Masters of Doom (20 page)

Intel banned the game after it found its system swamped. Texas A&M
erased it from its computer servers. Doom was such a problem that a computer lab
supervisor at the University of Louisville created a special software to remedy the
problem.
“People sprint in here
falling all over each other to play the game,” he said, “[so] we have a nice little
program that goes through the system and deletes Doom.”

Early reviews echoed the gamers’ glee.
PC Week
called Doom a
“3-D tour de force.”
Compute
said it signaled a new era in computer gaming:
“The once-dull PC
now bursts with power. . . . For the first time, arcade games are hot on the PC .
. . the floodgates are now open.” Others expressed a mix of shock and allure at the
game’s unprecedented gore and brutality.
“The follow-up to Wolfenstein 3-D
is even more brilliant, but even more disgusting,” wrote a reviewer for
The Guardian
of London. “This is not a game for children or anyone sensitive to violence.” As
another explained,
“This game is so intense
, and so genuinely frightening that the deeper you venture into these shadowy chambers
the closer your nose gets to the screen—an indication, I believe, of how much you,
the player, enter this adventure game’s other reality.” Despite the pleas of his wife,
the reviewer couldn’t keep himself away; Doom was, he confessed, a “cyberopiate.”

It was also a cash cow. The day after Doom’s release, id saw profit. Even though only
an estimated 1 percent of people who downloaded shareware bought the remaining game,
$100,000 worth of orders were rolling in every day. Id had once joked in a press release
that they expected Doom to be “the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses
around the world.” The prophecy was true everywhere, it seemed, including their own.

“Good night, monkey!”
Romero yelled. “You better fucking hop down! Fuck you, motherfucker! Suck it down!”
Shawn Green hunched over his computer at id, his sweaty hand twitching his mouse as
this barrage of insults screamed through the wall. Ostensibly Shawn had been hired
to handle tech support for Doom, but it wasn’t long before a more demanding job—sparring
partner—took over. With the bordering office, he was regularly challenged by Romero—the
ultimate gamer: the Surgeon, as Tom Hall had christened him back in the Wolfenstein
days—to a round of Doom deathmatch. Shawn had quickly subsumed and surpassed Tom’s
role as Romero’s sidekick and gaming pal. And now, to his shock, he was paying the
price.

“Come on, monkey fuck!” Romero screamed, pounding his fist on the wall. “Who’s your
fucking daddy? Let’s go!” Shawn checked his watch. It was 8:00 p.m. again. Holy shit!
he thought. Another day wasted playing deathmatch. The games with Romero were taking
over everything—work time, playtime, mealtime, bedtime. And now Romero was turning
this into a deranged sport, hurling insults like a trash-talking jock after school.
The most aggressive thing people usually did when they played video games was roll
their eyes. But Doom, Shawn realized, called for something more. After winning the
next round, he punched the wall back and screamed, “Eat that, motherfucker!” Romero
cackled approvingly. This was how games were meant to be played.

The violent revelry was not limited to Romero. Office destruction was even more a
part of daily life. Keyboards smashed against tables. Old monitors crashed into the
floor. The influx of sample America Online disks and computer sound cards ended up
embedded like Chinese throwing stars in the walls. One day even Carmack joined in
the action.

This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the
pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate
solution.
“You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax
in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made
weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other
guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped
Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.

Id was on a high. Though Doom had not penetrated the mainstream like Mortal Kombat
or Myst, it was the hottest game in the computer underworld since, well, Wolfenstein
and Keen. The guys at id were the indisputable rulers of the shareware market, heading
toward a year of multimillion-dollar earnings. And that, they soon discovered, was
just the beginning. With the help of a New Yorker named Ron Chaimowitz, they were
going to conquer retail.

