Masters of Doom (27 page)

After weeks of all-nighters, Carmack and his programming partner, Michael Abrash,
had finally tackled the problem of Quake’s strange blue gaps. The world was coming
together. Carmack would spend minutes on end just looking down into a corner of a
room in the game, just walking around in the virtual world and feeling, The world
is solid, it’s really there. On February 24, 1996, there was enough of Quake in place
for id to upload a test deathmatch level to see how it worked on gamers’ various machines.
Gamers had been clamoring online for months to get a taste of id’s new creation. There
was so much anticipation and speculation, in fact, that websites specifically devoted
to Quake news began to surface.

After the test, however, the reviews were not entirely flattering. Players were keen
on the prospects for deathmatching online but complained that the game was dark, sluggish,
nothing like the fast-action world of Doom. The criticisms were not unfounded. These
Doom-like features had had to be sacrificed in order to accommodate Quake’s meticulous
3-D rendering engine. But the gamers weren’t sympathetic. “While not bad for a ‘test’
version,” posted one player online, “there are still many rough edges that have to
be worked out . . . there is still a *lot* missing that is needed to make this game
truly rule.”

Dejected by the response, the id team went about the laborious task of stitching together
their disparate work. Over the sixteen months since the game began, the level designers
and artists had been off in their own worlds, and the results showed. Romero’s levels
looked medieval, American’s were futuristic, Sandy’s were strange gothic puzzles.
Though there were many staples of id’s trademark dark humor—such as the zombies who
would rip chunks of flesh from their asses and hurl them at the player—the game needed
cohesion fast.

Halfheartedly, the guys came up with a story they’d throw in Quake’s manual: “You
get the phone call at 4:00 a.m. By 5:30 you’re in the secret installation. The commander
explains tersely, ‘It’s about the Slipgate device. Once we perfect these, we’ll be
able to use them to transport people and cargo from one place to another instantly.
An enemy code-named Quake is using his own slipgates to insert death squads inside
our bases to kill, steal, and kidnap. The hell of it is we have no idea where he’s
from. Our top scientists think Quake’s not from Earth, but another dimension. They
say Quake’s preparing to unleash his real army, whatever that is.’ ”

Whatever, indeed—they all felt. But the vehicle was there, and they went about inserting
slipgates throughout the game, little gray static doorways that would lead players
through the strange different worlds. The final months of Quake became a blur of silent
and intense all-nighters, punctuated by the occasional crash of a keyboard against
a wall. The construction had turned the office into a heap. The guys were taking their
frustrations out by hurling computer parts into the dry-wall like knives. Even good
press couldn’t boost their spirits.
Wired
descended on the office for its highest honor:
a cover story on id
. But the guys could have cared less, showing up three hours late for the photo session.
The cover showed Carmack in front of Romero and Adrian staring into strange colored
light with the headline “The Egos at id.” The story ordained Quake “the most anticipated
computer game of all time.”

By June, the endless days and nights finally gave way to a finished product. But the
occasion of uploading the shareware to the Internet barely resembled the glory days
of Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom. When Romero showed up to ready the game on Saturday,
June 22, 1996, he was alone. He walked down the halls, past the old id awards, the
Freddy Krueger mask, the Doom plastic shotgun. So it had come to this. No Carmack.
No Adrian. No Kevin.

Romero took refuge with the fans, heading into a gamers’ chat room that teemed with
id fans. He phoned Mark Fletcher, a Doom addict who had become one of Romero’s friends.
He wanted someone there with him that night who really understood the games, who would
appreciate this moment. At 5:00 p.m. he tapped the button on his keyboard and sent
Quake to the world. It felt weird, he thought, that none of the other guys were here
with him, but it all added up. They weren’t gamers. They didn’t even
play
games anymore. They were broken.

“Okay,”
Carmack said, “we can’t put it off any longer.” Shortly after Quake’s release, he
sat in a Mexican restaurant called Tia’s having lunch with Adrian and Kevin. Romero’s
time was up. He was clearly not pulling his weight. It was time to let him go.

