Masters of Doom (8 page)

“We gotta talk,” Scott continued eagerly. “I saw your game Pyramids of Egypt. It was
so awesome! Can you do a few more levels of it? We can make a ton of money.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to publish your game,” Scott said, “as shareware.”

Shareware. Romero was familiar with the concept. It dated back to a guy named
Andrew Fluegelman
, founding editor of
PC World
magazine. In 1980, Fluegelman wrote a program called PC-Talk and released it online
with a note saying that anyone who liked the wares should feel free to send him some
“appreciation” money. Soon enough he had to hire a staff to count all the checks.
Fluegelman called the practice “shareware,” “an experiment in economics.” Over the
eighties other hackers picked up the ball, making their programs for Apples, PCs,
and other computers available in the same honor code: Try it, if you like it, pay
me. The payment would entitle the customer to receive technical support and updates.

The Association of Shareware Professionals put the business, largely domestic, between
$10 and $20 million annually—even with only an estimated 10 percent of customers paying
to register a shareware title.
Forbes
magazine marveled at the trend, writing in 1988 that “if this doesn’t sound like
a very sound way to build a business, think again.” Shareware, it argued, relied not
on expensive advertising but on word of mouth or, as one practitioner put it, “word
of disk.” Robert Wallace, a top programmer at Microsoft, turned a shareware program
of his called PC-Write into a multimillion-dollar empire. Most authors, however, were
happy to break six figures and often made little more than $25,000 per year. Selling
a thousand copies of a title in one year was a great success. Shareware was still
a radical conceit, one that, furthermore, had been used only for utility programs,
like check-balancing programs and word-processing wares. It had never been exploited
for games. What was Scott thinking?

As they talked, it became clear to Romero that Scott knew exactly what he was doing.
Scott, like Romero, was a lifelong gamer. The son of a NASA executive, he was a conservative-looking
guy with short, dark hair. He had spent his high school days in Garland hanging out
in the computer lab during the day and at the arcade after school. He even wrote a
strategy guide called
Shootout: Zap the Video Games,
detailing all the ways to beat the hot games of 1982, from Pac-Man to Missile Command.
Scott soon took the inevitable path and started making games of his own.

When it came time to distribute the games, Scott took a long, hard look at the shareware
market. He liked what he saw: the fact that he could run everything himself without
having to deal with retailers or publishers. So he followed suit, putting out two
text-based games in their entirety and waiting for the cash to roll in. But the cash
didn’t roll; it didn’t even trickle. Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed
from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply
to take what they could get for free. Scott did some research and realized he wasn’t
alone; other programmers who had released games in their entirety as shareware were
broke too. People may be honest, he thought, but they’re also generally lazy. They
need an incentive.

Then he got an idea.
Instead of giving away the entire game, why not give out only the first portion, then
make the player buy the rest of the game directly from him?
No one had tried it before, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. The games Scott
was making were perfectly suited to such a plan because they were broken up into short
episodes or “levels” of play. He could simply put out, say, fifteen levels of a game,
then tell players that if they sent him a check he would send them the remaining thirty.

In 1986, while working for a computer consulting company, Scott self-published his
first game, Kingdom of Kroz—an Indiana Jones–style adventure—as shareware, making
the initial levels available through BBSs and shareware catalogs. There was no advertising,
no marketing, and virtually no overhead—except for the low cost of floppy disks and
Ziploc bags. Because there were no other people to pay off, Scott could price his
games much lower than most retail titles: $15 to $20 as opposed to $30 to $40. For
every dollar he brought in, Scott was pocketing ninety cents. By the time he contacted
Romero, he had earned $150,000 by word of mouth alone.

Business was so good, Scott explained, that he’d quit his day job to start his own
shareware game publishing company, called Apogee. And he was looking for other games
to publish. Romero was making perfect shareware games and he didn’t even know it,
Scott said. An ideal shareware game had to have a few ingredients: short action titles
that were broken up in levels. Because the shareware games were being distributed
over BBSs, they had to be small enough for people to download them over modems. Large,
graphically intensive games, like those being published by Sierra On-Line, were simply
too big for BBS-based distribution. Games had to be small but fun and fast, something
adrenal and arcade-style enough to hook a player into buying more. If Romero would
give him Pyramids of Egypt, Scott would handle all the marketing and order processing;
the guys would receive some kind of advance plus a 35 percent royalty rate, higher
than they’d get from any major publisher.

