It wasn’t a popular way to rule. With the exception of Romero, the only other hacker-minded
programmer at id, Carmack’s generosity caused much consternation at the company—especially
among the more conservative-minded businessmen, like Jay and Kevin. “This is a
crazy
idea,” Kevin said. “No one’s ever given away their tools to make new content. And
we have to worry about legal questions. What if someone takes our content and combines
it with their product and releases it? What if someone takes all the content that’s
developed on the Internet and sells it on the shelf and suddenly we’re competing with
our own product?”
Carmack rolled his eyes. They didn’t get this at all, he thought, because they weren’t
programmers so they didn’t
get
the hacker joy of it. They weren’t really gamers either. They weren’t part of the
gaming community that was growing up there. To Carmack’s appreciation, Romero came
loudly to his defense. “Dudes,” Romero told the others, “we’re not going to lose that
much money. We’re making a ton of money right now. Big deal. Who cares?”
Even before Doom was officially released, plenty of people certainly did care about
the ability to modify it. One group was so eager, they hacked the leaked alpha version
of Doom. As the official release approached, Carmack had e-mailed the Wolfenstein
mod makers about the new faculties in Doom. He didn’t anticipate how far these gamers
would go. In only a matter of weeks after Doom’s release, hackers began releasing
crude level or map-editing programs. These tools let players modify existing rooms
of the game, say, adjusting walls, moving around floors, or making other minor adjustments.
On January 26, 1994, the hackers got all the more real. A student at the University
of Canterbury in New Zealand named Brendon Wyber uploaded a free program called the
Doom Editor Utility, or DEU. Wyber had created the program with the help of an international
online coalition of gamers who, through bone-breaking hack work, had found a way to
break apart Doom’s code. Though Carmack had provided source code, he gave no clue
of how actually to tear the goods apart. The DEU broke everything apart and explained
how to make a level from the ground up. Soon a Belgian student named Raphael Quinet
collaborated with Wyber to release a more readable version of the DEU, which hit the
Net on February 16, 1994. “You can do almost anything to any level,” they promised
in the program, “move, add or remove monsters and powerups, change the wall colours
and positions, create new lifts, doors, acid pools, crushing ceilings . . . or even
create a new level from scratch!”
The DEU was a watershed. Suddenly, all those with the gumption could make a level
of a game. They didn’t need to be programmers or artists or anything. If they wanted
they could just tweak what was there. Or they could dress it up, using their own sounds,
images, ideas. There could be Doom Barneys, Doom Simpsons, Doom shopping malls, Doom
subways. A University of Michigan student named Greg Lewis delved further into the
netherworld of Doom code and created a program called DeHackEd. This software—also
distributed for free—did the unthinkable by allowing a user to modify not the WADs
containing the graphics, sounds, and levels but the very
core
of the game itself, known as the executable file. The executable contained all the
technical information for how the game was played: how monsters behaved, how weapons
fired, how text was displayed.
“DeHackEd is capable of heavily restructuring the way Doom works,” Lewis wrote in
the file describing his program. “Make fireballs invisible, make missiles do 2000
points of damage, make demons float! Edit the Ammo tables to help your struggling
Marine with more ammo. Edit the Frame tables, and create new looking items, or extra-fast
shooting weapons. And save your changes in patch files to distribute to your friends.
Create new types of deathmatches, with plasma ‘mines’ and super-fast wimpy rockets.
Wad developers can modify monster types to distribute with their levels . . . great
new possibilities!”
Hacker tools for Doom became another means of immersion in what was already the most
immersive game around. Doom immersed players in a fast-action 3-D world. It immersed
competitors in an arena of deathmatching where they could hunt each other down. The
Doom mod tools immersed programmers as creators, as ones who could take this incredible
world and sculpt it to their own divine desires. The game made them into little gods.
Doom hackers began swapping their levels for free in forums on AOL, CompuServe, and
across the Internet. Gamers who had been failing out of school because of deathmatching
now had an even more addictive compulsion: hacking. They hacked all night. They hacked
all day. They even hacked naked; at the Taylor University computer lab, gamers stripped
down for regular “skinny-hacking” parties. Doom wasn’t just a game, it was a culture.
