From that moment, Tom’s attitude went from bad to miserable. It felt like everything
he had done, everything he wanted to do, was getting thrown out. It was like the end
of sixth grade, he thought, when some people are turning into jocks and some people
are turning into geeks and you get that realization that you’re heading down the wrong
path. Romero all but ignored him: no jokes, no destruction, no alien bleeps. The rest
made him feel just as alone, striking down anything he would suggest for the game.
It soon became too painful for Tom to be there. He found a girlfriend and began spending
more time out of the office.
Before long Carmack pulled Romero aside and suggested they fire Tom. But Romero knew
what such a change would mean. Though no owner had left or been fired before, the
guys had decided how to deal with such a situation if it should ever arise. Just after
they formed the company, they sat down and agreed, wholeheartedly, that the fate of
id Software had to transcend the fate of the individual owners. They had seen the
damage the infighting had caused Softdisk and were determined to insulate their own
company from such demise.
They made two agreements. First, there had to be a unanimous vote among the owners
to ask someone to go; at the moment, Adrian, Romero, Tom, and Carmack were the main
partners, with Jay and Kevin each owning smaller shares. Second, if an owner left,
he would lose all his shares and have no future stake in the company; they didn’t
want anyone’s departure to damage the success of id. Tom, in other words, would never
see a penny from Doom, let alone Wolfenstein or Keen. He would be on his own.
Romero convinced Carmack to give Tom another chance. Romero had other things on his
mind as well. He was getting married again. His relationship with Beth, the former
clerk at Softdisk, had become a deep and meaningful love affair. She could give him
the space he needed to build his career as well as be in a relationship. She was fun,
loved to cook, loved to have a good time. She didn’t have any real interest in games,
but at least he could continue doing what he most enjoyed.
Over July 4, 1993, Romero spent his honeymoon in Aruba. When he came back, he was
more energized than ever. Though he still maintained close contact with his sons in
California, the years without a family in town had been tough. And his relationship
with his ex-wife, Kelly, was only getting more strained. But now he had a new wife,
a new beginning. Money was rolling in from Wolfenstein to the tune of a hundred thousand
dollars per month. Doom had found its voice. All was well. All, he quickly discovered,
but Tom. By now, everyone else had had enough. They wanted him out. Finally, Romero
gave in.
He wanted to break the news to his old friend himself. So he invited Tom to his house
for a meal home-cooked by Beth. Tom was delighted. He hadn’t spent quality time with
Romero for ages. The dinner was like old times: the two guys joking around, talking
movies and games. Romero couldn’t bring himself to break the news. The next day a
shareholders’ meeting was called. Tom walked in to find everyone sitting around the
conference room table staring at the floor. “Tom,” Carmack finally said, “obviously
this isn’t working out. We’re asking for your resignation.”
For Tom, the moment felt unreal. He heard Romero say something about how he’d tried
to tell him about this last night but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Tom could
not even respond. He found a little sticker on the table, peeled it off, and began
rolling it between his fingers. Despite all the warning signs, he hadn’t seen this
coming at all. He felt depressed, ashamed. Maybe this wasn’t just about the games,
he thought. He always felt like they resented his upbringing, the fact that he wasn’t
a delinquent or the product of a broken home. He was just this guy with doting parents
and a college education. In a barely audible voice, he began defending himself, talking
about all the things he could do for Doom. But there was silence in response. Soon
his voice faded too. They asked him to leave the room while they discussed the situation.
As the door shut behind him, something in Tom shifted. A weight rose from his body.
He had been so miserable for so long, so dejected, feeling so unwanted, he never had
the gumption to recognize the situation for what it was and make a break. It was like
those old job interviews when the men in suits kept asking him if the job they were
offering was what he really wanted to do. At that time, he realized, it hadn’t been
what he wanted; what he wanted was to make games. Now, five years later, he accepted
that these were not the games he wanted to make. When he stepped back into the conference
room, he said, “I think, guys, this is really the thing to do.” His games at id were
over. The others’ were just getting started.
NINE
The Coolest Game
John Carmack stood
in the Ferrari dealership admiring a cherry-red 328 sports car and had one thought:
How fast can it go?