Romero was intrigued, but there was a problem. “We can’t do Pyramids of Egypt,” he
explained, “because Softdisk owns it.” He could hear the disappointment in Scott’s
sigh. “Hey,” he added. “Screw that game! It’s crap compared to what we’re doing right
now.”

A few days later, Scott received a package with the Super Mario Brothers 3 demo from
Ideas from the Deep. When he fired up the game, he was knocked out. It looked just
like the console version—smooth scrolling and everything. He grabbed the phone and
talked to Carmack for hours. This guy is a genius, Scott thought. He’s outthinking
everybody. By the time they were through talking, Scott was more than ready to make
a deal. The gamers said they would use this new technology to create a title specifically
for Apogee to release as shareware. “Great,” Scott said. “Let’s do it.”

Now they just had to come up with a game.

After their initial conversation,
Romero asked Scott to show them his seriousness by sending them an advance. Scott
responded with a check for two thousand dollars, half his savings. There was only
one thing he wanted in return: A game by Christmas, two months away.

Romero, Carmack, Adrian, Lane, Tom, and Jay convened in the Gamer’s Edge office to
come up with the game. Tom was quick to point out that, because they were using this
console-style technology, they should make a console-style game, something like Mario
but different. Fueled by the energy, he was quick to volunteer himself with a fair
amount of the bravado that was becoming a requisite part of their clan.

“Come on, what theme do you want?” Tom said. “Tell me. I can do anything. How about
science fiction?”

They liked the idea. “Why don’t we do something,” Carmack said, “where a little kid
genius saves the world or something like that? Mmm.”

“Okay, yeah!” Tom said. “I have a great idea for something like that.” And in a blur
he sped from the room and locked himself in his office in the Apple II department.
He could feel his head opening up, the ideas pouring out in what sounded like the
voice of Walter Winchell. Tom had long been a huge fan of Warner Bros. cartoons; Chuck
Jones, the Looney Tunes animator, was a god to him. He’d also watched Dan Aykroyd’s
impression of
The Untouchables’
Eliot Ness as a kid. He thought about all these things, plus Mario, plus, for flavor,
a routine by the comedian George Carlin about people who use bay leaves as underarm
deodorant and go around smelling like bean with bacon soup.

Tom typed until he had three paragraphs on his paper. Pulling it out of the printer,
he dashed back into the Gamer’s Edge office and read these words in his best Winchell
impression:

Billy Blaze, eight-year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse,
has created an interstellar spaceship from old soup cans, rubber cement, and plastic
tubing. While his folks are out on the town and the baby sitter is asleep, Billy sneaks
out to his backyard workshop, dons his brother’s football helmet, and transforms into.
. . .
Commander Keen—
defender of justice! In his ship, the Bean with Bacon MegaRocket, Keen dispenses justice
with an iron hand!

In this episode, aliens from the planet Vorticon VI find out about the eight-year-old
genius and plan his destruction. While Keen is out exploring the mountains of Mars,
the Vorticons steal his ship and leave pieces of it around the galaxy! Can Keen recover
all the pieces of his ship and repel the Vorticon invasion? Will he make it back before
his parents get home? Stay tuned!

He looked around. Silence. Then, in a burst, everyone was laughing, even the generally
stoic John Carmack, who not only laughed but applauded. Commander Keen was on board.
Where he would take them, they hardly knew.

The gamers
weren’t just Softdisk guys anymore, they were, as they called themselves, the IFD
guys, co-owners of Ideas from the Deep. Softdisk, as a result, took on an even greater
pallor. But it was a day job, a job they all needed since there was no real money
coming in yet and no guarantee that it would come in at all. They decided, then, to
continue working on titles for Gamer’s Edge during the day while they churned out
Commander Keen from the lake house at night.

