Eidos sent the Ion Storm owners on a whirlwind champagne and limousine press tour,
which Mike cheekily dubbed the “No Excuses” tour, since these were game designers
who were finally in the position essentially to put up or shut up. Mike described
the group as the “Fab Four” of gaming, which pleased the guys to no end. Todd even
suggested they take a picture of them crossing Abbey Road. But, behind the scenes,
everyone knew who this company was about: John Romero.
Ion painted itself as the place of freedom and dreams, while id was the out-of-touch
oppressor. It was about not just two companies but two visions: design versus technology,
art versus science, Dionysus versus Apollo.
“Id is a technology-oriented company,”
said Mike Wilson, “whereas our main focus is to indulge our artistic sensibilities.
At id, by the time the 3-D engine was finished, there wasn’t enough time to work on
aspects of the game. We didn’t think this was a well-balanced approach.”
Romero agreed.
“After I left,”
he told
Wired News,
“the mood at id turned dark and gloomy. . . . No more plans to expand the company;
no one to confront Carmack on important issues. I want to create more types of games
with no limits on creativity, and I want as many resources (i.e., people) as I need
to get the job done. That is why I left.” Romero told
The Times
of London that within two years Ion Storm would surpass id as the market leader.
“It’s going to happen,”
he said, “and it’ll be great.”
Carmack was
pulling into the parking lot of id’s black cube office building when he heard the
crash. It was a terrible sound, the sound of his cherry-red Ferrari F40 getting swiped
by a pickup truck. No sooner could he react than the truck peeled out of the lot and
into the blur of traffic nearby. Carmack inspected the gruesome damage, then stomped
upstairs and vented in a .plan file. “Words cannot do justice to how I feel right
now,” he typed. “If anyone knows a tall white male in the dallas [
sic
] area that now has red paint and carbon fibre [
sic
] on their tan pickup truck, turn the bastard in!”
Among the respondents was John Romero. “The F40 got hit,” Romero posted online. “Carma.”
This wasn’t the first snipe from Romero. Every day, it seemed, someone from the office
would wander in with some new outrage Romero had told the press. It was bad enough
that he kept deriding id as an out-of-touch technology company. Worse, the id guys
thought he was claiming sole credit for their success. Even Romero’s official press
release broadly credited him with being “responsible for the programming, design,
and project management of the [id’s] games.” And journalists eagerly and lazily picked
up the refrain, calling Romero
“the creative talent behind [id]”
and
“the man responsible
for creating the blockbusters Doom and Quake.”
Such comments were becoming the talk of id. Though they knew the press was often misleading,
Romero sure didn’t seem to be taking an active role in trying to
correct
the misconceptions. It quickly became fashionable in the office to bash Romero and
Ion Storm. American posted a .plan file mocking Romero’s claim of having made id.
Adrian and Kevin grumbled about how they were going to sink Romero’s ship. But no
one took up the war like id’s new artist and Carmack’s new friend, Paul Steed.
Paul was the antithesis of a computer game geek. Tough, muscular, inscribed with tattoos,
Paul had been abandoned by his father and spent a transient childhood up and down
the Eastern Seaboard. He had an early interest in computers but gave it up for other
pursuits. “Either you stay up all night chasing that program you want to write,” he
said, “or you stay up all night chasing girls. For me, women won out.” Though talented,
he grew into a volatile, confrontational personality, eventually getting thrown out
of military school for a classroom brawl. He retreated to the computer world and took
a job as an artist for Origin. The job at id was a dream, Paul thought, when he was
presented with the offer. He didn’t know he’d be walking into a war.
Paul didn’t know much about John Romero, other than that id’s estranged cofounder
kept making surprise visits to Suite 666, as if he still wanted to be friends. Romero’s
visits angered the staff, particularly Kevin and Adrian, who resented him behaving
as if he were not trashing id in the press. “Why is that fucker coming over here all
the time?” Paul would hear them complain. Finally, Paul spoke up. “Fuck Romero and
his company!” he said. “Let’s just show up in his office and see what happens!”
