Masters of Doom (31 page)

Mike Wilson was less than concerned about how he himself was coming off. At a video
game industry trade show in England in September, he called a meeting with the executives
of Eidos and presented them with an outline of Ion Storm’s
next
three games. “Here they are,” he said, “take them or leave them.” Mike had squeezed
publishers in the past, particularly with the Quake shareware deal that essentially
cut out GTI and the retailers. The Eidos executives didn’t even discuss the plan.
Who the hell did Mike think he was? Ion Storm was already behind on their first three
titles, and now they wanted to talk about their
next
three? No deal was struck.

Todd Porter told the other owners that after the meeting he received a call from the
Eidos CEO threatening to strangle Mike. Todd, who had long been against the idea of
burning through the Eidos options, complained to Romero and Tom, but to no avail.
They were too immersed in their games, he thought, to tend the store. So he decided
to tend it himself. He didn’t like what he found. Mike and the chief operating officer,
Bob Wright, he thought, were recklessly spending cash without keeping clear tabs.

But while Todd was moving in against them, Mike was taking similar steps against Todd.
Easygoing and fun-loving, Mike had quickly become something of a mentor to the young
gamers at Ion Storm. And they were opening up to him about their increased dismay.
Todd and his Dominion team were a pain in the ass, they said; so were Jerry’s artists.
A culture clash was emerging. While Romero’s team was composed of young gamers from
the Doom community, Todd’s and Jerry’s teams were older and more removed. Todd had
hired a few PhDs; few of Romero’s gamers had even graduated from college. Worse, Todd’s
guys didn’t know the game that had made Ion Storm possible. Romero’s crew was shocked
that a guy from Todd’s team didn’t even recognize Doom when it was being played on
someone’s machine.

After hearing these complaints daily, Mike decided something had to be done. In October
he took Romero and Tom to a bar and told them the things that their own staffs had
been afraid to say: everyone hated Todd. Dominion, despite his assurances, was taking
longer than six weeks and wasn’t looking too impressive. Todd didn’t fit in with the
company. He was wearing business suits to work, for Christ’s sake. They agreed to
let Todd go.

The next week, on the elevator to tell Todd the news, however, Romero backed down.
“Man, I can’t do it,” he told Mike. “I don’t feel like we’ve given him a chance, and
we’re just firing him because everybody hates him. We should just talk to him and
lay down some ultimatums and offer to help him.” Mike was shocked. Romero had flipped
his bit again. But Mike didn’t realize just what the implications of that flip would
mean. The next month Mike was called into a meeting himself. The owners, particularly
Todd, had had enough
with him.
Eidos was calling every day and saying how much they couldn’t stand working with
him. And they had discovered some problems: without the owners’ knowledge, Wilson
had borrowed company money to buy a new BMW. Furthermore, the self-publishing deal
was just too out of focus. Ion Storm didn’t need to publish games, Romero said, it
needed to
make
games. And if Mike was dead set on being a publisher, then Mike would have to go.
He went.

With Mike out of the picture, Romero could buckle down and lead his team to the completion
of the task at hand. By February 1998, he got what he had been waiting for: the Quake
II code. It was the stuff that would enable them to put the completion of Daikatana
into high gear. But when Romero opened the file, he took one look at the code and
froze. Oh my God, he thought, what had Carmack done?

“Do you have some aspirin?”
Carmack asked his friend, as they walked into a casino in Las Vegas.

“Do you have a headache?”

“No,” Carmack said, “but I will soon.”

It was February 8, 1998, and Carmack was about to put his brain to the test: counting
cards in blackjack. This had become something of a new fascination of his. “Having
a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate,
karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack,” he wrote in
a .plan file. “Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes
a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard
part is making yourself consistantly [
sic
] behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your ‘gut instincts.’ ” To refine
his skills before the trip, Carmack applied his usual learning approach: consuming
a few books on the subject and composing a computer program, in this case one that
simulated the statistics of blackjack dealt cards.

His research proved successful, netting him twenty thousand dollars, which he donated
to the Free Software Foundation, an organization of like-minded believers in the Hacker
Ethic. “Its [
sic
] not like I’m trying to make a living at [blackjack],” Carmack wrote online after
his trip, “so the chance of getting kicked out doesn’t bother me too much.” It didn’t
take long for him to find out just how he’d feel. On the next trip, Carmack was approached
by three men in dark suits who said, “We’d appreciate if you’d play any other game
than blackjack.”

The others at the table watched in disbelief. “Why are they doing this to you?” a
woman asked.

“They think that I’m counting cards,” Carmack said.

“They think you can
remember
all those different cards?”

“Yeah,” Carmack replied, “something like that.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“I’m a computer programmer,” he said, as he was escorted out the door.

Casinos weren’t the only places Carmack sought escape in February 1998. His old desire
for monkish seclusion brought him rather spontaneously one day to a small, anonymous
hotel room somewhere in Florida. Despite the glowing reviews and great sales of Quake
II, the stress of the office had finally proven too great: all the infighting, the
bitching, the moaning, the real-life deathmatches between the increasingly dissatisfied
staff. Things had gotten so bad that they even worked their way into the game. A secret
level created by Tim Willits contained portraits of each id member on the wall. Each
portrait triggered some type of animation that, in Tim’s mind, reflected the personality
of the staffer: Carmack’s disappeared into the floor when anyone approached.

