Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  In an increasingly stark opposition to Romero, Carmack expressed a minimalist point of view with regard to running their business. As he often told the guys, all he cared about was being able to work on his programs and afford enough pizza and Diet Coke to keep him alive. He had no interest in running a big company. The more business responsibilities they had—things like order fulfillment and marketing—the more they would lose their focus: making great games.

  Jay assured him that life would only get better. “We will truly become independent,” he said. “We’ll rely on nobody. We need to create our own opportunities. We don’t wait for them to knock. We open the door. We grab opportunity by the scruff of the neck and pull it through.” Carmack could be left alone to work on his technology. Ultimately, he agreed. Scott had to go.

  Scott took the news in stride. In fact, he had suspected for some time that id would jump ship. He felt grateful that the relationship had lasted as long as it did. The id games had helped put Apogee on top and buy Scott and his partner, George Broussard, nice sports cars. By this time id was also far from the only company making successful games for Apogee. Scott was continuing to publish many other authors, such as Tim Sweeney, a gifted programmer from Maryland who churned out popular titles under his company, Epic MegaGames. Apogee’s own title, Duke Nukem, was number one on the shareware charts, right above Wolfenstein, with a sequel on the way. Though Scott didn’t want to lose id, he was confident he’d survive.

  Scott Miller wasn’t the only one to go before id began working on Doom. Mitzi would suffer a similar fate. Carmack’s cat had been a thorn in the side of the id employees, beginning with the days of her overflowing litter box back at the lake house. Since then she had grown more irascible, lashing out at passersby and relieving herself freely around his apartment. The final straw came when she peed all over a brand-new leather couch that Carmack had bought with the Wolfenstein cash. Carmack broke the news to the guys.

  “Mitzi was having a net negative impact on my life,” he said. “I took her to the animal shelter. Mmm.”

  “What?” Romero asked. The cat had become such a sidekick of Carmack’s that the guys had even listed her on the company directory as his significant other—and now she was just gone? “You know what this means?” Romero said. “They’re going to put her to sleep! No one’s going to want to claim her. She’s going down! Down to Chinatown!”

  Carmack shrugged it off and returned to work. The same rule applied to a cat, a computer program or, for that matter, a person. When something becomes a problem, let it go or, if necessary, have it surgically removed.

  Tom didn’t like what he saw the moment he set foot inside the black cube. Compared with the creative boiler room atmosphere of the lake house and apartments, the new id domain felt isolated and detached. Everyone would have his own office. Everyone, it turned out, except Tom.

  On the first day, each guy chose his space. Carmack and Romero took side-by-side offices, while Adrian and Kevin, who were growing increasingly close, decided to share a space. Tom liked an open corner spot in a large room with a window. “This would be a great office area,” he said, “we just need to put some walls up.” The rest agreed. But the walls were slow to come. Whenever Tom asked Jay about it, Jay would say they were on their way. Out of humor and frustration, Tom put down two long strips of masking tape where the walls of what he called his creative corner would go.

  Those weren’t the only invisible barriers around. Romero seemed to be pulling away or, as Tom had often joked, flipping his bit from the moment they moved. Tom would sit at his desk behind his tape and watch Romero laughing down the hall with Adrian and Kevin. It felt sad to him, the inability to connect. Some of this, he thought, surely had to do with their emerging creative differences. There seemed to be a widening chasm between the factions of design and technology. It started the moment Romero chose Wolfenstein—a fast, brutal game that would emulate Carmack’s graphics engine—over a more robust, character-driven world like Keen. Tom was still id’s game designer, but he didn’t feel like he was designing what he wanted at all. Yet he held out hope that things might prove different for Doom.

  The early meetings suggested that they might. The discussions took place in a conference room overlooking the LBJ Highway through black Venetian blinds. Everyone sat around a large black table. Over pizza they brainstormed about Carmack’s demons from hell idea. They all agreed on making a fast-action game that had the sci-fi suspense of Aliens combined with the demonic B-movie horror of Evil Dead II.

