“Did someone say Wolfenstein?” asked a guy in the pool nearby. He nudged his friend.
“We love that game!”
The id guys looked at them dubiously. But the gamers were for real. They rushed over
to the hot tub and began raving about the game. It was a striking moment, especially
for Romero, who had spent so many years being a fan himself. Now here he was, sitting
in a hot tub under giant palm trees, surrounded by a theme park, money flowing, being
treated like a legend. He could deal.
As their success grew,
Carmack’s and Romero’s personalities came into even sharper contrast. Carmack sank
deeper into his technology; Romero, deeper into game play.
Tom documented
their differences in a hint manual he wrote for Wolfenstein 3-D. He characterized
Romero as the ultimate player and Carmack the ultimate technician—or, as he put it,
the Surgeon and Engine John.
“John Romero,” he wrote, “at this point in time, is the world’s best Wolfenstein player.
His current record for getting through all of episode one in Bring ’Em On mode—five
minutes, twenty seconds! That’s not going for anything but the shortest, fastest path
to each elevator. We call him The Surgeon, after the way he surgically takes out guys
and keeps going. He welcomes all challengers to his record. John’s advice: ‘Play with
the mouse and keyboard and use the up arrow and right shift to run most of the time.
Don’t sit and wait for the enemy to come—charge and lay waste to them before they
know what hit ’em. There’s no room for wimps in World Class Wolfenstein play.’ ”
Further down he described the work of Carmack. “
Engine John,
” he wrote. “We call the part of a program that actually gets the graphics onto the
screen ‘the engine.’ The cool, texture-mapped engine for Wolfenstein 3-D was written
by our resident technical ‘soopah genius,’ John Carmack. However, he’s already disgusted
with the technology. He’s excited about his new ideas on rendering holographic worlds.”
It was true, Carmack was over his previous accomplishment, just as he was over his
past. Right now the next obvious step was for him to further enrich his virtual worlds.
The spirit was in the air. In May 1992, when Wolfenstein was released, an author named
Neal Stephenson published a book called
Snow Crash,
which described an inhabitable cyberspace world called the Metaverse. Science fiction,
however, wasn’t inspiring Carmack’s progress; it was just his science. Technology
was improving. So were his skills.
The opportunity to experiment came during the development of Spear of Destiny, the
commercial spin-off of Wolfenstein that id was now making for FormGen. The game was
named for the mythical spear used to kill Christ, an object later sought by Hitler
for its supposed supernatural powers. In the game, Hitler steals the spear and B.J.
must fight to win it back. FormGen’s original concerns over violence had faded with
Wolfenstein’s success, so id was free to continue on its gory path.
Because Spear of Destiny was built using the original Wolfenstein engine, Carmack
could work on new technology while the rest of the guys completed the game. At first,
he fiddled with countless little experiments, using art resources from the existing
games. He played around with making a racing game like F-Zero, the hovercraft title
he played now and then with Romero. Carmack covered the floor of his computer screen
with an angular blue matrix of lines. Then he started laying down images that together
would make up roads. The only digital images around were big banners of Hitler from
Wolfenstein, so he put those down back to back, making a highway of Hitlers surrounded
by a sprawling web. Carmack could lose himself in the abstract mathematical imagery
of this world, working on the acceleration of movement, the sense of speed, velocity,
decline.
Soon his experiments became part of a deal for a game called Shadowcaster, an upcoming
title from a small game development company named Raven. The id guys had met the owners
of Raven while living in Wisconsin because they were the only other game company in
town. Run by two brothers, Brian and Steven Raffel, Raven had started making games
for the Amiga game console. Romero was so impressed by their work that he wanted to
cofinance their development of a PC game for Apogee. Raven turned him down, saying
that they weren’t interested in the PC at the time. But they stayed in touch. Now
they had a contract with Electronic Arts to make a PC game after all. Id suggested
a deal: let Carmack make the engine for a cut of the profits. Everyone agreed. Carmack
got busy.
Others in the office weren’t quite as immersed. Everyone but Romero, it seemed, was
burned out on Wolfenstein. Adrian was tired of churning out realistic Nazi images.
He began hanging out more with Kevin, who was now collaborating with him. Tom, meanwhile,
was getting increasingly frustrated with the design direction of the games. On occasion
he would pull Romero aside and ask him when they were going to start working on the
next Keen trilogy. Romero would tell him that it was still on the table, but privately
he was getting tired of the badgering. Tom was clearly not motivated to work on Spear.
