“The succession of the two events did not necessarily mean that something more significant
was happening or the trend was increasing. It was just the odds. This life event,
like every other, could be broken down to mathematics. If you’ve got any event that
has this random chance of happening, eventually after a certain time, there are going
to be multiple occurrences of it quickly after another.” Carmack wasn’t worried that
there was suddenly going to be some secret link exposed between games and murder;
disturbed people are disturbed people, pure and simple.
Id’s games weren’t about
really killing someone,
Carmack knew, they were just extensions of childhood play. “Deathmatch was tag,”
he said. “Doom was cowboys and Indians with better special effects. We build games
that we think are going to be fun. All the games we enjoyed like Defender and Robotron
were all about running around and blasting things. The gore and graphics just make
an already challenging and interactive game more visceral. It makes people jump and
sweat and be tense. It’s an
okay
game if you’re sitting saying, ‘Okay this is fun.’ But our definition of a good game
is something that’s going to be gripping and exciting.”
Were these violent games being marketed to kids? “Of course teenagers like our games,”
Carmack said. “To say that our games are targeted only for eighteen-year-olds and
older is ludicrous.” But the thing that people weren’t getting, he thought, was that
id wasn’t targeting anyone. All the way back to Softdisk, they had made games not
for an audience but for themselves. They made games they wanted to play that no one
else was making, games that, as fate would have it, would appeal to millions of others.
As Carmack returned to his desk, he went back to work on a game that was going to
be id’s most gleeful shooter yet: Quake III Arena. But, after Columbine, would people
want—would the market allow—his or Romero’s games again?
John Schuneman
gripped his bowling ball tighter as the talk turned to Doom. Romero’s stepfather,
now in his sixties, had been coming to this bowling alley more frequently since retiring,
and he could usually count on relaxing with a good game. But not today. The people
next to him, like millions across the country, were talking about the horrific events
at Columbine High School.
Kids today, they’re being corrupted by these violent video games like Doom.
Schuneman’s heart raced again as they spoke. He stepped over to the group. “We can
take it outside anytime you want,” he said, curling the ball at his side. He didn’t
want to hear any more trash about Johnny’s games.
He wasn’t the only one. Romero himself couldn’t believe the way people were harping
on Doom, a game that was
six years old.
It just showed how clueless the politicians had become. It was just the same old
crap from the same old people. And Romero was tired of the blame. Those kids were
defective, he thought, so don’t blame it on my game. Don’t blame the games. Blame
the fucking parents.
From his own experience, of course, Romero had strong opinions about just
how
parents could screw up their kids. And now, at the age of thirty-one, with three
kids of his own, he had become more self-aware of where the violence in his games
came from and the effect the violent games could have. He was a fucked-up kid making
fucked-up games to deal with the fucked-up physical and emotional violence he’d experienced
when he was young. He liked the violence in his games, just as he liked the violence
in his Melvin comics. There was no question—the violence in his games did have an
impact on him at least: he’d scream and curse and break keyboards, but he never confused
fantasy and reality. He didn’t even know how to fire a gun in real life.
But because he thought violence in games could have an effect, Romero thought that
even more responsibility should rest with the parent. For that reason, he supported
ratings on games, as did most of his peers. Ultimately, the responsibility shouldn’t
be the game makers’ or the politicians’. The parents should decide when their kids
were mature enough to play a game like Doom. Romero had long relished the day he could
sit down with his boys, Steven and Michael, and play through the worlds he created.
They were ready for that day, Romero decided, when they were eight.
After Columbine, though, Romero kept these opinions to himself. He wasn’t being sued
like id, but why say anything anyway? You talk to journalists and they’re going to
take what you say and twist it any way they want into their story and it will only
end up looking bad. The last thing Romero wanted was more bad press. Even before Columbine,
after all, he’d been getting more than his share.