The next day Paul, Adrian, and Kevin paid a visit to Ion Storm’s temporary office
space near downtown Dallas. Romero was surprised to see them but showed them around
nonetheless. Paul noticed that one of Romero’s artists seemed to be using an antiquated
program to create his animations. So he came back to id and questioned Ion’s direction
in a public .plan file. The comment ignited what became known as the .plan wars. Id
and Ion employees began disparaging each other on a daily basis. Romero eventually
jumped in, sending Paul a cheeky e-mail asking him if he’d endorse Daikatana on the
back of the game’s box. Paul showed Adrian the e-mail and suggested he retaliate.
Adrian was more than happy to give Paul his blessing. “Dude,” Paul wrote to Romero,
“don’t fuck with me because I’ll grab you by your ludicrously long hair and kick your
ass back into the Doom days where you wish you were.”
Carmack, up until this point, had stayed aloof. But as the competitive bile built
in the office, even he felt himself getting swept up in the fervor. So, in what he
described as “an experiment in mood manipulation,” Carmack decided to feel what it
was like to take the gloves off. He chose quite a forum for his first public salvo:
Time
magazine. In an interview for a two-page profile of Romero, Carmack set the record
straight that, contrary to his ex-partner’s frequent assertions, Romero didn’t quit,
he was fired.
“After he got rich and famous
, the push to work just wasn’t there anymore,” Carmack said. “He was handed his resignation.”
He scoffed at Romero’s ambitions for fame and fortune, saying, “There’s only so many
Ferraris I want to own.” And he added that there was “no chance” Romero would fulfill
his promise of finishing Daikatana in time for Christmas.
Romero retorted in the same story that “id was too limiting, too small, small thinking,”
which did little to quell the id-Ion deathmatch. The skirmish became even more public
with the approach of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game industry’s
massive annual convention, where companies demo their latest, greatest games. Id had
every confidence that its showing, Quake II, would not only outshine John Romero’s
Daikatana but crush it.
Since work had begun on Quake II in September 1996, it had been shaping up to be the
most cohesive and technologically impressive id game yet. The idea had come from a
1961 World War II movie called
The Guns of Navarone,
in which the heroes must take out two giant enemy guns that reside in a mountain
fortress on a remote island. It was the perfect theme, the guys at id thought, something
that could give their game not just a militaristic milieu but a narrative, a purpose—which
had never really been in an id game before. In Quake II, players would be cast as
marines doing battle on the evil planet of Stroggos, where mutant Stroggs have been
hoarding human limbs and flesh to build a lethal race of cyborgs. The object: take
out the Stroggs before they conquer humankind. To do this, players would have to take
out the weapon protecting the alien species, the Big Gun.
The technology would bring this world to life. Though Carmack didn’t consider his
new engine nearly as great a leap as Quake, it was still going to be formidable. Most
significant, Quake II would run with either software or hardware acceleration. This
meant that someone running a new 3Dfx card could get exceptional special effects—colored
lighting, smoother surfaces, a more fluid, cinematic feel.
Under the leadership of Kevin Cloud, who was always the most diplomatic and organized
of the owners, id’s troop took on its own militaristic approach. With the deathmatching
days over, the long hours proceeded with quiet intensity. The Shreveport swamp band
of the past—Tom, Romero, Jay, Mike—was replaced with a regime that fulfilled Carmack’s
conservative vision, including a new CEO—Todd Hollenshead, a former tax consultant
at Arthur Andersen—and Tim Willits, the company’s new lead designer.
Carmack uncharacteristically effused. “I doubt I can convey just how well things are
going here,” he posted on June 16, 1997, in his .plan file, just before attending
the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a.k.a. E3. “Things probably look a little odd from
the outside, but our work should speak for itself. I have been breaking into spontanious
[
sic
] smiles lately just thinking about how cool things are (of course, that could just
be a sleep deprivation effect . . .). We have a totally kick-ass team here. We are
on schedule. (no shit!) We are doing a great product. Everyone watch out!”
The 1997 E3 convention
in Atlanta was not just devoted to video games, it
was
a video game. Stepping inside the main floor was like walking into the heart of a
machine: flashing lights, pounding rock, skateboarders, and the ubiquitous “booth
babes”—actresses, models, and strippers who dressed up like video game vixens and
pressed the gamers’ eager flesh. The babe of the moment was Lara Croft, protagonist
of Tomb Raider. As lines of attendees with plastic bags of giveaway toys lined up
to play games, the Laras worked the floor. But they couldn’t compete with the real
star of the show, the long-haired guy walking through the halls and leaving a trail
of bowing gamers in his wake.