And it was a culture that made the skeptics within id even more queasy. After much
arguing in the company, Jay was granted permission to post legal terms for prospective
Doom hackers. “Id Software requires no fees or royalties,” he posted online. “You
may require user payment for your work; Your utility
must
not work with the shareware version of Doom; You
must
represent that your utility is not an id Software product and id Software cannot
and will not provide support for your product, nor for Doom after the data has been
changed by your product; You may be required to include some
legal
text in your utility to make our lawyers happy; There may be more or some of the
above may not be in the final document. It depends on my frame of mind at the time.:)
. . . I am sorry to have to resort to the
post,
” he concluded, “but . . . there is no other way to keep this process under control.”
But control at id Software was all the more difficult to be found.
By the spring of 1994,
id had a new answering machine message: “If you are calling to discuss some great
idea you have on how you can make money with our product,” it said, “please press
five now.”
As the Doom phenomenon grew, the big leagues began to take notice. Universal Pictures
with Ivan Reitman, director of
Ghostbusters
and
Stripes,
optioned the rights for a Doom movie. Other companies, including George Lucas’s LucasArts,
began developing Doom-like games. Even Microsoft, the powerhouse of the industry,
was entranced; the company saw Doom as the perfect program to flaunt the bold new
multimedia features of its upcoming operating system called Windows.
To show off Windows’s potential, Microsoft enticed John Carmack to port a short demonstration
of the game. The company ended up using the game at the Computer Game Developers Conference
to promote the power of the platform.
“Microsoft is committed
to delivering top-notch multimedia functionality in Windows,” said Brad Chase, a
general manager of the personal operating systems division at Microsoft. He said games
were one of the “largest, most important categories of multimedia applications.”
Soon, however, many began to marvel at how id might make companies like Microsoft
or IBM look obsolete. Id had taken the shareware phenomenon and transformed it into
a recipe for addiction. Doom was so compelling that people just
had
to have the full dose. Some dubbed it
“heroinware.”
Forbes
magazine published a gushing article titled “Profits from the Underground” about
how id, in fact, was making companies like Microsoft obsolete.
“Privately held id Software
doesn’t release financials,” it read, “but from what I can flush out about the company’s
profit margin, it makes Microsoft look like a second-rate cement company.” The writer
calculated that id’s estimated $10 million in revenues would give them a profit margin
that would rival Microsoft’s. “What happens to this kind of business when the data
superhighway arrives? . . . No sales force, no inventory costs, no royalties to Nintendo
or Sega, no marketing costs, no advertising costs, no executive parking spaces. This
is a new and exciting business model, not just for games, and not even just for software,
but for a host of products and services that can be sold or delivered via an electronic
underground.”
The mainstream media picked up the ball.
The New York Times
,
USA Today
,
and
Variety
—the movie industry’s trade magazine—published articles about the business and cultural
breakthroughs of Doom. Journalists came to Dallas to see who was behind the phenomenon
and reveled in the idiosyncratic world of long-haired gamers and souped-up $200,000
Ferraris. Id wasn’t just a company that made a killer game. It was the portent of
something new, something unseen: rich, young, creative guys who were bucking all the
sensible routes of traditional business for this strange amorphous thing that, at
the time, was not even widely known as the Internet.
“Everyone is talking
about the power of the information superhighway,” Jay boasted to
The Dallas Morning News.
“We’re the living proof.” The industry needed a rock star, he realized; id was it.
Like any good rock stars, the company had an air of controversy. Because of the violence,
China was considering banning Doom
;
Brazil, in fact, would later outlaw the game
. Even Wal-Mart, which would be the major retail outlet for Doom II’s release, was
beginning to balk at the content. But just as Doom was becoming positioned as the
next great scourge of violent games, a safety valve was pulled.
Since Senator Lieberman’s federal hearings on game violence in December 1993, the
industry had raced to find a response that would curtail the threat of government
involvement. After another hearing in the spring of 1994, the result was the Interactive
Digital Software Association: a trade organization representing all the major publishers
joined for the purpose of self-regulation. By the fall of 1994, the IDSA had a voluntary
system, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which would assign ratings much as
the movie industry did: T for Teen, M for Mature. The first game that would bear its
mark would be Doom II.
