Masters of Doom (24 page)

Still, when Carmack asked him to come work for id, Abrash said he’d have to give it
some thought, since it meant uprooting his family. Days later, he got an e-mail from
his boss, Bill Gates. Gates had caught wind of the id deal and wanted to talk. Abrash
was shocked; a meeting with Gates was like a meeting with the Pope. Gates was aware
of id. His programmers had been talking with the company about creating a version
of the game for the upcoming Windows platform. But id was just a small company down
in Texas, he told Abrash. Microsoft had plenty to offer, he said, and regaled Abrash
with the interesting research the company was planning to pursue in graphics. Gates
also mentioned how a Microsoft employee had gone to work for IBM, only to return eight
months later. “You might not like it down there at id,” he concluded.

Abrash chose Carmack over Gates. The potential at id was too great, he thought; he
wanted to have a front-row seat to see that breakthrough virtual world, that networked
3-D world, evolve. Furthermore, he was touched by the subtext of Carmack’s invitation.
Carmack seemed lonely, Abrash thought, like he didn’t have anyone who appreciated
the beauty of his ideas.

Carmack soon expanded
his own crew even more. He found an ambitious level designer who was especially eager
to put his dreams into action. American McGee connected with Carmack not through games
but through Carmack’s other fetish: automobiles. Carmack met him one day in his apartment
complex while American was under the hood of a car. Skeletal, chain-smoking, with
grease-speckled glasses and a badly grown beard, American was a tightly wound auto
mechanic. He spoke in fast bursts, like a race car driver jumping the gates, rushing
forth, then going back and blasting out again.

American’s blood was a strange fuel. Just twenty-one years old, he would often joke
to his friends that he wanted to write an autobiography of dysfunction ironically
titled “Growing Up American.” Born in Dallas, American never knew his father and was
raised by his eccentric mother, a housepainter. He was a highly creative, if not odd,
only child. At school he would talk vividly to imaginary friends. He would stop in
his tracks to draw a doorway in thin air, which he would walk through to get to imaginary
places. He was also gifted in math and science, and took an early interest in computer
programming, eventually getting accepted to a magnet school for computer science.

After living with a flurry of stepfathers, American’s mother finally settled on a
man who thought he was a woman. One day when American was sixteen, he came home from
school to every kid’s nightmare: an empty house. The only things left were his bed,
his books, his clothes, and his Commodore 64 computer. His mother had sold the home
to pay for two plane tickets and the fee for her boyfriend’s sex change operation.
American packed up his computer. He was on his own. To pay his bills, he dropped out
of high school and took a variety of odd jobs, finally settling on a Volkswagen repair
shop. In Carmack, he found someone who shared his interest in both cars
and
computers. When Carmack asked him if he wanted to work at id doing technical support
shortly after Doom’s release, he jumped.

The id office was palpably awesome, American thought; he could feel the momentum,
these irreverent young guys riding a tidal wave. Particularly impressive was Romero.
There was a real sense of magic to his work; it was like he was an architect, an engineer,
a lighting person, a game designer, an artist all in one. Romero had an intuitive
sense of how to surprise the player and make the game flow. On top of that, he seemed
just plain cool—living large, driving the hot car, always joking, and, unlike Carmack,
actually
enjoying
his fame and fortune. American and Romero too became fast friends. American never
wanted to go home.

With Doom II, Romero and Carmack agreed to promote American to level design. American
repaid the favor by emulating both Carmack’s ruthless work schedule and Romero’s ruthless
sense of fun. In turn, he became the ultimate id prodigy. As a level designer, he
had a fine aesthetic sense as well as a natural feeling for entertainment. In one
level of Doom II he called the Crusher, he placed a cyberdemon in the middle of the
room; when the player approached, a giant upper section of the room would come mashing
down like a hammer. Romero thought it was hilarious. Carmack was equally impressed
by American’s long hours. By the end of Doom II, American had completed more levels
than Romero himself.

As Quake’s development began, American was not only id’s hotshot young designer but
Carmack’s best friend. With Romero off working on his various projects, it was American
who experimented with Carmack late into the night. Carmack began to open up to American
about Romero. He said he didn’t know what to do with Romero, whose passion for programming
games seemed to be getting taken over by his passion for playing them.

Despite his empathy for Romero, American wanted to appease Carmack, so he said, “Yeah,
I think Romero’s slacking off too.” As Carmack listened, his mood turned.
Who did American think he was?
He was no Romero. Carmack thought Romero, despite his flaws, was still the best level
designer at the company. His levels were the best ones in Doom, and the best ones
in Doom II. There was no reason he couldn’t still be the best one for Quake. “Romero
is a really strong finisher,” Carmack said, “and until you see it, you’re not going
to understand.”