  But Tom, who maintained the role of creative director, was determined not just to make another plotless first-person shooter. In Wolfenstein there was no emotion, no feeling for the people getting blown away. Tom, who had left dead Yorps in Keen to impart a truer representation of death, wanted to bolster Doom with a more gripping kind of depth, something cinematic.

  “How about we tell this story of scientists on this moon at the butt-end of space,” he said, “and they’re studying this anomaly and it rips open and they think aliens are coming out? But as you get further along you realize it’s mythological demons from hell and that’s, like, the shock. It gets creepier and creepier as you go on. And you have an episode where that’s discovered and there’s, like, magnetic poles on the moon where there’s two anomalies. So you go in and walk through a slice of hell and you come out and hell’s come out in our dimension and perverted everything you’re used to in the first episodes.”

  Though Romero was somewhat supportive at first, Carmack had other ideas. “Story in a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Tom gnashed his teeth. Furthermore, Carmack added, the technology was going to be different this time around. He didn’t want to do another game consisting of levels and episodes. Instead, he said, “We’ve got to make this one contiguous world, a seamless world.” Rather than running through a door, say, and having an entire new level load up, the player would have a sense of invisibly progressing through one massive space.

  Tom hated this concept. It went against their winning formula. Players liked the sense of having completed one section or level of a game, then moving on to the next. He looked to Romero. But once again Romero sided with Carmack. Tom returned to his desk to wait for his walls.

  Romero wasn’t the only one realizing the importance of Carmack’s vision. One afternoon Jay and Kevin went outside for a smoke and talked about the company purchasing what was known as key-man insurance in case anything happened to Carmack. When Kevin suggested that the company buy the insurance for everyone else as well, Jay replied, “Everyone else is expendable.” Because of his technological innovations, Carmack remained the resident Dungeon Master, the guy in charge, the one holding the rule book.

  It was clear that Doom would look like no other game. All the features Carmack had experimented with in the Shadowcaster engine were coming to life. Most notable were the diminished lighting effects—the concept that would allow a virtual space to fade gracefully to black. Carmack’s first innovation was just to think up the idea of diminished lighting. But, equally important, he was willing to make the difficult choices that would make this technology possible. That meant letting something go.

  Programming is a science based on limited resources; one can program only within the range of power available in a computer’s hardware and software. In the fall of 1992, Carmack was still programming in VGA, which allowed only 256 colors. His challenge was achieving the effect of fading to black with these limited resources.

  The solution was to choose the colors on the palette so that there might be, for example, sixteen shades of red, ranging from very bright to black. Carmack then programmed the computer to apply a different shade based on where a player was within a room. If the player walked into a big, open space, the computer would make a quick calculation and then apply the darkest shades to the farthest section. As the player moved forward, the computer would brighten the colors; the colors
nearer would always be brighter than the ones farther away. Cumulatively, the world would seem not only more real but more evil.

  But this was not all. Both Carmack and Romero were eager to break away from the tile-based architecture of their earlier games; Keen and Wolfenstein were constructed like building blocks, piecing little square tiles of graphics together to make one giant wall. What the Two Johns, particularly Romero, wanted now was to create a more fluid, free-form design, a world, like the real world, that could have walls of varying heights, rooms that felt huge, twisted, and strange. In Wolfenstein walls had to be at ninety-degree angles; in Doom they would be at all kinds of angles.

  Carmack felt ready for the challenge; computers were getting more powerful, and so were his skills. He began experimenting with ways to draw larger, more arbitrarily shaped polygons, as well as add textures to the ceilings and floors. When Romero looked over Carmack’s shoulder, he was impressed—just as he had been on so many occasions before. Carmack explained his progress with diminished lighting and arbitrary polygons. He also talked about some other things he might do: make some special concessions so that hackers could more easily modify the game, as well as add some kind of networking component that could let players compete head-to-head.

