When Tom got his Apple II, it became an infinite world into which he could explode.
Like Carmack and Romero, Tom taught himself to make games as quickly as he could.
By the time he entered the University of Wisconsin to study computer science, he had
made almost a hundred games, most of them imitations of arcade hits like Donkey Kong.
Unlike Carmack and Romero, Tom
enjoyed
being a student. He immersed himself in cross-disciplinary studies, ranging from
languages to physics and anthropology. The computer game, he believed, was a unique
medium into which he could incorporate those disciplines. He could invent a language
for aliens in a game. He could program realistic physics. He could write stories,
invent characters.
He began volunteering around campus, eventually making games for learning-disabled
kids. Tom relished their enjoyment of his work, the looks on their faces when they
escaped into the worlds he created. He wasn’t just making games for himself, he was
making them for this audience. Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate
form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were
almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels.
After graduating college, Tom found his dreams dashed. When his résumés to game companies
went unanswered, he did what most college graduates did with their dreams—gave up
and applied for “real jobs.” Every time he put on his suit and went for an interview,
the person on the other side of the desk would ask him the same exact question: “Is
this really what you want to do?” Finally Tom listened to the answer he gave in his
head and said no. Shortly thereafter, he got a job at Softdisk.
Tom took an instant liking to Romero, who came on more than a year after he had started.
Romero loved one of the games Tom had recently made called Legend of the Star Axe.
It was clearly descended from Tom’s favorite book,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
—a kind of Monty Python meets
Star Wars
romp by the British cult author Douglas Adams. The game featured an intergalactic
’57 Chevy and a host of quirky characters like the Blehs—green creatures with two
big eye sockets who went around trying to scare people by saying, “Bleh! Bleh! Bleh!”
As much as Romero and Carmack connected as programmers, Romero and Tom connected as
comedians. They were always riffing off each other, transforming Tom’s alien chirps
into an elaborate language of blips and bleeps. They shared a love of dark comedy.
Tom might say something like “go press your man-beef in a sheep’s musky hollows” and
Romero would respond by telling Tom to “go slice open a goat and tie the warm, wet
intestines around you for a cock ring.” They were never at a loss for sick jokes.
While Carmack and Romero were working on Catacomb and Dangerous Dave, Tom would frequently
drop by to help. With Lane slipping, Romero decided to recruit Tom officially as the
new managing editor of Gamer’s Edge. Tom was as eager to work on games full-time as
the other guys. Plus, he too realized that the days of the Apple II were numbered.
Games for PCs were the future,
his
future. But Al Vekovius wasn’t having any of it. Tom was already managing editor
of the Apple II disk, and that was where he would stay.
Though disappointed,
Romero and Carmack knew they could survive for the time being without Tom; what they
couldn’t survive without was an artist. Up until then the game programmer was responsible
for doing his own artwork. But as Romero and Carmack envisioned making more ambitious
games, they wanted to have someone who was as skilled in and focused on art as they
were on programming and design. Though Romero was a more than competent artist—he
had done the art for all his old Apple II games—he was ready to leave those responsibilities
to someone else, specifically a twenty-one-year-old intern named Adrian Carmack.
Coincidentally, Adrian shared John Carmack’s last name though they were not related.
With dark hair down to his waist, Adrian stood out in the straitlaced art department
from the moment he arrived. That department, Romero lamented, was as sluggish as the
rest of the company. They weren’t gamers, they didn’t even think about games. All
they did was churn out little blocks of graphics for check-balancing programs and
clocked out at the end of the day. Adrian had a spark—plus, an awesome collection
of heavy metal T-shirts.
But Adrian, unbeknownst to Romero, wasn’t much of a gamer—not anymore, at least, though
games had lured him to art. Growing up in Shreveport, Adrian went through the arcade
phase, spending his afternoons playing Asteroids and Pac-Man with his friends. He
so liked the artwork on the cabinets that he began copying the illustrations, along
with Molly Hatchet album covers, in his notebooks during class. As an adolescent,
Adrian found himself sinking more deeply into his art, leaving even video games in
the past. There were other things weighing on his mind.