Romero knew Carmack.
He knew that, at the beginning of a project, Carmack went into research mode, and
there was nothing much for him to do but experiment with other things until the engine
was done. As Romero had already noticed, American had taken on the role of experimenting
with Carmack late at night. He didn’t think anything of it—better American than him.

Romero was too busy experimenting with the brave new world that Doom was continuing
to spawn. DWANGO and deathmatching were in full tilt. Raven’s game Heretic was doing
so well that Romero was already overseeing the sequel, Hexen. He had the big vision
in his head: a trilogy of games from Raven based on the Doom engine, concluding with
the final project, Hecatomb. He had also begun overseeing a Doom-driven game called
Strife by a local group of developers called Rogue Entertainment.

These games were fitting nicely into what he wanted to be id’s master plan: squeezing
every last drop of business and marketability out of Carmack’s engines. Carmack’s
technology was getting more complicated and, as a result, taking longer to produce.
Why not use that time to pursue other projects?
Id didn’t have to just be a company, it could be a gaming empire. Though Carmack
had been skeptical, Romero felt that Heretic’s success had proven his vision. As the
Doom II phenomenon grew, the obvious way to build the company was to release more
Doom product. The answer: cash in on the Doom mods.

Every home, office, or school had someone in the back who worked on computers; now
that person was working on Doom mods. Since Doom II, thousands of gamers had begun
modifying id’s products and making them available for free online. Doom fans would
communicate entirely over the Internet to create mods of the game—often never even
meeting in person or, for that matter, talking on the phone. It was a virtual company
complete with job descriptions, responsibilities, and monikers like Team TNT and Team
Innocent Crew.

As a result, the mods were growing in sophistication. Among the most popular was a
so-called total conversion of Doom II to make it look like the movie
Aliens.
There were deathmatch mods based on schoolyard games like Freeze Tag or King of the
Mountain. People were replicating their offices, their homes, their schools. A student
in England made a photorealistic version based on Trinity College. Another released
one simply titled School Doom. “School is a hell,” read the introductory text. “Nobody
really understands why you spend your time by the computer. . . . You are being mocked.
. . . You think about committing suicide, but then you realize it’s not what you want
to do. You should make the others suffer rather than yourself! . . . You will kill
them all! You will burn the school building out of the map as if it never has existed.
. . . Who cares if you are right or wrong! It’s your destiny . . . it’s your hell
. . . it’s your SCHOOL-DOOM!”

Such mods were taken to be all in good fun—
it was just a game,
after all. But some people were beginning to feel that the game had real-life applications.
In Quantico, Virginia
, in 1995, a project officer in the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management
Office named Scott Barnett created a modification called Marine Doom—complete with
realistic military soldiers, barbed-wire fences, and marine logos. The game was perfect
for training real-life soldiers in teamwork, Barnett’s supervisors agreed. Barnett
contacted id, who gave their blessing, though they thought the idea of someone using
their game to train soldiers was a joke. But it was the real deal. The game made its
way across the Net and would be used by the marines for years.

Id decided to jump into the game after discovering that WizardWorks, a publisher in
Minnesota, had released
D!Zone—a collection of nine hundred user-made Doom mods (which id obviously did not
own); the D!Zone CD-ROM had, remarkably, surpassed Doom II
to top the PC games sales charts, earning millions of dollars. It was a source of
great consternation in the office—this was exactly what people like Kevin Cloud had
been afraid would happen. In response, Romero initiated deals with a variety of mod
makers to put out id-approved collections called The Master Levels for Doom II as
well as one sprawling team project, Final Doom. They also put out a retail version
of the shareware product Ultimate Doom.

As the other projects grew, one question lingered on everyone’s mind:
What about Quake?
Many had gotten caught up in the hype; American McGee, Dave Taylor, and Jay Wilbur
had even been talking up the game themselves online. An industrious fan began collecting
any sly comment made by a member of id and began putting them together in an online
newsletter called
QuakeTalk.
Romero uploaded early pictures to the Net showing how the world was shaping up. “In
the screens where you see some pink/purple sky,” he wrote in an explanatory note,
“you can just imagine the wind whistling in your ears. . . . You should see these
screens in action.:)”

But back in the office by the middle of 1995, there was little to see. Work was proceeding
chaotically at best. With Carmack and Abrash working on the engine, and Romero spending
more and more time on other projects, the others were left to their own devices. After
having found happiness in a recent marriage, Adrian Carmack was growing impatient
with the lack of stability at work. He and Kevin, his now close friend and fellow
artist, began churning out textures for the games based on gothic, medieval schemes
as well as Aztec designs for a time-traveling portion of the game. Kevin also used
the time to start learning how to create characters in 3-D, something they had never
done before. Adrian, frustrated by the increased game technology, left the character
work to Kevin, who began to wear down from the mounting challenge.

