here by his side, experimenting with the engine on screen, testing bugs
until the sun came up. Tonight, Carmack watched the guy in the “Wrote It” shirt walk
out the door.

ELEVEN

Quakes

Everyone has unfulfilled dreams.
Maybe the dreams are too costly or time-consuming: fly a plane, drive a race car.
Maybe they’re too far-out: fight an alien space war, stalk a vampire. Or maybe they’re
illegal: streak through the suburbs, hunt down the boss with a sawed-off shotgun.
But the dreams are there, nonetheless, animating minds every day. This is why there
is a multibillion-dollar industry that lets people explore these fantasies the best
way technology allows. This is why there are video games.

Of course, video games don’t let people really
live
their dreams. They let gamers live a developer’s
simulation
of a dream. The action is digital. It’s confined to a computer or a television or
a handheld device. Players experience it through their eyes, ears, and fingertips.
But when they’re done careening down the Daytona Speedway or storming an interstellar
military base, they feel as if they’ve really been somewhere, as if they’ve momentarily
transcended their sac of fat and bones, their office politics, their mounting bills.
Games let them escape, learn, recharge. Games are necessary.

This belief has existed since ancient Greece, when Plato said,
“Every man and woman should play
the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties,
the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that
“play . . . is a
significant
function
. . . which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action.
All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,”
Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that
“a society without games
is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton. . . . Games are popular art, collective,
social
reactions
to the main drive or actions of any culture. . . . The games of a people reveal a
great deal about them. . . . [They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland
or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily
lives.”

By 1994 there was no more utopian vision of a game than the Holodeck. And the dream
of this virtual world simulator on
Star Trek
was inching from science fiction to reality. Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel
Snow Crash,
published in 1992, imagined the Metaverse—an alternate reality similar to the “cyberspace”
envisioned in William Gibson’s 1984 novel,
Neuromancer.
The Internet was taking off, capable of connecting humans into such a domain. Arcades
buzzed with virtual reality games—unseemly machines with big, clunky headsets that,
for about five dollars, immersed a player in a first-person polygon world. A new generation
of programmers was devoting their work, their lives, to realizing the Holodeck. As
John Carmack said, “It’s a moral imperative that we must create this.” His contribution
would be Quake.

The development of every id game began with Carmack telling the other guys what his
next graphic engine would be capable of doing. When Carmack first described his vision
of the Quake technology, Romero nearly combusted. They had talked about doing Quake,
after all, for years. The idea came straight out of their old Dungeons and Dragons
games; Quake was the character Carmack had invented who possessed a powerful hammer,
capable of demolishing buildings, as well as a supernatural conjuring object, Hellgate
Cube, floating above his head. Id had first worked on a Quake game back in the early
Commander Keen days but gave up because they felt the technology was not yet powerful
enough to do their idea justice. Now, Carmack said, the time had come. The technology
was ready to make the most convincingly immersive 3-D experience yet, the first fast-action,
first-person game to support groups of players competing together over the Internet.
Not only would Quake be id’s most ambitious game yet but it could be the world’s.

Romero exploded with ideas. “A full 3-D engine!” he said. “Hell, we can have forests
and stuff. . . . The artifact that we talked about in Keen—the hammer of thunderbolts—that’s
going to be your main weapon in Quake. And you’re going to have this transdimensional
artifact, the Hellgate Cube, a cube that orbits your head, and it will just do things!
It’ll have its personality and its own programming to where you feel like it’s a different
entity; it’ll attack people if you’re good to it, if you’re whacking on someone and
taking damage off someone, then the cube feeds off of pain basically in a certain
distance around it. So the more pain you do the happier the cube is, so it will start
doing things for you, it will heal you when you get screwed up or it will teleport
you somewhere else. And if you don’t fight for a long time, it’ll start damaging you
or it would take off and maybe it’ll come back one day.”

