Masters of Doom (35 page)

The house amazed them. It was down a rocky road behind a pond with a twenty-foot fountain,
a log cabin, a lagoon pool, waterfalls, a hot tub, and a peacock farm. It was perfect.
They bought it. Romero renamed the peacocks after video games—Pong, Pooyan, and Phoenix—and
transformed the home into the ultimate kid’s paradise: milk crates overflowing with
games, crystal bowls of multicolored M&M’s, video game music blasting from the speakers.
It was the kind of house he had dreamed of when he was a boy. Now he would do what
his own father never could—sit down and play games with his sons when they came to
town. He could even play with his biological dad, Alfonso Antonio Romero, for whom,
after he fell on hard times, Romero had bought a house not far away in town.

On the drive back from the Mexican restaurant, Romero and Stevie discussed the finishing
touches for the estate: maybe a wooden sign on the gravel road with one board pointing
to “The Cabin of Death” and the other to “Haunted Manor.” Or, even better, a stone
arrow leading to the woods with the words “For People We Don’t Know or Trust.” They
considered constructing a stone arch over the driveway with the words “Castle Wolfenstein.”

But these were all just grand designs, and their new company, Monkeystone Games, was
going to be everything but. This time it would be something small, something personal,
something fun. “It will be just good friends,” Romero said, arriving home, “good friends
making games.”

For Carmack,
the days of making games seemed like they might be numbered after all. The day after
his contentious meeting with Kevin and Adrian, he uploaded his news. “It wasn’t planned
to announce this soon, but here it is,” he wrote in his .plan. “We are working on
a new Doom game, focusing on the single-player game experience, and using brand new
technology in almost every aspect of it. That is all we are prepared to say about
the game for quite some time, so don’t push for interviews. We will talk about it
when things are actually built, to avoid giving misleading comments. [The decision]
went smoother than expected, but the other shoe dropped yesterday. Kevin and Adrian
fired Paul Steed in retaliation, over my opposition.”

Not long after the Doom III announcement hit, the rumor in Silicon Alamo started to
spread: this would be Carmack’s last game. And there seemed to be increasing evidence—tension
between the owners and, more important, Carmack’s new hobby, building rocket ships.
Real
rocket ships.

Carmack had rediscovered rocketry sometime during Quake III development. An interviewer
had asked him about his childhood, and Carmack had related some stories about rockets,
bombs, juvenile home, and being, as he now looked back,
“an amoral little jerk.”
After the conversation, Carmack idly surfed the Net to see what had become of the
model rocketry world. What he wandered into was the increasingly competitive and sophisticated
world of hackers, engineers, and fry cooks who were trying to build giant high-powered
rockets they could ride into outer space. Carmack was intrigued.

He ordered a few model rockets and shot them off at the end of his subdivision, moving
up in power, week after week, until he got into the more impressive equipment. He
began reading more about the amateur rocketry scene: the people who felt that NASA
was nothing more than a trucking company, the ones who were competing for a $10 million
“X Prize” to launch a ship into outer space with three people onboard. But what really
appealed to him was the engineering.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Despite the opportunities to innovate on Doom
III, Carmack felt, as he said, “near the peak of the existing bodies of knowledge
in graphics.” Once he had made the leap into arbitrary 3-D with Quake, there wasn’t
much further to go beyond optimizations. It was like that time he had come to Softdisk
and found Romero, someone who knew more than he did, someone who could help him learn
more. Now Carmack saw a similar opportunity in the world of rockets. Rockets weren’t
just arbitrary things based on a market or a sanctioning body of rules or regulations.
Here the goalposts were set by the way nature worked. It wasn’t him against the computer,
it was him against gravity.

Carmack bought thousands of dollars’ worth of rocket science research books and got
to work. He placed an ad on the local amateur rocketry website soliciting members
who would be interested in building a manned rocket ship or, as he called it, a “vertical
dragster.” The group—a handful of low-key engineers—dubbed themselves Armadillo Aerospace.
Bob Norwood volunteered his Ferarri shop for a work space. Before long they were meeting
there every week.

While working on Doom III, Carmack began spending more and more time immersed in rockets.
His house was covered in rocket parts. His Ferrari trunk overflowed with motors. He
was like the real-life manifestation of id’s old game character Billy Blaze—the boy
who built a rocket ship in his backyard. Carmack, the programmer who had once spent
a hundred hours per week hunched over his computer, was now spending nearly half his
time with grease and soldering irons. He would test-fire his high-powered rockets—complete
with a bucket seat for someone his size—in abandoned parking lots. Sometimes, he would
wait for events where he could launch his big ships with a few hundred other serious
enthusiasts. Sometimes, he’d just grab a few small model rockets and head out to a
field like when he was a kid—for fun.

On a gray afternoon in November 2001, Carmack loaded his car with a Day-Glo orange
model rocket and headed east out of Mesquite until the buildings gave way to open
pastures of grazing cows. He pulled in at Samuel Field, a browned patch of land that
was used for radio-controlled planes and amateur rockets. A few picnic tables sat
near a blue Porta Potti. An American flag fluttered on a rusty pole. A green garbage
can spilled with debris; it looked like a can from Doom. “There are people who argue
that you can just simulate reality,” he said, “but I think there’s value in coming
out here and dealing with the wind.”