The newer ranks felt frustrations of their own. American and the other guys thought
Quake was beginning to flounder. Romero, their project leader, seemed more interested
in leading his own life than in leading them. When pushed at one point to create a
design document for Quake, he grudgingly responded with a two-page sketch. The rest
thought it was a lazy attempt. But, as Romero was quick to explain, independence had
long been id’s modus operandi. They never had a design document, never wrote anything
down; the only person who’d tried was his old cohort Tom Hall, and it got him fired.

The guys at id responded by resenting both Romero
and
Carmack. Romero was off being a rock god. Carmack was off being a tech god. And everyone
else was left out to dry. Something had to change. Months were passing, and Carmack’s
engine was nowhere close to being done. The Wolfenstein engine had taken only a couple
of months. Doom had taken six. Already Quake’s engine was passing a half year of development
with no end in sight. Forget about the promised re-lease date of Christmas 1995, they
resolved. From now on if people wanted to know the completion date of an id game,
the reply was “When it’s done!”

TWELVE

Judgment Day

Alex St. John
was sitting at his desk at Microsoft when he got the e-mail from Bill Gates about
Doom. Word had it that that there were 10 million copies of the shareware installed
on computers—more than the company’s new operating system, Windows 95. Microsoft had
spent millions to promote the Windows 95 release in August 1995, blanketing the country
with ads that asked “Where do you want to go today?” Gates wondered how this little
company in Mesquite—the same one that had seduced Michael Abrash—was outperforming
him with some
game.

In the e-mail, Gates asked Alex, the chief strategist for Microsoft’s graphics division,
if he thought he should buy id Software outright. Alex, a large redheaded man with
a quick wit and easy laugh, couldn’t help but chuckle. By 1995 everyone, it seemed,
wanted a piece of id.

Doom imitations were flooding the shelves and topping the sales charts: Dark Forces,
a
Star Wars
–themed shooter from LucasArts; Descent, a free-flying shooter from Interplay; Marathon,
a Macintosh game from a small company called Bungie. Even Tom Hall, who had always
wanted to do deeper games at id, had been corralled into doing a shooter called Rise
of the Triad for Scott Miller’s company, Apogee. The games were now a part of the
cultural lexicon. Doom was featured on television shows like
ER
and
Friends.
It was in a Demi Moore movie. It was novelized in a series of books. Hollywood was
developing a Doom movie. The marines were making a Doom training mod. Even Nintendo—the
goody-goody empire that had long battled over video game violence—was porting the
gory hit to its new home video game platform, the Nintendo 64. Yet all the while id
had developed the enigmatic reputation of being staunchly independent. “I don’t think
you’ll be able to pull off buying id,” Alex wrote back to Gates, “but Doom could certainly
be valuable to us.”

Alex had been addicted to id’s games ever since Wolfenstein 3-D hit the Microsoft
campus in 1992. Doom was being played so frequently around the company that he equated
it with a religious phenomenon. Microsoft’s employees worshiped the game, not only
for its addictive qualities but for its enviable technical feats. The buzzword in
the industry was
multimedia,
and no one had seen a multimedia display for the computer quite as impressive as
Doom. Since Microsoft was embarking on a battle to rule the emerging age of multimedia
with its new operating system Windows 95, Alex thought it was time to enlist Doom
in the fight.

But a
game,
as he knew, was far from his boss’s idea of what multimedia really meant; in Gates’s
mind, multimedia meant video. Apple was gaining ground with its QuickTime video-playing
software, and Gates wanted Microsoft to respond with a similar program. Alex didn’t
agree with this direction. The real multimedia applications of the future, he argued,
were in games. Another competitor, Intel, he pointed out, was pursuing its own solutions,
and if Microsoft wanted to maintain its foothold, it needed to prove that Windows
95 would be the best game platform in the business.

