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.
For the majority of the time, however, those late nights at the lake house were a perpetual programming party. With Iggy Pop or Dokken playing on the stereo, the guys all worked into the wee hours. Occasionally, they’d take a break to play Super Mario on the Nintendo or maybe a round of Dungeons and Dragons. Carmack had been building a large D&D campaign for the guys, and on Saturday nights they’d gather around a table and play into the early morning hours. With Carmack as Dungeon Master, the game took on depth and complexity. It was quickly becoming the longest and deepest D&D game he’d ever created. And there were no signs of it letting up.
Other times, they’d cruise the lake on the boat. Jay quickly became the designated driver; his impeccable focus gave him the ability to drive not only fast but steady. A couple times they let Romero drive, but he was having too much fun, steering the boat precipitously off course. Jay also fell comfortably into the role of manager or, in a sense, frat house president. While the guys worked, he would grill up ribs on the barbecue or restock the sodas. They were under the gun and needed all the help they could get.
They didn’t need any help getting motivated, however. Carmack, in particular, seemed almost inhumanly immune to distraction. One time, Jay tested Carmack’s resolve by popping a porno video into the VCR and cranking it to full volume. Romero and the others immediately heard the “oohs” and “aahs,” and turned around cracking up. Carmack, though, stayed glued to his monitor. Only after a minute or so did he acknowledge the increasingly active groans. His sole response was “Mmm.” Then he returned to the work at hand.
Back at Softdisk, Al Vekovius was beginning to grow suspicious of his star gamers. Jay was continually requesting parts for the computers. And the other guys were behaving more curtly and elusively. His first suspicion came shortly after they were working on their new game for Softdisk, a ninja warrior title called Shadow Knights. Al had never seen a side scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.”
Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality he had struck what was growing into an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic.
All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to his life: writing code to solve problems. I
f the world became a place in which he couldn’t solve a problem without infringing on someone’s patents, he would be very unhappy living there.
Carmack was becoming more blunt and insulting about other topics as well, most notably the rest of the Softdisk staff. “You’ve got a lot of terrible programmers here,” he said. “They just stink.” It was as if Carmack simply didn’t care how he alienated himself from the rest of the employees.
Al began dropping by the Gamer’s Edge office more often, only to discover more strange behavior. He once walked in to find Carmack, Romero, and Tom huddled around Romero’s computers with their backs to the door. When Al made his presence known, they quickly dispersed. He stepped over and asked them what was going on. “Nothing but dirty jokes, Al,” Romero replied, gingerly. When Al looked at the screen, it was suspiciously blank. Later he commented to Carmack that Romero was acting strangely, which struck Al as odd since Romero was always so nice. Carmack considered this momentarily, then, as always, blurted out his unedited perception of the truth: “Romero was just being friendly,” Carmack said. “When you turn your back, he hates your guts.”
By Thanksgiving, the guys were immersed in the death schedule back at the lake house. Sleep was not an issue. Neither was showering. Eating was something they essentially had to remind themselves to do. To help keep them fed while they crunched on Keen, Scott had begun sending the team weekly hundred-dollar checks labeled “pizza bonus,” playing off the pepperoni slice icon that appeared in Keen. Pizza was id’s fuel. It was, as Carmack enjoyed noting, the perfect invention: hot, quick, and containing a variety of food groups. When Jay opened an envelope from Scott and waved the check in the air, everyone would declare “pizza money!”
Scott was confident he’d see a return on his investment. He had initiated a full-on blitz. Because of his own success, he had built strong ties with the heads of various BBSs and shareware magazines across the country. He called every one of them, preparing each for a game that would revolutionize the industry. Before long, whenever people logged on to a BBS, they would see a title screen reading: “Coming soon from Apogee: Commander Keen.” Scott was putting his reputation on the line. But there was never a doubt in the gamers’ minds that Keen would deliver.
Tom was in overdrive on the design, bouncing ideas like Ping-Pong balls off Romero. If Romero doubled over laughing, he knew he was on the right track. Scott offered his own advice for the game. “One of the reasons for Mario Brothers popularity,” he wrote them in a letter, “is that you can continue playing the game in search of secret or hidden bonuses, et cetera. I would really like to see something like this implemented in Keen—it would really add to the game I think.”
“Like . . . duh!” The guys responded. They loved finding secrets in games. Already secrets were like a subculture among programmers. Sometimes there were secret levels, or inside jokes, or tricks that had no real bearing on the outcome of the game. These were called Easter eggs. The mother of all eggs occurred in 1980, when intrepid Atari 2600 geeks stumbled on a secret room in the geometric role-playing game Adventure, only to find the flashing words “Warren Robinett.” Some players haplessly shot at the name. Others just scratched their heads. Robinett was a disgruntled Adventure programmer who wanted recognition following a corporate takeover.
Tom came up with some tricks for Keen. In episode one, players could find a secret hidden city if they pulled a combination of moves, like throwing themselves in the line of fire of an ice cannon. Around the game he inserted cryptic signs written in what was supposed to be the Vorticon alphabet. If players stumbled into a secret area, they could get the translations.