Like the id guys, Ron had hustled his way into the computer industry. Short, balding,
and in his forties, he entered the entertainment business by launching the industry’s
first Hispanic record label in Miami in the eighties. His big coup was to sign an
up-and-coming bar mitzvah band called Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine.
He also broke Julio Iglesias in the United States. Naming his company Good Times,
he pursued the emerging market for home videos with low-priced, twenty-nine-minute
workout tapes starring Jane Fonda. This product landed him a big deal with the Wal-Mart
chain, whose executives urged him to explore what they thought was another virgin
marketplace: budget computer software. Ron expanded his company into Good Times Interactive,
or GTI.

Good Times Interactive first published a Richard Simmons “Deal-A-Meal” CD-ROM and
a Fabio screensaver. But that was hardly enough to fill Wal-Mart’s shelves, so Ron
went looking into the computer game world. At first he cut deals with well-known publishers
like Electronic Arts and Broderbund to repackage previously released games that had
outlived their shelf life. What would be more lucrative, he realized, would be to
publish his own budget games. To do this, he needed budget developers—untapped by
the Electronic Arts of the world. He found them in shareware.

Shareware makers were like a farm league, he thought. He just needed to find the right
team to release a retail product. Id Software, he discovered, had done gangbusters
with Wolfenstein 3-D and now was causing an even greater firestorm underground with
Doom. Yet Doom, to his amazement, had no retail representation. Ron had found his
next Gloria Estefan.

After flying to Texas to meet with the young millionaires at id, he was surprised
to find a group of long-haired kids in shorts. The office was trashed with broken
computer parts, rancid pizza boxes, and an artillery of crushed soda cans. But these
appearances belied a true business savvy, Ron quickly learned. After he gave the guys
the big pitch about his company and his exclusive deal to shelve 2,200 Wal-Mart stores,
id played it cool. The guys knew that by selling shareware they were able to eliminate
all middlemen and get full dollar value for their product. Furthermore, after the
lackluster performance of the Spear of Destiny retail game, they weren’t about to
throw the shareware model away. Why, they wanted to know, did they need GTI?

Ron didn’t relent. “Look,” he said, “maybe you’ll sell a hundred thousand copies of
Doom in shareware, but I believe if you give me a retail version of Doom and, let’s
call it for lack of a better term, Doom II, I think I could sell five hundred thousand
or more units.” Id remained unmoved. Ron went back to New York but returned to Texas
two more times to plead his case. Finally, they told him their terms. If they were
going to do retail, they didn’t want to be treated like ordinary developers. They
wanted complete creative control. They wanted to own their intellectual property.
And they wanted to be featured prominently on all the merchandise so that people would
know the game was coming not from GTI but from id. Ron agreed and committed to a marketing
budget of $2 million for Doom II. Two million dollars was more than id had spent to
develop
all
its games combined. Doom, despite its success, was still relegated to the computer
underground. Doom II, which they started working on immediately, would take them mainstream.

For id, Doom II also fit into the now established and unique formula of putting out
a retail product based on a shareware release, just as they had done following Commander
Keen and Wolfenstein 3-D. It was the best way to milk Carmack’s new graphic engines
for all they were worth. Doom II would simply be a new set of levels built with the
original Doom engine. While the artists and level designers worked on the sequel,
Carmack could be free to research his next great graphic engine.

With the influx of cash from Doom and the promise of Doom II, the guys didn’t wait
long to start spending their money.
They were philanthropic
. Adrian bought his mother a new house in a safer neighborhood than where she had
been living. Romero gave his car, a Cougar, to the manager of a local Mexican restaurant
he frequented and paid for a Las Vegas vacation for his grandparents. Carmack bought
$3,200 of computer equipment for his former computer teacher at Shawnee Mission East
grade school.
“I wanted to buy them things
that will allow them to explore other areas,” he said, “not just what’s in books.”
He also put aside $100,000 to bail an old high school friend out of jail.