Id not only escaped unscathed but found its bad-boy image further enhanced. The hearings
had, ironically, heralded a new, meaner, more violent era in video games, and the
gamers of the world couldn’t get enough. Sega’s
Night Trap sold out around the country. With the ratings system in place, publishers
felt freer to release edgier content. Even Nintendo joined in the party, making plans
to release a version of Mortal Kombat II
—gore and all. But no developer was positioned quite like id. Now, as the media and
fans descended, all it needed was a face, someone they could pin their worship on.
At id, there was no competition. When it came time for a lead singer of the band to
emerge, John Romero wasn’t only perfect, he was the only one who wanted the job.
“We’re not worthy,
we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” the gamers chanted, bowing at Romero’s feet.
It was a scorching hot afternoon in Austin, Texas. Romero and Shawn Green were standing
inside
Austin Virtual Gaming
, a six-hundred-square-foot shop above a coffee shop on the main strip outside the
University of Texas. Five Doom junkies from the school’s zoology department and local
high-tech companies had pooled their cash to open this place just a few weeks before.
They figured they weren’t the only ones in town hooked on id’s demonic creation. So
they networked a small fleet of personal computers with twenty-seven-inch screens
and began charging gamers eight dollars per hour to deathmatch. The occasion this
day was the game room’s first official Doom tournament. And, to the elation of the
few dozen gamers gathered around the red-pulsing monitors to play, Romero—one of the
guys who
wrote
the game!—was here to fight.
Though few if any of the gamers had seen pictures of Romero, they figured he was the
guy wearing the black T-shirt with the militaristic Doom logo on the front and the
bold white words “Wrote It” on the back. The shirt was Romero’s own modification.
After id had printed up a bunch of promotional tees, he suggested they add the phrase
“Wrote It” for their own. He even sent his mother a Doom shirt with the words “My
Son Wrote It” on the back. (Carmack preferred his own favorite shirt—a yellow smiley
face with a bloody bullet hole piercing the forehead.)
Romero had taken to wearing the “Wrote It” shirt everywhere—around the office, around
town, around gaming conventions. The shirt had a Moses-like effect. Gamers would spot
him in the shirt and do a celebrity double take, parting as he moved through the crowd.
The brave few would venture forward with sweaty palms and shaky hands. It happened
first outside a CompUSA when the clerk came sheepishly after Romero, who was getting
into his yellow Testarossa, and asked for an autograph. Such displays were becoming
a regular occurrence, especially when he donned the “Wrote It” shirt. Gamers began
not only asking for autographs but literally falling to their knees and echoing the
“we’re not worthy!” refrain that
Saturday Night Live
characters Wayne and Garth bestowed upon rock royalty. The other guys at id couldn’t
believe it. In fact, they were embarrassed by it:
We aren’t Metallica, we’re gamers.
But as the enigma around the company grew, the fans and media wanted more and more
information about just who id
was.
In response, the guys created a news file that gamers could obtain by sending a message
request or, in technical slang, “fingering” id’s computers. They started posting regular
updates about technical matters, but soon the news expanded into lifestyle, giving
the skinny on, among other things, the status of Carmack’s and Romero’s Ferraris.
Fans began to build a sense of wonder about the company, which, as they discovered,
was spilling over into real life. This was something new, as Jay described it—“nerd
worship.” And there was no one who liked being worshiped more than Romero. Not only
had he printed up the shirts but he was starting to change his appearance, growing
out his dark hair, wearing his contacts more often. But he didn’t look at the bowing
gamers as his minions. He saw them as his peers, his friends. Here were all these
people, he thought as he looked down on their bowing skulls, who loved games as much
as he did. As the Doom momentum built, after all, Romero was becoming as addicted
to the game as his fans were. He and Shawn were now deathmatching on a regular basis,
staying long into the night. When he wasn’t playing Doom, Romero was talking about
Doom. He was a regular attendant in the burgeoning Doom chat rooms and message boards
and newsgroups, discussing the latest mods, deathmatch tourneys, and technical happenings.
To the outside world, Romero
was
id.