The guys were so enthusiastic that they decided to put in a preview of their upcoming games, which, at the time, didn’t exist. They described more installments of Keen as well as a new game based on characters and elements of Carmack’s evolving Dungeons and Dragons world. “ The Fight for Justice,” they wrote. “A completely new approach to fantasy gaming. You start not as a weakling with no food—you start as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent. You start off with the hammer of thunderbolts, the ring of regeneration, and a trans-dimensional artifact . . . all the people you meet will have their own personalities, lives, and objectives. . . . The Fight for Justice will be the finest PC game yet.”
The lake house was filled with the sense of unlimited possibilities. And the bond between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day. It was like two tennis players who, after years of destroying their competition, finally had a chance to play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better programmer. Carmack pushed Romero to be a better designer. What they shared equally was their passion.
This was most clear to Carmack one late weekend night. He was sitting in the house working at his PC as lightning flashed outside. Mitzi curled lazily on top of his monitor, her legs draping over the screen. The heat of her body was causing Carmack’s heat-sensitive display to ooze its colors. He pushed Mitzi gently from the monitor, and she scurried away with a hiss.
A rainstorm had picked up, and it was mighty. Cross Lake spilled into the backyard like the prelude to a horror movie. The lake was so high that it pushed the ski boat to the top of the boathouse. Long black water moccasins slithered toward the deck. The bridge leading to Lakeshore Drive was completely washed out. When Jay arrived after having been out for the day, there was no way to get in. It was, as he described it, “a turd floater” of a storm, bringing everything from the bottom of the lake to the surface. He turned away to wait it out.
Romero arrived with a friend later to find the bridge even worse than when Jay got there. There was simply no way he was going to get his car over the flooded expanse. And there were probably alligators and moccasins now making it their home.
Back in the house, Carmack resigned himself to working on his own that night. After all these hours, he had come to appreciate Romero’s diverse range of talents, gleaned from years of making his own Apple II games. Romero had been not only a coder but an artist, a designer, and a businessman. On top of all that, he was fun. Romero didn’t just love games; in a sense, he was a game, a walking, talking, beeping, twitching human video game who never seemed to let anything get him down. Like a game character, he could always find an extra life.
Just then the door behind Carmack swung open. Mitzi dashed under his feet. Carmack turned to see Romero standing there with his big thick glasses, soaking wet up to his chest, lightning flashing behind him, a big smile on his face. It was a real moment, a moment so impressive that Carmack actually saved it in his thin file of sentimental memories. This one he wanted for future access: the night Romero waded through a stormy river to work.
On the afternoon of December 14, 1990, Scott Miller pressed a button on his PC and uploaded the Commander Keen shareware episode Marooned on Mars to the first BBS. For $30, players could purchase the other two episodes, which Scott would ship on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. Before Keen, Scott’s total shareware sales were about $7,000 per month. By Christmas, Keen was approaching $30,000.
The game was, as Scott told the numerous editors and BBS controllers who were deluging him with calls, “a little atom bomb.” No one had seen anything like it for the PC—the humor, the graphics, the side-scrolling Mario-type action. “Superlative alert!” heralded one reviewer. “Be prepared to hear praise like we have rarely heaped on any program.” Keen “sets a new standard for shareware games,” declared another. “For stimulating, velvet-smooth and cutting edge PC arcade action,” wrote a third, “there is nothing better than Commander Keen from Apogee Software. Nothing.” The game wasn’t just on par with Nintendo, it concluded, it was better.
Fans couldn’t agree more. They were deluging Apogee with letters of praise and letters inquiring about the next games in the Keen series. All the main BBSs were ablaze with conversation about Keen—tricks, secrets, strategies. Gamers were pleading for information to decode the Vorticon alphabet. Scott was so swamped that he recruited his mot
her and his first employee, a teenage programmer named Shawn Green, to help with the demand. When Shawn showed up for work the first morning, he was greeted by Scott’s mother, standing in her bathrobe holding two cordless phones. The second she handed him one, it started to ring.
Romero, Carmack, and the rest of the group celebrated with a huge party at the lake house on New Year’s Eve. The stereo cranked Prince. The grill smoked. Revelers boated around the lake. Romero, who rarely drank, made this night a special occasion. It had been a great year but a tough year—one that had cost him his wife and kids. Faced with the choice, he’d chosen the game life over the family life. Though he spoke frequently with his boys and saw them as often as he could, he was living with a new family now: the gamers. And he wanted this night together to last.
He, Tom, and Jay were drunk on white wine and champagne in the kitchen. Romero saw Carmack standing in the corner by himself, sober. “Come on, Carmack,” he slurred, “you gotta drink, don’t be a baby! It’s going to be 1991!”
Normally in these situations Carmack wanted nothing less than to disappear into the wallpaper. This kind of scene—socializing, cavorting—was never his domain. He would rather be reading or programming. But contrary to what the other guys might have thought, he wasn’t inhuman. He was fun loving too, just in his own way. He was thrilled to be working for himself, making games, collaborating with people he admired and respected. It took only a little coaxing from Romero to get Carmack to join them in downing several glasses of champagne. The strongest thing they’d seen him drink before was Diet Coke.
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