Replay: The History of Video Games (42 page)

Shreveport was a long way away from video gaming’s spiritual heartland of Silicon Valley. The city was built on the back of oil and gas but, in the mid-1980s, the industry collapsed leaving behind a legacy of racial tension, double-digit unemployment rates, high levels of homelessness and gang crime. The offices in the downtown skyscrapers that once symbolised Shreveport’s wealth sat empty and disused buildings in the city centre were boarded up. Despite being told he would be able to make games at Softdisk, Romero spent his time converting the company’s existing programs so they could be put on its IBM PC compatible magazine
Big Blue Disk
in a monotonous nine-to-five working environment. One day in 1990 Romero cracked and confronted Softdisk’s owner. Romero told him that Softdisk should make a game subscription disk for PC owners and, if the company didn’t, he would quit.

“I was tired of writing programs for
Big Blue Disk
and wanted to make games full time,” said Romero. Softdisk’s boss agreed and
Gamer’s Edge
, a disk magazine for PC gamers that came out once every two months, was born, with Romero at the helm. To supplement the
Gamer’s Edge
team, Romero brought in Adrian Carmack, a Softdisk artist fond of drawing dark and disturbing images part-inspired by the pictures of injured and diseased people he saw while working in the photo archives of a Shreveport hospital, and the unrelated John Carmack, a fiercely intelligent and talented programmer recommended to Romero by Wilbur, who was charged with overseeing tusiness end of the
Gamer’s Edge
project.

“John Carmack submitted an overhead-view dungeon crawl game to me to buy for Softdisk,” said Wilbur. “It was magnificent. I would have loved to have purchased it but couldn’t because of the parameters of what I could do on the disk. So I said: ‘Hey John, this is awesome but it’s too large. Can you do something small?’. He came back with this tennis program that had accurate physics –
Pong
with physics and an isometric view. It was brilliant. It was like ‘oh my god, this guy’s got something going on here that’s beyond what we can do’. He is clearly up there as one of the best. He is a monster at what he does.”

Another Softdisk employee, Tom Hall, was the last member of the gang. Hall was not part of the
Gamer’s Edge
team but he loved games and would regularly contribute ideas. On the evening of 19th September 1990, Hall and John Carmack stayed late at work fooling around with game ideas and working out how to make a PC game scroll smoothly. That night Carmack cracked the problem. “Over that night they developed a perfect – and when I’m talking perfect, I mean pixel-by-pixel – rendition of the first level of
Super Mario Bros 3
,” said Wilbur.

The pair stayed at work until 5am recreating Nintendo’s hit game before heading home. On Romero’s desk they left a floppy disk containing their creation, which they named
Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement
after the video game character created by Romero who they had used in place of Mario, with a note saying ‘load me’. Romero was stunned as were the rest of the
Gamer’s Edge
crew. Romero saw the potential immediately: this was their ticket out of Softdisk. “We started piling in the next morning and they showed it to us and we were like ‘my god, that’s perfect, this is
Mario 3
’,” said Wilbur, who got in touch with Nintendo to see if they would be interested in a PC version of their game. They were not. “I contacted my friends at the legal end of Nintendo who said: ‘We have no desire to exploit this property outside of Nintendo’s hardware’.”

As luck would have it, around the time that Nintendo turned them down, a man called Scott Miller got in touch with Romero. Miller was the founder of Apogee, a Dallas-based game publisher specialising in selling titles via shareware. Shareware was an alternative to the mail order or retail distribution methods used by most software publishers, and was dreamt up by Andrew Fluegelman, the founding editor of
PC World
magazine. In 1982 Fluegelman created a communications software program called
PC-Talk
but, instead of seeking a publisher, he decided to use it for an economic experiment. He gave it away and asked people to send him a cheque if they liked it. Despite having the option of not paying, hundreds of users paid up leaving Fluegelman swamped by cheques. His trust-based experiment inspired a movement. By 1988 the estimated turnover of the shareware software market was somewhere between $10 million and $20 million in the US alone, even though, on average, only one i 10 users paid up.

Miller liked the shareware concept, but noticed that while people paid for applications or utilities they rarely paid for games. He started wondering why and whether there was a way to solve the problem. “Shareware games did not make money before I formed Apogee,” he said. “The reason was because shareware game authors – and there weren’t many – made the mistake of releasing their full game as shareware, giving no incentive for players to send them money. I decided to try a new method: release an episode rather than a full game and then sell the remaining episodes.”

To test his idea he created
Kingdom of Kroz
, a 1987 maze game divided into three episodes, and gave away the first part for free. If players wanted the remaining two episodes they would have to buy them from Apogee. “The first few months were slow, just a trickle of mail-in orders,” said Miller. “But it picked up and soon I was getting $100 to $200 a day in orders. On some days as much as $500. This spurred me on to create several more episodes of
Kroz
– seven in total. In 1989 I made around $100,000 and in 1990 I decided to quit my $30,000 per year day job and focus all my time on Apogee.”

Miller wanted more games to release via Apogee and started looking for developers who could help him grow the company’s product line. Miller had been impressed by Romero’s games and decided to contact him. Miller hoped Romero would be interested in remaking
Pyramids of Egypt
, a maze game he wrote for
UpTime
in 1987. Romero instead showed him the work Hall and Carmack had created. Miller was as blown away. “The technology was well ahead of anything I’d yet seen on a PC, so I made a pitch: I’d fund a game if they presented me with a design,” said Miller. “A week later I had a compelling design created by Romero, Carmack and Hall. The two-paragraph design was for a game titled
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons
. I loved it.”