The avalanche of trash talking—in the press and in the community—broke the moment
the eight members of the Daikatana team, or, as they became known, the Ion Eight,
had walked out Ion Storm’s emerald doors a few months earlier, in November 1998. No
sooner did Romero lose the core of his team than news broke that the Ion Eight had
formed a new company, Third Law, which was under contract to create a first-person
shooter based on the rock band Kiss for the Gathering of Developers—the independent-minded
publisher started by Mike Wilson after his departure from Ion Storm. It was a double
slap to Romero’s face. He felt backstabbed by Mike and burned by the team he trusted.
It was like the Softdisk mutiny in which Romero and the rest had jilted Al Vekovius.
Only this time Romero was the boss getting screwed.
But Romero, as usual, didn’t wait long to change moods. And this time he had someone
to help speed his recovery: Stevie Case. Throughout all the darkness at the company,
Stevie had been a beacon. They had much in common: two misfit kids who’d found a home
in the fantasy life of video games. And, like Romero, Stevie had radically reinvented
herself. Inspired by Ion Storm’s creative atmosphere, the small-town girl with the
student government bob had transformed her image. She stopped eating meat, went to
the gym, lost fifty pounds, bleached her hair. She ditched the sweatshirts for midriffs,
the baggy jeans for leopard pants. She used her video game salary to buy breast implants.
In the space of a year, she had gone from model tomboy to
Playboy
model—the magazine, hearing her story, paid her to pose. After the Ion Eight left,
she became Romero’s lead designer.
She also became his girlfriend. Just as he engaged to get Ion back on track, he separated
from his wife, Beth—not long after she had given birth to their daughter, Lillia.
Once again Romero had grown dissatisfied with his marriage and overwhelmed by the
pressures of being a Rich Person and Game God. After all the years of assuring everyone—his
fans, his friends, his family—that he could do it
all,
he had finally realized he could not manage both an empire
and
a family. His ex-wife, Kelly, had made this point clear when, to Romero’s dismay,
she moved back to California with his boys. Ultimately, he gave in to the truth: he
was married to his games. With Stevie, the first woman in his life who shared the
passion, it was a three-way affair.
As his personal life changed, Romero put his energy into rebuilding his team, hiring
a few old friends and picking up some help from Tom Hall’s squad. Though Daikatana
was in need of an overhaul, the end was in sight. The Quake II engine conversion was
complete, they announced in early January 1999. A producer Romero had hired to organize
Daikatana proudly told the press that
“come hell or high water
, the game will be done on February 15, 1999.”
Or so the team hoped. Days later they would receive the worst blow of bad press yet:
a scathing cover story called “Stormy Weather” in the city’s free weekly paper, the
Dallas Observer.
The seven-thousand-word story explicitly detailed how
“the place where the ‘designer’s vision is king’
has turned into a toxic mix of prima donnas and personality cults.” More shocking,
the article was based on internal e-mails. They now appeared in print and online for
the entire world to read.
The result, inside and outside the company, was devastating. Suddenly all of Ion’s
internal affairs—from Mike Wilson’s BMW financing to Romero’s interest in “burning”
through Eidos’s options—was public. Internet sites traded the story as fast as Doom
shareware, reveling in how the Surgeon of deathmatch, the one who was going to make
them his bitch, was finally getting his due. Romero tried fitfully to determine the
source of the leak. He blocked access to game gossip sites and even tried, though
unsuccessfully, to sue the
Observer
to reveal its sources. All he found was that his partner Todd Porter had accidentally
posted his e-mail file on the company computer network and that
anyone
within Ion could have copied them.
By the time the Columbine blow came, a few months later, Romero couldn’t have been
beaten down any worse. His company was a laughingstock. His game was once again delayed,
with no end in sight—having sailed past the promise for a February 1999 release. It
now was in danger of buckling to technology once and for all, with id Software already
deep into the Quake III engine. When a deathmatch demo of Daikatana was released in
March, gamers thought it looked dated.
