Masters of Doom (26 page)

“You have to give yourself the freedom to back away from something when you make a
mistake,” Carmack said. “If you pretend you’re infallible and bully ahead on something,
even when there are many danger signs that it’s not the right thing, well, that’s
a sure way to leave a crater in the ground. You want to always be reevaluating things
and say, Okay, it sounded like a good idea but it doesn’t seem to be working out very
well and we have this other avenue which is looking like it’s working out better—let’s
just do that.”

That was when it really hit Romero: We’re not of a single mind anymore. We’re not
an agreeing entity. He couldn’t believe that Carmack wasn’t saying, “Calm down guys,
you’ll see, it’s going to be a bad-ass game.” As much as Carmack thought Romero had
stopped being a programmer, Romero thought Carmack had stopped being a gamer. The
fact that Carmack was listening to these guys showed that he was actually worried,
that he didn’t have the faith in the big ambitious game anymore, that he didn’t have
the faith in Romero.

After hours of arguing, Romero threw in the towel. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll redesign
the whole game with Doom-style weapons and we’ll get it out.” But to himself he said
something else entirely, words that echoed the statement he had uttered long ago to
Carmack at Softdisk, the day he saw their future, their destiny. This is it, he thought,
I’m gone.

Despite Quake’s new direction
and a release date that would now surely slip into 1996, id’s publisher, GTI, cashed
in heavily in December 1995.
Sales for Doom II
in the United States would eventually top the $80 million mark. The game sold overseas
as well, with another $20 million from Europe, 30 percent of which came from Germany—a
country that had banned the game from its shelves. Meanwhile all of id’s old games
were continuing to sell, as were the spin-offs. Ultimate Doom, which was essentially
a retail version of the Doom shareware, was bringing in over $20 million in the United
States. And Raven’s games, Hexen and Heretic, were doing just as well, accounting
for nearly another $20 million.

Buoyed by the success, GTI began striking deals with other developers, including Midway,
creators of the lucrative Mortal Kombat series; the arcade magnate Williams Entertainment;
and WizardWorks, a publisher of budget games. With Doom’s help, computer games had
skyrocketed
GTI’s sales from $10 million to a projected $340 million in just two years. When the
company went public in December 1995, it was the largest venture-capital-backed IPO
of the year, even ahead of the Internet browser company Netscape. “[GTI] came out
of nowhere
to conquer a host of competitors,” declared
Crain’s New York Business,
“and become the country’s third largest interactive entertainment company.” It was
valued at $638 million.

But the success was by no means endearing GTI to id. When GTI offered that year to
buy id for $100 million, id declined. The publisher was a shitty company, the guys
thought, and they didn’t want to sell id to people they didn’t believe in. Furthermore,
they felt too frazzled to make any kind of rational business decision. Money wasn’t
exactly a problem either. In 1995, id’s earnings had doubled to $15.6 million, and
they would surely continue to rise. With the overhead still low, the owners were each
making millions. Id also thought GTI was claiming too much credit for the success
of Doom II. The guys didn’t like how GTI was throwing around its money at so many
other unworthy companies. At the urging of Mike Wilson, id’s increasingly brash biz
guy, they decided to use Quake as a way to bring GTI down.

The weapon: shareware. In most publishers’ minds by the end of 1995, shareware was
a thing of a past, a cute way to distribute software that was losing its relevance
in the increasingly big business of video games. So when id negotiated to retain shareware
rights for Quake, GTI’s Ron Chaimowitz didn’t think much of it. He would regret that
choice. Mike pitched the id guys on a new way to capitalize on the shareware plan.
Instead of just distributing Quake shareware over the Internet for free, id could
sell a CD-ROM containing both the shareware and an encrypted version of the full game.
Someone would buy the shareware for $9.95, then could call up id directly and pay
$50.00 for the code to unlock the complete game. As a result, id, despite not owning
the retail publishing rights to Quake, could succinctly cut GTI out of the equation.