Romero tried to motivate him as best he could, telling Tom to think about that nice
new Acura he was going to buy when all the money rolled in. Other times they’d just
take the easy way out: leaving their work altogether to kick-punch each other in Street
Fighter II.
The more bored Tom got, the more they played. And since Tom was bored much of the
time, the games were lasting longer into the night. Downstairs, Carmack was trying
to focus on Shadowcaster. He was really on to something here, he could see it, the
Right Thing, something different unfolding on his screen, but the distractions were
getting worse. After months of shutting out the paper fights and answering machine
messages and assorted screams, he finally gave way. Carmack stood up and began to
unplug his machine. Everyone else stopped what he was doing and watched. “I think
I’m going to get more done doing this by myself in my apartment,” Carmack said. He
picked up his stealth black NeXT machine and walked out the door. He wouldn’t return
for weeks.
When Spear of Destiny came out,
on September 18, 1992, it further cemented id’s fame and fortune. Once again they
won the shareware awards for best entertainment software. They were also winning continued
accolades from the press as well as their peers. At the annual Computer Game Developers
Conference, an executive from Electronic Arts spoke at a marketing workshop about
how Wolfenstein had become such a sensation with no marketing at all. Scott Miller
was the first to agree. But the orders were rolling in. The conventional wisdom, at
the time, was that at best 1 to 2 percent of the people who downloaded the shareware
version would actually pay for the game. To make matters worse, there was nothing
stopping someone from buying the game and simply copying it for friends. Despite all
these forces, the sales continued to soar. Id was getting checks totaling $150,000
per month.
And the opportunities were coming in from really unlikely places. The most unlikely
of all: Nintendo. Despite having turned id away when they tried to sell Nintendo on
a PC version of Mario, the company had changed its tune. Id was paid $100,000 to port
Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo machine. But Nintendo had one condition: tone the
game down. Nintendo was a family system, and they wanted a family version of the game.
This meant, first of all, getting rid of the blood. Second, they didn’t like the fact
that players could shoot dogs. Why not substitute something else, Nintendo suggested,
like rats? This being Nintendo, id agreed.
Even more ironic was an offer from a company called Wisdom Tree, makers of religious-themed
games. One day a representative called Jay to inquire about licensing the Wolfenstein
engine to make a game based on the story of Noah’s Ark. They wanted a first-person
3-D version in which the player was running around the ark and hurling apples and
vegetables to keep the animals in order. Jay had a good laugh. Nintendo, he knew,
didn’t allow any kind of religious imagery in a game, whether Satan or Noah. But Wisdom
Tree had plans of its own: putting the game out independently as a rogue title for
the Super Nintendo. Jay agreed to license them the technology.
For the time being, though, there was something more important to attend to: Carmack’s
technology. He returned to the id apartment with the results of his labors on the
Shadowcaster engine. It was, everyone immediately saw, quite a leap. There were two
noticeable firsts: diminished lighting and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. Diminished
lighting meant that, as in real life, distant vistas would recede into shadows. In
Wolfenstein, every room was brightly lit, with no variation in hue. But, as any painter
knows, light is what brings a picture to life. Carmack was making the world alive.
For greater immersion, he had also learned how to apply textures to the floors and
ceilings, as well as add variable heights to the walls. The speed was about half that
of Wolfenstein, but since this was an adventure game, built on exploration, it seemed
appropriate to have a steadier pace. The leaps didn’t come easily to Carmack. It took
a hefty amount of time for him to figure out how to get just the right perspective
down for the floors. But his diligence and self-imposed isolation had paid off in
a big way. He even had slopes on the floors, so the player could feel like he was
running up or downhill. Kevin spent about twenty minutes just running up and over
a little hill in the game. It was incredible. And, it was clear, it was time for id
to turn this technology into their next game.
With Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny done,
everyone, particularly Tom, was ready to move on to different subject matter. The
last two games had drained him. Blocky maze games and shooters were nothing like Keen,
and he was anxious to return to his pet project, to finish his long-awaited third
trilogy. Carmack, to his delight, seemed to go along with the idea. He even described
how great it’d be to see the Yorps dancing around in three dimensions.
There was another idea on the table too:
Aliens.
Everyone at id was a huge fan of this sci-fi movie. They thought it would make a
great game. After some research, Jay found that the rights were available. He thought
they could get a deal. But then they decided against it. They didn’t want some big
movie company telling them what they could and couldn’t put in their game. The technology
Carmack had come up with was way too impressive to compromise, they thought. So it
was back to the brainstorming.
