They needed to make great games because the expenses, Romero knew, were even greater.
The office renovations had cost over $2.5 million. Dominion, which was supposed to
have taken only six weeks to complete, had eaten up more than $3 million. The original
$13 million was gone, and Eidos was now sending in cash on a monthly run rate. Between
the lease, the salaries for the nearly one hundred employees, and the other expenses,
the bills were nearly $1.2 million per month.
But there was another problem, a
big
problem: Carmack’s Quake II code. The engine was completely different than what he
had expected. All this time he’d had his programmers preparing Daikatana in a way
that would make it easy to switch over to what he assumed Carmack’s new engine would
require. But it turned out that Carmack had trashed his expected direction and instead
produced a structure of code that caught Romero completely by surprise. It certainly
wasn’t done to dupe Romero into a delay, it was just Carmack making his own idiosyncratic,
intuitive leap—a leap that, once again, cramped Romero’s grand designs.
“This is going to take a while,” Romero told Eidos and his staff. “This code is jacked.”
Completing Daikatana for his promised March 1998 deadline was impossible, but Romero
thought they could turn it around in a few months. Others weren’t so confident, lobbying
him to forget about competing with id’s technology and just release the game using
the original Quake engine.
“You can’t keep up with Carmack,”
said Romero’s lead programmer, “so why even try?” But Romero wouldn’t waver. His
ambitions only grew larger.
Later that month, Romero told the gaming press that Ion Storm was going to begin work
on Daikatana II. Co-owners Todd Porter and Jerry O’Flaherty initiated a plan of their
own: to launch a comic book division within the company using the artists of Jerry’s
who had worked in that industry. The owners approved the plan to hire up a staff and
release a comic book for each of the company’s games as, essentially, free public
relations. When Eidos got wind of the plan, however, they immediately shut it down.
“You guys are supposed to be making games,” they said. “Why should we pay you to make
comics?”
Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare
of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing
worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work.
The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the
cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead,
they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple
guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t
just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had
to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became
an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all
one saw were rows of caves.
By the spring of 1998, the mood around the company was growing similarly black. Despite
their working in what felt like perpetual crunch mode—twelve-hour days, six days a
week—Daikatana was nowhere near being done. Many felt the project was out of control.
One guy produced a series of levels that proved unusable. An artist created a graphical
icon for an arrow in the game that was a thousand times the appropriate size. Factions
within the Daikatana team began breaking apart. Even Romero’s most devout fans—Will
Loconto, Sverre Kvernmo, and about a half dozen others—began getting more clandestine,
opting out of rambunctious deathmatches and keeping to themselves. Others started
lashing out. One employee was found alone at his desk, screaming. Romero fired him.
But more were concerned about Todd Porter’s and Jerry O’Flaherty’s increased sense
of ownership. The two, they felt, were running the company into the ground. Todd had
been showing up more frequently at Daikatana meetings, making what they thought were
fruitless suggestions about how to alter the game. Meanwhile, Dominion was a shambles,
to their minds, a sorry-looking title that was, unfortunately, going to be Ion Storm’s
first release. They soon took action.
On May 13, Sverre, Will, and six other members of Romero’s team asked Bob Wright,
Ion’s chief operating officer, whom they had perceived as an ally back when he was
working closely with Mike Wilson, to join them for lunch. They had an ultimatum for
Romero, they said—Todd and Jerry had to go or they would walk out the door. Bob urged
them to put their complaints in writing.
Word about the meeting leaked back to Tom Hall—Bob had told the guys that he could
help them to finance their own company if they did quit or get fired. Tom called Romero.
It was bad timing. Romero was out of the office with his wife, Beth, who had just
given birth to their first child, Lillia. He had been on something of a roll in his
family life, having convinced his ex-wife, Kelly, to move with his boys, Steven and
Michael, to Texas so he could see his sons more often. Before long he was right there
by their side—playing games. The birth of his daughter was supposed to be a joyous
day. But there was another fate in store.
