Not everyone in the office would agree. By November 1995, Quake was nowhere near completion,
and factions were more vocally blaming Romero. With Carmack still immersed in making
his engine, the rest of the company felt like they had nothing tangible to pursue.
The artists, Kevin and Adrian, were tired of churning out all the fantasy textures
without a clear plan. The level designers, American and Sandy, were bored twiddling
around with rudimentary game sections. Beyond the basic concept of a fantasy game
and a big hammer weapon, there wasn’t much to go on. Whenever they asked Romero for
direction, he would just spew out his generalizations and leave them to fend for themselves.
What kind of project director was that?
In Romero’s mind Quake was coming along just fine. Carmack was busy working on what
he knew would be the next killer game program. There was no reason to rush Engine
John. The rest of the company had to just be patient and get ready to throw on the
great game design. The best thing they could do was find ways to be productive. Romero
chose to spend this time by immersing himself in side projects that he felt would
have direct benefit to the company.
But he could sense that they wanted to blame him for not getting the game done, that
he wasn’t doing enough work. They viewed his detachment, his flipped bit, as a sign
that their resident rock star was spinning, if not crashing, his wheels. Their attitude
was starting to piss him off. So what if he was going home at 7:00 p.m.? He had a
wife. He was building a home. He was making a
life.
And he deserved it. Now that id finally had some more employees to take up the slack,
he should be able to take it easier. If the company were hurting, he could understand
the complaints. But the company was doing well, in no small part thanks to his multiple
projects. And if he wasn’t going to oversee these projects, who was?
Yet Romero was neither seeking nor finding empathy. One night Sandy Petersen decided
he had had enough. He stormed into Carmack’s office and shut the door. “I think John’s
a really good designer,” he said, “and I think that he’s currently not properly organizing
Quake. I’ve been at a big company where games get organized, and I know how it’s done
and he’s not doing it. He’s not a project manager, he doesn’t know how to do it, and
the game’s not gonna come together unless he changes some things.”
Carmack hit the reply button in his head and spewed out what was now his rote response
to this complaint: “Romero works like a demon at the right time,” he said, “and it’ll
all come together.” Then he spun around in his chair and went back to work, no good-byes,
no conversation ender, no nothing. Typical, Sandy thought. Carmack had long behaved
this way, unconcerned with the conventional etiquette of how to begin, continue, and
conclude a dialogue with another human being. But these days it was growing worse.
One afternoon Michael Abrash told Carmack about how his daughter had finally gotten
into a good school after considerable effort. It had meant a lot to Michael, but all
Carmack had to say in response was “mmm”; then he spun around to his desk.
Carmack could feel that he was drifting off into space, further and further away from
things that he could talk about with
normal
people. He couldn’t connect with anything that was stirring around him: the office
politics, happy hours, MTV. His world was Quake. His days were Quake. His nights,
his life. He was working eighty-hour weeks easily, fully immersed in his nocturnal
schedule. People would see him walk in, grab a Diet Coke from the fridge, then make
a beeline to his office. The only action they’d see would be the occasional pizza
delivery person knocking on his door.
And yet, despite his best efforts, Carmack for the first time in his life felt like
nothing was falling into place. Quake was requiring him essentially to reinvent everything.
Little from Doom could be extended into Quake’s 3-D world. Doom supported four players
in deathmatch in somewhat tricky network mode, but Quake would support sixteen people
easily over the Internet. Doom had a limited three-dimensional perspective, but Quake
would deliver full-blown immersion, allowing players to look in
any
direction and see a convincing virtual world. The most frustrating consequence was
his engine’s inability to draw a complete visible world or, in technical terms, a
potentially visible set. As a result, the world of Quake was filled with holes. Carmack
would be running down a hallway of the game only to find it abruptly end in a hideous
blue void. There were blue voids in the floor, in the walls, in the ceilings. His
virtual world was Swiss cheese.
Consumed by this dilemma, Carmack’s thoughts began getting all the more abstract.
His mind filled with geometric forms, floating and spinning at his command as he tried
to separate them, assemble them, organize them. He didn’t dream about girls in bikinis
at spring break like many guys his age; he dreamed about the relationship of two polygons
in space. He would stumble home at 4:00 a.m., and the visions wouldn’t leave him.