To Tom’s dismay, the Keen 3-D argument didn’t go far. Carmack’s technology was too
fast and brutal for another kids’ game, they all said. Tom looked to Romero, his friend
and sidekick, but even he clearly didn’t want to do the game. The computer bit in
Romero’s head flipped off for Keen. It wasn’t surprising. Wolfenstein, after all,
had originated with Romero, and clearly he preferred its gore to the cutesiness of
Keen. Tom knew how Adrian felt. Even Carmack, who had once shown interest in Keen
3-D, had moved on to another idea, something about as far removed from Keen as possible:
demons.
Carmack, of course, had a long history with demons. There were the demons of Catholic
school, the demons Romero had summoned in their Dungeons and Dragons game, the demons
who’d destroyed the D&D world. Now it was time for them to make another appearance.
Here was this amazing new technology, so why not have a game about demons versus technology,
Carmack said, where the player is using high-tech weapons to defeat beasts from hell?
Romero loved the idea. It was something no one had done before. Kevin and Adrian agreed,
snickering at the potential for sick, twisted art, something in the spirit of their
favorite B movie,
Evil Dead II.
In fact, they all agreed, that was what the game could be like: a cross between
Evil Dead II
and
Aliens,
horror and hell, blood and science.
All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from
The Color of Money,
the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler.
In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue
in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks.
Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this
player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this
next game, they might spring upon the world.
“In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
EIGHT
Summon the Demons
“
Ggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwlllll!!”
It was a scream from hell—a throaty cry, desperate, almost underwater, like somebody
gargling blood. Worse, it was coming from right next door to the new office the id
guys had christened Suite 666.
Once id had decided to spring upon the world with Doom, they’d relocated to this suitably
dark workplace: a seven-story, black-windowed, cube-shaped building called the Town
East Tower. The Tower was, like the gamers themselves, an anomaly in the suburban
cowboy domain of Mesquite. On either side of the bordering Lyndon B. Johnson Highway
were the consumer biospheres indigenous to the area: Big Billy Barrett’s Used Cars,
Sheplers Western Store, and the city’s biggest attraction, the Mesquite Rodeo. Though
the Tower housed ordinary offices of lawyers and truck driving schools, compared with
the rest of town, the stealth cube looked like it had dropped from outer space.
And now it sounded like someone was birthing an alien in the dentist’s suite next
door. In actuality, it was a patient who needed an emergency tracheotomy—which the
dentist had performed himself. The screams of patients and drills would become a regular
backdrop of life at id. For a group of guys making a game about demons, they sounded
just right.
In fact,
everything
felt right for id that fall of 1992. Wolfenstein and Spear of Destiny were the talk
of the computer and shareware magazines. Such accolades positioned id, and its publisher,
Apogee, as nothing less than the heroes of the shareware movement. The two companies
dominated the shareware charts with two Commander Keen titles, Wolfenstein 3-D, and
Apogee’s own original game—a side-scrolling shooter starring a brash, Schwarzenegger-style
hero called Duke Nukem—occupying the top four positions. The press declared Apogee
one of “the most remarkable, if unheralded success stories
in the entertainment software industry. . . . [Apogee] is ready to confront the Big
Boys.”
One of the only companies, it seemed, not caught up in the fanfare over Apogee was
id. The guys believed that Scott Miller, despite their friendship, had not been fulfilling
his responsibilities. This information came from Shawn Green, an Apogee employee whom
Romero had befriended since Keen’s release. Shawn was a hard-core gamer and aspiring
programmer from Garland, Texas. With long hair and a lust for loud rock music, he’d
grown up as an outcast in his conservative town—required to attend night school because
he refused to cut his hair. At Apogee, Shawn toyed with people who would call in to
complain about killing dogs in Wolfenstein by explaining that “you can kill people
too.”
He told Romero that there were more serious complaints—calls from people who could
not get through to order id’s games. Apparently, many of the Apogee lackeys spent
their days engaged in rubber band fights. Many were simply young students Scott had
hired by putting up flyers in computer stores that said, “Do you like to play games?
Can you handle talking on the phone and playing games all day for six bucks an hour?”
To make matters worse, there was no computer network. Orders were scrawled on scraps
of paper and then jammed on metal spikes.