“What the fuck?” Romero screamed when Tom told him about Bob’s interference. “That’s
it. Bob fucked with my team. He’s gone.” Bob was fired the next week, but this didn’t
begin to quell Ion’s burgeoning problems. The company once again had a disappointing
showing at E3, which took place the last week of May. Competing shooters, such as
the recently released Unreal and the upcoming Half-Life, garnered most of the attention,
as did id’s upcoming game, Quake III. When Ion Storm’s Dominion hit shelves the following
week, it flopped. Another fantasy-based strategy game, StarCraft, had been released
to rave reviews just a couple months before and made Todd’s title look stale. Not
only did it die in the marketplace but it confirmed to the already bitter gaming community
that all might not be well in Romero’s dream factory. And that community, the very
people who had grown up on Romero’s games, bit back.
On game sites with names such as Evil Avatar, Shugashack, Blue’s News, and Daily Radar,
players had a feeding frenzy around Ion Storm. “All talk, no game,” a typical post
read. “Reasons I Won’t Buy Daikatana,” read another. A comic strip online lampooned
Romero with long hair saying,
“Hi . . . I’m here to tell you
that Daikatana will be great. You guys know I’m good for it. Like Doom! You remember
Doom? I did that! And Quake, right? That was me too! Design is law!” The final frame
showed that Romero was, in fact, pitching a hot-dog seller to get a free meal. “Nice
try John,” the vendor replied. “No game, no wiener.”
Another death rumor surfaced. This time it came after a photo of Romero in a morgue
with a bullet hole in his head leaked onto the Web. Gamers joked that he’d killed
himself after losing a Quake game to Carmack.
But when a gaming magazine
online issued—and later retracted—a report that “sources at Ion Storm” confirmed
Romero’s demise, gamers went ballistic. Still reeling from the bitch ad, they resented
what seemed to be another publicity stunt—despite the fact that the leaked photo had
actually come from an upcoming
Texas Monthly
magazine article about Ion Storm.
The biggest blow came on September 30, when a scribe named Bitch X posted on a site
called Gaming Insider broke news of a plan by Eidos to buy Ion Storm. For months now,
the owners had been in talks with their publisher to hatch some kind of bailout plan.
The idea had started back in May, with Eidos buying 19 percent of Ion Storm’s equity
for $12.5 million in exchange for forgiving the $15 million advance; Ion’s royalty
would be lowered from 40 to 25 percent as well. Bob Wright would even sue the company,
alleging that they’d fired him specifically to cut him out of profiting from the Eidos
deal.
Months later the deal was still being negotiated. How Bitch X knew, no one could surmise.
When, over the next couple of weeks, the Bitch talked of various firings and e-mails
at Ion Storm, the guy who ran Ion Storm’s website told the owners,
“Either people who are no longer
with the company know a whole lot more than the people who are here, or we’ve got
a leak that the
Titanic
can sail through.”
No one admitted to leaking the news, so Romero tried unsuccessfully tracing employees’
e-mail activity to see who might be sending information to the sites in question.
But the damage was done. The company grew rife with suspicion and distrust. The employees
began to grumble quite loudly about Ion Storm’s financial future. From the beginning,
they had expected to be cut in to some kind of royalty or bonus or ownership. And
the more rumors spread, the more depression set in. Romero confronted his lead programmer,
Kee Kimbrell—who had cofounded DWANGO—one day for playing too many games and not getting
his work done, a complaint whose irony didn’t go unnoticed.
“What the fuck, dude?” Romero said. “You stopped working. And we need to get this
game done. It’s serious, you know.” Kee told Romero he was worried about the business;
he had seen a spreadsheet of Ion Storm’s financials and had been hearing rumors that
Eidos was going to shut the company down. Romero exploded. “Rumor! Rumor! Rumor! Rumor!
Rumor! Bullshit!” he said. “You don’t understand business, don’t try to fuck with
business stuff. You don’t understand the deal that we have with Eidos. You don’t understand
a lot of things. You’re letting it affect the way that you are not working and you’re
bringing other people down and all this shit.” But Kee wouldn’t back down, and Romero
fired him on the spot.
It would get worse. Employees began walking out the door, not to return. The deal
with Eidos fell apart just as it was about to be signed, due, in no small part, to
the increased delays and chaos within the glass walls. With the failure of Dominion
and the need to keep Ion afloat, Todd relinquished plans to work on Doppelganger and
immersed himself in his new position as CEO. Romero, he thought, was too nonconfrontational.
