Masters of Doom (30 page)

Romero thought Quake II was the best thing he had ever seen on a computer. By programming
the game specifically to take advantage of hardware acceleration, Carmack had forged
a true thing of beauty. Colored lighting brought the world magnificently to life.
This was the next wave, Romero knew; Carmack’s game was also, alas, his competition.
The difference between his game and id’s was like that between a piece of paper and
a color TV set, Romero thought. There’s no way in hell Daikatana can come out against
this, not the way this looks.

Part of Romero’s license deal with id was that he could upgrade to use their next
engine, but he’d never anticipated the leap would be so great. Now he knew he had
to scrap all the existing work on Daikatana and redo the game using the Quake II engine.
But there was a problem: id’s contract specifically stipulated that a licensee couldn’t
use
the new engine until id’s game was on the shelves. This meant that Romero would not
get the Quake II engine until after Christmas. He would have to finish Daikatana using
the existing technology, then spend about a month, he estimated, converting it when
he got the Quake II engine.

Carmack’s technology had once again forced him to change his plans.

Later in the show,
the gamers made their way to the
other
main event: the Red Annihilation deathmatch tournament sponsored by id. In the middle
of the floor was the grand prize: Carmack’s cherry-red Ferrari 328.
“I bought my first Ferrari
after the success of Wolfenstein 3-D,” Carmack told the press. “Doom and Quake have
bought three more. Four Ferraris is too many for me. Rather than sell off one of them
or stick it in a warehouse, I’m going to give it back to the gamers that brought it
to me in the first place. The king of this Quake deathmatch is going to get a really
cool crown.”

More than two thousand gamers had been competing online for the right to be one of
the sixteen flown to E3 to compete. Everyone was gathered for the finals, which came
down to Tom “Entropy” Kizmey, the sharpshooting clan member of the University of Kansas’s
Impulse 9, and Dennis “Thresh” Fong, winner of the first official deathmatch event,
Microsoft’s Judgment Day. The two sat onstage in front of Carmack’s car, which bore
the license plate idtek1. With the crowd cheering, they battled as their match played
out on a large overhead screen. Thresh could see the reflection of the Ferrari in
his monitor as he closed in for his final slaying, winning the deathmatch thirteen
kills to one.

Carmack walked onstage and handed Thresh the keys. “So how are you planning on getting
the car home?” he asked. “I don’t know,” Thresh said. “I guess I’ll ship it.” Carmack
came back a half hour later and handed Thresh five thousand dollars in cash to cover
the costs.

As the crowd cleared, Romero wandered up to see who was around from id. Just because
they were competitors didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends. He found Carmack and a
couple of other id guys gathered near some computers. They talked about the event,
and then it was suggested that they have a go at deathmatching each other. Romero
beat everyone until it came down to just him and Carmack.

The Two Johns sat at their machines and faced off. It was funny how the games had
taken on such different meanings over the years. They’d played Super Mario back in
Shreveport, when the world was full of possibilities and id was just an idea from
the deep. They’d played F-Zero, the hovercraft racing game, in Wisconsin to escape
the cold and dream of the race cars they could someday afford to own. They had played
Doom, that very first deathmatch, which foretold the fame and fortune to come. And
now they were competing for the first time in Quake—the game that had finally torn
them apart. In all those long months of development, they had never played each other.

On cue, they were off—blasting rocket launchers at each other through the halls. No
sooner had it begun than Romero, the Surgeon, made giblets of Engine John. This match
was over. The next one would take place in an even more challenging arena: the one
where Quake II and Daikatana were destined to meet. And this world guaranteed competition—and
surprises—of its own.

FOURTEEN

Silicon Alamo

Brother Jake
stood behind the bar of the Horny Toad Cantina in Mesquite mixing up another Big Fucking
Gun. One part Rumplemintz, one part Midori, with a splash of blue curaçao, the BFG
was a drink he’d concocted in honor of his favorite weapon from Doom. It was the least
he could do, considering the cantina was right across the highway from id’s office.
The toxic green cocktail was the unofficial toast of Dallas, the new capital of the
video game gold rush.

By the summer of 1997, Dallas had become to gamers what Seattle was to musicians in
the early 1990s; id was Nirvana. In the five years since the Two Johns had rolled
into town with a Pac-Man machine in the back of their truck, the game developer community
there had more than tripled. The growth extended to Austin, where just as many were
popping up around Richard Garriott’s flagship company, Origin.
Time
called the Texas gamers the
“New Cowboys.”
Wired
called them
“Doom babies.”
The Boston Globe
dubbed the state’s video game renaissance
“the new Hollywood.”

A more appropriate name would have been Silicon Alamo, because the crux of the rush
was first-person shooters. Between Doom, Quake, and Scott Miller’s hit Duke Nukem
3D, shooters had spawned a multimillion-dollar cottage industry and dominated the
video game charts. This fulfilled the dream that id had set out to accomplish back
at Softdisk: to make the PC a viable gaming platform.
Of the $3.7 billion generated
in 1996 from interactive entertainment software, nearly half—$1.7 billion—was from
PC games alone.
“The PC gaming boom,”
declared
USA Today,
“has helped the industry bounce back.”

