Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier’s check for $11,000. The
money was for
a NeXT computer
, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black
cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs’s earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP,
a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs
and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles
for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present
for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack.
The NeXT computer wasn’t the only new spirit ushering in the new year. Times were
changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to
Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush
era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where
a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the
top of the pop charts with their album
Nevermind.
Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views.
Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the
status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop,
in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced
anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D.
The title came after much brainstorming. At first they assumed they had to use something
other than the Wolfenstein name, which had been created by Silas Warner at Muse Software.
Tom banged out a list of options from the strained—The Fourth Reich or Deep in Germany—to
the absurd—Castle Hasselhoff or Luger Me Now. He even played around with some German
titles—Dolchteufel (Devil Dagger), Geruchschlecht (Bad Smell). To their surprise and
relief, they discovered that Muse had gone bankrupt in the mid-1980s and let the trademark
on the Wolfenstein name lapse. It would be Wolfenstein 3-D.
When they ran the idea by Scott, he loved it. He had been pleading with them to do
a 3-D shareware game for months. He too knew Castle Wolfenstein and cracked up at
Romero’s plans for their version: loud guns, fast action, mowing down Nazis. Money
was still rolling in from the Keen games. The second trilogy was out in the shareware
market too. Its numbers were disappointing, about a third of the original, but Scott
knew this was not so much a sign of the game’s appeal as verification of his original
concern: that the retail release of a Keen game for FormGen would cut into his sales
because it left him with only two episodes, not three. Nevertheless, the guys at id
were his stars, and he believed wholeheartedly in their technology and vision. He
guaranteed them $100,000 for Wolfenstein.
Id had no intentions to stop there. Mark Rein, still id’s probationary president,
had scored with FormGen to release two more retail id products. Id was excited but
concerned; FormGen’s first game with them, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Babysitter,
didn’t sell well. Id blamed in part what they thought was a terrible box cover, designed
by a company that had done packages for Lipton tea. But the prospect for another shot
was enticing. Again, it would allow them to earn revenues from two lucrative markets:
shareware and retail. No one, not even Origin and Sierra, was doing this. Though Mark
and FormGen were reluctant to, as they said, “stir up the World War II stuff,” they
agreed to take Wolfenstein retail. The id guys were growing accustomed to getting
their way.
Mitzi enjoyed her new perch
atop Carmack’s spacious black NeXT computer. She stretched out lazily on the monitor,
letting her legs dangle over the screen. Surrounded by empty pizza boxes and Diet
Coke cans, Romero, Carmack, Tom, and Adrian sat at their computers, working on Wolfenstein
3-D. The calmness of the outer world was in stark contrast to the world unfolding
on the screens. Wolfenstein had taken on two imperatives: it would be brutal, as originally
imagined by Romero, and it would be fast, as engineered by Carmack.
Carmack knew he could up the speed and, thus, the immersion—thanks to the leaps he
had made by combining raycasting with texture mapping on Catacomb 3-D. For Wolfenstein,
he didn’t so much take another leap as improve his existing code: cleaning up the
bugs, optimizing the speed, making it more elegant. A key decision was to let the
graphics engine focus on drawing only what the player needed to see. That meant, once
again, drawing the walls but not the ceilings and floors. Also to speed things up,
characters and objects in the game would not be in true 3-D, they would be sprites,
flat images that, if encountered in real life, would look like cardboard cutouts.
Romero, in pure Melvin mode, imagined all the crazy stuff they could do in a game
where the object was, as he said, “to mow down Nazis.” He wanted to have the suspense
of an Apple II game pumped up with the shock and horror of storming a Nazi bunker.
There would be SS soldiers and Hitler. Adrian hit the history books, scanning images
of the German leader to include throughout the game.
But that wasn’t enough. “How about,” Romero suggested, “we throw in guard dogs? Dogs
that you can shoot! Fucking German shepherds!” Adrian cracked up, sketching out a
dog that, in a death animation, could yelp back. “And there should be blood,” Romero
said, “lots of blood, blood like you never see in games. And the weapons should be
lethal but simple: a knife, a pistol, maybe a Gatling gun too.” Adrian sketched as
Romero spoke.
Tom came up with ideas for objects the player could collect through the game. In a
paradigm dating back to the early text-based adventures, the gamer had two essential
missions: to collect and to kill. Tom came up with treasures and crosses for players
to find. There was also the issue of health items. A player would begin with his health
at 100 percent. With every shot, the health would decrease until, when it hit 0 percent,
the player would die. To survive, a player could pick up so-called health items. Tom
wanted these items to be funny; he said, “Why not turkey dinners?”
“Yeah,” Romero agreed, “or even better, how about dog food?” They were having German
shepherds in the game, so what the hell? Tom began cackling at the thought of a player
slurping up dog food. “Or how about this?” Tom added. “When the player gets really
low on health, at like 10 percent, he could run over the bloody guts of a dead Nazi
soldier and suck those up for extra energy.”
“Flllippp slrrrrrp,
” Romero said, making the sounds and wiping his chin while cracking up. “It’s like
human giblets, you can eat up their gibs!”
The work would go late into the night. Carmack and Romero perfectly embodied the two
extremes. While Carmack tweaked his code, Romero experimented with the graphics and
new ways to exploit the tools. Carmack was building the guitar that Romero would bring
to life. But their friendship was not traditional. They didn’t discuss their lives,
their hopes, their dreams. Sometimes, late at night, they would sit side by side,
playing a hovercraft racing game called F-Zero. For the most part, though, their friendship
was in their work, their unbridled pursuit of the game.
Carmack and Romero shared a vision the others didn’t possess. Tom, deep down, was
still closer to Keen, concerned about violence, about being too controversial, too
bloody. Adrian liked the gore; he sketched out dead Nazis lying in pools of blood.