When Adrian was thirteen, his father—who sold sausages for a local food company—died
suddenly of a heart attack. Adrian, already quiet and sensitive, fell deeper into
withdrawal. While his mother, a loan officer, and two younger sisters tried to cope,
Adrian spent more time illustrating. Not surprisingly for a teenage boy with a pet
scorpion, the ideas and subject matter that most compelled him were dark. In college
the inspiration turned grimly real.
To earn money for school, Adrian worked as an aide in the medical communications department
of a local hospital. His job was to photocopy pictures taken of patients in the emergency
room, the most graphic images of fatality and disease. He saw bedsores so terrible
the skin was falling from the bone. He saw gunshot wounds, severed limbs. One time
a farmer came in with a wooden fence post driven through his groin. The pictures took
on an almost fetishistic quality, as Adrian traded them with his friends.
His artwork became not only darker but more skillful. His college art mentor, Lemoins
Batan, recognized Adrian’s talents, his ability to draw with precise and seemingly
effortless detail. When Lemoins asked Adrian what he wanted to do, his student told
him that he’d like to work in fine art. In the meantime, he was looking for experience.
His teacher had heard through the grapevine of somewhere he might start: Softdisk.
When Adrian found out that the company was looking for people to do art for computer
software, he was less than intrigued. He was partial to pencil and paper, not keyboard
and printer. But the Softdisk internship paid better than the hospital, so he agreed,
laboring at the innocuous work until one day he returned to find his boss arguing
loudly with two young programmers. One of the other artists came over to Adrian and
said, “You know what’s going on?”
“No,” Adrian replied quietly, “I have no idea.”
“They’re talking about you.”
“Oh shit, man, I’m toast.” Adrian assumed something was wrong, that he was being fired.
The two young programmers came up to him when they were through and introduced themselves
as Carmack and Romero, his partners at Gamer’s Edge.
For the next Gamer’s Edge disk,
they were going to make only one game. Al agreed to that plan, letting Romero and
Carmack pursue their vision of making one big commercial game from scratch every two
months—still a considerable feat. But with their roles in place—Carmack doing the
engine; Romero, the software tools and game design; Adrian, the art; Lane, the management
and miscellaneous coding—it seemed within their reach.
The idea for the next game came from Carmack, who was experimenting with a breakthrough
bit of programming that created an illusion of movement beyond the confines of the
screen. It was called scrolling. Again, arcade games were the model. At first, the
action of arcade games all took place within one static screen: in Pong, players controlled
paddles that could move only from the bottom to the top of the screen as they hit
a ball back and forth; in Pac-Man, the character would chomp dots as he cruised within
a confined maze; in Space Invaders, players controlled a ship at the bottom of the
screen that would shoot at descending alien ships. There was never a sense of broad
movement, as though the players or enemies were actually progressing outside the box.
All this changed in 1980, when Williams Electronics released
Defender
, the first arcade game to popularize the idea of scrolling beyond the scope of the
screen. In this sci-fi shoot-’em-up, players controlled a spaceship that moved horizontally
above a planet surface, shooting down aliens and rescuing people along the way. A
tiny map on the screen would show the player the entire scope of the world, which,
if stretched out, would be the equivalent of about three and a half screens. Compared
with the other games in the arcade, Defender felt big, as if the player was living
and breathing in a more expansive virtual space. It became a phenomenal hit—filling
almost as many arcades as Space Invaders and beating out Pac-Man as the industry’s
Game of the Year. Countless scrolling games would follow. By 1989 scrolling was the
“it” technology, fueling in part the success of the bestselling home video game in
history at the time: Super Mario Brothers 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
But at this moment, in September 1990, no one had yet figured out how to scroll games
for the PC; instead, they would use lame trickery to make the player feel like the
action was larger than the screen. A player might get to the right edge of the screen
and then, in one clunky movement, see the panel from the right shift over into place.
