At school, Romero turned in
a homemade comic book called
Weird
for an art class assignment. In one section he described and illustrated “10 Different
Ways to Torture Someone,” including “Poke a needle all over the victim’s body and
in a few days . . . watch him turn into a giant scab” and “Burn the victim’s feet
while victim is strapped in a chair.” Another, titled “How to Drive the Babysitter
Mad!,” illustrated suggestions including “Get out a very sharp dagger and pretend
that you stabbed yourself” and “Stick electric cord into your ears and pretend that
you are a radio.” The teacher returned the assignment with a note that read, “This
was awfully gross. I don’t think it needs to be that way.” Romero got a B+ for his
artistic efforts. But he saved his hardest work for his code.
Within weeks of his first trip to Sierra College, he had programmed his first computer
game: a text adventure. Because the mainframes couldn’t save data, the programming
had to be punched on waxy paper cards; each card represented a line of code—a typical
game would take thousands. After every day at the school, Romero would wrap the stack
of cards in bungee cord around the back of his bike and pedal home. When he’d return
to the lab the next time, he’d have to feed the cards into the computer again to get
the game to run. One day on the way home from the college, Romero’s bike hit a bump
in the road. Two hundred cards went flying into the air and scattered across the wet
ground. Romero decided it was time to move on.
He soon found his next love: the Apple II computer.
Apple had become the darling
of the indie hacker set ever since the machine was introduced at a 1976 meeting of
the Homebrew Computer Club, a ragtag group of California techies. As the first accessible
home computers, Apples were ideally suited for making and playing games. This was
thanks in no small part to the roots of the company’s cofounders, Steve Jobs and Stephen
Wozniak—or, as they became known,
the Two Steves
.
Jobs, a college dropout with a passion for Buddhism and philosophy, took his first
job at a start-up video game company called Atari in the mid-seventies. Atari was
legendary because its founder, Nolan Bushnell, had produced the 1972 arcade hit, Pong,
a tennislike game that challenged players to maneuver white strip paddles on either
side of the screen while hitting a dot back and forth. Jobs would share the confidence
and brashness of his boss, who had
hacked Spacewar
to create his first arcade game, Computer Space. But Jobs had larger plans to realize
with his childhood friend Wozniak, a.k.a. Woz, a math whiz who could spend hours playing
a video game.
Woz was equal parts
programming genius and mischievous prankster, known around the San Francisco Bay
Area for running his own dial-a-joke phone number. In computers, Woz found the perfect
place to combine his humor and his math skills, creating a game that flashed the message
“Oh Shit” on the screen when the player lost a round. Jobs recruited Woz to design
Breakout, a new game for Atari. This alchemy of Jobs’s entrepreneurial vision and
Woz’s programming ingenuity gave birth to their company, Apple. Created in 1976, the
first Apple computer was essentially a prototype for the Homebrew crowd, priced devilishly
at $666.66.
But the Apple II, made the following year, was mass market
, with a keyboard, BASIC compatibility, and, best of all, color graphics. There was
no hard drive, but it came with two game paddles. It was
made
for games.
Romero had first seen the stylish beige Apple II computers up at Sierra College. While
a mainframe’s graphics were capable of, at best, spitting out white blocks and lines,
the Apple II’s monitor burst with color and high-resolution dots. Romero had spent
the rest of the day running around the lab trying to find out all he could about this
magical new box. Whenever he was at the school, Romero played the increasingly diverse
lineup of Apple II games.
Many were rip-offs of arcade hits like Asteroids and Space Invaders. Others showed
signs of true innovation. For instance, Ultima. Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British,
the son of an astronaut in Texas, spoke in Middle English and created the massively
successful graphical role-playing series of Ultima games. As in Dungeons and Dragons,
players chose to be wizards or elves, fighting dragons and building characters. The
graphics were crude, with landscapes represented by blocky colored squares; a green
block, ostensibly, a tree; a brown one, a mountain. Players never saw their smudgy
stick figure characters attacking monsters, they would just walk up to a dragon blip
and wait for a text explanation of the results. But gamers overlooked the crudeness
for what the games
implied:
a novelistic and participatory experience, a world.