Earlier attempts at games for Windows, however, had left Gates with a bad taste. For
Christmas 1994, the company had shipped a game based on Disney’s
The Lion King
with one million Compaq computers. At the last moment, Compaq had changed its hardware,
which caused the million games to trigger a million system crashes. The problem, Alex
surmised, was that there was no technical solution that would allow a game in all
its multimedia splendor to play safely and effectively on a variety of machines. As
a result, game developers were steering clear of Windows in favor of DOS, the old
operating system that Microsoft was trying to put out to pasture. If Microsoft was
going to convince the masses to upgrade to Windows 95, it needed the game developers
to come on board.

So in early 1995, Alex and his team developed a technology that made sure a game would
run on Windows no matter how a computer’s hardware might change. The technology was
called DirectX. With DirectX, developers could make games without having to worry
about a
Lion King–
like fiasco and, in turn, pledge their support to Windows. But Alex knew that game
developers were a highly skeptical bunch. There was no better way to convince them
to use this new technology, he figured, than to show them a version of Doom running
on Windows with DirectX.

Id, he quickly discovered, was less than interested in taking on the job of programming
a Windows version of Doom. The company had already turned away Apple and IBM because
Carmack didn’t want to spend time doing ports. And Doom was already running fine on
DOS—and being played by plenty of people—so why bother? Furthermore, Carmack—long
an advocate of giving away source code for the greater good of the technology—seemed
almost disdainful of Microsoft’s proprietary stance. Alex assured him that id would
not have to lift a finger; Microsoft would port the game itself. Carmack agreed.

WinDoom, as the version was called, was showcased at the Game Developers Conference
in Silicon Valley in March 1995. Microsoft spared no expense, renting out the Great
American Theme Park to unveil its goods. As the lights dimmed in the auditorium, the
audience of gamers began chanting, “DOS! DOS! DOS!” in defense of Microsoft’s established
platform for games. But as WinDoom began playing on the large screen, a hush of reverence
fell over the crowd. The age of Windows and DirectX had begun.

The next and most formidable step was to come: selling Windows as a gaming platform
to the public. Despite Doom’s success, most casual gamers still viewed computers as
geeky things, full of weird bugs and cryptic command requirements that plagued DOS
games. Now was the key moment, Alex knew, for Microsoft to put up or shut up. On the
strength of the WinDoom demo, he had managed to enlist several companies to create
games for Windows 95 using DirectX. They just needed to make a big splash in time
for Christmas 1995. With a demonic game like Doom as its showcase, what better way
to make a splash than a Halloween media event? It would be a bash like no other, filled
with hundreds of reporters from gaming to mainstream publications. This would be their
chance to see what Microsoft was all about in the multimedia age. The event would
be called, appropriately, Judgment Day.

Alex couldn’t have called id about the party at a better time. The company had just
brought on a new colleague who was the epitome of a party guy: Mike Wilson. A childhood
friend of Adrian Carmack’s from Shreveport, the twenty-four-year-old had finished
his stint working with DWANGO Bob. The rise of the Internet had put an end to DWANGO’s
spree; gamers had no reason to pay to play when they could do it for free online.
But for Mike, life was a party that never died. With long blond hair and a surfer’s
ease, he was a free spirit who had done everything from manage a daiquiri bar to sell
Jesus wallets in a local country and western store. Though he wasn’t a big gamer,
he could see that games were the new rock ’n’ roll, and the guys at id, the new rock
stars.

Mike loved the idea of Judgment Day. Alex was going to convert Microsoft’s cafeteria
and garage into a sprawling haunted mansion. More than thirty of the biggest game
developers, including Activision, LucasArts, and id, would be invited to create their
own sections of the mansion. Mike’s eyes widened, imagining what demonic fun id could
have with such an assignment. Why not invite the top Doom gamers from around the world
for a giant deathmatch tournament—the first ever!—to be held right at the show? The
plan was set. “It’s now official,” Mike declared in a press release. “We are leading
Microsoft down the highway to Hell.”

Alex didn’t have much trouble connecting with Mike’s devilish attitude. Despite all
his work on DirectX, he still felt like Microsoft was treating his project as “skunk
work.” On one occasion, he received a call from an incredulous superior who simply
said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you.” Judgment Day would show them all the answer.
But to succeed, he knew that he needed to unveil not only the games but the man himself:
Bill Gates.

Alex’s requests to feature the CEO at the Halloween event, not surprisingly, were
turned down. Gates had other things to do, he was told. But Alex persisted and managed
to persuade Gates’s public relations lackeys at least to have him record a video address
for the crowd. On the day of the shoot, Gates met Alex in the Microsoft video studio,
flanked by anxious PR representatives, who began dictating how the shoot was going
to proceed. Gates, noticing Alex’s clear dismay, cut them off.

