For the majority of the time, however, those late nights at the lake house were a
perpetual programming party. With Iggy Pop or Dokken playing on the stereo, the guys
all worked into the wee hours. Occasionally, they’d take a break to play Super Mario
on the Nintendo or maybe a round of Dungeons and Dragons. Carmack had been building
a large D&D campaign for the guys, and on Saturday nights they’d gather around a table
and play into the early morning hours. With Carmack as Dungeon Master, the game took
on depth and complexity. It was quickly becoming the longest and deepest D&D game
he’d ever created. And there were no signs of it letting up.
Other times, they’d cruise the lake on the boat. Jay quickly became the designated
driver; his impeccable focus gave him the ability to drive not only fast but steady.
A couple times they let Romero drive, but he was having too much fun, steering the
boat precipitously off course. Jay also fell comfortably into the role of manager
or, in a sense, frat house president. While the guys worked, he would grill up ribs
on the barbecue or restock the sodas. They were under the gun and needed all the help
they could get.
They didn’t need any help getting motivated, however. Carmack, in particular, seemed
almost inhumanly immune to distraction. One time, Jay tested Carmack’s resolve by
popping a porno video into the VCR and cranking it to full volume. Romero and the
others immediately heard the “oohs” and “aahs,” and turned around cracking up. Carmack,
though, stayed glued to his monitor. Only after a minute or so did he acknowledge
the increasingly active groans. His sole response was “Mmm.” Then he returned to the
work at hand.
Back at Softdisk,
Al Vekovius was beginning to grow suspicious of his star gamers. Jay was continually
requesting parts for the computers. And the other guys were behaving more curtly and
elusively. His first suspicion came shortly after they were working on their new game
for Softdisk, a ninja warrior title called Shadow Knights. Al had never seen a side
scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.”
Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.”
Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality
he had struck what was growing into an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic
programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained
in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic.
All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon
using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting
approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea
in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents
were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to his life: writing code to solve
problems. If the world became a place in which he couldn’t solve a problem without
infringing on someone’s patents, he would be very unhappy living there.
Carmack was becoming more blunt and insulting about other topics as well, most notably
the rest of the Softdisk staff. “You’ve got a lot of terrible programmers here,” he
said. “They just stink.” It was as if Carmack simply didn’t care how he alienated
himself from the rest of the employees.
Al began dropping by the Gamer’s Edge office more often, only to discover more strange
behavior. He once walked in to find Carmack, Romero, and Tom huddled around Romero’s
computers with their backs to the door. When Al made his presence known, they quickly
dispersed. He stepped over and asked them what was going on. “Nothing but dirty jokes,
Al,” Romero replied, gingerly. When Al looked at the screen, it was suspiciously blank.
Later he commented to Carmack that Romero was acting strangely, which struck Al as
odd since Romero was always so nice. Carmack considered this momentarily, then, as
always, blurted out his unedited perception of the truth: “Romero was just being friendly,”
Carmack said. “When you turn your back, he hates your guts.”
By Thanksgiving, the guys were immersed in the death schedule back at the lake house.
Sleep was not an issue. Neither was showering. Eating was something they essentially
had to remind themselves to do. To help keep them fed while they crunched on Keen,
Scott had begun sending the team weekly hundred-dollar checks labeled “pizza bonus,”
playing off the pepperoni slice icon that appeared in Keen. Pizza was id’s fuel. It
was, as Carmack enjoyed noting, the perfect invention: hot, quick, and containing
a variety of food groups. When Jay opened an envelope from Scott and waved the check
in the air, everyone would declare “pizza money!”
Scott was confident he’d see a return on his investment. He had initiated a full-on
blitz. Because of his own success, he had built strong ties with the heads of various
BBSs and shareware magazines across the country. He called every one of them, preparing
each for a game that would revolutionize the industry. Before long, whenever people
logged on to a BBS, they would see a title screen reading: “Coming soon from Apogee:
Commander Keen.” Scott was putting his reputation on the line. But there was never
a doubt in the gamers’ minds that Keen would deliver.
Tom was in overdrive on the design, bouncing ideas like Ping-Pong balls off Romero.
If Romero doubled over laughing, he knew he was on the right track. Scott offered
his own advice for the game. “One of the reasons for Mario Brothers popularity,” he
wrote them in a letter, “is that you can continue playing the game in search of secret
or hidden bonuses, et cetera. I would really like to see something like this implemented
in Keen—it would really add to the game I think.”
“Like . . . duh!” The guys responded. They loved finding secrets in games. Already
secrets were like a subculture among programmers. Sometimes there were secret levels,
or inside jokes, or tricks that had no real bearing on the outcome of the game. These
were called Easter eggs. The mother of all eggs occurred in 1980, when intrepid Atari
2600 geeks stumbled on a secret room in the geometric role-playing game Adventure,
only to find the flashing words
“Warren Robinett.”
Some players haplessly shot at the name. Others just scratched their heads. Robinett
was a disgruntled Adventure programmer who wanted recognition following a corporate
takeover.
Tom came up with some tricks for Keen. In episode one, players could find a secret
hidden city if they pulled a combination of moves, like throwing themselves in the
line of fire of an ice cannon. Around the game he inserted cryptic signs written in
what was supposed to be the Vorticon alphabet. If players stumbled into a secret area,
they could get the translations.
The guys were so enthusiastic that they decided to put in a preview of their upcoming
games, which, at the time, didn’t exist. They described more installments of Keen
as well as a new game based on characters and elements of Carmack’s evolving Dungeons
and Dragons world. “
The Fight for Justice
,
” they wrote. “A completely new approach to fantasy gaming. You start not as a weakling
with no food—you start as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent.