Romero was so excited, he just
had
to share the news with all id’s fans. “The next game is going to blow Doom all to
hell,” he typed. “Doom totally sucks in comparison to our next game, Quake: The Fight
for Justice! Quake is going to be a bigger step over Doom than Doom was over Wolf
3-D (ya know—Doom = Pong).” Romero smacked his keyboard and uploaded the message to
the Internet.

But with Doom II still in development, all the Quake talk began striking the other
owners as premature. “Romero’s going out and telling people what we’re doing,” Adrian
lamented to Kevin and Jay, “even though we know that all our stuff is going to change,
so there’s no need to tell the public all these plans. Romero just likes all the attention,
which is why he does it.”

Jay, having been flamed by gamers on numerous occasions after id missed its promised
deadlines for Doom, heard Adrian loud and clear. “Let’s not talk about stuff at this
point that’s still projection,” he told Romero. “Because if it doesn’t come to fruition,
there’s backlash.” Romero agreed but soon caved in once again.
“Quake won’t be just a game,”
he told
Computer Player
magazine, “it will be a movement.” He had to be stopped.

Late one night
in September 1994, Romero sat at his computer, tweaking the final sounds for Doom
II. With the game near completion, he took it upon himself to polish the audio effects
for the final enemy or “boss” of the game, called the Icon of Sin. To win the game,
the player had to shoot the Icon—a hideous beast that spit out cubes that could spawn
into other monsters—between the eyes.

Romero ran around in a special mode that allowed him to, for purposes of testing the
game, pass through walls—effectively going behind the images the player would see
in the game. He had just passed behind a wall in back of the Icon of Sin when he stopped
cold.
Did I just see my own face?
Shrugging it off, he went on with his work, thinking maybe he had been there too
long. But then, as he ran behind the beast again, he thought he saw his face once
more. How weird, he thought, slowly creeping back. And then, to his shock, he saw
it: a digital copy of his head, decapitated and bloody, writhing on a stick. “No fucking
way!” he said.

Romero raced his character back around and fired a shot at the Icon of Sin, then followed
the trajectory of the rocket: it sailed through the beast, through a back wall, into
the hidden chamber, and smack into Romero’s head—which would twitch in agony. Romero
got the joke. The player thought he was winning the game by shooting the beast, but
in fact he was shooting Romero. Romero
was
the Icon of Sin.

The next morning, word spread around the office that Romero had found the Easter egg
and left one of his own. Adrian and Kevin booted up the final scene of the game and
began firing off the rockets at the beast. All the while, they heard demonic sounds—like
a backward track of a Judas Priest song—coming from the hidden room. The words were
indistinguishable but, when reversed, perfectly clear: “To win the game,” the voice
bellowed, “you must kill me, John Romero.” With another blast of the rocket, the Icon
of Sin was dead.

On October 10, 1994,
Doom II hit the Limelight. Limelight, a onetime church in New York City that had been
converted into a gothic nightclub, was the site of the “Doomsday” press party for
Doom II. TSI Communications, the high-powered public relations company hired by GTI
to break id Software into the mainstream, used a sizable chunk of the game’s $2 million
marketing budget to convert the club into a hellish mansion of demons and gore. A
holograph machine near the front door projected beasts from the game. The techno-rock
soundtrack from the game pumped through the halls. A giant deathmatch arena constructed
in the center of the church pulsed with Doom players who had been flown in for the
event.

Reporters representing every paper from
The Wall Street Journal
to
The Village Voice
mingled through the crowd with awe and confusion. There was a growing fascination
with computer culture and the Internet, buoyed by that month’s release of Netscape
Navigator: the new Web browser from the creators of Mosaic. Though many had heard
about the underground success of Doom, they had never witnessed the strange new world
firsthand. Even Audrey Mann, the publicist in charge of the event for TSI, was taken
aback. Her company had long represented two of the heaviest hitters in the high-tech
industry, IBM and Sony, but they had never faced the unique challenges that came with
the id Software account. Launching Doom II brought a whole new vernacular to the PR
industry, words like
deathmatch
and
frag
and
mods.
They debated the appropriateness of terms like
kick ass
in a press release. “How many ways can we say ‘mutilate’?” they joked. But when they
saw the response at the Limelight, they realized they had underestimated their client.
“We didn’t think it was worth a story,” Audrey said. “We thought we were just launching
a
game.
”

