Masters of Doom (5 page)

Romero confronted Al. “You told me that I would make big commercial games, and all
I’m doing is helping them out in the PC department. If things don’t change, I’m going
to leave and go work for LucasArts,” he said, referring to the new gaming company
launched by George Lucas, creator of
Star Wars.
Big Al didn’t like what he was hearing. Romero had proven to be one of his most valuable
employees. He admired the kid’s ability to focus. Whenever Al came by to check up,
Romero was sitting there with his big square glasses pressed up against the computer
monitor, working for hours on end. He told Romero he didn’t want him to go.

Romero said he had spent the last year studying all the PC games and felt they were
glaringly under par. Because the PC was still not as robust as the Apple II, the games
were lackluster—static little screens with crappy graphics, nothing approaching the
sophistication of the games being done for the Apple II. Now was the time to strike.
Al agreed and suggested they start a subscription disk dedicated to games, a monthly.

“Monthly?” Romero said, “No way, one month is nowhere near enough time.”

“Well, our subscribers are already used to a monthly disk,” Al said. “Maybe we could
do it every other month, but that would be pushing it.”

“I think we can do that. That’s still not a great amount of time, but we could probably
do something decent, but I’m going to need a team: an artist, a couple programmers,
and a manager, because I don’t want to sit there interfacing with management all day;
I want to program.”

Al told Romero he couldn’t have an artist; he’d have to farm out the work to someone
in the existing art department. But he
could
have a manager and another programmer; he just had to find them.

Romero ran back to the Apple II department to tell Lane and Jay the good news: “Dudes,
we’re fucking making games!” Lane would now be editor of Gamer’s Edge, Softdisk’s
new bimonthly games disk for the PC. All that remained was to get another programmer,
someone who knew the PC and, just as important, could fit in with Lane and Romero.
Jay said there was someone he knew who was definitely hard-core. This kid was turning
in great games. And he even knew how to port from the Apple II to the PC. Romero was
impressed by the apparent similarities to himself. But there was a problem, Jay said.
The Whiz Kid had already turned down a job offer three times because he liked working
freelance. Romero pleaded with Jay to try him again. Jay wasn’t optimistic but said
okay. He picked up the phone and gave John Carmack one last pitch.

When Carmack pulled up
to Softdisk in his brown MGB, he had no intention of taking the job. But, then again,
times were getting rough. Though he enjoyed the idea of the freelance lifestyle, he
was having trouble making rent and would frequently find himself pestering editors
like Jay to express him his checks so he could buy groceries. A little stability wouldn’t
be bad, but he wasn’t eager to compromise his hard work and ideals to get there. It
would take something significant to sway him.

When Al met Carmack, he was thrown off.
This
was the Whiz Kid he’d heard so much about? A nineteen-year-old in ripped jeans and
a tattered T-shirt who, despite his muscles, seemed not to have reached puberty yet?
But Carmack did pack plenty of attitude. When Al spelled out the plan for Gamer’s
Edge, Carmack brushed off the tight deadline as no problem at all. He was brutally
honest in his criticism of the current crop of games, including those being put out
by Softdisk. Al showed Carmack to the other building, where Romero and Lane were eagerly
waiting. On the way, Carmack was impressed to see a stack of
Dr. Dobb’s Journal
s, the magazine for hackers, which grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club. But the
strongest impression came when he met Lane and Romero, a meeting that bordered on
the kinetic.

Within moments the three programmers were discussing the spectrum of game programming,
from the challenges of double resolution 16-bit graphics for the Apple II to the nuances
of 8086 assembly language. They talked nonstop, not just about computers but about
their other common interests: Dungeons and Dragons, Asteroids,
The Lord of the Rings
. Carmack told them about how he never had the computers he wanted when he was growing
up. Romero said, “Man, I would have bought you those machines.”

Carmack was unprepared to meet anyone who could keep up with him intellectually, particularly
in programming. Not only could these two guys talk the talk but they actually knew
more
than Carmack himself. They weren’t just good, they were better than he was, he thought.
Romero was inspiring, not only in his knowledge of programming but in his all-around
skills: his artistry, his design. Carmack was cocky, but if someone could teach him,
he wasn’t going to let his ego get in the way. On the contrary, he was going to listen
and stick around. He was going to take the Softdisk job.