The dream of the Big Company seemed to be proving too big after all, too loose, too
high, too ambitious. All those things Carmack had berated him about—the hyperbole,
the lack of focus, the dangers of a large team—had come back with a vengeance. Even
Eidos, Romero’s publisher, agreed. In return for their sinking by now nearly $30 million
into the company, Romero had to change his ways once and for all. As the Eidos president,
Rob Dyer, put it:
“Shut up and finish the game.”
Id Software
was once again in the spotlight at the E3 convention in Los Angeles in May 1999, but
this time for all the wrong reasons. Coming only one month after the Columbine shootings
and the Paducah lawsuit, the show became a feeding ground for the media’s increasingly
sensational investigation of video game violence. Of all the companies the reporters
wanted to interview, there was none higher on the list than the creators of Doom and
Quake.
This wasn’t going to be easy. No one, it seemed, wanted to talk about the events.
In his opening remarks, Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software
Association—the group that was created in response to Senator Lieberman’s 1993 hearings
on game violence—tried to set the tone. He pointed out that only 7 percent of the
five thousand games released were violent enough to be rated Mature. Nevertheless,
he added, the game industry was in fact growing up. This was not for kids. The IDSA
reported that 54 percent of video gamers were over eighteen, with 25 percent of these
older than thirty-six; the age of computer gamers was even higher, with 70 percent
over eighteen and 40 percent of them over thirty-six. Together, U.S. gamers were spending
nearly $7 billion that year alone—more than Americans spent on movie tickets.
“For those of you
who are here to focus on violence,” Lowenstein said, “I submit that you’re missing
a much bigger story about what it is that makes interactive entertainment the fastest-growing
entertainment industry in the world.”
The reporters responded by rushing over to id’s booth for comments on Columbine, to
no avail. Any journalist who muscled up to one of the gamers from id was abruptly
intercepted by a PR representative, who would refer him or her to the publisher, Activision,
who would refuse to say anything at all. These weren’t the only gamers laying low.
Raven, id’s old friends from Wisconsin, showed their violent shooter, Soldier of Fortune,
only behind closed doors; the same was true for one of the year’s other hotly anticipated
shooters, Kingpin. For id, however, the controversy was the least of their difficulties.
With Quake III Arena, the game they had come to demonstrate, they were having enough
problems.
The trouble started the moment Carmack had announced the previous year that the game’s
design would be deathmatch only. In light of the success of Half-Life, a shooter in
which story was everything, the free-for-all plan sounded heretical, if not out of
touch. Others bristled at the notion that id’s next title would be, essentially, its
most elitist ever: not just suggesting that a player had a high-end machine but requiring
it by making the game compatible only for players who had 3-D graphics cards installed.
The fans weren’t the only ones in doubt. After the office dysfunction that had surrounded
Quake II, the energy level heading into Quake III was at an all-time low. The old
battles that Carmack had endured with Romero had been supplanted by the rest of the
team. Inspired by Half-Life, everyone, it seemed, wanted a more ambitious design.
But no matter what they came up with, Carmack shot it down. For Adrian, it was just
more of the same: further proof that after all these years since their lake house
in Shreveport, id had become Carmack’s company. Adrian felt frustrated, wanting to
do something,
anything,
that was different. It was a criticism that was starting to bubble up in the community
as well: id was rehashing the same game over and over without any consideration for
story and design. But Adrian resigned himself to go along. What was he going to do,
he thought, fire John Carmack?
As work began on the project, the dissolution only festered. Carmack’s intention to
create a game that allowed the members of his company to work in, essentially, isolation
proved a bit too isolationist. As he churned out early versions of the Quake III engine,
the mappers and artists felt adrift, with no direction on what to pursue. Left to
their own devices, they simply created their own little worlds, worlds that clearly
didn’t relate to or complement each other.
Carmack grew increasingly frustrated. Here he was, creating the most powerful graphics
engine the company had ever seen, and no one on his staff seemed to be taking advantage
of the opportunities. No one was pushing the technology, pushing the design, pushing
him.
Though Carmack never came out and said that he pined for the days of Romero’s giddy
experimentations, it was clear to him that something was missing. The magic of the
self-motivated id Software team was gone.