One night, he sat on the edge of his bed watching coded messages travel down to his
arm, instructing it how to move, grip, release. This isn’t the way it works in real
life, he thought. I must be having a weird dream. He awoke in a cold sweat. There
was no escape, not even in sleep.
Though Carmack rarely felt—let alone cracked from—pressure, Quake was beginning to
break him. He started lashing out at his employees. One day, Jay suggested they talk
about getting software patents for their game technology. “If you guys ever apply
for software patents,” Carmack barked, “I quit, that’s it, end of discussion.” Everything
grated on him: the distractions of business, the politics of emotion, the laziness—at
least in his mind—of others. “You always leave early,” Carmack said one evening as
Sandy was walking out the door. Sandy was stunned; he was putting in eleven-hour days
at least, but his days started at 9:00 a.m., whereas Carmack didn’t even get in the
office until 4:00 in the afternoon. “I don’t leave early,” he said. “You’re just not
here when I’m here.”
Carmack didn’t relent. He began firing off disciplinary e-mails. First, he banned
deathmatching in the office. Then he sent out grades. Everyone in the company was
given a letter grade based on his performance: Sandy got a D, Romero a C. Carmack
wasn’t through. One night he dragged his desk outside his office and planted himself
to work in the hallway—the better to keep an eye on everyone around him. Employees
began living in fear of their jobs and staying later and later, trying to keep up
with Carmack’s relentless pace.
The fun, they felt, was being sucked out of the company. The tension was so thick
that people started to complain about Carmack too. Romero wasn’t the only one with
the ego; Carmack was off in his own world, refusing to come down. Soon nothing, not
even the most tempting distraction, could lighten the situation. One afternoon Carmack
was sitting in his office when he heard a woman’s voice down the hall asking if someone
had ordered a pizza. Romero replied, “No, I didn’t order a pizza.” She asked again,
“Did you order a pizza?” Someone else said, “Uh, no.” Carmack heard his door open.
“Did you order a pizza?” the woman asked. He spun around to see an attractive young
woman, topless, carrying a pizza box. The stripper was a practical joke arranged by
Mike Wilson in an attempt to lighten the mood. “No,” Carmack told her flatly, “I didn’t
order a pizza”; then he too went back to work. “Boy,” the stripper said, “you guys
are boring as hell!” Then she walked out the door.
All Carmack wanted was to be left alone to work or, even better, just be cast adrift,
left as a hermit. The only person who had any empathy for him, it seemed, was Romero.
One night Romero pulled him aside. “Dude, I know you’re being hard on yourself,” he
said, “but you can’t be superhuman.”
To some extent, Carmack thought, Romero was being reasonable. They could certainly
work hard without requiring people to work the death schedules of the past. But Romero’s
attitude was indicative of something deeper, something much more telling. After all
these years, all the late nights, the collaborations, Romero was pulling himself out
of the trenches of code for the ether of fame and notoriety. Where
was
Romero when he needed him to work, experiment, lead by example? Off building his
mansion and being a celebrity!
Carmack knew what he had to do. He had to prove that Romero was slacking. And he knew
just how. He wrote a program that would create a time log whenever Romero worked on
his PC. According to the results, his partner wasn’t working much. When he confronted
Romero with the data, his partner exploded. “You’re only doing that so you can fire
me,” Romero snapped.
Well, Carmack thought, yeah!
After all his speculation,
Carmack now had his proof—
scientific
proof—that Romero was not only not working but becoming toxic. With that evidence
in hand, he didn’t feel the least bit of remorse when he arrived at his conclusion:
Romero needed to be warned, officially warned, to shape up. He was talking too much
to the press, talking too much to fans, deathmatching too much in the office, and
now the rest of the company was suffering. Carmack approached Adrian and Kevin and
said, “We need to put Romero on record that he is about to be fired.”
Carmack had a habit of being abrupt, they knew, but this statement took them aback.
“No, no, no,” Adrian said. “I don’t want to do that, he’s a friend of mine, a partner.
He’ll come back around.”