Kevin Cloud, who was emerging as one of the more business-minded members of id, tried
calling Apogee himself and found that he couldn’t get through. Something had to be
done. Sure Scott was their friend, and he’d given them their start, but now he was
unnecessary. Why give up 50 percent of their sales when they could do the self-publish
completely on their own? Doom would surely be as big as, if not bigger than, Wolfenstein.
Jay, Tom, Adrian, and especially Romero—who, from the moment he suggested they leave
Softdisk, had always been looking for ways to grow the business—agreed. The only dissonant
voice was Carmack’s.
In an increasingly stark opposition to Romero, Carmack expressed a minimalist point
of view with regard to running their business. As he often told the guys, all he cared
about was being able to work on his programs and afford enough pizza and Diet Coke
to keep him alive. He had no interest in running a big company. The more business
responsibilities they had—things like order fulfillment and marketing—the more they
would lose their focus: making great games.
Jay assured him that life would only get better. “We will truly become independent,”
he said. “We’ll rely on nobody. We need to create our own opportunities. We don’t
wait for them to knock. We open the door. We grab opportunity by the scruff of the
neck and pull it through.” Carmack could be left alone to work on his technology.
Ultimately, he agreed. Scott had to go.
Scott took the news in stride. In fact, he had suspected for some time that id would
jump ship. He felt grateful that the relationship had lasted as long as it did. The
id games had helped put Apogee on top and buy Scott and his partner, George Broussard,
nice sports cars. By this time id was also far from the only company making successful
games for Apogee. Scott was continuing to publish many other authors, such as Tim
Sweeney, a gifted programmer from Maryland who churned out popular titles under his
company, Epic MegaGames. Apogee’s own title, Duke Nukem, was number one on the shareware
charts, right above Wolfenstein, with a sequel on the way. Though Scott didn’t want
to lose id, he was confident he’d survive.
Scott Miller wasn’t the only one to go before id began working on Doom. Mitzi would
suffer a similar fate. Carmack’s cat had been a thorn in the side of the id employees,
beginning with the days of her overflowing litter box back at the lake house. Since
then she had grown more irascible, lashing out at passersby and relieving herself
freely around his apartment. The final straw came when she peed all over a brand-new
leather couch that Carmack had bought with the Wolfenstein cash. Carmack broke the
news to the guys.
“Mitzi was having a net negative impact on my life,” he said. “I took her to the animal
shelter. Mmm.”
“What?” Romero asked. The cat had become such a sidekick of Carmack’s that the guys
had even listed her on the company directory as his significant other—and now she
was just
gone
? “You know what this means?” Romero said. “They’re going to put her to sleep! No
one’s going to want to claim her. She’s going down! Down to Chinatown!”
Carmack shrugged it off and returned to work. The same rule applied to a cat, a computer
program or, for that matter, a person. When something becomes a problem, let it go
or, if necessary, have it surgically removed.
Tom didn’t like
what he saw the moment he set foot inside the black cube. Compared with the creative
boiler room atmosphere of the lake house and apartments, the new id domain felt isolated
and detached. Everyone would have his own office. Everyone, it turned out, except
Tom.
On the first day, each guy chose his space. Carmack and Romero took side-by-side offices,
while Adrian and Kevin, who were growing increasingly close, decided to share a space.
Tom liked an open corner spot in a large room with a window. “This would be a great
office area,” he said, “we just need to put some walls up.” The rest agreed. But the
walls were slow to come. Whenever Tom asked Jay about it, Jay would say they were
on their way. Out of humor and frustration, Tom put down two long strips of masking
tape where the walls of what he called his creative corner would go.
Those weren’t the only invisible barriers around. Romero seemed to be pulling away
or, as Tom had often joked, flipping his bit from the moment they moved. Tom would
sit at his desk behind his tape and watch Romero laughing down the hall with Adrian
and Kevin. It felt sad to him, the inability to connect. Some of this, he thought,
surely had to do with their emerging creative differences. There seemed to be a widening
chasm between the factions of design and technology. It started the moment Romero
chose Wolfenstein—a fast, brutal game that would emulate Carmack’s graphics engine—over
a more robust, character-driven world like Keen. Tom was still id’s game designer,
but he didn’t feel like he was designing what he wanted at all. Yet he held out hope
that things might prove different for Doom.
The early meetings suggested that they might. The discussions took place in a conference
room overlooking the LBJ Highway through black Venetian blinds. Everyone sat around
a large black table. Over pizza they brainstormed about Carmack’s demons from hell
idea. They all agreed on making a fast-action game that had the sci-fi suspense of
Aliens
combined with the demonic B-movie horror of
Evil Dead II.