Though Carmack had reservations, the rest of the company was more than eager to embark
on an even more radical experiment in self-publishing. The deal was hatched. Ron Chaimowitz
read about it in the newspaper. Wilson—that prick! he thought. He’s an immature kid
who doesn’t know how to deal in a professional manner! But id had every right to do
the deal, even though it was not a move anyone had ever imagined. There was nothing
GTI could do to stop them.

As 1996 rolled around,
not only was id at war with GTI but it was at war with itself. The decision to abandon
Romero’s design for Carmack’s technology created incinerating pressure. The company
was in perpetual crunch mode, trying to get the Doom-style shooter done by March.
Carmack, feeling like he was the only one running the ship, decided it was time to
turn up the heat. For weeks he had been working out in the hallway to keep an eye
on everyone else. But now he suggested they tear the walls down.

The decision was made, ostensibly, because the company had long been talking about
doubling its work space. With the purchase of a suite next door, they could begin
the remodeling right away. Carmack saw this as a key opportunity to get everyone out
of isolated offices and into one big communal work space while the renovations would
be done. Reluctantly, they agreed to the new arrangement. They called it the war room.

They had no idea how messy the war room would be. Within days, walls began crashing
around them, blanketing the area in plaster dust. They lined tables up against the
windows and piled on their computers, sitting by each other with barely enough room
to grab a soda without knocking elbows. Carmack and Romero sat side by side. To get
all their computers networked they had to run cables through the ceiling and bust
out the acoustic tiles to rope the wires down to their machines. Shades drawn, lights
low, long gray cables stretching from the ceiling to their desks, it looked as though
they were all sitting
inside
a computer’s dark web of wires. There was nowhere to go without getting caught.

Without the privacy of personal space, the tension began to mount. They worked eighteen-hour
days, seven days a week. They had to listen to their music on headphones. At any given
moment a visitor might walk in to find a room full of guys quietly typing with headphones
on their ears. Romero had taken a liking to instrumental video game soundtracks—available
as Japanese imports. He popped one in and bitterly slipped on his headphones. This
is not the id of the past, he thought, the id of “let’s make a great game together
and have fun.” This is the id of “shut up and work.”

Competition rose within the ranks. With Romero vulnerable, aspiring designer American
McGee jockeyed for supremacy. But now even he had competition: Tim Willits. Tim had
the distinction of being the first employee drafted from the Doom mod community. He
had discovered the game while studying at the University of Minnesota. At the time,
the twenty-three-year-old was a hardworking computer science major who lived at home
with his parents—his father, a pipe fitter, his mother, a radiation technician. It
was a competitive household, and Tim frequently butted heads with his sister—a graphics
design major at the university. Short and balding with an occasional nervous stutter,
he overachieved as best he could, not only signing up for ROTC but volunteering to
slip into a life-size rodent costume to portray the school mascot, Goldie Gopher,
at football games and events.

On a lark one day, Tim downloaded this game a lot of kids were talking about called
Doom. Though he had played games before, he never had the sense of entering a world.
But here, his actions affected the world; he could move doors, trigger buttons. He
was amazed at the size of the place he had entered, the scope of this strange new
universe. Tim began experimenting with the hacker-made Doom level-editing programs
that were floating around the bulletin board services. He started to get recognition
for some of the levels he had made and uploaded. Soon enough, he got the ultimate
response: an e-mail from id.

Tim was hired by American to work on the id-produced title Strife. But as Quake began
to grow, he was brought in to help the team. Tim immediately aligned himself with
Romero and started learning as much as he could about the art of level design. In
the war room, he sat at Romero’s side. He proved himself to be not only highly skilled
but highly efficient, able to complete a level design in record time. Soon Romero
found himself competing just to keep up with Tim’s output. Carmack immediately began
to show appreciation for Tim’s work. Though he still considered American his close
friend, American felt left out to dry.

