Masters of Doom (13 page)

Tom took out a laptop, set it on the table, and urged Williams to hit the key. Wolfenstein
came on the screen. Williams played the game with a poker face. The guys were dying
with anticipation. Finally Williams said, “Ah, that’s neat.” He closed the program.
A final screen came up, with the face of Commander Keen and a green monster from Aliens
Ate My Babysitter. In big words in the middle it said: “id Software: Part of the Sierra
Family?”

“Do you mind removing the question mark?” Williams said. Then he offered them $2.5
million.

The id guys
returned to their snowed-in apartment to discuss the deal. Two and a half million
dollars was a lot of money for four or five guys to split. But they didn’t jump the
gun. They didn’t want just to do a stock deal, they wanted some up-front cash. So
they returned to the approach they’d originally taken with Scott Miller. “Why don’t
we do this?” Romero suggested. “Let’s ask for a hundred thousand down. If they’re
interested, then we’ll sell. If they don’t, then we don’t do it.”

When presented with the request, Williams balked. Though he was impressed by their
work, he wasn’t ready to fork over such a large chunk of cash. The deal was over.
Clearly, id thought, he just didn’t
get
what they were doing. He didn’t understand the potential of Wolfenstein 3-D. If he
had, he would have immediately handed over the cash. It was a disappointment, not
so much because they missed out on the money but because their hero and his company
had let them down. This game was going to change things, they knew; there was nothing
on a computer like it. Fuck Sierra and their loser programmers, Romero told them,
id would remain independent. And, independently, they would rule.

Fueled by the trip
to Sierra, id’s burgeoning egos exploded into their Dungeons and Dragons fantasies.
Games, once again, had become expressions of their own inner worlds. In recent rounds
Romero had been toying with the Demonicron, the darkly powerful book he had encouraged
them to seize from the demons. It was a dangerous move, one that would either help
them rule or destroy the world. Carmack grew increasingly distressed at Romero’s recklessness.
He didn’t want to see the game he had spent so long creating get ruined. In a desperate
move, he called Jay Wilbur back in Shreveport, asking him if he could fly up to Madison
to reprise his D&D character and help stop Romero. But Jay couldn’t make the trip.
Ultimately, Carmack decided to test Romero’s resolve, to see just how far his partner
was willing to go.

Late one night Carmack the Dungeon Master brought the devil in to play. He told Romero
that a demonic creature in the game had a bargain to make:
Give him the Demonicron and he will grant you your greatest wishes.
Romero said, “If I’m going to give you this book, then I want some really kick-ass
shit.” Carmack assured him the demon would oblige with the Daikatana.

Romero’s eyes widened. The Daikatana was a mighty sword, one of the most powerful
weapons in the game. Despite the pleas of the others, he told Carmack he wanted to
give the demon the book. It didn’t take long to find out the consequences. As the
rules of the game dictated, Carmack rolled the die to randomly determine the strength
of the demon’s response. The demon was using the book to conjure more demons, he told
the group. A battle of epic proportions ensued until Carmack declared the outcome.
“The material plane is overrun with demons,” he said, flatly. “Everyone is dead. That’s
it. We’re done. Mmm.”

No one spoke. They guys couldn’t believe it. After all those games, all the late nights
around the table in Shreveport, the adventures here that cured all the cold nights
of Madison, it was over. A sadness filled the room. Romero finally said to Carmack,
“Shit, that’s fun playing that game. Now it’s ruined? Is there any way to get that
back?” But he knew the answer. Carmack was always true to himself and to his game.
“No,” he said, “it’s over.” There was a lesson to be learned: Romero had gone too
far.

With the D&D world destroyed, the Sierra deal blown, and Madison growing even colder,
the id guys turned up the heat literally and figuratively. They needed help to get
Wolfenstein done, they decided, and they knew just the person to call: Kevin Cloud.

Kevin was the editorial director at Softdisk and had been acting as an informal liaison
between id and their former home. Artistic, diligent, and well organized, he seemed
like the perfect complement to their team. Born in 1965 to a teacher and an electrician,
Kevin grew up in Shreveport reading comics and playing in arcades. While pursuing
a degree in political science, he took a job as a computer artist at Softdisk. It
ended up changing his life.