  Romero immediately saw the potential in Carmack’s technology, potential that Carmack was, by his own admission, not capable of envisioning himself. And because Romero was a programmer, he could speak to Carmack in a language he understood, translating his own artistic vision into the code Carmack would employ to help bring it to life. The moment Romero saw the diminished lighting effects, his mind went to work imagining what effects he could design. “If you can change the light value,” he said, “can we do it dynamically, like on the fly while the game’s playing, or does it have to be precomputed?”

  “Well,” Carmack said, “I can make it dynamic.”

  “Cool, then let’s have strobes! You know, you’re fucking running through a room and—bzzzz! bzzzz! bzzzz!—the lights flash off!”

  Romero raced back to his office. He booted up the map editor—the programming template he and Tom would use to create the Doom worlds. Using it, again, was very much like designing architecture for a house. On screen Romero would look at something resembling a flat overhead blueprint. By clicking his mouse and dragging down a line, he could draw a series of walls. With another click he could switch the point of view to look at his creation from within the space. Adrian and Kevin, meanwhile, would provide the texture images, essentially the wallpaper, which a level designer could use to decorate a room’s walls.

  With those map-editing tools available, Romero was eager to use Carmack’s innovations to bring Doom to realization. Carmack was doing amazing work; Romero knew this on two counts—as a programmer who appreciated Carmack’s ingenuity and, just as important, as a gamer who had never played through such worlds on a PC, or any other platform for that matter. He played around with rooms that flashed strobe light, with walls that soared and receded at different heights. Every decision he made was based on how he could best show off Carmack’s technology. Carmack couldn’t have been happier; what more could someone want, after all, than to be both appreciated and celebrated? Romero was just as energized; with Carmack’s innovations, he too could reach new heights.

  Tom, by contrast, felt himself sinking. Since their initial meeting about the game, he had been on his own writing up a treatment, known in the game industry as a design document, for Doom, fleshing out the characters, motivations, story. The game would begin, he wrote, with the player assigned to a military base conducting experiments on a distant moon. The experiments go awry, however, when the scientists accidentally open a portal to hell, releasing an onslaught of beasts—much like what happened with Romero in their Dungeons and Dragons game. The action would start with the player engaged in a game of cards with some other soldiers. Suddenly a burst of light would flash and the demons would come, ripping the player’s best friend to shreds. Tom wanted to create an immediate sense of terror as the player watched his pal die a terrible, instant death. He named the doomed character in the game Buddy—the same name as that of the Dungeons and Dragons character he’d played.

  But his work fell flat among his own friends. The first blow came when Carmack casually announced that he was no longer interested in pursuing a seamless world for Doom. The game could return to a more traditional level design. “But I’ve spent the last two months writing a design document based entirely on that seamless world you wanted!” Tom exclaimed. Carmack’s remark meant that Tom had to revise everything he’d done.

  “This Doom Bible is not helping us get the game done,” Carmack said. Id had never written down anything in the past, why start now? Doom didn’t need a back story. It was a game about fight or flight. The player just needed to be scared all the time; he didn’t need to know why. Carmack told Tom to drop the Bible and start playing around with the technology, like Romero was doing. “I’m still working on this technology,” he explained, “but please experiment. Figure out what can be done with this.” He suggested Tom go to the library and check out some books about military bases to get some ideas.

  Romero agreed. Though he liked much of what Tom had put into the Doom Bible, a character-driven story was clearly not going in the same direction as Carmack’s technology. There was no time for guys to sit around and play cards in Doom. Not only was the game going to be brutal and fast, like Wolfenstein, but it was going to be even more brutal and fast.