The thought made Adrian physically sick. This is Romero we’re talking about. But he
knew he was at a crossroads. Either Romero was going to have to leave or Carmack was
going to dissolve the company. There was no middle ground. Kevin agreed. It was hard
to let someone go, especially given that Romero was one of the founders of the company,
someone who’d contributed so much to their success; but there was no alternative.

The chasm between Carmack and Romero was too wide. Both of them had their views of
what it meant to make games and how games should be made. Carmack thought Romero had
lost touch with being a programmer. Romero thought Carmack had lost touch as a gamer.
Carmack wanted to stay small, Romero wanted to get big. The two visions that had once
forged this company were irreparably tearing it apart. And though Adrian and Kevin
had, on so many occasions, sympathized with Romero’s goals, they had once and for
all to choose which John to follow.

Romero, unbeknownst to them, was making plans of his own. On the way to work that
morning, he had dialed up Ron Chaimowitz at GTI to discuss a possible publishing deal
for the company he wanted to start with Tom Hall. This wasn’t going to be any ordinary
game company, he said, this was going to be a Big Company, unrestrained by technology;
design would be law.

The next day at id, Romero was beckoned to the conference room. Carmack, Adrian, and
Kevin sat around the table. Adrian stared at the floor. Kevin was silent. Carmack
finally spoke. “We’re still not happy with how everything’s going, you know,” he said.
He reached for a piece of paper and handed it to Romero. “This is your resignation.
You can sign it.”

Romero, despite all the warnings, all his plans, felt nothing but shock. “Wait,” he
said, “don’t you mean
a year ago
that I wasn’t working? Because these last seven months I’ve been killing myself!
I’ve been killing myself to make Quake!”

“No,” Carmack said, “you’re not doing your work! You’re not living up to your responsibilities.
You’re hurting the project. You’re hurting the company. You’ve been
poisonous
to the company, and your contribution has been negative over the past couple years.
You needed to do better and you didn’t. Now you need to go! Here’s a resignation and
here’s a termination! You’re going to resign now!”

I don’t want to be here, Adrian thought, staring more deeply into the carpet, I don’t
want to be here, I don’t want to be here. Despite the fact that both Carmack and Romero
were each somewhat justified, he knew there was no way out.

But then everything stopped. Romero fell quiet. Deep inside him, the bit began to
flip, as it had so many times in his life: he would not let this get him down just
like he hadn’t let anything else—his father, his stepfather, his own broken families,
and now his own broken company. I was making plans to go start a company with Tom
anyway, he reminded himself. I guess I’ll go now. He wasn’t bowing out from a fight,
he was starting his new life. Romero signed the form, handed it to Carmack, and headed
out.

By the time Romero got to the door, Carmack assumed his ex-partner had convinced himself
that he had been planning on doing this for a long time, that he had been stifled
creatively and was off to bigger and better things. In the space of forty feet, he
thought, Romero had redesigned history. Carmack didn’t watch him go with sadness or
nostalgia. He watched him go with relief.

Two days later,
Romero posted his first and last .plan file at id. “I’m going to jump on this .plan
bandwagon just this once,” he wrote for all the world to read online. “I have decided
to leave id Software and start a new game company with different goals. I won’t be
taking anyone from id with me.”

The next day, Carmack posted a .plan file of his own. “Romero is now gone from id,”
he typed. “There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects. I
can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am trying to acomplish [
sic
], but all I promise is my best effort.”

The old deathmatches were over. A new one had begun.

THIRTEEN

Deathmatch

In a dark room
pulsing with blood red shadows, Stevie “Killcreek” Case sat at her computer, twitching
her body as if she were repeatedly and intentionally sticking her toe in a light socket.
“Doh!” she yelped, leaping her soldier on the screen through a static-filled teleporter
gate, only to see him rematerialize in an unanticipated blizzard of nails. Or, as
she described the style of this particular death, “Telefragged!”

