Carmack’s research into 3-D computer games was on a more intuitive level. Though he
was a fan of science fiction, enamored of
Star Trek
’s Holodeck, his focus was not on chipping away at some grand design of such a virtual
world but, rather, on solving the immediate problem of the next technological advance.
He had been experimenting with 3-D graphics since making his wire-frame MTV logos
on his Apple II. Since then several games had experimented with first-person 3-D points
of view. In 1980, Richard Garriott employed this perspective in his very first role-playing
game, Akalabeth. Two years later an Apple II game from Sirius Software called Wayout
wowed gamers and critics with a first-person maze game. But it was flight simulations,
putting the player in the cockpits of a variety of airplanes, that exploited this
kind of immersion. In 1990, Richard Garriott’s company, Origin, released a space-themed
combat flight simulator called Wing Commander, which became a favorite around the
id lake house.
Carmack figured he could do better. Flight sims, he thought, were painfully slow,
bogged down by their heavy graphics and leaving the player to snail through the game
play. What he and the others preferred was the fast action of arcade games like Defender,
Asteroids, and Gauntlet. While the other guys worked on Rescue Rover and Dangerous
Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Carmack tried to see how he might do something that hadn’t
been done before: create a fast-action game in 3-D.
The problem, he found, was that the PC was not powerful enough to handle such a game.
Carmack read up on the topic but found nothing adequate for his solution. He approached
the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think
outside the box. One of the reasons for a 3-D game’s slow speed was that the computer
had to draw too many surfaces at once. Carmack had an idea. What if he commanded the
computer to draw only a few surfaces at a time, the way one would put blinders on
a horse? Rather than draw, in this case, arbitrary polygons, he designed a program
that would draw only sideways trapezoids—in other words, walls but no ceilings or
floors.
To get the computer to draw at the fastest possible speed, Carmack tried another nontraditional
approach, known as raycasting. Instead of drawing out a large slab of graphics, which
required a lot of memory and power, raycasting instructed the computer to paint a
thin vertical strip of graphics at a time, based on the player’s point of view. The
bottom line: raycasting meant speed.
Carmack’s final challenge was to add characters in the 3-D world. The solution was
to incorporate simple though convincing graphical icons or sprites. Wing Commander
had used a calculation that told the computer to reduce or scale the size of the sprite
depending on the player’s location. By combining these so-called scaled sprites with
his limited polygons and raycasting, Carmack was able to brew up a fast 3-D world.
Carmack emerged from his research after six weeks, two weeks longer than he had spent
on any other game. When Romero saw the technology, he was once again impressed by
the Whiz Kid. They discussed what kind of game could best exploit the new engine.
They settled on a futuristic world in which the player, driving a tank, had to rescue
people from nuclear Armageddon. Released in April 1991, Hovertank was the first fast-action,
first-person shooter for the computer. Id had invented a genre.
Despite Hovertank’s innovations, it was no Commander Keen. The game looked rather
ugly with its big, solid-colored walls. But it included id’s increasingly ghoulish
touches. Adrian relished the chance to draw a cast of nuclear-mutated beasts reduced
to puddles of blood. Like the Yorps in Keen, the puddles would linger through the
game, so if a player returned to a spot he would see the remnants of his carnage.
As May began, id Software continued to innovate its games and expand its business,
returning specifically to its first emerging brand, Commander Keen. To fulfill a game
for Softdisk, id decided to make a new episode called Keen Dreams. Though they had
experimented with first-person 3-D gaming in Hovertank, they wanted to preserve Keen’s
side-scrolling integrity while adding something new. An obvious choice was to create
a more compelling sense of moving through a landscape, for example, allowing the foreground
and background to move at different speeds. This effect was known as parallax scrolling.
In the past, a character might run past a static forest. In a parallax-scrolling game,
the trees would move very slowly while the character ran past. It seemed more real.
Again Carmack was faced with the limits of PC technology. After a few attempts, he
realized that there was no way to create parallax scrolling in a convincing manner.
Since the computers were too slow to draw a moving foreground
and
background, Carmack decided to fudge it. He wrote a program that could temporarily
save or cache an image on the screen so that it didn’t have to be redrawn every time
a character passed by. To create the illusion of depth, he realized that he could
temporarily save two images together, say, a little section of a sidewalk and a little
chunk of a tree in the background, for quick recall. Once again he had pushed the
graphics of the PC into a place no one had gone this quickly before. Keen Dreams was
completed by the end of the month.
