Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  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.

  Then Id dropped a bombshell. It was willing to let other game developers buy a licence to use John Carmack’s revolutionary 3D technology. Until then game developers had treated their in-house technology like their most valued possession; secret weapons that could give their games the edge over the competition. Even saying you should let your rivals use your technology was viewed as heresy. The idea to let others use the Wolfenstein 3D engine came direct from Carmack and won support from most of Id’s creative team. “Carmack, Romero and the bulk of the creative team wanted to do that,” said Wilbur, Id’s chief executive. “They were like ‘Oh, this is great – it’s going to be a lot of fun, it’s going to open up the market’. To be honest I was the blood-sucking
business and financial guy and I was a little apprehensive, thinking we were going to open up a whole can of worms.”

  Despite Wilbur’s doubts, Id pushed ahead with the plan and began selling licences to other game studios such as Raven Software, who used it to make 1993’s Shadowcaster. It was a revolutionary business move that would reshape the way games were made. Before Wolfenstein 3D game developers would build the systems and tools they needed to make their games themselves. After Wolfenstein 3D they had a choice. Instead of creating their own game engine they could buy Id’s technology, and focus on being creative. By 2005 the idea of buying in technology would be so commonplace in game development that dozens of companies, specialising in making software that did everything from 3D graphics to generating the leaves on virtual trees, had emerged. Even the developers of top-selling, big-budget games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City would use the software written by these ‘middleware’ providers to help make their games.

  One licensee of Id’s technology was Christian game publisher Wisdom Tree, who used it to make Super 3D Noah’s Ark for the Super NES. Wisdom Tree was formed by Color Dreams, a game publisher that started out by making games for the NES console without Nintendo’s approval before deciding to start making games for the Christian market. The first Wisdom Tree release, 1991’s Bible Adventures, sold more than 350,000 copies. “Our main goal was to provide scripturally correct games that offered families an alternative to the violent and sexually oriented games in the secular market,” said Brenda Huff, the company’s sales supervisor who would buy out the company in 1997. “Wisdom Tree’s games were sold in Christian bookstores, ministry premiums and other Christian venues.”

  Wisdom Tree also got its games promoted in the magazines produced by Focus on the Family, one of the organisations at the heart of the US’s conservative Christian movement, which rose to prominence in the 1980s. “Focus on the Family offers premium items for sale in its magazines and the approval process for inclusion in these publications is a very structured and involved process,” said Huff. “Founder James Dobson had talked about the dangers of video games a few months before we presented Bible Adventures to them. In April 1991 our game was featured in the Focus magazine. It was the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

  It is doubtful that Focus on the Family would have approved of Id’s next game – 1993’s Doom, where Id took the violent intensity of Wolfenstein 3D to a whole new level. Doom would prove to be a landmark release that would shake up the entire video game industry. From the outset Id aimed to create a game that would make Wolfenstein 3D look like yesterday’s news. John Carmack rewrote his 3D engine, determined to once again demolish the competition. His revised code allowed Id to build rooms of any height, create curved walls and use new lighting effects such as flickering ceiling lights. Adrian Carmack also upped the shock value of the artwork, creating a nightmarish carousel of twisted monsters and twitching bodies impaled on spikes. They sampled animal noises to provide the game’s demonic opponents with intimidating growls and roars and added a pulsing, clanging musical soundtrack inspired by the work of industrial metal acts such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. And, in a total rejection of the approach of the movie-inspired CD full-motion video epics flooding onto the market at the time, Id abandoned the idea of story almost entirely. “The full-motion video games were trying to look as good as possible without the hard programming necessary to do a true 3D game like we were making,” said Romero. “I saw those games as the remnants of a dying niche. The future belonged to the 3D programmers.”

  Carmack summed up Id’s thinking on game narrative by comparing video game stories to those of porn movies – expected but unnecessary. Doom’s scenario consisted of no more than telling the player they were on Mars and that demons from hell were attacking. Your job was to kill them. All of them. To help players carry out their bloody task, Id supplied players with a selection of vicious weapons ranging from shotguns and rocket launchers to mini-guns and chainsaws.[7] Doom was about one thing and one thing only: survival. It was terrifying, exhilarating, primal and angry. “With Wolfenstein 3D we wanted to shock people with the speed of the engine and the violence,” said Romero. “With Doom we wanted to shock people with everything. It was the best game ever.”