Doom II, it was clear that night, would become not just a game but, in fact, a movement.
Reporters who had previously ignored Jay’s pitches about the company now besieged
any id gamer they could corner. Protesters muscled in too. With violent films like
Natural Born Killers
and
Pulp Fiction
on the radar, Doom was perceived as yet another threat to the youth of America. During
Jay’s speech to the crowd, a man stood up in the rafters and screamed, “You should
be ashamed for making such violent games that children can play!” Everyone fell silent,
looking to Jay for a response.

“Sir,” Jay said calmly, “I have two children, I would never do anything that would
hurt them. To some extent we’re creating the Three Stooges of interactive media with
guns. If you look at this from the top down, this is more humorous than it is damaging.”
But the protester wouldn’t relent, screaming about violence and Satan until finally
Shawn Green, who was sitting next to Jay onstage, rose to the microphone and yelled,
“Suck it down, dude!” The crowd laughed. Everyone, it seemed, was on id’s side.

Six hundred thousand copies of Doom II were sold to retail stores for the initial
release, guaranteeing that it would be among the bestselling games in history. The
inventory was supposed to last a quarter. It lasted one month. After the Doomsday
event, the mainstream media snowballed around the game. Anyone who’d missed the so-called
Doom cult the first time around jumped on board, while the ones who had been hip the
whole time trumpeted their pioneer status.

Journalists from all walks cooed over the game’s immersion, the marketing scheme,
the violence, the great American success story.
“It’s as close to virtual reality
as you’re going to get,” gushed the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“Virtual Mayhem and Real Profits,”
headlined
The New York Times. The Economist
published an essay titled
“Doomonomics,”
which academically explored how “the drippingly gory computer game took its creators
from obscurity to riches. . . . [It’s a tale that] holds a lesson of striking relevance
to tomorrow’s information economy.”
The Red Herring
marveled that id had
“an entire file
filled with letters from VCs and private investors who are just dying to sink cash
into [the company]”—yet the company was remaining staunchly and profitably independent.

Of course the millions of players who were
living
the game could give two flying fireballs about any of those things. What was really
selling the game, they knew, was deathmatch. And the person who wanted to own deathmatch
was DWANGO Bob.

DWANGO Bob,
a.k.a. Bob Huntley, was a thirty-four-year-old who looked and behaved like a Texas
version of the Woodstock emcee, Wavy Gravy. He’d gotten into the high-tech industry
by producing interactive kiosks for gas stations throughout Houston. After some years,
though, he began to burn out on the fumes. He was looking for something else, and
he found it in Doom.

During the early part of 1994, the DWANGO guys were falling behind on work, staying
at the office until 2:00 a.m., lying to their wives so they could play the game. Bob’s
partner, Kee Kimbrell, had become yet another blissful victim of Doom addiction. Bob
pulled Kee aside one night and said, “If every machine is not clear of Doom, you’re
fired.” Kee didn’t have the nerve; instead of deleting the game, he renamed the file—so
Bob wouldn’t find it—and kept on playing. When Bob found out the truth, something
clicked.
If these guys are this passionate about this game, maybe there’s something to it.
Bob sat down for one round, and his life changed forever.

The thrill, he found, was in the head-to-head competition, playing against real live
people over a local area computer network. With some research online, he realized
he was hardly alone. Doom deathmatch was taking over lives: fans hijacked their office
networks to play all weekend, threw their kids out of their basements to wire together
their own arenas, and put off so many trips to the bathroom that at least one player
(who had been consuming Ding Dong cupcakes during a marathon match) explosively defecated
in his pants midgame.