In June 1991, id began work on the next trilogy of games for Scott Miller and Apogee.
Keen 4, 5, and 6 would be released in the same manner as the first set: one initial
chunk uploaded as shareware to tease players into purchasing the whole group. At this
point Apogee was comfortably ruling not just the shareware gaming world but the
entire
shareware world. The Keen games were at the top of the charts, bringing in close
to sixty thousand dollars per month. If they followed the same plan, Scott assured
them, they would earn at least as much.
Tom wrote the story line of this trilogy, Goodbye Galaxy. This time around, Commander
Keen discovers a plot to blow up the galaxy and must head off in his Bean-with-Bacon
MegaRocket to save the world. First, he has to tend to his parents, whom he temporarily
immobilized with a stun gun. The stun gun was a new and necessary addition to the
game, Tom thought. After the first Keen trilogy, Tom began opening letters of complaint
from concerned parents who didn’t like the dead Yorps corpses hanging around on screen.
Why couldn’t the characters just disappear when they die, like in most games?
Tom still wanted kids to see the effects of their violence, but he didn’t want to
stir up unnecessary controversy. He decided that, beginning with this game, the creatures
would simply be stunned when hit. They wouldn’t die; they would just remain frozen,
circles of stars surrounding their heads.
By August, id had a working prototype, or beta, of Commander Keen 4: Secret of the
Oracle. At the time Romero had met a smooth-talking gamer in Canada named Mark Rein.
Mark had been a big fan of the first Keens and asked Romero if they needed anyone
to play-test their next games. Romero said they did and sent Mark a beta of Keen 4.
At the end was a teaser description of the next episode, “The Armageddon Machine,”
which promised the game would be, among other things, “more fun than real life!”
Mark replied with a detailed list of bugs, impressing Romero. Mark wasn’t just a gamer,
he was an aspiring businessman who was so sure he could get id some deals that he
offered to fly himself down to Shreveport to meet with the guys. Romero, from the
moment he saw the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement demo, had been looking
for ways to expand the business. Maybe Mark could fill that void. Carmack was making
this great technology, after all, so why not have someone in the company who would
exploit it for all it was worth?
Carmack didn’t jump at the suggestion. As he was fond of pointing out, he wasn’t interested
in running a big company, he just wanted to program games. But he recognized that
without Romero id wouldn’t have been in the business in the first place. He agreed
to bring Mark Rein on as id’s probationary president for six months.
Within weeks Mark had scored a deal to release a retail version of Commander Keen
with a company called FormGen. He raved about the opportunity for id to cash in on
the commercial marketplace. They were going to make three games anyway; all they had
to do was take one of them and release it with FormGen as retail. For id, it seemed
like a great idea, a second way to cash in. They could release one Keen in the shareware
market and another in retail.
Id had no contract with Apogee, but they called Scott Miller to tell him of the opportunity.
Their relationship was going well. Earlier in the summer, Scott had brought a coterie
of game developers to visit at the boys’ invitation. Romero had decided to host a
seminar to encourage other game developers to license id’s technology. Licensing made
sense, Romero thought, because Carmack’s technology was clearly so impressive. Why
not let others
pay
to use it themselves? Over a weekend the id guys showed how the Keen engine could
be used by creating an impromptu PC version of Pac-Man that they dubbed Wac-Man. They
completed it in a night and sold their first license to Apogee.
When the id guys told Scott later about the FormGen opportunity, he was dismayed.
“This is a big problem,” he said to them. “You’re breaking the magic formula of the
trilogy. If you release a shareware game and don’t let people buy the full trilogy,
it’s not going to sell as well.” It’s too late, they told him. They had already signed
the deal.
By August 1991,
id Software’s growing ambitions were leading them not only into new business, new
games, and new technologies but to a new home. Tom and Romero wanted out of Shreveport.
Despite the fun days at the lake house, they were getting tired of the depressing
environment. Romero hated driving past all the poor people fishing for food off the
Cross Lake bridge. He had another motivation too: a girlfriend, Beth McCall.
Beth worked at Softdisk in the shipping department. A former debutante from New Orleans,
she was bright and cheerful, and laughed at all Romero’s silly jokes. The relationship
was light and fun, just the tonic Romero felt he needed after his divorce. Though
his relationship with his ex-wife was strained, he still felt close to his sons. With
Beth, he was able to fill a void. Best of all, she wanted out of Shreveport too.