Long enamored of Romero’s rock-star lifestyle, American started living the life himself.
This came after id struck a deal with Trent Reznor of the industrial rock band Nine
Inch Nails, a die-hard Doom fan, to provide the music and sound effects for Quake.
Overseeing the project, American began to change his look: shaving his beard, styling
his hair, dressing in black. He felt increasingly disconnected from Carmack, who,
despite having originally approved of his work on Quake’s music, now seemed only to
chastise him for not spending more time making levels for the game. For American,
it was the beginning of the end. Even his best friend at id, Dave Taylor, had left
to pursue his own game company. American had never felt more alone. His days as id’s
wonder boy were over.

It didn’t take long to find out who had replaced him and Romero. Carmack abruptly
announced one day that Tim’s levels would have the coveted honor of being the opening
levels of the shareware release—players’ first taste of Quake. Everyone was silent
in disbelief. It was an insult to Romero, who they all assumed would get that distinction.
But the backlash had been coming. Since the meeting to change Quake’s direction, Romero
had seemed to distance himself even more from the project.

“What?” Romero said. “I’m the lead designer!”

“That’s my decision,” Carmack replied. “Tim’s levels are more cohesive.” Romero, as
always, was quick to let the bad vibes go and wished Tim well. As far as everyone
was concerned, Carmack had just passed the torch.

It was late one night
in January when Romero picked up the phone in his Tudor mansion and dialed the number
of Tom Hall, his ex-partner at id. The two had rekindled their friendship some months
before with no hard feelings. Romero knew that Tom wasn’t happy at Apogee. Tom had
been running into the same old problems he’d had at id, feeling like he wasn’t able
to implement his own creative ideas. Apogee started doing business under the name
3D Realms, making games that would one-up id Software. Their first release, Duke Nukem
3D, was in fact doing just that. The game was like a comic book version of Doom set
in a realistic modern-day world. Players would shoot through abandoned porno theaters
and strip clubs. There were even strippers. Though Carmack hated it, feeling that
its engine was “held together with bubble gum,” the gamers bought it in droves. People
were dubbing it the “Quake killer.” Tom, however, was stuck working on another project
for 3D Realms called Prey that was barely getting off the ground. Romero’s call couldn’t
have come at a better time.

“Dude,” Romero told him, “the same thing that you ran into at id just happened to
me.” He explained how he had been trying to push Carmack into doing something new
and creative but Carmack just wanted to play it safe and do the same old Doom game
over again. Romero had even suggested splitting the company in two, with Carmack leading
a technology side and him leading a design side, but the suggestion went over with
a thud. “I’m going to leave after Quake,” he concluded. “What do you think about starting
another company? It’ll be a company where any kind of design we want to do, that’s
what we make. Technology has to work with
our
design, not the other way around. How would you like to have a company where design
is law?”

“That,” Tom said, “would be a dream.”

[idsoftware.com]

Login name: johnc In real life: John Carmack

Directory: /raid/nardo/johnc Shell: /bin/csh

Never logged in.

Plan:

This is my daily work . . .

When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day.

Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I
make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed.

Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since
fixed.

—- John Carmack

= feb 18 ====================================

* page flip crap

* stretch console

* faster swimming speed

* damage direction protocol

* armor color flash

* gib death

* grenade tweaking

* brightened alias models

* nail gun lag

* dedicated server quit at game end

+ scoreboard

+ optional full size

+ view centering key

+ vid mode 15 crap

+ change ammo box on sbar

+ allow “restart” after a program error

+ respawn blood trail?

+**-1 ammo value on rockets

+ light up characters

As life in the war room pressed on, Carmack took it upon himself to let gamers know
that, yes, id really was moving along with its work on Quake. So he decided to upload
his daily work log, or, as it was known, a .plan file, to the Internet. .Plan files
were often used by programmers to keep each other informed of their efforts but had
yet to be exploited as means of communicating with the masses. But id’s fans had suffered
months, years, of Romero’s unsubstantiated hyperbole, Carmack felt, and it was time
that they saw some hard data.