Carmack set up his launch rod, a red-and-black frame that splayed on the ground with
a long rod pointing toward the clouds. He laid out his rockets and assessed the wind.
One of the first times he’d launched out here, the strong wind had lifted the ship
until it disappeared. Carmack had since been working on a solution: a hot-wired global
position system controlled by a radio modem and laptop. It would be, by all definitions,
something of a hack—a piece of creative engineering that he’d invented to solve a
problem. For now, he would be relying on an old-fashioned radio beacon that would
beep a little distress signal when the rocket touched ground.

Carmack set up the first rocket, fitting it down on the metal pole, adjusting it for
the wind. He clipped the wires to the bottom with rusty little clips. Stepping back,
he pressed a small plastic button and—
swooooooosh
—the rocket spiraled into the air with a trail of smoke. When it reached about three
hundred feet, it arced down and the chamber popped open, so the clear plastic tube
became a helicopter blade. Carmack jogged stiffly through the field to retrieve it.

“Okay,” he said, “now let’s try this one.” He twisted open the base of the orange
rocket. He’d made this rocket himself, starting with the main tube, scaling the fins
in the slots, fixing the right epoxy, painting the body Day-Glo orange. He put in
a G-80 engine, sixteen times more powerful than that of the last rocket. Carmack opened
the cone and pushed in the purple-and-white parachute and the audio beacon, mashing
the stuff down with a three-foot dowel.

These rocket motors were kids’ stuff, he said. His high-powered rockets, by contrast,
required high-grade hydrogen peroxide—something difficult to acquire. To get the dangerous
stuff, an inspector has to make sure a rocketeer has enough room to house it. Also,
it cost about twelve hundred bucks for a drum. Rather than deal with these hassles,
Carmack and his rocket group started making moonshine rocket fuel, buying 70 percent
grade hydrogen peroxide and distilling it to 90 percent. It was a dangerous brew;
a mistake could shatter nearby glass or cause explosions. Carmack soon nixed the plan.

“We’ll need to step a little further back for this one,” he said, once the orange
rocket was ready. Carmack rolled out the wires, attached them to the base, and hit
the button. This time there was a
boomswooshboom
at blastoff, a puff of light and smoke. But the rocket was too low. It was heading
off into the horizon over the trees. “Oh boy,” he said, “hope we can find it.” Carmack
jogged off toward the woods. Down the path were broken propellers, loose bits of plastic
hanging from trees like the membranes of robot intestines. Carmack stopped cold, hearing
the shrill squeal of the beacon. The rocket was safe.

Though the cold wind was picking up, Carmack was not about to head home. He was just
starting to have fun. He was talking a lot. Smiling. Ready for more. It was time to
try a new engine, something with a little more oomph: an engine that was twice as
powerful as what was meant for this size ship. He twisted off the old engine, dumped
it out, and reached for the new one. He adjusted the rod, aimed straight for the clouds.

Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would
allow at least one thought on his own. “In the information age, the barriers just
aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and
go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization.
You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work
on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across
rivers.”

Without warning he pressed the launch button, unleashing a thick black trail of smoke
with a bang. High above the cows, the rocket soared.

EPILOGUE

It took a decade
after the Two Johns met for their industry to come of age. Video game sales hit a
record
$10.8 billion in the United States
, once again
surpassing box-office receipts
. With the emerging multibillion-dollar market for games on cell phones, games would
outsell music too.

Gamers were also growing up. Far from being pimply boys, their average age was twenty-eight.
Their diversity reflected the new range of game themes: from baseball to bridge, ancient
Rome to future Japan, Mickey Mouse to David Bowie.
An estimated 60 percent of all Americans
—145 million people, including 62 million women
and
the U.S. president (who admitted to daily rounds of computer solitaire)—played. In
countries such as Japan, Germany, and South Korea, games were already national pastimes.

As games seized the mainstream, some of the tremors over first-person shooters began
to subside. Senator Lieberman praised the game companies’ efforts in informing parents
about mature content. And while there were continued efforts by politicians to legislate
violent games, the courts sent a message by throwing out the multimillion-dollar lawsuits
that alleged the teenage shooters at Columbine and Paducah were influenced by Doom.
“This was a tragic situation,”
a U.S. district judge declared, “but tragedies such as this simply defy rational
explanation and the courts should not pretend otherwise.”

The time also proved the end of an era, particularly for the extended family of Silicon
Alamo. Dallas, once home to at least a half dozen game companies, saw some of its
most ambitious start-ups—including Romero’s Ion Storm and Mike Wilson’s Gathering
of Developers—close their doors. A golden age seemed to have passed, when rebellious
outsiders could independently rule a multibillion-dollar industry. But the spirit
remained. Even the largest companies now emulated the innovations of id (such as online
play, giving away demos, and encouraging game modification), but they called it viral
marketing. And with new platforms like mobile phones emerging, maybe the next great
gamers were waiting to rise from the swamps. The world would always be ready for the
next great games.