  Tom gave up the story once and for all. But another story was falling into place for id. In the company’s brief history, a pattern was emerging that emulated Carmack’s programming ideology: innovate, optimize, then jettison anything that gets in the way. It happened in their games: how Keen was killed for Wolfenstein, how floors and ceilings were sacrificed for speed. And it happened in their lives: Al Vekovius, Scott Miller, and even Mitzi the cat had all been abruptly deleted from the program. It was impossible to know who or what could be next.

  Romero marched into the kitchen at id, waving a crudely drawn caricature of Burger Bill, the renowned gamer rumored to keep hamburgers for days in his desk. Tom, Kevin, and Adrian followed, cackling. Romero stapled Bill’s picture to the chair, then grabbed a steak knife from the drawer. It was time for revenge.

  Bill had been contracted by id to convert or port Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo. But with the deadline approaching, he still hadn’t delivered an iota. He finally admitted that there was a problem: he had made the mistake of signing id’s contract while employed by the game publisher Interplay. His contract with Interplay stipulated that any work an employee did was property of the company; the Super Nintendo port, therefore, was now owned by Interplay.

  The id guys flipped. “See,” Romero said, “this is just the kind of bullshit you get when you rely on other people.” Tom took out a pencil and sketched a hideous caricature of Bill with burger meat dripping from his greasy mouth. Romero swiped it from his hands and said it was time for Bill to pay the price. In the kitchen, they took turns stabbing the picture, yelling and laughing and egging each other on. They began attacking the chair, knifing it, stomping it, trashing it. Days later, when Bill came to visit, the ruins were still on the floor. He took one look at the knife with his name scrawled on the blade and asked meekly, “Um, what’s this?” Then they fired him. Carmack would do the port himself.

  Such shenanigans were becoming par for the course. The guys had long engaged in a kind of competitive, creative hazing ritual known as the Rip-A-Thon. They would take turns humiliating each other in some artistic way. Adrian programmed a screen opening so that when Romero turned on his computer he’d see a doctored picture of himself engaged in compromising sexual acts. After Tom had some glossy headshots made of himself following Wolfenstein’s success, Romero and Adrian went to town defacing them; the most elaborate example involved a bratwurst, clay testicles, and a can of whipped cream.

  Id’s frat house even had its own house m
other in the form of their office manager, Donna Jackson. Donna had a syrupy southern accent and big teased hair, and was partial to bright pink business suits and matching rouge. She quickly took to the role of company matriarch. She made sure everyone was fed and happy and healthy, offering to get more junk food or soda whenever someone was down. When she arrived, her hobby was gambling in Shreveport casinos; she soon became an expert sharpshooter in id’s games. She called the id guys, still in their early twenties, “my boys.” The boys called her Miss Donna or, sometimes, the id mom.

  But since Miss Donna was a mom for hire, no one was in fear of being reprimanded for their outbursts. Office destruction became sport. The office was strewn with broken keyboards, smashed monitors, broken disks. Romero might just walk up to Kevin and joke, “Hey, Kevin, that garbage can is calling you a sad motherfucker.” Kevin would reply dryly, “It is?” before pummeling the can into the ground.

  More darkness was coming from the art room. Doom was precisely the kind of game Adrian had always wanted to do: something that could allow him to exorcise his most nightmarish visions. Along with the others, he and Kevin dreamed up the most hideous creatures they could imagine: the Imp, a red-eyed Bigfoot-like beast with brown fur covering his muscles and metal spikes protruding from his shoulders and arms; the Demon, a snorting pink bull with bloodstained teeth and horns; and, meanest of all, the Cyber Demon, with a gun for an arm and a ripped-open torso.

  This time around, the monsters would look even more lifelike, thanks to a new animation technique. For Wolfenstein, Adrian had had to draw every frame, showing each character in several walking and running positions. Now they decided to try a mixed media approach. They would sculpt the characters in clay, then shoot them in different positions on video. The video frames would then be scanned into the computer, colorized, and programmed as moving digital characters using a program Carmack wrote called the Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. “The overall effect is distorted,” Kevin said, “but that’s Doom.”