Kevin immediately struck up a friendship with the Gamer’s Edge guys, emerging as one
of their few allies during the rising mutiny. He spoke in a slow southern drawl and
was partial to cowboy boots and blue jeans. He was polite and laid-back, but he could
also be darkly funny, enjoying scatological humor and riffing just as sickly as Romero
and Tom. Unlike them, though, Kevin could tether it all in on a dime, returning to
a steady focus that their creative giddiness didn’t seem to allow. After they left
the company, Kevin distinguished himself for his diplomatic skills—able to keep Softdisk
at bay, letting id maintain maximum freedom.

The id guys called him from Wisconsin and said they’d like him to join their team.
There was only one condition. He had to move to Madison. Kevin didn’t hesitate. He
was growing tired of Softdisk. He had also just gotten married and was ready to begin
a new life. So he packed up all his belongings and hit the road with his wife for
a nineteen-hour drive. He arrived early the next morning and knocked on id’s apartment
door. After a minute or so, Carmack appeared in his underwear, bleary-eyed, his hair
matted. “Come back later,” he said, and shut the door, leaving them standing with
their bags in the cold.

Kevin turned to his wife. “Um, let’s go get some coffee.” Later he came back and met
with the guys. The deal was made, Kevin would join the team. Elated, he told them
that he had already found an apartment and would sign the lease the following morning.
Inspired, id decided it was time for them to move too. So Romero and Tom went out
in search of spacious new digs. That night they reported back to Carmack and Adrian.
They had found a stylish new apartment complex, but Romero’s bit, it seemed, had flipped.
“Yeah, we can move across town,” he said, “but I’m telling you, this fucking snow
and ice, this shit sucks. I hate it here.”

“Yeah!” Adrian said.

“I really don’t want to stay here anymore,” Romero said. “I didn’t know it’d be this
bad in Wisconsin. Wouldn’t it be cool to go to California, mountains and trees? You
know, that’s what I like—a place where a human can be outside around the year and
live, not die if he has nothing. I’m into that. It’s like, okay, heat versus freezing
winter? I choose heat! I’d rather not have to bundle up, slide around, crack my skull
open, and not be able to move my fingers. I’d rather be sweating my ass off in a fucking
tank top out by the lake! We’re a developer, we don’t have to be in any one location.
We can be anywhere.” Wherever he went, he knew, his girlfriend, Beth, would be happy
to come along.

As the midnight hour passed, they stretched a map across a table and discussed all
the places they could move: “Jamaica!” Tom suggested. Adrian spoke: “How about Dallas?”
How about Dallas!
It had a lot going for it. It was warm, in the South. And Apogee was there. Scott
Miller, in fact, had long raved about the city, telling the guys how there was a huge
lake, just like the one in Shreveport, where they could go skiing and maybe even get
a house. Still better, Tom added, Texas had no state income tax, which meant they
could make even more money. Dallas it would be.

There was only one problem: Kevin Cloud. He was about to sign a lease for an apartment,
which would commit id to staying in Madison for at least another six months. He had
to be stopped. It was 3:00 a.m. In a panic the id guys left a flurry of messages at
Kevin’s hotel. He woke up a few hours later and got the messages: “Don’t sign the
lease! Call immediately! We are the wind! We are the wind!”

“Oh my goodness,” he said to his wife, “they must have looked at their budget and
realized they can’t hire me.” He was relieved to hear the real news. Despite the long
drive, he agreed to head with the guys down to Dallas, closer to home. “We are the
wind,” they repeated, as if it summed up everything about them: their spontaneity,
their speed, their elusiveness.

A few weeks later, a moving truck backed up to their apartment. The guys waited as
the driver went to open the back of the truck. The gate slid up. Their jaws dropped
in disbelief. Sitting alone in the back of the truck, like a vision, like an omen,
was a Pac-Man machine. Here it was: the game they had all grown up with, the one Romero
had plastered with his high scores all around Sacramento, the one they had copied
in Shreveport in their Wac-Man demo. Romero gulped and asked the driver, “Is that
your machine?”

“It’s mine now, I guess,” the driver said. “Someone left it on my truck. They didn’t
want it in their house.”

The id guys looked at each other, nodding. “Hey, dude,” Romero said, “can we buy it
from you?”