But Carmack insisted and, as was becoming the pattern, Kevin and Adrian did what Carmack
wanted. There was no question in their minds—or the others’ at id for that matter—that
Engine John was their key man. As Mike Wilson said, “If he takes his ball and goes
home, the game’s over.” A meeting was called in November 1995. The owners solemnly
gathered around the black conference table behind the black Venetian blinds. Carmack
sat at the head of the table, as usual. “You’re still not doing your work,” he told
Romero, “and you absolutely need to do all of this or you’re going to be fired.”
Romero was indignant. “I work as much as anyone else,” he said. “I’m here all the
time.”
Carmack looked to Kevin and Adrian for help, but Adrian was just staring at the floor.
“Well,” Kevin said in Romero’s defense, “John does come in and do his work.”
Carmack was flabbergasted. He thought Kevin and Adrian were going to support his argument.
Everyone knew that, if it came down to it, he couldn’t fire Romero by himself—he needed
their vote too. For now, they agreed to give Romero a so-called smackdown bonus, a
lower bonus than usual to tell him that he had to get his act together on the game.
Whatever, Romero thought; he didn’t need the cash right now and, when the game was
finally done, he knew he’d prove them wrong.
By Thanksgiving, however, nothing had changed. The game was still far off track. Carmack
called another meeting, this time for the entire company. “There’s no proof of concept
for game design,” he declared. Everyone concurred that the game was taking forever.
There was no cohesive plan. American McGee finally made the inevitable suggestion
to abandon Romero’s ambitious idea of a hand-to-hand combat game for something more
simple. “I think it will be better,” he said, “if we make a game with rocket launchers
and stuff like that.”
“Yeah,” Sandy said, “let’s do Doom III, and the next game we’ll do something innovative.”
Romero was floored. First the smackdown bonus, now this? Who the fuck were these guys?
What did they know? They had never worked on a new game from start to finish. They
didn’t understand id. “Every id game proceeded just like this before!” he said. “Carmack
makes a revolutionary engine,
then
we put a revolutionary game design on top of it. Let’s just get the engine done,
then we can make this really cool game idea that no one’s seen before. Quake is going
to be better than Doom; even if we just slap Doom on this new engine, it’ll still
be a hit. We need to go beyond that and put the original great game idea that no one
has done on top of this new engine and create something that’s as big as Doom was
when it came out.”
But the ball was rolling. Newer guys like American began arguing passionately against
Romero’s fantasy design. They felt they couldn’t be creative because there was nothing
to work with. There were two paths in the road. They could just stick with Carmack’s
technology and create a lean, mean game that could be done in a reasonable amount
of time. Or they could go with Romero’s design and end up God knows where. They should
just do another Doom.
At first, Adrian and Kevin seemed to take Romero’s side. “Holy crap, guys,” Adrian
said. “We’ve done a shitload of work here.” They had spent nearly a year churning
out art specifically designed for a medieval fantasy,
not
a futuristic marine game. And after all that work, they were just getting to the
fun part: putting blood on the walls, making specialized areas. “Just because some
of you guys haven’t gotten anything done,” Adrian snapped, “there’s no reason to scrap
the project. If we switch games, it’s going to take us another
year
to get to the point where we are right now. We’re not talking about an easy change.”
The others didn’t seem to care. As they continued to argue against Romero’s ambitious
design, Romero watched Carmack in disbelief. Oh my God, he realized, Carmack agrees
with them. He’s giving validity to the idea of not doing a revolutionary game design.
Romero burst. “We’re already slaves to technology in this company,” he said, “and
at least we can do what we can to make a great game on top of it like we did with
Doom. Now these guys just want to slap out a game using the Doom stuff? We can still
make a great game if we take the time to program it.”
Carmack could see both sides. But there was a key flaw in Romero’s argument: he had
nothing to support himself. The only workable levels of Quake that existed were the
high-tech Doom-style ones coming from American. If Romero had created an amazing fantasy
world, that would have been a different story. But, in Carmack’s mind, Romero had
done practically nothing. Clearly their old ambitious idea for Quake—the one that
went back to the lake house in Shreveport—was misguided.