Tom had an idea where to go. He missed the change of the seasons and culture of his
college town and begged them to relocate to Wisconsin. Romero agreed to accompany
Tom to check out Madison, a college town. They returned convinced that this was the
place to go. Their other lake house roommate, Jason Blochowiak, had gone to school
in Madison and quickly offered to leave Softdisk and come along. The other guys didn’t
think Jason was quite motivated enough; he had once commented how he made more money
from his investments than from his computer programming. He drove a van with a vanity
license plate that read autocrat. But Carmack thought he was a smart, talented programmer
and was happy to have him.
Carmack was fine with going to Madison; as he often told the others, he didn’t care
where he was as long as he could code. Adrian was much more reluctant. Shreveport,
after all, was his lifelong home. Though he explored dark worlds in his art, in real
life he craved stability. Romero begged and pleaded, promising Adrian that their apartments
would be only the best. After much convincing from his friends and family, Adrian
agreed to go. Jay, however, to everyone’s disappointment, was not on board for this
ride. Feeling obliged to complete his projects at Softdisk, and leery of risking a
start-up venture, he chose to stay behind.
On a warm morning in September, the id guys loaded up their cars and drove away from
the lake house one last time. The computers in their trunks were their own.
SIX
Green and Pissed
For once,
reality didn’t live up to Romero’s hype. The id guys arrived at the apartment in Madison
on a gray day in September 1991 to find it considerably less fun than he and Tom had
described. They were in a sprawling complex in which every building looked the same.
Compared with their Shreveport house, it was a dump: no lake, no yard, no boat. When
they walked down the hall they didn’t pass trees, they passed two scary-looking guys
dealing drugs.
At least they had some semblance of an id office: a three-bedroom apartment in the
complex. Because Carmack didn’t care, he agreed to live in the upstairs bedroom while
all the other guys got their own apartments elsewhere in the complex. Adrian, who
was instantly miserable being out of his element, had even more problems because his
apartment was on the far side of the development. While the other guys walked across
a parking lot to get to the id office, Adrian had to drive.
But Romero was delighted. He was starting fresh: he had a new girlfriend and new games.
Tom shared in the enthusiasm, happy to be back home, refreshed by the collegiate environment.
The only real sore point for the two of them was Jason, who had become Carmack’s friend.
He seemed to be on a completely different wavelength. Still, Carmack wasn’t ready
to let him go.
Despite their mixed feelings about their new situation, the id team buckled down to
finish the second Commander Keen trilogy. After their long months working together,
the team had formed into a collective personality. Romero and Carmack were now in
a perfect groove, with Carmack improving the new Keen engine—the code that made the
graphics—while Romero worked on the editor and tools—the software used to create the
game elements. Nothing could distract them. One night Beth and a few other women showed
up at the apartment. The guys were hard at work. Beth did her best to attract Romero’s
attention. When nothing elicited a response, she threw up her hands and said, “Why
can’t we just have our men come home and have sex with us?”
“Because we’re working,” Romero said. Carmack laughed.
Tom was just as dedicated, feeling particularly giddy about the success of the project,
which inspired him to new heights of creative design. He populated Keen’s world with
gun-toting potato men, tongue-wagging poisonous mushrooms and, his favorite, the Dopefish—a
green fish with big dopey eyes and giant front teeth.
Adrian, as usual, didn’t share Tom’s glee. But he put all his efforts into bringing
the silly characters to life. His artwork was taking on more color and precision,
rivaling that of the best games on the market. He was also finding a way to vent his
mounting frustrations with Tom, Keen, and Madison. One time he played around with
the Commander Keen image, creating a graphic of Keen with his eyes gouged out and
his throat ripped open. Adrian had a good laugh switching between the images of Keen
all happy and chipper and Keen sliced and diced.
With the work on the new Keens progressing and checks continuing to pour in, Carmack
was able to go back to his pet project: 3-D first-person shooters. The latest step
was inspired by something he had heard from Romero. Carmack and Romero had developed
another aspect of their collaboration. Though Carmack was gifted at creating game
graphics, he had little interest in keeping up with the gaming world. He was never
a player, really, he only made the games, just as he was the Dungeon Master but not
a player of D&D. Romero, by contrast, kept up with
everything,
all the new games and developers. It was through one of these developers that he
first learned about an important new development called “texture mapping.”