Before the Gamer’s Edge crew
could get started, they needed one vital machine: a fridge. Making computer games
required an accessible mound of junk food, soda, and pizza. And to eat this stuff,
they’d need someplace convenient to stash it. Romero, Carmack, and Lane agreed to
kick in $180 of their own money to buy a used refrigerator for their new office, a
small room in the back of Softdisk.

But as they carried the appliance through the door, they felt the icy stares of the
jealous employees around them. All week they had been coming into the office with
accessories: a microwave, a boom box, a Nintendo.
Fucking Romero even came in with a video game!
It was, Romero told them, research. The other employees weren’t buying it. Worst
of all was when they saw some workmen wheeling in a fleet of sparkling new 386 PCs—the
fastest computers around—for the gamers. Everyone else in the company was stuck working
on machines that were about one-fourth the power.

When the Gamer’s Edge guys had everything set up, they plugged in the microwave and
popped in some pizza. But the moment they hit cook, all the lights in the office fizzled
out. This was grounds for a revolt, the other employees decided. They went to speak
with Big Al. Al was quick to quiet the storm. The Gamer’s Edge crew, he explained
patiently, wasn’t just out to have a good time, they were out to save the company.
Yes,
he said,
save the company.
The boom of the recent years, he told them, was coming to a close. The company had
sunk tremendous resources into the ill-fated Apple II line. Al had recently been forced
to lay off twenty-five people in one day.

“Look,” he told the employees who were bemoaning the Gamer’s Edge project, “don’t
complain. If these guys make a home run, we’ll all benefit from it. It’ll work. Don’t
worry.” Truth was, Big Al was worried himself. He walked down to the Gamer’s Edge
office and opened the door. It was pitch-black, except for the glow of the computer
monitors. He went to flip the light switch, but nothing happened.

“Oh,” Romero said, “we took out the lights. They sucked.”

“Fluorescent,” Lane explained, squinting, “hard on the eyes.”

Al looked up. The light sockets were gutted of their tubes. The team had clearly made
itself at home. He saw the microwave, the fridge, the junk food. Metallica played
from a boom box. A dart-strewn poster of the hair metal band Warrant hung on the wall.
Carmack, Lane, and Romero each sat at his own fancy machine. “Look,” Al said, “we
can’t take two months to get out this first disk. We have to get it out in four weeks.
And you have to have two games on it so we can entice people to subscribe.”

“One month!” they cried. Two months, the original deadline, was tight enough. There
was no way they could come up with two games from scratch. They would have to port
a couple of their existing Apple II games to PC—a specialty that both Carmack and
Romero could handle. And they had just the titles: Dangerous Dave, an Apple II game
of Romero’s, and The Catacomb, a title of Carmack’s. Romero had made his first Dangerous
Dave back in 1988 for Uptime. It was a fairly straightforward adventure game, featuring
a tiny little splotch of a guy with a purple bodysuit and green cap. The object was
to run and jump through mazes and collect treasure without getting killed first. Donkey
Kong, the arcade game from Nintendo, had a similar paradigm, one Romero admired.

Catacomb was Carmack’s latest spin on the role-playing worlds he’d first explored
with Shadowforge and Wraith. This one would show an even stronger influence from Gauntlet,
the popular arcade game in which characters could run through mazes, shooting monsters
along the way, casting spells. It was like Dungeons and Dragons with action. This
was also a key point of communion for the Two Johns: their admiration for fast-action
arcade games, their desire to emulate them, and, most important, their unbridled confidence
in their abilities. They turned up the stereo. There was work to be done.

Romero gleefully referred to the ensuing experience as “crunch mode” or “the death
schedule”—a masochistically pleasurable stretch of programming work involving sleep
deprivation, caffeine gorging, and loud music. For pure sportsmanship, Carmack and
Romero had a little contest to see who could port a game the fastest. It didn’t take
long for the Ace Programmer to see just how fast the Whiz Kid was, as Carmack fairly
easily pulled ahead. It was all in good fun. And Romero was full of admiration for
his new friend and colleague. They coded late into the nights.