So Todd hired an auditing firm to make sense of Ion’s hemorrhaging financials. Despite
knowing that his own aggressive style could alienate those around him, he felt obliged
to get the Daikatana team back into shape. But it was to no avail. Romero refused
his suggestions to cut the game. And the employees only became more embittered at
Todd’s increasingly vocal lashings. They resented the fact that one day, while they
watched a building go down in flames nearby from their perch, Todd exclaimed, “We’re
not paying you to watch a building burn.”
By the fall, Ion was headed for a conflagration of its own. On the evening of the
November 18, Romero was taken out to P. F. Chang’s for dinner by Stevie Case and a
couple of other trusted employees. Since Stevie was hired, she had remained loyal
to Romero, providing solace and perspective during the increasingly hard times. “We
heard a rumor,” she said, “that your entire Daikatana team is going to leave tomorrow.”
Romero remained defiant. “Fuck them if they’re going to leave,” he said.
The next day Romero and Tom were called into the conference room, where they found
the Daikatana team waiting. “We can’t keep working under these conditions,” they were
told by Will Loconto. “We don’t think this game is ever going to get done, so we’re
going to go and start our own company.”
Romero wandered back through the maze of cubicles and sat down at his desk, where
he would remain long after the sun came down on the glass tower. Everything is bullshit!
he thought. Why did I hire these people? It shouldn’t have been this big. This was
too many people, too much money. It should have been just me and Tom and a small team
of people with a common goal. It should have been like the way it was when we weren’t
biz guys. We were just gamers.
FIFTEEN
Straight out of Doom
As gamers came,
RebDoomer wasn’t unique. He loved first-person shooters, especially Doom and Quake.
He stayed up late at night, deathmatching over the Internet.
He made amateurish mods
—an arena space based on a hockey rink; a boxing ring for hand-to-hand combat—and
traded them with friends online.
“Whatsup all you doomers
out there!” he typed to them. “REB here, bringin you another kick-ass doom2 wad!
This one took a damn long time to do, so send me some bloody credit man!”
Offline, he wasn’t finding much camaraderie at all. He was deeply troubled at school:
the jocks, the jokes, the feeling of being a pariah. He began keeping increasingly
angry journals, venting his desires for revenge. Finally, one day he set up a video
camera in his basement, then sat in a reclining chair holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s
and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. Looking into the camera, he described his plan
to go on a shooting spree through his high school.
“It’s going to be like fucking Doom,”
he said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick. Ha! That fucking shotgun is straight out of Doom!”
On the morning of April 20, 1999, Eric “RebDoomer” Harris and his best friend, Dylan
“Vodka” Klebold, strapped themselves with bombs and shotguns and went on a rampage
through their Littleton, Colorado, school, Columbine High, leaving fifteen people,
including themselves, dead. The event, which played out on live television, galvanized
the country. Parents, teachers, politicians, and children wanted to make sense of
the ultimate senseless act. They were looking for something to blame.
At 5:15 p.m. on April 21, 1999, Steve Heaslip, the editor of a game news site called
Blue’s News, uploaded a message.
“Several readers have written
in reporting having seen televised news reports showing the Doom logo on something
visible through clear bags containing materials said to be related to the suspected
shooters. . . . There is no word yet of what connection anyone is drawing between
these materials and this case.” As the killers’ Doom books, Doom games, and Doom fantasies
surfaced, the connection was made soon enough.
In the weeks following the tragedy, Doom became emblematic of how violent media were
inspiring real-life violence.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
issued a report suggesting the Eric Harris had reconfigured Doom in a “dry run” of
the real-life killings. Similarly without substantiation, others began reporting that
Harris had created a mod based specifically on Columbine High.
The Washington Post
described the world of Doom deathmatching as a
“dark, dangerous place.”
Newsday
wrote about how playing Doom can
“widen the hole in any kid’s soul.”
David Grossman, a former army ranger, became a media darling for his views on games
as
“murder simulators.”
Even President Clinton chimed in
, quoting Grossman in a radio address and adding that “Doom . . . the very game played
obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make[s] our
children more active participants in simulated violence.”
Once again, violent games and their associated pop culture—black clothes, heavy metal,
gory films—were under attack. The mayor of Denver asked promoters to cancel a concert
by Harris’s and Klebold’s alleged favorite band,
Marilyn Manson
. Schools
banned trench coats
.