“So what do I need to do for this video?” Gates asked.

Alex took a deep breath. Then he handed Gates a shotgun.

Halloween came one night
early at Microsoft, on October 30, 1995.
The party was in full swing
. A Ferris wheel spun outside. A circus tent offered beer and barbecue. A three-story-tall
makeshift volcano bubbled up red light. Over at the microphone, Jay Leno, master of
ceremonies for the night, entertained the crowd. But the real action was happening
underground, in the garage that had been converted into a haunted mansion. There,
the deathmatch competition Mike Wilson had organized was under way.

Twenty elite gamers had been flown in and were competing under a giant screen that
showed the game. The two top contenders—a stealth Asian American teenager nicknamed
Thresh and a Floridian beach bum nicknamed Merlock—twitched over their PCs as they
fought. The crowd gathered around them, cheering and taunting. Thresh won the match
and was besieged by fans and reporters. “Oh my God,” Jay Wilbur said to himself, looking
on in disbelief, “this is a
sport.
”

Alex St. John, dressed as Satan, was busy chasing Mike Wilson through the red lights
and fog. He found him in a corner, sucking down beers with one gamer dressed as Jesus
and another as the Pope; Mike and his wife came as the blood-soaked antiheroes of
the movie
Natural Born Killers.
Alex told them that he had seen the id installation and he thought it was hilarious.
But, he said, Microsoft’s PR people were less than pleased. How were the press—or,
for that matter, the Microsoft execs—going to react?

As the media and execs started making their way through the mansion, the displays
seemed innocent enough. Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall
Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift
vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric
bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall
vagina.

Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed
their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of
dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the
top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked
in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them
with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone’s relief,
they burst out laughing.

Not everyone else, however, was getting the joke. Onstage, a band of Mike’s friends
called Society of the Damned was screeching through a dissonant set of industrial
rock. No sooner had they launched into an abrasive track called “Gods of Fear” than
the Microsoft PR people decided they’d had enough. Two security guards stormed the
stage and demanded that the band members conclude their set. Alex saw the commotion
and lumbered over, his face as red as his Satan costume. “These guys are the guests
of id Software!” he barked. “
The
id Software! The guys who made Doom! Any friends of id’s are friends of Microsoft.”
But the guards weren’t having it and unplugged the sound system.

As the lights fell, a video screen lowered above the stage. It was time for the main
event. The crowd cheered as footage of Doom’s familiar corridors began to roll. But
it was not the Doom soldier chasing the demons, it was . . . Bill Gates. Microsoft’s
fearless leader was superimposed running inside the game in a long black trench coat
and brandishing a shotgun. Gates stopped running and addressed the crowd about the
wonders of Windows 95 as a gaming platform, a platform that could deliver cutting-edge
multimedia experiences like Doom. But no sooner had he begun than an imp monster from
the game jumped out and, through a voice-over, asked Gates for an autograph. Gates
responded by raising his shotgun and blowing the beast into gory chunks. “Don’t interrupt
me while I’m speaking,” he said, then finished his speech. At the end, the screen
went black with blood, only to be replaced by the familiar Microsoft logo and the
phrase “Who Do You Want to Execute Today?”

This is it, Alex thought, I’m going to be fired. He went to retrieve the video, but
it was gone. He could keep his job, he learned; Microsoft was keeping the tape.

The news was
spreading fast.

Subject: ROMERO is DEAD

> I heard on the Newsgroup that John Romero was in a car accident?

> Is he OK?

Could it be? John Romero—twenty-eight-year-old Ace Programmer, Rich Person, the Surgeon—dead?
According to the gossip online, his fly yellow Ferrari had gone careening off some
Dallas highway in one final joyride. It wouldn’t have been the first ill fate of an
id sports car. Just weeks earlier, a $500,000 custom Doom Porsche race car—complete
with the game’s logo emblazoned on the fire-red hood—being financed by Carmack and
built by Bob Norwood had been mysteriously stolen from his lot. Maybe Romero was suffering
some curse.

In reality, Romero was very much alive. He had just returned from inspecting the house
he was having custom built: a $1.3 million nine-thousand-square-foot Tudor mansion
with a six-car garage, video game arcade, and two limestone gargoyles guarding the
door. Now he was sitting at his desk in Suite 666 overlooking his pristine car in
the lot. The rumors were a fitting coronation, the game-god equivalent of the Beatles’
”Paul is dead” legend. But Romero took exception to the implication that he would
perish by his own ineptitude. “Uh, no. I’m not dead,” he wrote online in response.
“I don’t wreck cars or myself.”