Texture mapping meant applying a detailed pattern or texture to a tile of graphics
on the computer screen. Instead of drawing a solid color on the back wall of a game,
the computer would draw a pattern of bricks. Romero heard about texture mapping from
Paul Neurath, whose company, Blue Sky Productions, was working on a game called Ultima
Underworld, which would be published by Richard Garriott’s Origin company. Neurath
told Romero that they were applying texture mapping to shapes or polygons in a three-dimensional
world. Cool, Romero thought. When he hung up the phone, he spun his chair to Carmack
and said, “Paul said he’s doing a game using texture mapping.”
“Texture mapping?” Carmack replied, then took a few seconds to spin the concept around
in his head. “I can do that.”
The result was Catacomb 3-D, which incorporated texture-mapped walls of gray bricks
covered in green slime. To play, the gamer ran through the maze, shooting fireballs
out of a hand that was drawn in the lower center of the screen, as if one was looking
down on one’s own arm, reaching into the computer. By including the hand, id Software
was making a subtle but strong point to its audience: You are not just playing the
game, you’re inhabiting it.
The game ended up being published six months before Neurath’s Ultima Underworld. Though
Ultima Underworld, a role-playing adventure, received more attention because of the
Garriott connection, together the games took the 3-D gaming experience to a new, more
immersive place. When Scott Miller saw Catacomb 3-D, he had one thing to say: “We
need to do something like this as shareware.”
As Thanksgiving 1991 neared,
life in Madison was turning increasingly ugly. The drug-dealing neighbors had been
arrested after the cops pounded down their door.
Someone siphoned gasoline from their cars. Adrian was particularly miserable
because he lost the cap to his water bed and couldn’t find a replacement. He spent
months in a sleeping bag on the floor. Carmack had been sleeping on the floor for
months too, though by choice. He simply didn’t feel he needed a mattress. Finally
Romero got fed up with the situation and bought his partner a mattress, leaving it
for him on his floor. “Dude,” he said, “it’s time you got a good night’s sleep.”
Madison was growing cold—really, really cold. Snow dumped from the sky. The entire
parking lot of the complex was glazed over in ice. Every afternoon when he’d wake
up, Adrian would have to sit in his car for twenty minutes warming the engine so he
could drive to the other side of the development. One time they all went out to buy
a pizza but ran back to their cars without the pie. They were so cold they decided
to leave the pizza and drive home. No one was willing to run back inside.
The result was that they barely left their apartment. Though they were used to spending
endless hours together in a small room, in Shreveport at least they had the
opportunity
to go outside and kneeboard around the lake. Here they killed even more time playing
Dungeons and Dragons. In an effort to expand the game, they even drew up flyers that
they posted around town.
At the top of the page, Adrian had drawn each of the id guys as his character in the
game—Tom with a beard and a large ax, Romero with a huge sword, Adrian standing high
with a belt that had the word
die
on a cloth, and Carmack, dressed as a wizard, holding the rule book. Next to them
was a blank stick figure with a question mark for a head. The flyer read:
“wanted: cleric and/or thief!
Party playing in an awesome, character and event-driven campaign. . . . Just moved
our business here, need one or two new players. . . . Things you will enjoy in this
campaign: character interaction, good balance, cool stuff happening, pizza. Things
you won’t be doing in this campaign: Dominating the world.”
Tensions began to rise, however, about who was trying to dominate the apartment. Adrian
was fed up with Tom and Romero bopping around making alien noises and imitating the
characters from Keen. Even Carmack was growing tired of their antics. Worse was the
trouble with Jason, who was becoming something of a fifth wheel. Carmack was still
defending him, though; so instead of firing him they assigned him to bang out a fast,
easy game by himself that could fulfill an obligation on the Softdisk contract.
With the Softdisk game being handled by Jason and the second Keen trilogy wrapping
up, id could focus on its next project for Apogee. At this point, a hierarchy had
been established. Carmack was the technology leader, coming up with the latest engines
with which they could construct a game. Tom, as creative director, was in charge of
spearheading the game stuff that would go around Carmack’s technology. Romero fit
nicely between the two, able to help Carmack with tools and at the same time goof
around with Tom on creative ideas. Adrian would fulfill their orders for artwork,
injecting, when he could, his own menacing visions.