Ultima also showed off the latent entrepreneurship of this new breed of hackers. Garriott
came to fame in the early eighties through his own initiative. Like many other Apple
II programmers, he would hand-distribute his games on floppy disks sealed in clear
plastic Ziploc bags to local computer stores.
Ken and Roberta Williams
, a young married couple in Northern California, also pioneered the Ziploc distribution
method, turning their homemade graphical role-playing games into a $10 million–a–year
company, Sierra On-Line—a haven of hippie digerati with hot tub parties to boot.
Silas Warner
, a six-foot, nine-inch, 320-pound legend, cofounded his own company, Muse Software,
and put out another of Romero’s favorite games, the darkly suspenseful Castle Wolfenstein,
in which players ran their stick figure characters through a series of plain mazes
while battling Nazis and, ultimately, Hitler himself.
Romero spent so much time on the games that his stepfather decided it was best for
the family to have a computer at home, where they could better keep an eye on him.
The day the Apple II arrived, he found his wife standing at the door. “Promise you
won’t get angry,” she pleaded. An empty Apple II box sat in the living room. “Johnny
put it all together already,” she said cautiously. A few ill-sounding beeps could
be heard. Enraged, Schuneman stomped down the hall and flung open the door, expecting
to encounter a savage pile of plastic and wires. Instead he found Romero at the functioning
machine, typing. His stepfather stood for a minute quietly, then went in and let the
boy show him some games.
For Christmas that year, 1982, Romero had two requests: a book called
Apple Graphics Arcade Tutorial
and another called
Assembly Lines,
which explained assembly language, a faster and more cryptic code. These books became
his lifeblood when his stepfather took the family on a job reassignment to the Royal
Air Force base in Alconbury, a small town in central England. There Romero wrote games
that could exploit his refined assembly language skills. He drew his own packages
and created his own artwork. Selling his games at school, Romero became known for
his skills.
Romero’s stepfather knew something was up when an officer working on a classified
Russian dogfight simulation asked him if his stepson was interested in a part-time
job. The next day an officer led the boy into an icy room filled with large computers.
A black drape blocked Romero’s view of the classified maps, documents, and machines.
He was told they needed help translating a program from a mainframe to a minicomputer.
On the monitor he saw a crudely drawn flight simulation. “No problem,” he said. “I
know everything about games.”
Romero was ready for the big time. The computer was now a cultural icon.
Time
magazine even put a computer on its cover in place of its usual Man of the Year as
1982’s
“Machine of the Year.”
Games for the computer were becoming all the more enticing as video games—made for
systems or “consoles” that hooked up to television sets—collapsed with a resounding
crash. A surplus of games and hardware had led to
$536 million in losses
for Atari alone in 1983. Meanwhile, home computers were gaining speed. Commodore’s
VIC-20 and 64 computers helped it surpass Apple with
$1 billion in sales
. And these computers needed games.
For a kid working with an Apple II, there were two ways to get published in the nascent
industry. The big publishers, like Sierra and Electronic Arts, Romero found, were
fairly inaccessible. More within his reach were the enthusiast magazines, which, to
save costs, printed games as code on their pages. To play, the reader would have to
type the program laboriously into a computer.
While in England, Romero spent every spare moment in front of the Apple, working on
games to send away for publication. The resulting slip in his grades angered his stepfather,
reviving old battles and inspiring, for Romero, new
comics he called “Melvin.”
The action was always the same: Melvin, a boy, would do something his father, a bald
guy with sunglasses, like his stepdad, had told him not to do—then suffer the creatively
grisly consequences. In one strip, Melvin agrees to do the dishes but instead disappears
to play computer games. After discovering this, his dad waits until Melvin is sleeping,
runs into his room screaming, “You little fucker!” then punches his face into a bloody,
eye-popping pulp. Romero wasn’t the only one who found a release in the violent comics.
Kids at school would sneak him ideas for how Melvin should meet his doom. Romero drew
them all, exaggerating every opportunity for scatological gore. He was much admired.