“We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” the gamers cooed to John Romero
or, as he was lately referring to himself, God. Romero had accepted the divine moniker
as a tongue-in-cheek descriptor of himself in his .plan file, but it wasn’t entirely
a joke. As far as the press and fans were concerned, Romero was a rock god. He was
everywhere:
Computer Gaming World, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune
—on covers, in color, regal. In an ad for a joystick, Romero wore a crown and flowing
red robe to give, as the tag line declared, “The Royal Seal of Approval.” “If you
want to crack skulls with the big boys,” Romero’s quote read, “the Panther XL is the
weapon of choice.” His publicity stills featured him sitting in a nine-thousand-dollar
medieval chair he had bought for his Tudor mansion.
Romero looked more royal than ever. He was dressing in tight-fitting designer shirts,
jewelry. He had let his hair grow out so that it flowed to the middle of his back.
His mane had become so renowned that, in an online interview, he dispensed his own
ten-step plan for grooming:
“I always flip my hair
over in front of my face and look at the floor while using a brush and hair dryer
to slowly dry all my hair. Brushing downward while drying will help straighten your
hair and completely drying it will make sure it doesn’t kink up or curl up.”
Walking through the kaleidoscopic floor show of E3, Romero buzzed and beamed as brightly
as the games around him, but he was not there to preen. He was there, as everyone
in attendance was keenly aware, to unveil a demonstration of Daikatana. From the day
production began in March 1997, Romero had promised the game for a Christmas 1997
release, which meant that, by now, it would be nearly halfway to completion. Romero
thought this was more than doable since he had assembled such a large team—eight artists
versus id’s two, for example—to get the job done. Though Carmack had publicly expressed
skepticism, the gamers and press were frothing at the bit. They had reason to feel
piqued. Between the rock ’n’ roll showmanship of Mike Wilson, the hyperbolic confidence
of Romero, and the multimillion-dollar vested interest of Eidos, Ion Storm had pulled
out all the stops to hype the game. And, with one ad in particular, a lot of people
thought they had finally gone too far.
Earlier in the year, on the suggestion of Mike Wilson, Romero had agreed to an ad
that would emulate the cheeky bravado of deathmatch smack-talk—the very language Romero
had helped define. But when he saw the words in print, he felt a tinge of hesitation.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked Mike.
“Yeah,” Mike said, “don’t be a pussy.”
Romero agreed. The ad ran in all the major gaming publications in April with simply
these words written in black against a red background: “John Romero’s About to Make
You His Bitch.” Underneath was the tag line “Suck It Down!”—a phrase Mike had recently
trademarked. The ad achieved its intended effect and then some. Gamers were not only
provoked, they were pissed. Who did Romero think he was? Had all this fame gotten
to his head? But they were willing to give him a chance, to see if his game would
really be, as he was promising, the coolest one planet Earth had ever seen. Since
it was coming from the ego at id, the Surgeon of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, they
certainly wanted to believe. At E3 they were ready for their first chance.
The Daikatana demo was front and center in the Eidos booth, right alongside promos
for the much-anticipated Tomb Raider sequel. The demo of the game’s Norway level was
made especially for this event. And gamers crowded around the screens to see it. Gone
were the dark mazes of Doom and Quake. Instead, scenes were outdoors, with blankets
of snow covering little Norwegian cottages, teasing glimpses of ancient Greek temples.
Gamers were complimentary but not ecstatic. When Romero wandered over to id’s booth,
he found out why.
He pushed his way through the crowd to see the demo of Quake II. His face filled with
yellow light as his jaw slackened.
Colored lighting!
Romero couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The setting was a dungeonlike military
level, but when the gamer fired his gun, the yellow blast of the ammunition cast a
corresponding yellow glow as it sailed down the walls. It was subtle, but when Romero
saw the dynamic colored lighting, it was a moment just like that one back at Softdisk
when he saw Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement for the first time. “Holy fuck,”
he muttered. Carmack had done it again.