As an engineer, he considered speed an efficient way to measure his progress: How
much faster could he get the computer to render graphics on screen? A car was much
the same. When Carmack looked at the sexy design of the body, he saw straight through
to the engine. To the dealer’s surprise, the wiry twenty-two-year-old in T-shirt and
jeans wrote a check for seventy thousand dollars and took the keys.
It didn’t take long for Carmack to feel that the car wasn’t quite fast enough. His
instinct was to get under the hood and start futzing around, just like he had with
his MGB. But this was no ordinary car, this was a Ferrari.
No one
futzed with a Ferrari. The elite manufacturer had very low regard for anyone who
dared mess with its pristine design. For Carmack, though, it was another machine to
hack.
With Romero’s help, Carmack soon found someone who was more than up to the task: Bob
Norwood. Norwood had been racing and building cars since he was a thirteen-year-old
in Kansas. He held more than a hundred spots in
The Guinness Book of World Records
for speed records in a variety of funny cars and, above all else, Ferraris. When
Romero read in an auto magazine that Norwood now ran an auto shop in Dallas, he suggested
Carmack give him a call.
Carmack, as usual, was skeptical. Every other auto guy in town had shrugged off his
request. “A Ferrari, eh?” they’d say. “Well, I guess we can put a new exhaust system
on it.” A new exhaust, Carmack knew, was a wimpy and ineffectual answer to his problem.
When he drove into Norwood’s, the crusty owner walked out with greasy hands. “I got
this 328,” Carmack said cautiously, “and I want it to be a little faster.” Norwood
squinted his eye and replied matter-of-factly, “We’ll put a turbo on it.” Carmack
had found a new friend.
For fifteen thousand dollars, Norwood rigged the Ferrari with a turbo system that
would activate when Carmack floored the gas pedal. It was a ballsy bit of hacking,
and Carmack immediately felt a kinship with the veteran racing man. The day it was
finished, Carmack planned to celebrate by driving to his brother’s graduation in Missouri;
though his success with Keen and Wolfenstein had helped him mend bridges with his
mother, pulling up in a car like this was guaranteed to close the deal.
He showed up at Norwood’s with his duffel bag, threw it in the trunk, then hit the
road. Just outside Dallas, he saw an open stretch of highway. Slowly, he pushed the
pedal down to the floor. As it lowered, he felt a force build until the pedal hit
the metal and the car accelerated almost twice as fast, reaching nearly 140 miles
per hour. Life was good. He was living his dream: working for himself, programming
all night, dressing how he pleased. All those long, hard years without a computer,
without a hacker community, were fading behind him. Contrary to what the other guys
might have thought, he did have feelings. And at this moment, with the cows and corn
blurring beside him, he felt unbelievably happy. He drove the rest of the way with
a huge grin on his face.
His car
wasn’t the only engine Carmack wanted to go faster. Doom, though quick, was still
not quite quick enough for his taste. The game had considerable challenges for speed,
such as the textured ceilings and floors, as well as the walls of varying heights.
While porting Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo System, Carmack had read about a programming
process known as Binary Space Partitioning, or BSP. The process was being used by
a programmer at Bell Labs to help render three-dimensional models on screen. In the
simplest terms, it broke the model into larger sections or leaves of data, as opposed
to sluggishly drawing out many little polygons at a time. When Carmack read this,
something clicked. What if you could use a BSP to create not just one 3-D image but
an entire virtual world?
No one had tried this. No one, it seemed, had even
thought
about this because, after all, not many people were in the business of creating virtual
worlds. With BSPs, the image of a room in Doom would be essentially split up into
a giant tree of leaves. Rather than trying to draw the whole tree every time the player
moved, the computer would draw only the leaves he was facing. Once this process was
implemented, Doom, already fast, soared.
To keep Doom’s development going, however, Carmack, Romero, and the rest knew they
had to deal with one pressing problem: replacing Tom Hall. As a friend, of course,
Tom was irreplaceable, particularly for Romero. There was just no one who possessed
that hysterically comic streak. Worse, the split from id was so painful that Romero
and Tom had hardly spoken since the firing. But at least Tom had managed to land on
his feet. Scott Miller, another casualty on the way to id’s success, offered him a
job as a game designer for Apogee. It was bittersweet, but Tom accepted; maybe now
he would be able to make the games he had always imagined.