As for id, the company’s decision to revisit its former hits met with mixed results.
The id-developed mission pack Quake III Team Arena was both a critical and a commercial
disappointment, viewed by many as a lackluster attempt to answer the success of Unreal
Tournament. A Game Boy Advance version of Commander Keen, produced but not developed
by id, met a similar reception. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, however, proved to be
both a critical and a commercial smash even though the title bore little resemblance
to its predecessor (aside from a few turkey dinners on the tables).

This period saw John Carmack elevated to legendary status. His innovations in graphics
programming were among the reasons why, as MIT’s
Technology Review
magazine put it,
“video games drive the evolution
of computing.” And his philanthropy—including the source code he continued to give
away for free online—was surpassed by none. At an annual Game Developers Conference
in San Jose, a twenty-nine-year-old Carmack became the third and youngest person ever
inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame—the Oscars
of the gaming business. After a videotaped congratulations from Bill Gates (who joked,
“I just want you to know that I can write slicker and tighter code than John”), Carmack
took the stage and endured a standing ovation from peers—comparable to that received
by the industry’s first inductee, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the very
Mario game Carmack had replicated on the PC that fateful night at Softdisk.

The question on many gamers’ minds was whether Carmack would be done with games after
Doom III. Carmack himself wasn’t sure. Between game and engine license sales, he felt
he had more than enough money and, in fact, was giving frequently to charities. Plus,
after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he had achieved an almost
Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light
on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead
lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world,
this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. “These are things I find enchanting
and miraculous,” he said. “I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the
way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.”

He immersed himself more deeply in a new source of learning: his rockets. On Saturdays
he met with his team of rocketeers, including Ferrari whiz Bob Norwood, to work on
what he called his vertical-landing hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles. Carmack fashioned
a Lunar Lander–style craft complete with a bucket seat in the middle for him or his
wife, Anna. Next up: maybe a shot at the $10 million X Prize, which required the winner
to launch three people into orbit and back two times within fourteen days. Those who
knew Carmack expected him to have a decent shot.

John Romero, meanwhile, was happy to set his sights closer to home. Living with Stevie
Case in their sprawling house in the Dallas countryside, he decided to get back, as
he said, to his roots: designing and programming games. After some brief attempts
at a traditional publishing deal, Romero, Stevie, and Tom Hall—despite good reviews
of Anachronox—decided to forgo the route of ambitious computer games for the uncharted
territory of games for pocket computers, cell phones, and other handheld devices.
As the first well-known developer to embrace this new area of gaming, Romero became
a cheerleader for mobile games much the way he once was for PC games.

True to their original vision of a small team turning out small games with short development
cycles, Monkeystone completed their first title, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, in a matter
of months. Working with three other developers late into the night at Romero’s country
house, Tom and Romero designed and programmed the entire game—just like the old days.
The game cast players as Guy Carrington, an interstellar courier whose job was “to
deliver the universe’s most important parcels!” One reviewer called Hyperspace Delivery
Boy
one of the few pocket PC games
worth buying. Next up: maybe a new version of Commander Keen, thanks to a license
purchased from id. Tom was happy to have his boy, Billy Blaze, back home.

For Romero, the fun at Monkeystone wasn’t just a new beginning, it was a break from
the past. Shortly after his thirty-fourth birthday, he followed Tom’s lead and cut
off the notorious hair he’d been growing since 1991, leaving him with a close-cropped
coif that was as easy to manage as his new company. Never one to let things go to
waste, Romero wrapped the long black mane in a package and donated it to Locks of
Love, a nonprofit group that supplies hairpieces for sick and needy children. His
trademark hair wasn’t the only thing to go. Now that he was living amid the trucks
and dirt roads of the country, Romero found little use for his once prized possession:
the Ferrari that Doom bought.

He lovingly photographed the car from a variety of angles in his front yard and uploaded
the pictures with a description to eBay, the popular online auction depot, with the
headline “Brutal Luxury.” His opening price of $65,000 was well worth it, he explained,
considering the more than $100,000 of modifications he’d installed, from the turbo
system to the custom engine. “The sound that comes out of this car is completely amazing
and destructive,” he wrote. “Going down the street, you will sound like an Indy car
when you hit the gas. . . . All you can do is laugh, it’s so awesome.” “It was,” he
promised, “the most awesome Ferrari Testarossa you’ll ever see.” The buyer who drove
it away for $82,500 agreed.

Another Ferrari would bring Romero and Carmack back together. It happened outside
a Quake III tournament in Mesquite. In previous years, the Two Johns all but ignored
each other here. But this time was different. The games had been played. The scores
had been settled. And a friend was in need. Carmack was in the parking lot having
trouble starting his engine. Hearing a rumble, he looked up into the headlights of
a fly yellow Hummer. Romero stepped from the car, jumper cables at the ready. There
was work to be done.