Mainly, though, the guys at id spent money on their cars. Kevin bought a Corvette.
Adrian bought the Trans Am sports car he’d always wanted. Dave Taylor got an Acura
NSX. (The guys even chipped in and bought a new leather couch for the office so, in
part, Dave could have something nice to pass out on next time he got what was now
widely known as Doom-induced motion sickness.) Carmack and Romero themselves celebrated
by going Ferrari shopping.

At a showroom, they admired a gleaming new Testarossa that listed at $90,000. Carmack
was treating cars like he treated his games; he had already grown somewhat tired of
his current engine. What he really wanted was one of these. “Oh my God,” said Romero.
“Holy shit! Now
that
is a car. That is fucking daddy car right there! Dude, I can’t believe you’re getting
that car.” Carmack paid cash for a red one to match his 328. Romero bought a “fly
yellow” Testarossa for himself. They parked them side by side in id’s lot—just in
the right place so that, during work, they could gaze down at their ultimate machines.

But Carmack’s Ferrari didn’t stay in the lot for long. Within days he drove it over
to Norwood Autocraft and started on the modifications—he wanted to get the car, which
ran at four hundred horsepower, at least twice as strong. Bob Norwood, who had become
Carmack’s automotive mentor, had a master plan: to install a twin turbo system that
would not just double but triple the car’s horsepower. For added energy, they put
in a computer-controlled device that would inject a burst of nitrous oxide. While
Romero was enthralled enough by the pure aesthetics of the Ferraris, for Carmack the
cars were now less means of a joyride than new engineering materials to be modified
to his liking.

As the id guys soon discovered, Carmack wasn’t the only gamer who liked getting under
the hood.

“Hey,”
Romero told Carmack one day at the office, “there’s something you have to see.” He
booted up Doom—or at least what was
supposed
to be Doom—on his computer. Instead, the trumpeting theme of the
Star Wars
movie began to play. The screen filled with not Doom’s familiar opening chamber but
instead a small, steel-colored room. Romero hit the space bar, and a door slid open.
“Stop that ship!” a voice commanded from within the game. Carmack watched as Romero
jolted down the hall past bleeping droids, white Stormtroopers, laser guns, the deep
bellows of Darth Vader. Some hacker had completely altered Doom into a version of
Star Wars.
Wow, Carmack thought. This is gonna be great. We did the Right Thing after all.

The Right Thing was programming Doom in such a way that willful players could more
easily create something like this: StarDoom, a modification, or mod, of their original
game. It was an idea hatched after seeing the early modifications that players were
creating for Wolfenstein 3-D. That small phenomenon had caught Carmack by surprise,
even though he had long hacked games like Ultima himself. The Wolfenstein modifications
were different, however, because players weren’t just finding the code that they could
change to increase their characters’ health; instead, they were changing their characters
altogether, replacing the bosses with Barney.

Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions, they were
concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players had to erase the original
Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images; once a Nazi was changed into
Barney, there was no way to bring the Nazi back quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized
the data so players could replace sound and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He
created a subsystem that separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym suggested
by Tom Hall, it stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every time
someone booted up the game, the program would look for the WAD file of sounds and
images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the main program to a
different
WAD without damaging the original contents. Carmack would also upload the source
code for the Doom level-editing and utilities program so that the hackers could have
the proper tools with which to create new stuff for the game.

This was a radical idea not only for games but for any media. It was as if a Nirvana
CD came with tools to let listeners dub their own voices for Kurt Cobain’s or a Rocky
video let viewers excise every cranny of Philadelphia for ancient Rome. Though there
had been some level-editing programs released in the past, no programmer—let alone
owner
—of a company had released the guts of what made his proprietary program tick. Gamers
would not have access to Carmack’s graphical engine, but the stuff he was making available
was more than just subtly giving them the keys. It was not only a gracious move but
an ideological one—a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened
the grip of corporations. Carmack was no longer a boy dreaming of computers in his
Kansas City bedroom; he was the twenty-three-year-old owner of a multimillion-dollar
company, and he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. He could live the Hacker Ethic
big time.