It was January 1997, minutes away from the online gaming underground’s unofficial
Super Bowl. Like the few dozen others convulsing throughout this University of Kansas
flophouse, Stevie—an ebullient twenty-year-old with a short brown bob—had been practicing
two sleepless nights for the match between her team, Impulse 9, and their rivals,
who had driven eight hours from Michigan, the Ruthless Bastards. Their contests were
part of the burgeoning international subculture of clans: organized groups of gamers
who played—and lived—Quake. Like those of the hundreds of thousands of other Quake
addicts, their wars were usually over the Internet. But on this tornado gray day in
Lawrence, Kansas, the country’s best were settling the score in the flesh.

On one level such passion came down to the beautiful nightmare of the game itself.
Despite id’s internal problems during the game’s development, Quake was heralded for
its breakthrough graphics and visceral experience.
USA Today
gave Quake four out of four stars, calling it
“bloody amazing.”
A reviewer for
Computer Gaming World
gave it ten out of ten, saying it was
“a towering programming feat
that goes beyond immersive to make you feel like you’re there in a combat environment.”
Entertainment Weekly
said,
“Quake delivers the most carnage
you can revel in without having to deal with actual jail time. No wonder bored office
workers across the country love it.” Even the actor Robin Williams praised Quake on
the David Letterman show.

Though gamers enjoyed the single-player experience—hunting down monsters through the
twisting 3-D mazes—what they
really
enjoyed was deathmatch. As the first game designed specifically for multiplayer team
competition over the Internet, it allowed up to sixteen people to compete in paintball-like
teams, hunting each other down in a wild panic to kill or be killed. “Football with
guns,” as a player named Dr. Rigormortis put it. In addition to competing over the
Internet, gamers schlepped their computers to each other’s homes and wired them together
into a local area network, or LAN, so they could fight in person. These so-called
LAN parties—which began casually with Doom—became the offline social nexus for the
online gaming world.

Within days of Quake’s release, fans in chat channels and newsgroups began forming
clans with names like the Breakfast Club, the Revolting Cocks, Impulse 9, and the
Ruthless Bastards. By August there were about twenty clans with up to twenty players
each. Two months later there were close to a thousand. A group of women calling themselves
the Clan Widows started a webpage support group. It was the dawn of cybersports.

And it didn’t take long for the moguls to cash in.
“Electronic games
are the extreme games of the mind,” said an entrepreneur behind a chain of virtual
reality arcades in New York, Chicago, and Sydney, “so, let’s bring the cyberathletes
into arenas and elevate this to a spectator sport”: big screens, Quake matches networked
from around the world, beer, prizes, the works. His prediction of star players competing
with Nike logos tattooed across their knuckles wasn’t crazy. One clan, Dark Requiem,
hustled a webpage ad from a joystick maker. Thresh, winner of the Judgment Day tournament,
received a sponsorship from Microsoft. The kids who were always the last ones picked
in gym class lineup could be the next Michael Jordans. Michael Jordans who might look
something like _fo0k (pronounced “fook,” like “spook”), the coleader of the Ruthless
Bastards.

The twenty-seven-year-old with a tiny soul patch beard led his clan to the top of
the ClanRing league, a feat accomplished by only one other team at that point, Impulse
9. Since Quake’s debut, _fo0k had been spending his evenings in East Lansing, Michigan,
buried in his parents’ basement, a windowless computer game mission control filled
with twisted piles of joysticks and keyboards, mammoth speakers, a scattering of NBA
video game cartridges. The only art on the walls was a black velvet portrait of Jesus,
which _fo0k found funny because the nose resembled the end of a double-barrel shotgun,
one of the weapons in Quake.

Video game images had been burning into _fo0k’s consciousness ever since Space Invaders,
he said, “first melted my mind.” At the time, _fo0k was just Clint Richards, a competitive
new kid on the block escaping into the fantasy worlds of sci-fi novels and the Atari
2600. After seeing
Star Wars
a few dozen times, he decided his life’s ambition: “to fly to other planets and battle
aliens.” Contrary to most kids, he never gave up. Following a stab at rock god fantasy
in a “disco punk” band called Shampoop, Clint found a more stimulating environment
to live out his childhood dream: Quake.