In keeping with their Nintendo-inspired demo,
Commander Keen
was the kind of colourful action game common on home consoles but a rare sight on PCs. Miller sent the team a cheque for $3,000 and they started work on
Commander Keen
under the name Ideas from the Deep. The team wrote
Commander Keen
, a game about an eight-year-old boy who lives a double life as a planet-saving space hero, in their spare time while still working for Softdisk and, on the 14th December 1990, Apogee released it in three parts. The first part was given away free via bulletin board systems (BBSs), while the second two episodes could be bought by mail order for $30. “It set a new standard on the PC for scrolling platform games,” said Miller. “Not even the big publishers had anything as good. From day one Id was a technology leader and this alone generated a lot of buzz and attention. On top of that,
Commander Keen
was a damn fun and often funny game.”

Apogee’s monthly sales quadrupled and
Commander Keen
became the talk of the BBS world. The team’s first royalty cheque for
Commander Keen
topped the $10,000 mark prompting the
Gamer’s Edge
team to quit Softdisk on the 1st February 1991 to form Id Software. After relocating briefly to Madison, Wisconsin, the team moved to Dallas. Id planned to focus on producing more console-style games on the PC, but everything changed when Romero heard about a game being put together by Blue Sky Productions, the new game studio formed by his former Origin colleague Paul Neurath.

Neurath envisaged the Massachusetts-based studio, which would rename itself Looking Glass Studios in 1992, as a game design think tank, a place where pushing back the boundaries of game design and the exploration of new video game concepts was the order of the day. To fulfil Neurath’s grand vision, the studio used its proximity to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to recruit some of the US’s brightest graduates who would help the company foster a rigorously intellectual approach to game design. It was a place where every day felt like a game design symposium.

“It was like being in university,” said game designer Ken Levine, who joined Looking Glass in 1995. “Their focus was building up principles of game design that would turn games from being something where we sort of guessed what would be fun to putting a theory on it and then building on those theories to move forward with confidence. They all came from MIT, a place where they could all define a problem set. They brought that thinking to games.”

During its lifespan, Looking Glass continually broke new ground in game design.
[5]
When the studio decided that flight simulations suffered from a lack of realism it created
Flight Unlimited
, which incorporated satellite imagery of real-life terrain to give players a more authentic experience. And when it decided that audio was underused as a game play device it produced 1998’s
Thief: The Dark Project
, where players had to listen out for footsteps and use noise to distract guards so they could successfully carry out their thieving. “We started working on the game system for
Thief
writing documents about the stealth mechanic and comparing it to the stealth fighter and submarine games where you have all these tools like noise makers to throw off detection,” said Levine, who helped developed the game’s initial concepts. “The noise maker in
Thief
is right out of submarines, they have noise makers and that’s where the idea came from.”

But the studio’s first breakthrough was its most significant. In 1990 one of the company’s programmers, Chris Green, devised a revolutionary 3D graphics engine that was not only fast, but also allowed wallpaper-like ‘textures’ to be attached to each polygon, turning them from solid blocks of colour to patterned images. After Neurath told
him about Green’s breakthrough, Romero promptly informed John Carmack. Id had just put together a texture-less polygon 3D game of its own called
Hovercraft 3D
, where players drove around a maze shooting enemies and rescuing hostages, and Carmack soonorked out how to do what Green had done. And in November 1991, just a few months after Neurath’s conversation with Romero, Apogee started selling Id’s first texture-mapped game –
Catacomb 3-D
. Viewed through the eyes of the player’s character, the fantasy-themed game was set in maze-like dungeons filled with monsters that could be zapped with fireballs shot from the player’s virtual hand, which stuck out from the bottom middle of the screen. It wasn’t until March 1992 that Blue Sky Productions got its texture-mapped game,
Ultima Underworlds: The Stygian Abyss
, on the shelves.
[6]

Encouraged by the positive reception for
Catacomb 3-D
and Carmack’s ideas for improving his 3D graphics engine, Id halted work on its console-style games to focus on its third 3D game. At Romero’s suggestion they based it on
Castle Wolfenstein,
a 1981 game for Apple II where players sneaked around a Nazi castle bumping off guards quietly in order to steal secret war plans. The original idea was to remake the Apple II game in 3D, but the Id team found it was much more fun mowing down the Nazi soldiers with a machine gun rather than sneaking past them. They began reducing the game down, stripping it back to a one-man assault on Hitler’s underground bunker. The result, 1992’s
Wolfenstein 3D
, was brutal.

Opening to the strains of the Nazi Party anthem
Horst Wessel Lied
, it married John Carmack’s cutting-edge 3D visuals with gory artwork created by Adrian Carmack and Id’s latest recruit Kevin Cloud to create a trigger-happy first-person shooter set in a maze-like bunker adorned with swastika-bearing flags. The result shocked and excited in equal measure. Its action was, at heart, not far removed from 2D overhead-view games such as
Gauntlet
where players run around a maze shooting swarms of enemies, but the 3D visuals gave the experience a whole new level of intensity and realism.

Wolfenstein 3D
became a huge success. By the end of 1993 more than 100,000 copies had been sold, making it the biggest-selling shareware game released at that point. Its inclusion of Nazi imagery earned it a ban in Germany and objections from the US pressure group the Anti-Defamation League. It also raised the standard for 3D visuals to a new level, forcing other game designers to rethink their work. Overnight, Id became the hottest game developer around. Nintendo paid them to bring the game to the Super NES provided they cut the blood and replaced the dogs of the PC original with rats.