They became all the more efficient at “borrowing” the Softdisk computers. Every night
after work they’d back their cars up to the office and load the machines. The next
morning they’d come in early enough to bring the computers back. They even got a little
cocky about it. Though the machines were top of the line, they wanted some minor adjustments
made. Jay began moseying on down to the Softdisk administration office to request
new parts. Al Vekovius took notice of the requests but didn’t think too much of them.
He was still gung ho about Gamer’s Edge and the potential to break into the PC marketplace.
So whatever the gamers wanted, the gamers would have.

From October to December 1990, they worked virtually nonstop to get Keen done for
Scott by Christmas. And it wasn’t just one Keen; it was a trilogy called Invasion
of the Vorticons. Trilogies were common in the games industry for the same reason
they were common in books and films; they were the best way to build and expand a
brand identity. Tom, who assumed the role of creative director, mapped out the game
plan.

Mario, this was not. As a hero, an eight-year-old misfit who steals his dad’s Everclear
for rocket fuel was more identifiable than a middle-aged Italian plumber. It was as
if the gamers had followed that golden rule of writing about what they knew. Tom,
as a kid, used to walk around in a Green Bay Packers helmet and red Converse sneakers,
just like Billy Blaze. And, in a sense, they were all Billy Blazes, oddball kids who
modified technology to create elaborate means of escape. Keen was a punk, a hacker.
And he was saving the galaxy, just as countless hackers like Carmack and Romero used
technology to save themselves.

The roles were set: Carmack and Romero were the programmers, and Tom the lead designer—the
person in charge of coming up with the game play elements, from the story and setting
to the characters and weapons. Carmack and Romero were happy to leave Tom to the creative
work; they were too busy programming. Carmack was refining his engine, getting the
smooth scrolling down to the point where Keen could move as fluidly left or right
as he could up or down. Romero, meanwhile, was working the editor, the program that
allows the developers to put together the graphics of the game—characters, rooms,
monsters. It was essentially a game designer’s construction kit. Carmack and Romero
were in sync.

Not everyone else gelled quite as well. Lane was now officially kicked out of the
Keen development. Despite Romero’s fondness for him as a friend, he felt that Lane’s
energy was lacking. Adrian was having problems of his own. Though he was recruited
later to help them work on Keen, Adrian hated the project. It was too . . . cutesy.
Tom had a target audience in mind: “kids,” he said, “or those who have kidlike mentalities
like we do.” Adrian hated kiddie stuff. Even more, he hated cutesy. Worst of all was
cutesy kiddie. And now here he was having to sit all night drawing pizza slices, soda
pop, and candy. Tom came up with a little character called a Yorp with a big fat green
body and one periscopelike eye over his head. Even the monsters were cute. In most
games, when a character died, it would simply disappear, vanish. But Tom had other
notions. He was eager to incorporate some “larger philosophical ideas,” as he said.
He loosely based characters on ideas he’d read in Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents;
a guard was made to represent an id. He wanted to teach kids that when people or
even aliens die, they
really
die, they leave corpses. So he wanted the dead creatures in the game to just . .
. remain: not graphic or bloody corpses, just dead Yorps.
Cute
dead Yorps.

The cuteness of the characters wasn’t the only thing bugging Adrian, it was the cuteness
of their creator. Tom was getting on his nerves. He would run around the house, craning
his neck and making sounds to show Adrian exactly what the alien creatures in the
games were supposed to look like. Romero would usually crack up at these displays.
Adrian took a liking to Romero, who shared his taste in heavy metal and his appreciation
of sick humor; but Tom, in Adrian’s mind, was just plain annoying. To make matters
worse, they had to share a desk, and Tom was so full of energy that he kept bobbing
his knee up and down, inadvertently hitting the table when Adrian was trying to draw.
But it was better than working at the last open space in the house, next to the litter
box used for John Carmack’s cat, Mitzi. Tom had no idea how Adrian felt. He thought
he was just quiet.