The reason, in part, was the PCs’ slow speed, which paled compared with those of arcade
machines, the Apple II, or home consoles like the Nintendo. Carmack was determined
to find a way to create a smooth scrolling effect, like the one in Defender or Super
Mario.
The next Gamer’s Edge game would be a step in that direction. When the crew discussed
ideas for the game, Carmack demonstrated a technology he was working on that could
scroll the action down the screen. Unlike the more sophisticated scrolling games,
this one was set up like a treadmill—the graphics would descend the screen on a steady,
set path. There was no sense that the player was willfully moving up through the action.
It was more like standing on a stage and having a rolling landscape painting move
behind the actor.
Romero, the erudite gamer who had played nearly every available title for the PC,
had never seen anything like it; here was a chance at being the first. They called
the game Slordax; it would be a straightforward shoot-the-spaceships descendant of
arcade hits like Space Invaders and Galaga. They had four weeks.
From the start of the work on Slordax, the team gelled. Carmack would bang away at
his code for the graphics engine while Romero developed the programming tools to create
the actual characters and sections of the game. As Carmack engineered breakthrough
code, Romero designed gripping game play. Tom Hall even managed to sneak into the
Gamer’s Edge office to create the creatures and backgrounds. Adrian, meanwhile, would
sketch out the spaceships and asteroids on his screen. It was clear right away to
Romero that the quiet intern was talented.
Though still new to computers, Adrian quickly assimilated with a palette on screen.
Computer art at the time was almost like pointillism because game graphics were so
limited. Most had only four colors, in what was known as Computer Graphics Adapter,
or CGA; recently, games had evolved to allow sixteen colors in Enhanced Graphics Adapter,
EGA. But that was still pretty tight for an artist. Adrian had only a few colors at
his disposal. He couldn’t even push them together; he just had to bring the worlds
to life with what he had. People in the business called this craft “pushing pixels.”
And it was clear that Adrian could push pixels with ease.
It was also clear that Adrian liked to keep a profile so low it was almost subterranean.
One reason he kept to himself was that he didn’t know what to make of these gamers.
Carmack was like a robot, the way he spoke in little clipped sentences with the strange
“mmm” punctuation at the end. He could sit there all day and code, not saying anything
but turning out amazing work. Romero was just plain
bizarre,
making all these sick jokes about disembowelment and dismemberment, and all those
twisted Melvin cartoons he still drew. Adrian thought he was pretty funny too.
Tom Hall was another story. The first time Adrian met him was when Tom came leaping
into the room in blue tights, a white undershirt, a cape, and a big plastic sword.
He stood there, raised his eyebrow, and made a strange alien beep, to which Romero
responded with almost debilitating laughter. It was Tom’s costume for Halloween. Tom
stayed, as he often did, helping out with the game design and tool creation. Adrian
was thankful that he didn’t stick around much longer.
One night shortly after that, however, Tom stuck around long after Adrian, Romero,
and the rest of the Softdisk employees had gone home. The only people left were he
and Carmack. Slordax was wrapping up nicely, and Carmack was on to something else.
A born night owl, he remained at the office into the wee hours of the morning. He
liked the solitude, the quiet, and the chance to immerse himself even more deeply
in his work. He was doing what he had always wanted to do: code games. And he was
happy, in the moment as always, not thinking at all about what would come next. If
he could be here working on games with enough money for food and shelter, that was
good enough for him. As he told the other guys on one of his very first days, put
him in a closet with a computer, a pizza, and some Diet Cokes, and he would be fine.
As Tom settled into a chair late this night, Carmack showed him how he had figured
out a way to create an animating block or tile of graphics on the screen. The screen
consisted of thousands of pixels; a group of pixels make up a tile. When making a
game, an artist would first use pixels to design a tile, then place the tiles together
to create the entire environment. It was like laying down a tile floor in a kitchen.
With Carmack’s animation trick, a tile could have a little animating graphic on it
too. “And,” he explained, “I’ll be able to make it so your guy can jump on the tile
and something can happen.”