Disney World and Disneyland
pulled violent games from their arcades. But none took the call to arms like the
senator who had initiated the country’s first investigation into violent games six
years earlier: Senator Joseph Lieberman.
In an April 28 statement
, he called for a new investigation into the scourge. “My hope,” he said, “is that
such a summit would persuade the nation’s top cultural producers to call a cease-fire
in the virtual arms race, to stop the release of ultraviolent video games and movies
and CDs that romanticize and sanitize extreme forms of violence and teach our children
that killing is cool—the very material, such as Doom . . . that several of the school
gunmen murderously mimicked down to the choice of weapons and apparel.”
Without any sensible counterpoint, the press and politicians—many of whom had never
played such games—were left to draw their own conclusions. Ellen Goodman, in her nationally
syndicated column, asked,
“How many of us accept
as ‘normal’ boy stuff the video games that we are now told are virtual training sessions
for military de-sensitization?” She didn’t seem to know or care that the military
didn’t use the games to desensitize, they used them for team building.
Good Morning America
corralled a friend of the teenage killers who led the viewers through a game of Doom.
“There’s more to learn
from Eric Harris’s computer game,” the reporter intoned. “Watch closely as we enter
the secret rooms he created.” There were bodies hanging from the ceiling, images,
he implied, that Harris had created; in fact, they were the original B-movie effects
of the game. “This is like walking through somebody’s nightmare,” the reporter declared.
“Did it ever strike you that, Hey, this is a little strange, this guy really likes
all this blood and shooting and violence?” His friend replied, “Never.” He was just
a gamer.
And these were just
games.
It was an obvious point among the people who actually played Doom and Quake but one
that seemed strangely to elude everyone else: games were make-believe. In video games,
no one
really
got hurt. But when it came to violent play, people had a history of linking fantasy
with reality, as the author Gerard Jones explored in his book,
Killing Monsters: Why Children
Need
Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence.
As Jones noted
, an influential study in 1963 found that children who watched films of a person punching
an inflatable clown doll later beat up such a clown toy more aggressively than kids
who hadn’t watched the film. The conclusion: exposure to violent media caused real-life
violence. In reality, of course, the kids were just punching inflatable clowns; they
were not running to the local circus and pummeling Bozo. Rather than blame violent
media, Jones argued, adults needed to understand the role make-believe violence plays
in human development: “Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible
or too dangerous or forbidden . . . is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality.
Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive
in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on
our way to being good people.”
Researchers since the 1980s
had been finding positive effects of video games; a report in the
Journal of American Academic Child Psychiatry
argued that games not only didn’t inspire aggression, they released it.
An academic study in England
would find that gamers “seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better
than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge
similarity with top-level athletes. The skills they learnt on computers seem to transfer
to the real world.”
In Finland, researchers used computer games
to help treat children with dyslexia.
And, despite all the studies that attempted to link violent media with aggression,
the conclusions remained suspect.
“Violence in film
, in video games, in music lyrics is disturbing to us all,” Dr. Stuart Fischoff, founder
of the Media Psychology lab at California State University in Los Angeles, said in
an address to the American Psychological Association later in 1999, “but because two
phenomena are both disturbing and coincident in time does not make them causally connected
. . . There is not, I submit, a single research study which is even remotely predictive
of [events like] the Columbine massacre.”
Murderers, after all, had proven that they could find inspiration in anything—the
White Album,
Taxi Driver, Catcher in the Rye.
How many acts of violence had the Bible inspired? After Columbine, however, few had
the nerve or the knowledge to defend games. Jon Katz, a writer for
Rolling Stone
and the tech community Slashdot, posted several essays that assailed the media’s
stereotypes of geeks and gamers.
“This is so crazy and hysterical,”
he told the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“The real issue should be how teenagers get their hands on machine guns and bombs—not
about a Web site and video games.” Others offered backhanded defense at best.
“Violence has always been
a big thing in the U.S.,” wrote
Time,
“and there are good constitutional reasons why we can’t legislate that out of our
entertainment products. But the video-game industry makes only what it can sell. And
as long as gore is what we’re buying—for our kids and for ourselves—gore is what they’ll
give us.”