Back at id, the guys started sifting through résumés for a new game designer of their
own. Kevin had received a résumé from a promising-looking gamer named Sandy Petersen.
At thirty-seven years old, Sandy was ancient compared with the id guys and an admirable
veteran of the gaming scene. In the early eighties, he had created a pen-and-paper
role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu, that featured flesh-eating zombies and tentacle-legged
alien parasites. The game became a cult favorite around the world, selling over a
hundred thousand copies. Eventually, Sandy went on to create computer games at MicroProse,
a company in Baltimore founded by Sid Meier, legendary designer of the historically
based strategy series Civilization.
But Romero had a concern about Sandy. At the bottom of Sandy’s résumé, he noted that
he was Mormon. “Dude,” Romero told Kevin, “I don’t want anyone who’s religious here.
We’re fucking writing a game about demons and hell and shit, and the last thing we
need is someone who’s going to be against it.”
“Nah,” Kevin said. “Let’s just meet him, he might be really cool.”
Romero sighed. “Okay, dude, but I wouldn’t do it.”
Several days later, Sandy showed up. He was a heavyset, balding guy with glasses and
suspenders. He had a rapid-fire, high-pitched voice that got more excited as he spoke
about games. Encouraged, Romero sat him down in front of a computer to see how he
could put together a makeshift level of Doom. Within minutes Sandy was drawing what
seemed like a mess of lines on screen. “Um,” Romero said, “what are you doing here?”
“Well,” Sandy chirped speedily, “I’m going to have you come through here and this
wall’s going to open up behind you and the monster’s going to come through it and
you’re going down this way and I’m going to turn the lights off and all this stuff
. . .”
All right, Romero thought, this guy’s getting it like—bam! With Sandy on board as
id’s game designer, Romero would be free to do all the different things he enjoyed—programming,
making sounds, creating levels, overseeing business deals.
Sandy was given an offer, but he told Jay he needed more money to support his family.
Later that day Carmack approached him and said, “The stuff you’ve done is really good.
I like your work, and I think you’d be good in the company.” The next day Carmack
stopped him in the hall again. “When I said your work was good,” he said, “that was
before I knew that you’d asked Jay for more money. So I don’t want you to think I
told you your work was good in an attempt to get you to ask for less money. Mmm.”
Then he walked off. It seemed to Sandy like a weird thing to say, as if Carmack thought
that he could cajole him out of wanting a higher salary. He doesn’t know anything
about how humans think or feel, Sandy thought.
It didn’t take long for Romero to appreciate Sandy’s speed, sense of design, and encyclopedic
knowledge of games. Sandy regaled him about the payback a player should receive when
blasting the lungs out of a demon with the shotgun. “You really should get rewarded
on several levels,” he said. “You hear the gun go off, you see the big, manly guy
cocking his shotgun, you see the bad guy go flying backwards, or an explosion. It’s
always you’re rewarded for doing the right thing!”
Romero couldn’t agree more, adding how, in addition to all that, there would be like
tons of blood flying out from the beasts. They had a good laugh. Romero decided to
probe the religious issues. “So,” he said, “you’re Mormon?”
“Yep,” Sandy replied.
“Well,” Romero said with a chuckle, “at least you’re like not a Mormon that keeps
pumping out tons of kids and stuff.”
Sandy stopped typing. “Actually, I’ve got five kids.”
“Oh, okay,” Romero stammered. “But that’s not like
ten
or anything. But you know five’s a lot but, um, at least you’re not a really
hard-core
card-carrying Mormon.”
“Oh, I got my Mormon card right here!” Sandy pulled it out.
“Well, at least you don’t wear those garments and stuff, right?”
Sandy lifted his shirt. “Got my garments on right here!”
“Okay, okay,” Romero said, “I’m going to shut up.”
“Look,” Sandy said, “don’t worry. I have no problems with the demons in the game.