Now Carmack had vanished for real—sequestering himself in this faraway hotel room
for a week. Pizza boxes littered the floor. The phone didn’t ring. The door didn’t
open. The only distraction was when his throat dried out so much that he had to venture
outside for another Diet Coke. He had even bought a special laptop for the occasion:
a Dolch portable Pentium II system with full-length PCI slots—just roomy enough for
his Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator. Ostensibly, he had come here to research
what he was calling his Trinity engine, a new leap of a graphics system that he would
develop while the rest of the team churned out a mission pack for Quake II. But when
he arrived back in Mesquite the next week, he found himself as well with an uncommon
need to reflect in a .plan file he posted online:

Name: John Carmack

Description: Programmer

Project: Quake 2

Last Updated: 02/1998 03:06:55 (Central Standard Time)

Ok, I’m overdue for an update.

The research getaway went well. In the space of a week, I only left my hotel to buy
diet coke. It seems to have spoiled me a bit, the little distractions in the office
grate on me a bit more since. I will likely make week long research excursions a fairly
regular thing during non-crunch time. Once a quarter sounds about right.

I’m not ready to talk specifically about what I am working on for trinity. Quake went
through many false starts (beam trees, portals, etc) before settling down on its final
architecture, so I know that the odds are good that what I am doing now won’t actually
be used in the final product, and I don’t want to mention anything that could be taken
as an implied “promise” by some people.

I’m very excited by all the prospects, though.

Many game developers are in it only for the final product, and the process is just
what they have to go through to get there. I respect that, but my motivation is a
bit different.

For me, while I do take a lot of pride in shipping a great product, the achievements
along the way are more memorable. I don’t remember any of our older product releases,
but I remember the important insights all the way back to using CRTC wraparound for
infinate [
sic
] smooth scrolling in Keen (actually, all the way back to understanding the virtues
of structures over parallel arrays in apple II assembly language . . .). Knowledge
builds
on knowledge.

I wind up catagorizing [
sic
] periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time.

My basic skills built up during school on apple II computers, but lack of resources
limited how far and fast I could go. The situation is so much better for programmers
today—a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools
and resources necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want
to shoot for.

My first six months at Softdisk, working on the PC, was an incredible learning experience.
For the first time, I was around a couple of programmers with more experience than
I had (Romero and Lane Roath [
sic
]), there were a lot of books and materials available, and I could devote my full
and undivided attention to programming. I had a great time.

The two years following, culminating in Doom and the various video game console work
I did, was a steady increase in skills and knowledge along several fronts—more graphics,
networking, unix, compiler writing, cross development, risc architectures, etc.

The first year of Quake’s development was awesome. I got to try so many new things,
and I had Michael Abrash as my sounding board. It would probably surprise many classically
trained graphics programmers how little I new [
sic
] about conventional
3-D when I wrote Doom—hell, I had problems properly clipping wall polygons (which
is where all the polar coordinate nonsense came from). Quake forced me to learn things
right, as well as find some new innovations.

The last six months of Quake’s development was mostly pain and suffering trying to
get the damn thing finished. It was all worth it in the end, but I don’t look back
at it all that fondly.

The development cycle of Quake 2 had some moderate learning experiences for me (glquake,
quakeworld, radiosity, openGL tool programming, win32, etc), but it also gave my mind
time to sift through a lot of things before getting ready to really push ahead.

I think that the upcoming development cycle for trinity is going to be at least as
rewarding as Quake’s was. I am reaching deep levels of understanding on some topics,
and I am branching out into several completely new (non-graphics) areas for me, that
should cross-polinate [
sic
] well with everything else I am doing.

There should also be a killer game at the end of it.:)

The good mood didn’t last. Like Romero at Ion Storm, Carmack was discovering that
the glory days of a small team and easy chemistry were gone. In their place was a
palpable atmosphere of bitterness and dysfunction. The tension between Tim, American,
and the other level designers had reached a boiling point. Adrian and Kevin were battling
with Paul Steed. They disliked each other too strongly to work closely together on
the mission pack, Carmack realized. The solution: build the next game around the company’s
animosity. Quake III would be a deathmatch-only title, using most of his ideas for
the Trinity engine, that would allow the map designers to work in complete isolation
from each other.

Carmack’s idea did not go over well. Adrian was vocally upset with yet another marines
and shotguns shoot-’em-up game. He felt like they had been making the same title for
years, and he wanted something different. So did American. Paul agreed, lobbying to
do a title that had more of a story, more characters, more freshness. He drafted a
long design document detailing a story for the game. Carmack shot it down, saying
that story was not important. Even Kevin, long the ultimate team player of the group,
expressed his dismay, telling Carmack that if he wanted to do this game he’d have
to find a different project manager. This was Carmack’s company now more than ever.
Quake III would be Carmack’s game.

For American, it was the beginning of the end. He was called into a meeting with the
owners and told that he was being fired for not performing. Carmack thought American
had served his purpose but had now gone the route of Romero. When American wanted
more of an explanation he was told, ultimately, that it was because no one liked him.
Typical, he thought. It was indicative of what the company had become since Romero
had left. There was no balance anymore.

He wasn’t the only one feeling newfound empathy for Romero. Even though Paul Steed
had never worked with him, he was beginning to think that firing Romero had been a
terrible mistake. “Romero is chaos and Carmack is order,” he said. “Together they
made the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?”

The emerald green elevator doors
slid open on the penthouse of the Texas Commerce Building. In February 1998, Romero
stepped out to see at last the completed renovation of his Willy Wonka factory. Everything
he had imagined was there: the game room with the vintage arcade machines, the Foosball,
the pool table. A deathmatch arena with shiny twenty-one-inch monitors wrapped around
a fine oak kiosk. A bank of twelve television sets flashing MTV. A maze of corrugated
steel cubicles that resembled a level of a game. A kitchen overflowing with candy
and junk food. And, wrapping around and on top of the 22,500 square feet, windows
that scraped the clouds. Romero took it all in and had one thought: Holy shit, we
gotta fucking make some great games.