The attention changed him. He was listening to heavy metal—Judas Priest, Metallica,
Mötley Crüe. He dated a half dozen girls. The one he liked best soon became his girlfriend,
a popular, intelligent, and outgoing daughter of a respected officer. She had him
buy button-down shirts, wear nice jeans and contacts. After years of being beaten
down by his father and his stepfather, Romero was finally getting recognition.
At sixteen, Romero was just as eager to have success with his games. After eight months
of rejections,
the good news came
on March 5, 1984, from an Apple magazine called
InCider.
An editor, weary from a recent trip to Mardi Gras, wrote that the magazine had decided
to publish the code for Romero’s Scout Search, a low-resolution maze game in which
the player—represented by a single dot—had to gather all his scouts—more dots—before
being attacked by a grizzly bear—another dot. It didn’t look great, but it was fun
to play. Romero would be paid $100. And the magazine might be interested in publishing
some of the other games Romero had sent in. “I’ll get around to them as soon as my
hangover clears up,” the editor wrote.
Romero put all his energy into making more games, for which he did all the programming
and art. He could program one game in a half hour. He arrived at a naming convention:
every game title was a two-word alliteration, like Alien Attack or Cavern Crusader.
He grew increasingly brash.
“When I win
this month’s [programming] contest,” he wrote to one magazine, “(I
will
win; my program’s awesome!), instead of a $500 prize, could I just take the $500?
The same goes for the annual prize of $1000 (which I’ll get also).” He signed this
letter, like all of them, “John Romero, Ace Programmer.” And he won the cash.
The success inspired him to get back in touch with his biological dad, who was living
in Utah. In a letter he wrote on makeshift letterhead for his company, Capitol Ideas
Software, he was eager to show how far he’d come, telling about all the contests and
publications.
“I’ve been learning computers
for 4
1/
2
years now,” Romero wrote. “My programming has just undergone another revolution.”
This time he signed his letter “John Romero, Ace Programmer, Contest Winner, Future
Rich Person.” He was already on his way, he could
feel
it. But to make it big, Future Rich Person big, he had to leave England and get back
to America.
Romero got his wish
in 1986, when he returned with his family to California. He signed up for classes
at Sierra College, which he started just before finishing his senior year of high
school. His publishing rolled; almost everything he churned out found its way into
a computer magazine. His games made magazine covers. And, during a shift at Burger
King, he fell in love.
Kelly Mitchell came into the restaurant one day and caught Romero’s eye from behind
the cash register. The two began dating. Kelly was the daughter of an upper-middle-class
Mormon family. Best of all, she lived in a cool house high on a hill in town. Though
Romero had dated other girls, no one was as fun and compatible as Kelly—even if she
didn’t care about games. For nineteen-year-old Romero, it seemed like the chance to
start the family he’d never really had. He proposed, and the two were married in 1987.
He decided it was time to go for his dream job. He had published ten games. He was
about to graduate from high school. He was taking on a family. He needed a gig. The
opportunity came on September 15, 1987, with a gathering for Apple computer enthusiasts
called the Applefest. Romero had read about it in a computer magazine and knew that
everyone
would be there: the big game publishers, Origin and Sierra, as well as the magazines
that were keeping him gainfully published,
Uptime, Nibble,
and
InCider.
He arrived at the convention center in San Francisco as hackers and gamers lugged
monitors, printouts, and disks inside. A table overflowed with
Nibble
magazines that featured one of Romero’s games on the cover. In the booth for
Uptime,
a computer magazine published on floppy disk, another of his games played on the
monitors. Oh yeah, Romero thought, I’m gonna do well here.
At the
Uptime
booth, Romero met Jay Wilbur, the editor who had been buying up his work. Jay, a
strapping twenty-seven-year-old former bartender at T.G.I. Friday’s, looked like a
kid pumped up with air and peppered with facial hair. Jay had a soft spot for Romero:
an irreverent but reliable programmer who understood the magic formula of a great
game—easy to learn, difficult to master. Jay offered him a job. With typical bravado,
Romero told him he’d have think about it.