Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  Adrian and Kevin had so much fun they even began scanning themselves into the game. One day Kevin rolled up his sleeve and stood behind the video camera with his arm extended in front of the lens, taking turns firing toy weapons: a plastic shotgun and pistol from Toys “R” Us; a chain saw—like the one used by the hero of the movie Evil Dead II—borrowed from a woman Tom had been dating. The video images would then be placed in the lower center of the game’s frame, looking like the player was sighting down the length of his forearm or, in actuality, Kevin’s. Inspired, Adrian scanned a pair of his snakeskin boots, which he used to create a serpentlike texture for one level of the game. When Kevin came to work with a bloody wound on his knee, they scanned that in too, to use as a wall texture. In the strange emerging world of Doom, anything could go.

  By the new year, there was enough coming together that Tom typed up a press release. “Dallas, Texas, January 1, 1993—Heralding another technical revolution in PC programming,” he wrote, “id Software’s Doom promises to push back the boundaries of what was thought possible on a computer. . . . In Doom, you play one of four off-duty soldiers suddenly thrown into the middle of an interdimensional war! Stationed at a scientific research facility, your days are filled with tedium and paperwork. Today is a bit different. Wave after wave of demonic creatures are spreading through the base, killing or possessing everyone in sight. As you stand knee-deep in the dead, your duty seems clear—you must eradicate the enemy and find out where they’re coming from. When you find out the truth, your sense of reality may be shattered!”

  He touted the game’s new, improved technologies: texture-mapped worlds, nonorthogonal walls, and diminished lighting. For the hell of it, they threw in a teaser about multiplayer gaming, something they had yet to implement. “Up to four players can play over a local network,” Tom wrote, “or two players can play by modem or serial link. . . . We fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.”

  With the bar set, Tom, Romero, Adrian, Carmack, and Kevin had arrived at a genuine look and feel for the game. The player would progress while staring down the barrel of a shotgun jutting out in the lower center part of the screen. The rooms would unfold dark, foreboding, mainly in grays, blacks, and browns, with an occasional royal blue floor. As originally intended, the walls were anything but ninety degrees; they were octagonal, tiered, with steps leading from one room to the next. Carmack had also devised a way to create windows within walls, so a player could look from one room into another, though not know how to get inside. There were actual light sources in the games—strips of fluorescence on the floor or above. But the realism was punctuated by demonic monsters. In one section a player would progress through a locker room, only to find a pink demon floating in the showers.

  By the spring, several of these levels were collected into an early demonstration, or alpha, of the game, which was distributed to friends, testers, and select members of the press. Computer Gaming World published a glowing preview: “We don’t know what nasty sludge is seeping into the Texas water table,” it read, “but whatever it is has given these boys some strange visions, and what’s worse, the programming sorcery to carry it out. Doom is the name of their next creation, and unbelievable graphics technology is their game.”

  Despite the enthusiasm, the Two Johns were still not happy with Tom’s work. Tom had taken Carmack’s advice to study military architecture too much to heart. The levels he created had the banality of a real-life military base. He stuck stubbornly close to the scenario of his Doom Bible, creating a room, even, that showed a group of soldiers sitting around a table playing cards. Many of the rooms looked like actual offices: with gray walls, brown-tiled floors, and even office chairs and file cabinets. Tom was trying to appease Carmack at the expense of the game, Romero thought. So he decided to show how the design should be done, even if that meant Carmack would have to make his code faster.

  Romero retired to his office, cranked up Dokken, and got to work. Hours into the night, he pointed and clicked, dragged and dropped, creating lines on his map editor, switching back and forth into the first-person point of view. He knew what he was going for: to break out of the concrete box–like military bunkers and into something else, something big, expansive, twisting, weird, and abstract. After a series of late nights, the world emerged just as Romero wanted it. And when he pulled the others into his office, they stepped inside.

  It began in a room with a low gray ceiling but angled walls. Walking to the front right, they came to a wall with slats in it, open spaces that revealed an outdoor vista, a sky, but no apparent way to get out. Two large lights stripped the opening of a hallway. It seemed like the way to go. As one walked down the hall, the rooms opened up to a plank leading outdoors. There was a gray sky overhead. Mountains off in the distance. But as one moved, the path only led back inside, now into a room with higher walls than the first. Lights flashed from overhead as a flurry of Former Humans—zombie soldiers possessed by demons—unleashed rounds of fire, emerging from the shadows with bloodstained chests. When Romero was through, everyone agreed. Tom’s banal levels were out. Romero’s were in. This was the design. This was Doom.

  From that moment, Tom’s attitude went from bad to miserable. It felt like everything he had done, everything he wanted to do, was getting thrown out. It was like the end of sixth grade, he thought, when some people are turning into jocks and some people are turning into geeks and you get that realization that you’re heading down the wrong path. Romero all but ignored him: no jokes, no destruction, no alien bleeps. The rest made him feel just as alone, striking down anything he would suggest for the game. It soon became too painful for Tom to be there. He found a girlfriend and began spending more time out of the office.