With the prospects of id’s and Ion’s fame and fortune, a new generation of companies
were arising around Dallas. Rogue and Ritual, spawned respectively from id and 3D
Realms, specialized in making so-called mission packs, add-on levels for Quake. Ensemble
Studios, empowered by the addition of id’s Sandy Petersen, created one of the bestselling
strategy games of all time, Age of Empires. Terminal Reality, founded by ex-Apogee
members and the creator of Microsoft’s groundbreaking Flight Simulator engine, devoted
itself to a range of multiplatform gaming products. The Cyberathlete Professional
League was trying to turn live deathmatching events into the gaming version of the
NFL.

Id did much to increase the community by licensing out its technology. In addition
to Ion Storm, other companies were now paying close to $250,000, as well as royalties,
to use the Quake engine. Though id would profit from some of its competition, there
was more on the rise. Soon the gaming press began speculating about the “Quake killers”
that would or could knock id from its perch. Duke Nukem 3D had already received much
acclaim. Valve, a Seattle-based company founded by some former Microsoft employees,
had licensed the Quake engine to make Half-Life, a game that had previewed at E3 to
a favorable response. Unreal, a shooter created by Epic, the North Carolina company
discovered by Scott Miller years before, had demoed as well to laudable reviews. Then,
of course, there was Daikatana. With all these games due sometime over the next year,
as well as id’s own Quake II, the Silicon Alamo showdown promised to be one of the
best shoot-outs in years—if only those involved could survive the battles brewing
in their own companies.

The race was on.
Carmack was behind the wheel of his Ferrari F40, burning down the drag strip as the
Porsche 911 stormed up behind him. It was a bright sunny day in Ennis, Texas. Carmack
had decided to rent out this country racetrack for a little company competition. It
was a fun way for everyone to flex the power of the sports cars the games had afforded
them. This wasn’t the only track they had been visiting of late. In a pinch, Carmack
had once called the mayor of Mesquite and asked him if he would shut down the local
airport long enough for the company to have a few little drag races. The mayor was
happy to oblige. Carmack, after all, had donated tens of thousands of dollars of equipment,
including bulletproof vests (which some gamer on the force stitched with Doom patches),
to the local police. He deserved consideration.

The drag races weren’t the only contests in town. Though Quake II was the favorite
shooter at E3, the pressure inside id was mounting. Carmack had absolved himself of
his competitive mood manipulation test—determining that such motivation didn’t suit
his circuitry—but the rest of the guys were hardly resigned. Other companies’ shooters,
even id’s own licensees, became regular subjects of ridicule. When the first demo
of Half-Life came through the doors, many insisted it would do nothing less than fail.

The company, like Quake II, had grown militaristic and serious. For some, all the
fun and humor seemed to have been sucked out of id, not just figuratively but literally—with
the most fun people—Romero, Mike, Jay, Shawn—all out the door. In place was real-life
competition that had begun against Romero and now spread among themselves. American
and others blamed Carmack, who sequestered himself in his office, for passive-aggressively
encouraging the conflict.

One of the main sources of distrust among the employees was id’s competitive bonus
structure. Every quarter or so the owners would meet to assign a dollar amount to
each employee. They would then split up a bonus payment based on those decisions.
One quarter someone might get $100,000; the next, $20,000. The owners admitted that
it was an arbitrary and imperfect plan, but it was the only one they could surmise.
As a result, the employees realized that the easiest way to get the higher bonuses
was to outwit, outplay, and outsmart each other. It was a business deathmatch.

With Romero out of the picture, the competition had only grown more fierce. Though
American had been the golden boy during the early days of Quake, those days were over.
Carmack had turned cold, American thought, making him feel like he was never sure
if they were really friends. For Carmack, American was just another casualty of self,
someone with talent who’d lost his drive and focus, like Romero. As a result, Tim
Willits, American’s old adversary, swiftly moved into favor, triggering rampant infighting.

More and more, Carmack wanted to grab his laptop and disappear into a hotel room in
some strange state. All he wanted to do was code. That was all he had ever wanted.
The problems at id, he thought, were precisely the kinds of problems that he could
avoid by keeping the company small, the team tight. “For any given project,” he posted
in his .plan file online, “there is some team size beyond which adding more people
will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from
chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier
to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for
id is very small.”

With Romero gone, Carmack’s life could aspire to the elegance of his code: simple,
efficient, lean. This was how he would lead his company. This was how he would make
his games. He would not succumb to internal pressures or grand aspirations that would
lead to infinite delays. He would deliver. And on December 9, 1997, he did just that.

“Oh my god.
Quake 2 is the most impressive game I’ve ever played on a computer. . . . What game
have you played lately that was better than Quake 2? I predict the answer is none.”
Among the most gushing reviews—and there were many—of Quake II was this one from Romero.
He posted it on December 11 in his .plan file two days after the game was released.
Romero had burned through nonstop for forty-eight hours, completing the entire game
in one long twitch. He had reason to be excited.