But he still harbored a desire to get back to something more gothic and horrific,
like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion.
Carmack and Romero, however, were in sync. Carmack didn’t so much care about the accoutrements
of the game as he enjoyed Romero’s passion for showing off what his engine could do.
Romero
got
what he was doing—trying to make a sleek, simple, fast game engine. And he was the
one who dreamed up the sleek, simple, fast game to go around it. Romero even began
excising parts of the game just to adhere to that dictum. At first they had programmed
the game so that players could drag and search dead Nazis, as in the original Castle
Wolfenstein. But they didn’t like the outcome.
“Ugh.” Romero groaned as he watched Tom drag a body across the screen. “That’s not
going to help the game be bad ass, it’s slowing the game down. It’s a neat idea, but
when you’re running down hallways and blowing down everything you see, who cares if
you drag shit? We gotta rip that code right out of there. Anything that’s going to
stop us from mowing shit down—get rid of it!”
The brutality was not just a graphic and game play concern, it had to be a matter
of sound too. Id had developed a relationship with an out of town computer game musician
named Bobby Prince. Bobby had worked with Apogee and come highly recommended by Scott
Miller. He had done some work on the Keen games. For Wolfenstein, they needed him
even more badly. The weapons had to sound suitably
killer.
To accomplish this, they would, for the first time, use digital sound. Bobby came
up with a few suggestions, including a staccato rip for the machine gun.
Late one afternoon Romero got ready to play the sound effects for the first time.
The game had really taken shape. On the suggestion of Scott Miller, Carmack had gone
from the 16-color palette of EGA graphics to the new Video Graphics Adapter or VGA,
which allowed 256 colors. Adrian took full advantage of the expanded color range.
He had drawn out soldiers with little helmets and boots. He created a special animation
sequence that would show the soldiers twitching back in pain, blood spurting from
their chests, when they were shot.
Romero loaded up the test portion of the game. He looked down the barrel of his chain
gun as the Nazi approached him. He hit the fire button, and the roaring fire of the
machine blast Bobby had programmed tore through the speakers as the Nazi went flying
back. Romero flew back himself, hands off the keyboard, and fell to the floor laughing,
holding his stomach. It was another moment, a variation on when he saw Dangerous Dave
in Copyright Infringement for the first time.
“You know,” he said, as his laughter finally subsided, “there’s never been another
game like this.”
On screen, the little Nazi bled.
One afternoon
in February 1992, Roberta Williams opened a package. She and her husband, Ken, were
sitting in a gorgeous office in Northern California atop one of the largest empires
in the business, Sierra On-Line. They were among the leaders in the computer game
industry, which had grown from $100 million per year in 1980 to nearly $1 billion.
Their early graphical role-playing games had given way to a slew of titles, all created
around Sierra’s inherent philosophy: building brands by making game designers into
celebrities.
Sierra, as a result, received submissions for games all the time. This day the contents
of the package would catch Roberta’s eye. There was a cover letter from a young programmer
named John Romero. He had heard that she was becoming interested in children’s games
and was including one he and his friends had made. It was doing rather well in the
shareware market, he wrote. It was called Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy!
Roberta and Ken were impressed and requested a meeting. The id guys were awestruck.
They had grown up playing Sierra games; now they were being asked to visit the king
and queen in their lair. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Wolfenstein
was coming into shape. If Sierra made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, they might
strike a deal. They decided to put together a short demo of the game to show the Williamses.
When the id guys showed up at Sierra’s offices, it was clear that they hadn’t left
their apartments for a month. Romero had been growing out his hair. Tom had an unkempt
beard. Carmack had holes in his shirt. They were all in ratty, torn jeans. Before
they met with Ken and Roberta, they were given a tour of the offices. For the guys,
particularly Romero and Tom, it was a tour of the gamers’ hall of fame. Back in a
CD duplication room, they were introduced to Warren Schwader. Romero and Tom looked
at each other and immediately fell to their knees, bowing. “We’re not worthy, we’re
not worthy,” they said. Schwader, they knew, had designed one of their favorite old
Apple II games, Threshold. “Dude!” Romero beamed. “
Threshold!
You are the Daddy!”
But the allure soon wore off. Around the corner Carmack fell into a conversation with
a programmer. As Romero, Tom, and Adrian watched, Carmack chipped away at the programmer’s
work, challenging what to him was an obvious waste of time. When he was through, the
Sierra programmer just sat there, completely belittled by Carmack’s superior skills.
Romero patted Carmack on the back as they walked away. “God,” he said, “you just wiped
them down.” Carmack shrugged modestly. Romero was proud.
The Williamses were not as impressed. The boys struck them as nothing more than highly
talented and highly naÏve kids. When Ken Williams showed up at a fancy restaurant
called Edna’s Elderberry House with this ragtag group of guys in shabby clothes, he
was pulled aside by the maître d’. Williams had to explain that these were important
guests before they were led to a private room with a long oak table and a burning
fire.
The food came, and conversation flowed. Williams prided himself on discovering and
nurturing young talent. But the inexperience of this group, he thought, was palpable.
They didn’t seem to have a business bone in their bodies. When they told Williams
how much they were making on Commander Keen, he blanched. “You’re telling me,” he
said, “you’re making fifty thousand dollars a month just from shareware?”
They showed him the numbers. Scott had upped their royalty to 45 percent. There was
virtually no overhead, they explained. The shareware model let Apogee keep ninety-five
cents for every dollar that came in. “We make the best stuff in shareware,” Romero
proclaimed, “that’s why we’re making so much money. If you think that’s awesome,”
he said, “check this out.”