But Tom, who maintained the role of creative director, was determined not just to
make another plotless first-person shooter. In Wolfenstein there was no emotion, no
feeling for the people getting blown away. Tom, who had left dead Yorps in Keen to
impart a truer representation of death, wanted to bolster Doom with a more gripping
kind of depth, something cinematic.
“How about we tell this story of scientists on this moon at the butt-end of space,”
he said, “and they’re studying this anomaly and it rips open and they think aliens
are coming out? But as you get further along you realize it’s mythological demons
from hell and that’s, like, the shock. It gets creepier and creepier as you go on.
And you have an episode where that’s discovered and there’s, like, magnetic poles
on the moon where there’s two anomalies. So you go in and walk through a slice of
hell and you come out and hell’s come out in our dimension and perverted everything
you’re used to in the first episodes.”
Though Romero was somewhat supportive at first, Carmack had other ideas. “Story in
a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but
it’s not that important.” Tom gnashed his teeth. Furthermore, Carmack added, the technology
was going to be different this time around. He didn’t want to do another game consisting
of levels and episodes. Instead, he said, “We’ve got to make this one contiguous world,
a seamless world.” Rather than running through a door, say, and having an entire new
level load up, the player would have a sense of invisibly progressing through one
massive space.
Tom hated this concept. It went against their winning formula. Players liked the sense
of having completed one section or level of a game, then moving on to the next. He
looked to Romero. But once again Romero sided with Carmack. Tom returned to his desk
to wait for his walls.
Romero wasn’t the only one
realizing the importance of Carmack’s vision. One afternoon Jay and Kevin went outside
for a smoke and talked about the company purchasing what was known as key-man insurance
in case anything happened to Carmack. When Kevin suggested that the company buy the
insurance for everyone else as well, Jay replied, “Everyone else is expendable.” Because
of his technological innovations, Carmack remained the resident Dungeon Master, the
guy in charge, the one holding the rule book.
It was clear that Doom would look like no other game. All the features Carmack had
experimented with in the Shadowcaster engine were coming to life. Most notable were
the diminished lighting effects—the concept that would allow a virtual space to fade
gracefully to black. Carmack’s first innovation was just to think up the idea of diminished
lighting. But, equally important, he was willing to make the difficult choices that
would make this technology possible. That meant letting something go.
Programming is a science based on limited resources; one can program only within the
range of power available in a computer’s hardware and software. In the fall of 1992,
Carmack was still programming in VGA, which allowed only 256 colors. His challenge
was achieving the effect of fading to black with these limited resources.
The solution was to choose the colors on the palette so that there might be, for example,
sixteen shades of red, ranging from very bright to black. Carmack then programmed
the computer to apply a different shade based on where a player was within a room.
If the player walked into a big, open space, the computer would make a quick calculation
and then apply the darkest shades to the farthest section. As the player moved forward,
the computer would brighten the colors; the colors nearer would always be brighter
than the ones farther away. Cumulatively, the world would seem not only more real
but more evil.
But this was not all. Both Carmack and Romero were eager to break away from the tile-based
architecture of their earlier games; Keen and Wolfenstein were constructed like building
blocks, piecing little square tiles of graphics together to make one giant wall. What
the Two Johns, particularly Romero, wanted now was to create a more fluid, free-form
design, a world, like the real world, that could have walls of varying heights, rooms
that felt huge, twisted, and strange. In Wolfenstein walls had to be at ninety-degree
angles; in Doom they would be at all kinds of angles.
Carmack felt ready for the challenge; computers were getting more powerful, and so
were his skills. He began experimenting with ways to draw larger, more arbitrarily
shaped polygons, as well as add textures to the ceilings and floors. When Romero looked
over Carmack’s shoulder, he was impressed—just as he had been on so many occasions
before. Carmack explained his progress with diminished lighting and arbitrary polygons.
He also talked about some other things he might do: make some special concessions
so that hackers could more easily modify the game, as well as add some kind of networking
component that could let players compete head-to-head.
Romero immediately saw the potential in Carmack’s technology, potential that Carmack
was, by his own admission, not capable of envisioning himself. And because Romero
was a programmer, he could speak to Carmack in a language he understood, translating
his own artistic vision into the code Carmack would employ to help bring it to life.
The moment Romero saw the diminished lighting effects, his mind went to work imagining
what effects he could design. “If you can change the light value,” he said, “can we
do it dynamically, like on the fly while the game’s playing, or does it have to be
precomputed?”