  Doom’s action and 3D visuals alone would have been enough to send shockwaves through the games business, but the Texan studio’s game also ripped up the rules of the industry. Having already explored the idea of letting outsiders use its technology by licensing the use of its Wolfenstein 3D engine, Id decided it was time the players also had access. The team drew inspiration from the Wolfenstein 3D fans who had hacked into the game and created new versions featuring different new graphics and levels. This practice was called modding, as in modification, and most video game companies were fiercely opposed to it, regarding it as a breach of copyright. But rather than frowning on its mod-making fans, Id embraced them. Doom came with the tools fans needed to redesign Doom as they wished and share their work.

  The idea of letting players create their own levels dated back to early 1980s games such as Pinball ConstructionSet, but players’ level of access was usually tightly controlled. Id’s pro-modding stance went a step further, giving fans unprecedented access to the code that made Doom tick. “It gave users the opportunity to literally touch the tools that we used for the games we make, allowing them to turn themselves from an amateur developer into a professional developer,” said Wilbur. It also brought business advantages, he added: “It gives the game legs, so a game that might exhaust its time in the marketplace in six to 12 months might get an additional 12 or 18 months or more depending on how popular it is because users are creating more content.”

  Doom also let players fight each other by connecting their computers together. Romero named these player-versus-player battles ‘death matches’. The idea had been tried before. Maze, the original first-person shooter, let up to eight players battle each other and games such as the 1987 Atari ST game MIDI Maze let up to 16 people play together by connecting up their computers with cables. But the need to have each player’s computer in the same room meant these features were rarely used. Doom’s arrival, however, coincided with the opening up of the internet, which meant computers could be connected via phone lines rather than direct cables. Soon after Doom’s release fans modified the game so it could be played over the internet as well as on PCs connected by cables. Soon thousands of people were spending their nights and days playing Doom death matches online.

  Id’s marketing for Doom was just as revolutionary. Having decided to publish Doom itself as shareware rather than go through Apogee, Id started using viral marketing years before the term had even been invented. “It was more how do we make the most impact based on what we had, which was zero dollars,” said Wilbur. “We’d had some impact on the consumer with Wolfenstein 3D, we were talking about what we were going to do next and everybody was listening, so we just used that.”

  Id kept its increasingly rabid fan base in a state of heightened excitement with a constant drip, drip, drip of information about the cool features that would be in Doom. By the time the team was getting close to completing the game, some fans were so excited they began phoning Id’s offices demanding that they hurry up and get the game out. By the launch day – the 10th December 1993 – the fans were at fever pitch. So many fans were sat waiting on the website where the free shareware version of Doom would first appear that it took Id hours to upload the game. The stampede to download the game as soon as it appeared caused the website’s servers to crash several times. Within five months of its launch, the free demo of Doom had been downloaded more than 1.3 million times and Id was raking in $100,000 a day as fans began buying access the rest of the game. Romero had achieved his dream of becoming a video game superstar. “When Doom was released, I knew we were absolutely number one in the industry. Without a doubt,” said Romero.

  Id was the hottest video game company in the world and the o
utgoing Romero, with his long black hair, was the perfect front man. “We made a conscious decision,” said Wilbur. “Romero wanted to be the rock star and he started to dress in the role. At the time the industry needed a rock star. The company and the software happened to be there and we had a guy out in front willing to take the mic and play the lead singer, so we pushed him out there.”

  Romero readily agreed: “I was the only person the press could talk to that knew every single aspect of what we were doing – design, art, coding, publishing, playing. I loved talking to people about our games, how we made them, why we made them, what was upcoming and everything else about Id Software. I was perfectly suited for the job. I wasn’t just a mouthpiece – I made these games.”

  Video games were never quite the same after Doom. It was to games what The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was to pop: a paradigm shift. Its most immediate impact was to be the catalyst for video gaming’s shift from 2D to 3D visuals. Doom inspired a flood of first-person shooters and fuelled demand among PC gamers for 3D graphic cards. These hardware add-ons contained graphics processing units (GPUs): fast microprocessors dedicated to doing the maths needed to create realistic 3D visuals that would further accelerate gaming’s move into three dimensions. Ironically, GPUs were a by-product of the virtual reality research that had faded from popular interest by the end of the 1990s. “Cheap 3D graphics hardware is what enabled the current explosion of video games,” said Warren Robinett, the former Atari game designer who later moved into a virtual reality research.

  Id also changed video games in more subtle but equally revolutionary ways. Id’s willingness to let other game companies licence its technology was the starting point of a culture shift that has made the exchange of technology between developers widespread in North America and Europe.[8] The company’s embrace of modding was another break with tradition and one that has evolved into a multi-pronged movement that has spawned hit games and acted as a training ground for hundreds, possibly thousands, of game developers.