Using the handle _fo0k (a satire of self-conscious hacker typescript) and a high-speed
modem hustled from his job as a cable installer, he cofounded the Ruthless Bastards,
a team of Doom junkies who became his closest friends. Though _fo0k said he probably
wouldn’t be hanging out with some of the younger, geekier clan members if it wasn’t
for the game, their friendships, he said, ran deep. The last time he stopped to check
the clock, he was plugging in six hours a night.

Despite the camaraderie, _fo0k, like most players, rarely spoke to his “brothers”
in person or on the phone, preferring instead the anonymity of the Internet’s chat
channels, the locker rooms of Quake. At any time, day or night, he could log on and
trash-talk his way into a pickup game. “The Internet is my real home,” he said. “At
work, I’m sentient, but I find myself walking around in a daze, because I’m so bored
with the usual stuff: my job, meeting people who aren’t interesting. When I get home
and start shooting the shit with the guys and start playing, that’s when I get excited.”

Although he was well known online for his wit and skills, _fo0k readily acknowledged
the absurdity of being underappreciated, if not unknown, everywhere else. “The mainstream
just sees them as little games,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’m wasting my time,
but I guess this is my chance to play rock god for five minutes. Everyone wants to
be remembered. I’m really good at video games, so maybe this is how I can do it. .
. . In some future Olympics,” he joked, “the weight-lifting team will be standing
there and right next to them: a bunch of weird-looking guys with big bulging foreheads.”

_fo0k wasn’t the only id fan with big dreams. One of his chief competitors in Impulse
9, the legendary game grrrl Stevie Case, was just beginning to transform her life
through Quake. Stevie was among the leaders of a new generation of young women who
were defying the stereotype of the adolescent boy gamer. Raised in the small town
of Olathe, Kansas, the daughter of a social worker and a schoolteacher, she’d always
had a strong competitive nature. She took to sports early on, becoming the first and
only girl on the neighborhood T-ball team—much to the distress of the local dads,
whose boys she regularly beat. By high school, Stevie had been voted athlete of the
year and parlayed her popularity into becoming student government president. An exceptional
student, she was among those flown to the White House to meet President Clinton. She
wanted to be a politician.

Once enrolled at the University of Kansas, she overachieved even more—committing herself
on the fast track to law school. She earned straight A’s, ran for student government.
She became a member of Mensa. Then Quake took hold. She was dating a guy, Tom “Entropy”
Kizmey, who was deep in the throes of the game’s grip. But unlike the women online
who despaired over their men’s obsessions, Stevie was eager to compete. Quake was
everything that a woman was not supposed to be: loud, violent, aggressive. It was
also creative: programmed to be even more extensible than Doom, thus giving rise to
even more elaborate modifications. Stevie wanted it all. Soon enough she found herself
at the top of her boyfriend’s clan, Impulse 9, facing off in the ultimate showdown
with their rivals, the Ruthless Bastards.

As the countdown on the screen began that day, Stevie slipped on her headphones and
began nervously clicking her mouse. “You okay, honey?” asked her boyfriend, ready
at a computer beside her; reflected in his screen, he resembled a hydrocephalic Emilio
Estevez. Stevie gave him the thumbs-up and said, “I’m fine, hon.” Down the hall in
the Ruthless Bastards’ room, _fo0k sucked the last of his cigarette and reached for
the keyboard. “Okay, brothers,” he said, “let’s win.”

But when the dust cleared, Stevie and her clan had clocked _fo0k’s Bastards, making
Impulse 9 the undisputed champions. Leaning back at her PC, Stevie slipped off her
headphones and ran her hand through her hair. Victory felt good. She was powerful,
supreme, connected with the gamers of the world, even the baddest of them all—her
hero, John Romero. I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a politician, I’m a gamer, she resolved.
And I’m going to Dallas.