There was a bitter reason for Romero’s increased freedom. He was getting a divorce.
Being a twenty-two-year-old Future Rich Person was challenging enough, without the
demands of husbandry and parenthood. His wife didn’t share his love for games and,
in Romero’s mind, was becoming even more depressed. She wanted family dinners, church,
Saturday barbecues—things that Romero was feeling increasingly ill-equipped to provide.

For a while he had tried to make both worlds work, even leaving the office early while
the others stayed behind. But it was never enough. The truth was, Romero didn’t know
if he had enough to give. Though part of him wanted to have the family he never had
as a child, he sometimes felt that he wasn’t programmed to be that kind of husband
and dad. It would be best for everyone, they agreed, if they split up. But Kelly didn’t
just want this; she wanted to split to California to be closer to her family. Romero
felt crushed. At the same time, he knew that he couldn’t handle having the boys live
with him. Instead, he convinced himself he could make long-distance fatherhood work.
Even with several states between them, they would be closer than he ever was with
his dad.

Rather than dwell on his family life,
Romero immersed himself in Gamer’s Edge. Working on the ports had helped Carmack and
Romero realize how they could best work together given their strengths and weaknesses.
Carmack was most interested in programming the guts of the game—what was called the
engine. This integral code told the computer how to display graphics on the screen.
Romero enjoyed making the software tools—essentially the palette they would use to
create characters and environments or “maps” of the game—as well as the game design—how
the game play would unfold, what action would take place, what would make it fun.
It was like yin and yang. While Carmack was exceptionally talented in programming,
Romero was multitalented in art, sound, and design. And while Carmack had played video
games as a kid,
no one
had played as many as Romero. The ultimate coder and the ultimate gamer—together
they were a perfect fit.

But Lane wasn’t fitting in at all. He was still serving as editor of the Gamer’s Edge
project but becoming more distant. Unlike Romero, Lane was not enthused about the
PC. Romero could tell that his old friend was not up to the task. And, as quickly
as he had once decided to befriend Lane, Romero shut him out. In Romero’s eyes, Lane
wasn’t up to the rigors of the death schedule. And Romero didn’t want anything standing
in the way of the team’s profitability. With Carmack, he had everything he needed.
One time when Lane left the room, Romero spun around and told Carmack, “Let’s get
him out of here.”

At the same time,
there was someone Carmack and especially Romero wanted in: Tom Hall. Tom was a twenty-five-year-old
programmer who had been working in the Apple II department since before Romero arrived.
He was also, in Romero’s mind,
fucking hysterical.
Tall and witty, Tom existed in an accelerated state of absurdity, as though nothing
could keep up with the creative output pouring from his mind. His office was covered
in yellow Post-it note reminders and doodles. Every day he had a ridiculous new message
on his computer screen, such as “The Adventures of Squishy and the Amazing Blopmeister.”
When Romero would pass him, Tom would frequently raise an eyebrow and emit an alienlike
chirping sound, then continue on his way. And: he was a gamer.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Tom didn’t have to work nearly as hard as Romero or
Carmack to get into games. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a journalist whom
Tom described as “the Erma Bombeck of Milwaukee,” provided their youngest son with
all the ammunition he needed to pursue his early obsession: an Atari 2600 home gaming
system and, shortly thereafter, an Apple II.

Tom was charmingly odd. He would parade around the house in a Green Bay Packers helmet
and red Converse sneakers. At school, his security blanket came in the form of a brown
paper grocery sack filled with all his drawings and eight-millimeter films. He carried
it everywhere, keeping it beside his desk during class. Eventually he weaned himself
down to a satchel and then, in high school, a small bag. A
Star Wars
nut, he saw the film thirty-three times. He was just as passionate about quirky sports.
He was the state Frisbee golf champion. He also loved origami and domino construction,
building elaborate mazes around his parents’ house. While other kids worshiped pop
stars and athletes, Tom’s hero was Bob Speca: the world domino toppling pro.