By licensing the Quake II engine, Romero was assured that he could implement all the
tricks of the game—including colored lighting—in Daikatana. Not only was he making
what he thought was the most ambitious shooter ever created but he would be able to
do it using the most ambitious engine ever created. It was finally like the ultimate
collaboration—a marriage of technology and design that Romero could never achieve
at id. And now, best of all, no one—not Carmack, not anyone—could get in the way.

Or so he thought. The burgeoning troops of Ion Storm were grumbling with discontent.
It had begun when Ion released the “bitch ad” in April. Just as that backlash was
stinging, the company went to E3 in June 1997 with what many thought to be a shabby
demo of Daikatana. Romero seemed more interested in playing games and courting the
press, they thought, than in telling them what they needed to do to realize his game.
And the game, as a result, was feeling further and further from completion.

Unlike Romero, most on his staff didn’t like the idea of switching Daikatana to the
Quake II technology. In fact, they
hated
it. Romero seemed to have no idea how much work it was going to take just to implement
the bare essentials of his four-hundred-page Daikatana design document. He wanted
sixty-four monsters! Four time zones! A game four times the size of Quake! They’d
have trouble meeting the new March 1998 deadline without the pressure of switching
technologies. Now how were they going to handle this?

They weren’t the only ones with suspicions after E3. Eidos was not pleased to find
out that Ion Storm’s flagship title was now going to miss the Christmas season. But
the Eidos executives were willing to give Romero the benefit of the doubt. Romero
assured them, as he assured his staff, that the game would be pushed back only a few
months. “Bodies plus manpower,” he said, was going to be the formula of success. The
company already had eighty people, and it was still growing.
With all those people at work, of course the work would get completed. Just look at
what we did at id with barely thirteen guys!
Eidos had no choice but to take his word, since he was managing the development of
the game without intervention on their part. For all they knew, the game really
was
just a few months from hitting the shelves. And they were willing to do whatever
it took to help make that happen.

What that took was money. After less than a year, Eidos’s original $13 million deal—which
was supposed to fund all three games—was starting to dwindle away. Eighty people on
staff meant eighty salaries and, with two computers per person, 160 state-of-the-art
machines with twenty-one-inch monitors. The office renovations were now approaching
the $2 million mark. In all, there was no end in sight. Something had to be done.
Mike Wilson, Ion’s marketing whiz, had a plan.

Ever since his days at id, Mike had dreamed of running his own publishing company.
And he’d made this dream clear to Romero and the other owners of Ion the moment he
came on board. They even nicknamed the plan Ion Strike, which would be the self-publishing
wing they’d start once they finished their obligation to Eidos. Mike couldn’t believe
that Romero, unbeknownst to him, had signed not a three-game deal with Eidos, as he
had expected, but a deal that gave them the option on three more. This meant that
Ion received $13 million for its first three games and, when presented with the next
three game ideas, Eidos could decide whether to fund them as well. The faster they
burned through the options, the faster they’d get their cash and be on their way to
Ion Strike. The time now was to burn.

The first deal made to cash in on this plan was to acquire Dominion, which Todd Porter
had begun at 7th Level. The game was languishing at Todd’s former company, and he
convinced the other owners that it was the perfect fit for Ion. They could simply
buy it for $1.8 million, and it would take him only six weeks or so to get it out
the door. Then he’d finish the game he was originally planning to do, Doppelganger.
They made the deal. But it was only the beginning.

In September 1997, Romero had heard through the grapevine that a game designer named
Warren Spector was looking for somewhere to go. At forty-one years old, Warren was
a well-regarded veteran of the industry. The son of a dentist and a reading teacher
in New York, he had grown up intellectual and academic. While pursuing a doctorate
in radio, television, and film at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s,
Warren fell in with the town’s burgeoning community of science-fiction authors and
gamers, eventually taking a job with Richard Garriott’s company, Origin. Games, for
him, were not just diversions, they were the closest thing to artificial reality.

“There’s never been a medium in the history of mankind that can literally put you
in another world,” he said, “we’re stuck here.” But, with the right balance of story
and technology, a good game can get close. “This is the only medium ever that lets
ordinary people travel to other worlds. . . . I am never going to fly a World War
I biplane. I’m never going to visit a space station. I’m never going to be a super
spy. But when I play one of these games, I am.”

As id popularized what he thought were mindless first-person shooters, Warren worked
on more literary first-person games, which he termed “immersive simulations.” Titles
like Ultima Underworld, Thief, and System Shock relied more on a player’s intellect
and stealth than on the trigger finger. Romero thought he’d be a perfect fit. Warren
signed on to head up his own development team in what would become Ion Austin. He
set to work on an idea for
his
own dream product—a sci-fi counterterrorist game that would be a most realistic and
gripping immersive simulation. The title was Deus Ex. When Romero’s public relations
company tried to pull Warren into the fray, however, he was quick to draw a line in
the sand. “I will never say the words ‘suck it down,’ ” he told them, “and I don’t
want to make anybody my bitch. We’re going to be the classy part of this company,
just get ready for it.”