The only place
that wasn’t in the throes of Quake deathmatch as 1997 arrived, it seemed, was a tiny
company in Texas: id Software. No one was screaming or cursing, or smashing keyboards
into the ground. With the renovations complete, the war room was divided into a suite
of small private offices. The pool table had been sold, the Foosball shipped away.
Everything was, if not respectable, respectably quiet. And everyone in the company
knew why: John Romero—Ace Programmer, Current Rich Person, Deathmatch Surgeon—was
gone.

American McGee felt Romero’s absence from the moment he walked by his old office and
saw the empty chair. Romero, even with his problems, had always bridged the gap between
the owners and the employees. And there was no one who could even remotely take his
place. Carmack didn’t take into account that he had let go more than just John Romero,
American thought. He had let go the soul of any video game company: the fun.

American wasn’t the only one feeling gloomy. Quake’s shareware retail experiment had
proved disastrous. In theory, id was going to cut out retailers by allowing gamers
to buy the shareware and then call an 800 number to place an order and receive a password
that would unlock the rest of the game. But gamers wasted no time hacking the shareware
to unlock the full version of the game for free. Worse, all the mundane aspects of
distribution and order fulfillment were spinning out of control. In a desperate measure,
id tried to put the brakes on the retail shareware, but it was too late. They were
stuck with almost 150,000 CDs sitting in a warehouse.

Mike Wilson, id’s biz guy, put the burden on their publisher, GTI—forcing them not
only to absorb the inventory but to increase id’s royalty before releasing the full
version of Quake into the retail market. For GTI’s Ron Chaimowitz, it was just more
of the kids’ audacity. Id had even made him wait to release the retail version of
the game until it could rake in as many sales as possible through the shareware; Ron
didn’t get the game until
after
the lucrative holiday season, and by that time the shareware debacle had left its
scar. Sales were good—with 250,000 units shipped—but not a phenomenon like Doom II.
Id decided its days with GTI were over. Ron was disappointed but, with his company
doing fine without id, his attitude was Good riddance.

Mike and his cohort Jay Wilbur had another plan: turn id into a publishing empire,
beginning with their next game, a sequel to Quake called Quake II. “We don’t need
GTI,” Jay said to the owners. “We don’t need Activision, we can do this all on our
own. We can keep the benefit, but we need an organization to do that. In order to
do that right, we need to hire more people. And that can be id publishing, here, there,
or yonder. It can be a completely separate company whose charter is to completely
handle our product.”

Kevin and Adrian were intrigued by the idea but knew it was Carmack’s decision. Even
though they were now the majority owners, there was no question about who was really
in charge. Carmack’s technology had long been the heart of id—with Romero out of the
way, it was completely unfettered. The last thing Carmack wanted to do now was spoil
the company by turning it into an empire—that had been Romero’s wish, not his. Despite
Carmack’s battles with his mother’s conservative fiscal ideals, he himself had become
quite the conservative businessman. As long as he was in the company, he told Adrian
and Kevin, id was going to stay small and let a new publisher, like Activision, handle
their next game.

With Romero gone, Carmack felt happier than he had in some time. No more grandiose
statements about stuff they were working on. No more all-night deathmatching. No more
poison. Now, with the other guys beginning work on Quake II, using the existing graphics
engine, he was free to experiment—no deadlines, no pressure, just pure immersive learning.

Carmack’s first project was to explore the burgeoning hardware for 3-D computer graphics.
In the past, only arcade machines had been designed specifically to improve or accelerate
3-D graphics. With robust computer games like Doom and Quake, however, start-up companies
saw an opportunity finally to bring 3-D acceleration to home machines. This would
be done by putting powerful graphics processing chips onto special cards that could
be inserted into an existing PC. One manufacturer, called 3Dfx, convinced Carmack
to port a version of Quake in a programming language called OpenGL, which could run
with its debut line of Voodoo 3-D accelerator cards. Carmack completed the task in
a weekend and uploaded the OpenGL version to the Web for free.