The driver looked at these kids with long hair and torn jeans. They didn’t look like
they could afford a haircut, let alone a fancy arcade machine. “Sure,” he said brashly,
“for a hundred and fifty bucks!”

Carmack reached into his pocket. “No problem,” he said, peeling off the cash from
a fat wad of bills. “Leave it on the truck.” The game was coming to Texas.

SEVEN

Spear of Destiny

In Texas
video games made the long list of evils. Games were bad, corrupting the kids, causing
them to blow their milk money on nonsense. So the upright citizens of Mesquite, a
small town just southeast of Dallas, took their cause to the courts.
They wanted the games banned
. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, ultimately, shot the Texans
down. This was in 1982. The games at the center of the debate were arcade hits like
Pac-Man, the very machine that arrived on the truck when id Software, Mesquite’s first
gaming company, pulled into town on April Fool’s Day 1992.

Carmack and Romero couldn’t have been happier to be in the heat again. Everything
in Dallas was big. The highways were big. The trucks were big. The car dealerships
were big. Even the people were big, from the towering cowboys to the statuesque blondes.
Id settled on Mesquite to be near Scott Miller, who ran Apogee from his hometown of
Garland, just a few minutes up the road. Mesquite, as it so happened, had what the
guys considered a suitably killer place to live. La Prada Apartments, off Interstate
635, boasted sprawling lofts with ten-foot black windows overlooking crystal blue
swimming pools and gardens. When id arrived, women in bikinis lounged by the pools,
the sweet, tangy smell of barbecue floated up from the grills, water polo balls flew
over the nets. They were home.

Scott was thrilled to have his star gamers as neighbors. He and his partner, George
Broussard, took them out for a big Tex-Mex dinner of burritos and nachos, then off
to SpeedZone, a
big
arcade, for go-cart racing and games. The id guys chased each other around the tracks
in their Formula One model cars. Afterward they admired the authentic sports cars
being driven by Scott and George. Apogee was clearly reaping the rewards of Keen’s
continued success. “Oh man,” Romero told Carmack, “they’re driving bad-ass cars while
we drive ass cars. It’s time for us to kick ass.”

There was plenty of reason for them to succeed. In addition to the guarantee of a
hundred thousand dollars, Scott upped their royalty to 50 percent—unheard of in the
industry. He was eager to keep the boys happy. He had made other concessions too.
He knew they hated their obligation to Softdisk. In order to let id focus on Wolfenstein,
he told them that Apogee would create a game to fulfill the Softdisk contract. Unbeknownst
to Softdisk, the next game they received, ScubaVenture, came not from id Software
but from Apogee.

Scott had increasingly big plans for Wolfenstein. At the moment, the idea was to follow
their existing shareware formula: release one episode, containing ten levels, for
free, then charge gamers to receive the remaining two episodes. After talking with
Romero and Tom, Scott learned that it was taking the group only about one day to make
a level of the game.
Ka-ching! Dollar signs!
Instead of just three episodes, why not have six? Scott said, “If you can do thirty
more levels, it would only take you fifteen days. And we could have it where people
could buy the first trilogy for thirty-five dollars or get all six for fifty dollars,
or if people buy the first episode and later want the second episodes it will be twenty
dollars. So there’s a reason to get them all!” After some consideration, id agreed.

Not everything about the future was looking up. The guys abruptly decided to part
ways with their president, Mark Rein, after a difference of opinion. “That’s fucking
it,” Romero declared. “Boom! He’s gone.”

But gone too was id’s one and only biz guy. Official biz guy, at least. Unofficially,
of course, Carmack and Romero had been running businesses for years. Though coders
by trade, they’d been working for themselves since they were teenagers. Carmack had
put a team of his friends together to make Wraith, then he managed his own freelance
programming career. Romero had grown up as a one-boy band, churning out dozens of
titles and pawning them off to small publishers. Like most artists or programmers,
however, they enjoyed doing their craft more than cutting a deal.

And the more immersed they became at id, the less interested they were in handling
the mounting production tasks: paying bills, ordering supplies, fielding calls. They
needed someone who could be a front man for the company, someone as brash and iconoclastic
in business as they were in game development. There certainly were plenty of candidates,
as budding executives across the country began sniffing out id. But id didn’t want
just anyone. They wanted their old friend Jay Wilbur.