The politicians, however, weren’t going to wait for the people to decide matters for
themselves. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, made a speech on the Senate floor,
saying,
“The video game ‘Quake,’
put out by . . . id Software, the same company as the producer of ‘Doom,’ consists
of a lone gunman confronting a variety of monsters. For every kill, he gets points.
As he advances in the game, the weapons he uses grow more powerful and more gory—he
trades in his shotgun for an automatic and later gets to use a chain saw on his enemies.
The more skilled the player, the gorier the weapons he gets to use. Bloodshed his
reward.”
By June 1999, the White House had stepped up to the plate. During a press conference
in the Rose Garden, a dour-faced President Clinton stood holding up an ad from a gaming
magazine that promoted a game as
“more fun than shooting
your neighbor’s cat.” “We ought to think twice,” he said, “about the impact of ads
for so-called ‘first person shooter video games,’ like the recent ad for a game that
invites players to—and I quote—’Get in touch with your gun-toting, cold-blooded murdering
side.’ ”
With that, he ordered a federal investigation to determine whether gaming and other
entertainment companies were guilty of marketing violent products to children. The
industry’s assertions that games were being made, in part, by and for adults didn’t
ring true. “It’s hard to argue with a straight face that the games were made for adults
in the first place,” he said. Three days later Senators Lieberman and John McCain
announced a solution: the Twenty-first Century Media Responsibility Act, a formidable
bill that would establish a standardized rating system for movies, music, and video
games. If the bill passed, retailers who sold violent games to minors would face ten-thousand-dollar
fines. No one in the games industry opposed ratings; they already had their own voluntary
Entertainment Software Rating Board. But, of course, they bristled at standardization
and government involvement. The message from Washington was loud and clear: Rethink
violent games or else.
It was 1:34 a.m.
in Suite 666, days after the Columbine shootings. Carmack sat at his desk behind the
black windows in the black night, cursor blinking on his computer, awaiting a response.
He thought over his words carefully. Writing his .plan updates was becoming increasingly
laborious because, as Carmack knew, everyone seemed to be hanging so much on what
he said. “Some of you,” he finally typed, “are busy getting all bent out of shape
about this.”
Carmack was talking about the gaming community’s reaction to id’s announcement that
the first test of their next game, Quake III Arena, would be released for Macintosh,
not Windows. In the gaming world, this was usually as big as the controversies got.
But while Carmack turned his attention to his plan, describing the pros and cons of
the new Macintosh systems, he couldn’t avoid the
other
controversy. Finishing his update, he pushed himself away from his desk and walked
down the hall to get a Diet Coke and a snack. “Hey,” he said, passing the police officers
in his lobby, “do you guys want anything to eat?”
The cops were the most obvious sign of Columbine’s impact on id. They had been hired
to stand guard shortly after the first wave of hate calls and hate mails started flaming
into the office. Miss Donna, receptionist and id mom, would pick up the phone to find
a raging protester on the other end of the line asking
what in God’s name this company had done.
Soon there were journalists hanging around outside, trying fruitlessly to get a word
from one of the many long-haired guys walking from their sports cars into the jet
black cube. After a hateful protester was found outside screaming, a few of the newer
members of the id staff pleaded for security during the late hours. Carmack and the
other owners relented but felt it was an overreaction. “Oh,” they said, “this happens
all the time.”
In fact, it had happened only eight days before the Columbine shootings. On April
12, 1999, the parents of three students killed in a 1997 school shooting in Paducah,
Kentucky, had leveled
a $130 million lawsuit
against entertainment companies, including id Software, whose violent products, they
said, had inspired the fourteen-year-old murderer, Michael Carneal—a fan of Doom and
Quake. And, of course, it had happened long before that: the Wolfenstein controversies
in 1992, the Mortal Kombat hearings in 1993, the Doom bans to follow—not to mention
the Death Race arcade outrage in the 1970s, or the Dungeons and Dragons hysteria in
the eighties.
As long as these guys had played games, there had been the detractors, the lawsuits,
the sensationalism, but nothing quite as powerful as the one-two punch of Paducah
and Columbine. Because of the Paducah lawsuit, id’s lawyers strongly advised the owners
and employees to remain quiet. The staff obliged, but Carmack felt frustrated that
he couldn’t tell the world what he thought. As a result, the media storm brewed and
brewed, with no word from the people who had made the games. But Carmack knew exactly
what he would say.