You start off with the hammer of thunderbolts, the ring of regeneration, and a trans-dimensional
artifact . . . all the people you meet will have their own personalities, lives, and
objectives. . . .
The Fight for Justice
will be the finest PC game yet.”
The lake house was filled with the sense of unlimited possibilities. And the bond
between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day. It was like two tennis
players who, after years of destroying their competition, finally had a chance to
play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better programmer. Carmack pushed Romero
to be a better designer. What they shared equally was their passion.
This was most clear to Carmack one late weekend night. He was sitting in the house
working at his PC as lightning flashed outside. Mitzi curled lazily on top of his
monitor, her legs draping over the screen. The heat of her body was causing Carmack’s
heat-sensitive display to ooze its colors. He pushed Mitzi gently from the monitor,
and she scurried away with a hiss.
A rainstorm had picked up, and it was mighty. Cross Lake spilled into the backyard
like the prelude to a horror movie. The lake was so high that it pushed the ski boat
to the top of the boathouse. Long black water moccasins slithered toward the deck.
The bridge leading to Lakeshore Drive was completely washed out. When Jay arrived
after having been out for the day, there was no way to get in. It was, as he described
it, “a turd floater” of a storm, bringing everything from the bottom of the lake to
the surface. He turned away to wait it out.
Romero arrived with a friend later to find the bridge even worse than when Jay got
there. There was simply no way he was going to get his car over the flooded expanse.
And there were probably alligators and moccasins now making it their home.
Back in the house, Carmack resigned himself to working on his own that night. After
all these hours, he had come to appreciate Romero’s diverse range of talents, gleaned
from years of making his own Apple II games. Romero had been not only a coder but
an artist, a designer, and a businessman. On top of all that, he was fun. Romero didn’t
just love games; in a sense, he
was
a game, a walking, talking, beeping, twitching human video game who never seemed
to let anything get him down. Like a game character, he could always find an extra
life.
Just then the door behind Carmack swung open. Mitzi dashed under his feet. Carmack
turned to see Romero standing there with his big thick glasses, soaking wet up to
his chest, lightning flashing behind him, a big smile on his face. It was a real moment,
a moment so impressive that Carmack actually saved it in his thin file of sentimental
memories. This one he wanted for future access: the night Romero waded through a stormy
river to work.
On the afternoon
of December 14, 1990, Scott Miller pressed a button on his PC and uploaded the Commander
Keen shareware episode Marooned on Mars to the first BBS. For $30, players could purchase
the other two episodes, which Scott would ship on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. Before
Keen, Scott’s total shareware sales were about $7,000 per month. By Christmas, Keen
was approaching $30,000.
The game was, as Scott told the numerous editors and BBS controllers who were deluging
him with calls, “a little atom bomb.” No one had seen anything like it for the PC—the
humor, the graphics, the side-scrolling Mario-type action.
“Superlative alert!”
heralded one reviewer. “Be prepared to hear praise like we have rarely heaped on
any program.” Keen
“sets a new standard for shareware games,”
declared another.
“For stimulating,
velvet-smooth and cutting edge PC arcade action,” wrote a third, “there is nothing
better than Commander Keen from Apogee Software.
Nothing.
” The game wasn’t just on par with Nintendo, it concluded, it was better.
Fans couldn’t agree more. They were deluging Apogee with letters of praise and letters
inquiring about the next games in the Keen series. All the main BBSs were ablaze with
conversation about Keen—tricks, secrets, strategies. Gamers were pleading for information
to decode the Vorticon alphabet. Scott was so swamped that he recruited his mother
and his first employee, a teenage programmer named Shawn Green, to help with the demand.
When Shawn showed up for work the first morning, he was greeted by Scott’s mother,
standing in her bathrobe holding two cordless phones. The second she handed him one,
it started to ring.
Romero, Carmack, and the rest of the group celebrated with a huge party at the lake
house on New Year’s Eve. The stereo cranked Prince. The grill smoked. Revelers boated
around the lake. Romero, who rarely drank, made this night a special occasion. It
had been a great year but a tough year—one that had cost him his wife and kids. Faced
with the choice, he’d chosen the game life over the family life. Though he spoke frequently
with his boys and saw them as often as he could, he was living with a new family now:
the gamers. And he wanted this night together to last.
He, Tom, and Jay were drunk on white wine and champagne in the kitchen. Romero saw
Carmack standing in the corner by himself, sober. “Come on, Carmack,” he slurred,
“you gotta drink, don’t be a baby! It’s going to be 1991!”
Normally in these situations Carmack wanted nothing less than to disappear into the
wallpaper. This kind of scene—socializing, cavorting—was never his domain. He would
rather be reading or programming. But contrary to what the other guys might have thought,
he wasn’t inhuman. He was fun loving too, just in his own way. He was thrilled to
be working for himself, making games, collaborating with people he admired and respected.
It took only a little coaxing from Romero to get Carmack to join them in downing several
glasses of champagne. The strongest thing they’d seen him drink before was Diet Coke.
Some time later Romero found Carmack leaning quietly against the kitchen wall. “Hey,
man,” Romero said, “you feeling buzzed yet? You getting drunk, Carmack?”
“I am losing control of my faculties,” Carmack replied. “Mmm.” Then he stumbled away.
Romero got a lot of mileage out of that response, repeating it robotically to everyone
throughout the night. It was good to see Carmack loosen up.
Two weeks later,
Jay walked out to the mailbox and came back brandishing an envelope. It was the first
residual check from Apogee. “Pizza money!” they all said, as he opened it up. The
check was for $10,500. With barely any overhead expenses, it was gravy. At this rate
they’d be making more than $100,000 in their first year, more than enough for them
to quit their day jobs at Softdisk.