Here’s the deal, they told Jay on the phone: as id’s new chief executive officer,
he’d get 5 percent of the company and full reign to run the business side of things.
All he had to do was say yes and drive the few hours from Shreveport to Dallas. Tired
of Softdisk and feeling that he had fulfilled his obligation to Al Vekovius, Jay agreed.
Fire up the barbecue, he told them, he was coming to Mesquite.

“Dance, motherfuckers!”
Romero screamed. “Lay down!
Brrrrrschh! Brrrrrschh! Brrrrrschh!
” The SS guards were everywhere—down the hall, under the Hitler portrait, careening
by the shit buckets. And Romero was there—
dude, fucking right there
—storming down the hall with the chain gun, mowing down Nazis and running over their
bloody, bony chunks of gibs.

It was well past midnight at the id pad in the La Prada Apartments. Romero was at
his perch on the second floor of the loft, Adrian to his right, Tom behind him. To
his left was a snarl of cables and controllers; at the moment, the office’s favorite
new obsession, a one-on-one brawl game called Street Fighter II, was jammed in the
Nintendo. Downstairs by the kitchen, Carmack sat at his stealth black NeXT machine.
Kevin sat to his right, Jay behind them. The floor was piled with pizza boxes. Carmack
sat above a pile of empty Diet Cokes. It had been only days, and id had settled in.

Romero had been growing more and more enthused over Wolfenstein’s progress. This was
easy to tell; all one had to do was listen to the volume of his screams. Game playing,
everyone was beginning to notice, was more than just a part of work for Romero, it
was a part of life. He was spending much of his time testing out Wolfenstein. When
he wasn’t testing it himself, he was contacting gamers across the BBS world who were
play-testing it for him.

“Hey, you know what we should have in here?” Romero called out, as he paused the game.
“Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you
mow him down! Heh heh! That would be fucking awesome!”

Adrian and Tom chuckled heartily beside him. Tom reached below his desk, then hurled
one of his many wads of paper at Romero. Romero, who had his own stash, responded
with three or four more. One or two sailed over the loft and hit Kevin, who, as usual,
responded with his own litany of paper bombs. Carmack tried to focus. Paper fights.
Nazi yells. Romero’s violent fantasies. They were becoming the norm since the guys
had arrived in Mesquite. Carmack never participated in the revelry; no one expected
him to. So far his powers of concentration were good enough to shut out the distractions
so he could deal with his immediate problems: optimizing the Wolfenstein engine for
maximum speed and stability.

Though he could tolerate the paper fights, the bigger annoyance was the push walls.
Push walls were essentially secret doors in a game. The idea was that the player could
run down against a wall and, if he pushed in the right spot, a portion of the wall
would slide back, revealing a secret room full of goodies. Tom had been needling Carmack
incessantly about adding this special feature. Secrets, he lobbied, were an essential
part of every good game. There had been secrets in their early games—like the Vorticon
alphabet in Keen or the spot where Keen would moon the player if the player paused
too long without doing anything. Wolfenstein was in dire need of something like that.
And creating a way for players to find secret rooms through push walls seemed like
a natural.

But Carmack wasn’t biting. It was, he said, “an ugly hack.” This meant that it was
an inelegant solution to an unnecessary problem. Making a game, writing code, for
Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something
that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible. The Wolfenstein engine
simply wasn’t designed to have walls sliding back into secret rooms. It was designed
to have doors slide open and shut, open and shut. It was a matter of streamlining.
The simpler Carmack kept his game, the faster the world would move, therefore, the
deeper the immersion. Nope, he’d say, push walls were out.

Tom didn’t relent. He’d bring it up whenever he sensed an opening. Soon Romero joined
Tom’s crusade. “We understand that you’re overloaded on programming stuff because
of this new engine,” Romero told Carmack. “How about just this one thing? Put push
walls there and we’ll be happy. We’ll put ’em fucking everywhere.” Carmack still said
no. It was, notably, the first time since they had begun that the team experienced
creative conflict.

During the day they took occasional breaks, playing football in the pool. One time,
with Carmack out there, Romero pleaded Tom’s case again. “Dude,” he said, “we need
push walls! You can’t just run down these hallways and not find secret stuff! Everything
you’re doing is awesome. Just doing this one thing will make me and Tom really happy
with the design. This is really simple design-wise.”

“Forget about it,” Carmack snapped.