When the four sat down late one night to discuss a new game, those roles unexpectedly
began to shift. The trouble started with Tom. Buoyed by the blockbuster success of
the first trilogy months before, he had long imagined doing three trilogies, similar
to the plan his hero George Lucas had mapped out for the
Star Wars
films. But Carmack’s technology was clearly headed toward another idea: a fast-action,
first-person game. Keen was neither fast-action nor first-person; it was a side-scrolling
adventure like Mario. It was implicit that the next game, at least, would call for
something else.
Tom was disappointed, but he shifted into high gear, brainstorming for a new first-person
game. He had an immediate idea. “Hey,” he said, “remember in the movie
The Thing
when the guy comes out of the cage where the dogs are going insane from that alien,
and everyone asks him what’s in there? And he says, ‘I don’t know, but it’s weird
and pissed off’? Well, that’s just like a video game, because in video games you have
no idea why you’re shooting the monsters other than that they’re green and pissed
off. Why not do a game like that? Something about these mutant lab experiments you
have to hunt down?” He started jotting down potential titles at his PC as he read
them aloud to the group: “Mutants from Hell!” “Die, Mutants, Die!” “3-Demons!” “Texture-Mapped
Terence and the Green Shits!” Or, he concluded, they could just cut to the chase and
call the game “It’s Green and Pissed.”
Everyone laughed. “Yeah,” Romero said, “imagine some game dude wandering into a computer
store and saying to the clerk, ‘Um, excuse me, but do you have It’s Green and Pissed?’”
Despite their approval, Tom quickly retreated from his idea. He didn’t want to be
controversial for controversy’s sake.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Romero said. “That’s so hackneyed. That’s something you always
hear of. It’s like ‘yet again the mutated lab full of bullshit, blah blah blah.’ We
need to do something cool. You know, it’d be really fucking cool if we made a remake
of Castle Wolfenstein and did it in 3-D.”
Wolfenstein! It was a word that struck an immediate chord with both Carmack and Tom,
who, like Romero and every other hard-core Apple II gamer, had grown up playing the
classic action title created by the legendary Silas Warner in the early 1980s. They
immediately
got
Romero’s vision. Wolfenstein was perfect for Carmack’s technology because it was,
at its core, a maze-based shooter. The player had to run through all these labyrinths
fighting Nazis and collecting treasure, then doing away with Hitler. Despite the game’s
blocky, low-resolution graphics, it was unique in its implication of a larger virtual
world. When Castle Wolfenstein was released, most games for computers or arcades,
like Pong, existed on one static screen. But in Wolfenstein the conceit was that each
screen the player saw represented one room of a large castle. Each room was a maze
of walls. When the player ran through the maze, the screen would change, showing a
new room. Though there was no scrolling, the
feeling
was one of true exploration. Part of the appeal was that the player never knew what
awaited in the next room: often it was a Nazi screaming in German.
Encouraged by everyone’s sympathetic reaction, Romero exploded with ideas. In the
original Wolfenstein, the characters could search the bodies of dead soldiers. “How
cool would that be to have in first-person 3-D?” he said. “You could go through and,
like, drag the bodies around a corner and rifle through their pockets!
Prsshh prsshh prsshh!
” he said, imitating the sounds. “We have this opportunity to do something totally
new here, something fast and texture-mapped. If we can make the graphics look great
and fast, and make the sound cool and loud, and make the game explosively fun, then
we’re going to have a winner, especially with the theme.”
The computer game industry was still meek, after all. SimCity, a hit game, challenged
players to build and micromanage a virtual town. Civilization, another success, was
a heady Risk-like strategy game based on famous historical battles—blood not included.
Wolfenstein could be like nothing the industry had ever seen. “It will be just shocking,”
Romero concluded, “a totally shocking game.”
Carmack gave his blessing. Once behind an idea, Romero was always charismatically
convincing. And Carmack was growing to appreciate Romero’s talent for taking his technology
into a new world, a place he himself would never have conceived. Adrian, who wasn’t
familiar with the original Wolfenstein, was eager to do anything other than Keen,
and the idea of 3-D art intrigued him. Tom, though stung by the rejection of Keen,
assumed that they would return to his games after this one. He was still the company’s
game designer, after all. So, true to his conciliatory nature, he was willing to go
along for the ride. It was a ride all the more immersive because of Carmack’s technology
and all the more wild because, for the first time in id’s brief history, it was being
steered by Romero.
On a cold winter day
,
Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison
snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice.
Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he’d sold the MGB long before. It
was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary,
shut Tom and Romero’s antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.