They’re just cartoons. And, anyway,” he added, smiling, “
they’re
the bad guys.”
While id refined Doom
in September 1993, two sons of a preacher from Spokane named Rand and Robyn Scott
released Myst, a literary adventure computer game on CD-ROM. The game became an instant
phenomenon, topping the computer game charts and eventually
selling more than 4 million copies
. It also popularized the burgeoning new format of CD-ROM. With the rise of CD-ROM
drives on home computers, this spacious format (which could store hundreds of times
more data than floppy disks) was becoming the “it” software for game developers. The
extra space afforded better sound and even full-motion video—effects exploited in
a horror CD-ROM game called 7th Guest, another chart topper.
Shot in a photorealistic manner, Myst set players on a mysterious abandoned island,
where they were to explore strange rooms and machines and unlock the secret of their
inventor, a man named Atrus. Like Doom, Myst unfolded from a first-person point of
view. But in Myst, players didn’t run or, for that matter, crawl. They just slowly
flowed; clicking a space or item before them would gracefully fade one setting into
the next.
“Its brilliantly designed and rendered 3-D images,”
Wired
magazine raved, “and its funhouse world of mazes, puzzles, and human intrigues will
certainly set a new standard for this type of adventure game.”
Id hated Myst. It had none of the elements they liked: no real-time interaction, no
pace, no fear, no action. If Myst was like Shakespeare, Doom was going to be Stephen
King. With Carmack’s engine in gear, the rest of the team buckled down on finished
elements of the game. Adrian and Kevin churned out dark, demonic art. They drew guys
impaled, twitching on stakes (like the impaled farmer Adrian had seen at the hospital
long ago), blood-spattered corpses chained to walls. The death animations were more
elaborate than ever: monsters stumbling with their skulls ripped open, the Baron of
Hell slumping forward with his intestines spilling onto the floor.
The weapons were falling into place: the shotgun, the pistol, the chain saw, a rocket
launcher, and the affectionately named BFG, Big Fucking Gun. In Wolfenstein, if the
player lost a gun, it would be replaced with the default weapon, a knife. In Doom,
the player would be left to duke it out with his bare fists. They digitized Kevin’s
hand, slugging punches against a blue screen. The killer weapons and monsters needed
suitably killer sounds. The guys signed Bobby Prince up again to record the audio.
Under Romero’s guidance, Bobby gave Doom a techno metal–style soundtrack. A puree
of animal groans were used for the game’s beasts.
With the guns and monsters and gore, Sandy and Romero went to town on the levels.
Romero had found his voice in Doom. He loved everything about the game, the speed,
the fear, the suspense, and he tried to play it all up. Romero’s levels were deliberately
paced. As level designer, he was responsible for not only designing the architecture
of the environments but also choosing where to put monsters, weapons, bonus items
and objects; it was like being a theater director and haunted-mansion creator all
in one.
Romero relished the roles. In a level of his, a player might run into a room and see
a window leading outside but wouldn’t know how to get there. So the player would run
down a room, music pumping, looking for a way. A door would slide open and
Boom!
there’d be a howling Imp. Blast that monster down, run down a brown spotted corridor,
open another door, and
Blam!
another herd of beasts. Romero had a knack for staging the battles, letting the player
win one small round, then pummeling him with a storm of enemies.
While Romero was raw and brutal, Sandy was cerebral and strategic. One level was littered
with green barrels that, when shot, would explode. Sandy made levels in which the
only way to kill a monster was to shoot a barrel at the perfect moment. His levels
were not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as Romero’s; in fact, some of the id guys
thought they were downright ugly, but they were undeniably fun and fiendish. They
complemented Romero’s well.
By the fall of 1993, the pressure was on as gamers began to clamor for Doom. A demonstration
for the press leaked out onto the Internet, despite id’s best efforts. Small groups
of die-hard fans began calling the id office or sending desperate e-mails for information.
But the mainstream press didn’t seem to know or, for that matter, care.
A community television program did a piece
on the guys, filming them at work playing games, but that was about it. Calling the
big papers and magazines, Jay found, was fruitless.