More new tensions began to surface. With the extra levels ordered by Scott, the id
guys were putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Kevin and Jay did ease
the burden somewhat. Kevin was able to assist Adrian with the character work, as well
as help out with some packaging and marketing designs. As CEO, Jay’s main asset wasn’t
so much strategizing the company as being the office “biz guy.” He made sure there
was enough computer paper, enough disks, enough toilet paper, enough pizza. He made
sure bills got paid. One of the reasons he got the job was he was the only one who
balanced his checkbook.

Despite the help of Kevin and Jay, though, nothing could dissipate the reaction everyone
was having to the shenanigans of Romero and Tom. They were over the top with energy.
They used to jump around, bleeping and blurting, imitating sounds and characters from
Keen. But now they had a microphone. Literally. Bobby Prince, their freelance sound
designer, had temporarily set up camp in the id apartment, turning the loft into a
mini–sound studio. With an artillery of effects and mikes, Tom and Romero went overboard.
They’d stay up well into the morning recording demented screeds.

One night they got the idea to record answering machine messages for the id phone.
The first started with jazzy piano and Romero speaking over the music.
“Id Software is brought to you
today by the letter
I
and the number five,” he said, like at the end of
Sesame Street.
Tom followed by singing in a strange high voice, “Five strawberry pies!” Screams
and thunderclaps followed into the beep. For another, they cranked up the distortion
to make them sound like gravel-voiced demons. “Id Software is not available right
now,” the demon belched, “because I’m eating them!” In a third, Tom began by saying
that he was standing in the rubble of id Software. Suddenly, the demon appeared and
said, “Are you in any way related to id Software?” Tom told the demon that he was
just there doing the answering machine message. “Goodbye, ass!” the demon bellowed,
followed by a blaze of thunder, fire and, at the end, Tom’s screams.

Adrian got so fed up with their noise that, on the night of the answering machine
revelry, he simply left. Carmack, for the time being, would stay behind.

Tensions were building
outside the office too. One day Scott received a call from FormGen, with whom he had
been in contact since the company decided to do a retail version of Wolfenstein. FormGen
would often appeal to Scott when they were having difficulty negotiating with id.
Scott had had some concerns of his own: most notably that Wolfenstein was nothing
more than a maze game, Pac-Man with guns. He wondered if people would see it for what
it was. FormGen’s latest concern, however, was even bigger.

“Look, Scott,” an executive said, “we don’t think they should be showing blood and
stirring up the World War II stuff. We’re really worried about this. It’s too realistic.
We’re going to make a lot of people upset. There’s never been a game like this.”

“Let me see what I can do,” Scott replied. He dialed id. “Hey,” he said, “FormGen
thinks the game needs to be toned down.” He could hear the guys huffing on the other
end of the line. It was time for id to do something about the violence, he conceded.
“Beef it up!” he said. They wholeheartedly agreed.

Adrian filled the game with all kinds of gruesome details: skeletons hanging by their
wrists from chains, corpses in jail cells slumped against the bars, blood and flesh
chunks randomly spotting the labyrinthine walls. It was a welcome change from the
art Tom was having him create for the game, novelistic elements like pots and pans
hanging in the kitchen and still-life plates of turkey dinners. Adrian, who was growing
to despise the game’s realism, was longing for more splatterpunk, demonic gore. He
pumped in as much blood as he could.

Tom and Romero upped the shock value in other ways, most notably the screams. They
stayed up late into the night, recording hellish German commands and orders: “Achtung!”
and “Schutzstaffel!” They recorded last words for dying Nazis: “Mutti!” (Mommy), and,
for Hitler himself, a final good-bye to his wife: “Eva, auf Wiedersehen!” To cap it
off, they used a digital version of the Nazi party anthem, “Horst Wessel Lied,” to
open the game.

They also threw in something they called a Death Cam. After the final enemy, known
as “the boss” of an episode, got killed, a message would appear on the screen saying,
“Let’s see that again!” Then a detailed animation would slowly play, showing the big,
bad boss meeting his grisly demise. This Death Cam was id’s version of a snuff film.
They decided to include a screen at the beginning of the game that would say, “This
game is voluntarily rated PC-13: Profound Carnage.” Though tongue-in-cheek, it was
the first voluntary rating of a video game.