  Before long Carmack pulled Romero aside and suggested they fire Tom. But Romero knew what such a change would mean. Though no owner had left or been fired before, the guys had decided how to deal with such a situation if it should ever arise. Just after they formed the company, they sat down and agreed, wholeheartedly, that the fate of id Software had to transcend the fate of the individual owners. They had seen the damage the infighting had caused Softdisk and were determined to insulate their own company from such demise.

  They made two agreements. First, there had to be a unanimous vote among the owners to ask someone to go; at the moment, Adrian, Romero, Tom, and Carmack were the main partners, with Jay and Kevin each owning smaller shares. Second, if an owner left, he would lose all his shares and have no future stake in the company; they didn’t want anyone’s departure to damage the success of id. Tom, in other words, would never see a penny from Doom, let alone Wolfenstein or Keen. He would be on his own.

  Romero convinced Carmack to give Tom another chance. Romero had other things on his mind as well. He was getting married again. His relationship with Beth, the former clerk at Softdisk, had become a deep and meaningful love affair. She could give him the space he needed to build his career as well as be in a relationship. She was fun, loved to cook, loved to have a good time. She didn’t have any real interest in games, but at least he could continue doing what he most enjoyed.

  Over July 4, 1993, Romero spent his honeymoon in Aruba. When he came back, he was more energized than ever. Though he still maintained close contact with his sons in California, the years without a family in town had been tough. And his relationship with his ex-wife, Kelly, was only getting more strained. But now he had a new wife, a new beginning. Money was rolling in from Wolfenstein to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars per month. Doom had found its voice. All was well. All, he quickly discovered, but Tom. By now, everyone else had had enough. They wanted him out. Finally, Romero gave in.

  He wanted to break the news to his old friend himself. So he invited Tom to his house for a meal home-cooked by Beth. Tom was delighted. He hadn’t spent quality time with Romero for ages. The dinner was like old times: the two guys joking around, talking movies and games. Romero couldn’t br
ing himself to break the news. The next day a shareholders’ meeting was called. Tom walked in to find everyone sitting around the conference room table staring at the floor. “Tom,” Carmack finally said, “obviously this isn’t working out. We’re asking for your resignation.”

  For Tom, the moment felt unreal. He heard Romero say something about how he’d tried to tell him about this last night but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Tom could not even respond. He found a little sticker on the table, peeled it off, and began rolling it between his fingers. Despite all the warning signs, he hadn’t seen this coming at all. He felt depressed, ashamed. Maybe this wasn’t just about the games, he thought. He always felt like they resented his upbringing, the fact that he wasn’t a delinquent or the product of a broken home. He was just this guy with doting parents and a college education. In a barely audible voice, he began defending himself, talking about all the things he could do for Doom. But there was silence in response. Soon his voice faded too. They asked him to leave the room while they discussed the situation.

  As the door shut behind him, something in Tom shifted. A weight rose from his body. He had been so miserable for so long, so dejected, feeling so unwanted, he never had the gumption to recognize the situation for what it was and make a break. It was like those old job interviews when the men in suits kept asking him if the job they were offering was what he really wanted to do. At that time, he realized, it hadn’t been what he wanted; what he wanted was to make games. Now, five years later, he accepted that these were not the games he wanted to make. When he stepped back into the conference room, he said, “I think, guys, this is really the thing to do.” His games at id were over. The others’ were just getting started.

  NINE

  The Coolest Game

  John Carmack stood in the Ferrari dealership admiring a cherry-red 328 sports car and had one thought: How fast can it go? As an engineer, he considered speed an efficient way to measure his progress: How much faster could he get the computer to render graphics on screen? A car was much the same. When Carmack looked at the sexy design of the body, he saw straight through to the engine. To the dealer’s surprise, the wiry twenty-two-year-old in T-shirt and jeans wrote a check for seventy thousand dollars and took the keys.

  It didn’t take long for Carmack to feel that the car wasn’t quite fast enough. His instinct was to get under the hood and start futzing around, just like he had with his MGB. But this was no ordinary car, this was a Ferrari. No one futzed with a Ferrari. The elite manufacturer had very low regard for anyone who dared mess with its pristine design. For Carmack, though, it was another machine to hack.

  With Romero’s help, Carmack soon found someone who was more than up to the task: Bob Norwood. Norwood had been racing and building cars since he was a thirteen-year-old in Kansas. He held more than a hundred spots in The Guinness Book of World Records for speed records in a variety of funny cars and, above all else, Ferraris. When Romero read in an auto magazine that Norwood now ran an auto shop in Dallas, he suggested Carmack give him a call.

  Carmack, as usual, was skeptical. Every other auto guy in town had shrugged off his request. “A Ferrari, eh?” they’d say. “Well, I guess we can put a new exhaust system on it.” A new exhaust, Carmack knew, was a wimpy and ineffectual answer to his problem. When he drove into Norwood’s, the crusty owner walked out with greasy hands. “I got this 328,” Carmack said cautiously, “and I want it to be a little faster.” Norwood squinted his eye and replied matter-of-factly, “We’ll put a turbo on it.” Carmack had found a new friend.

  For fifteen thousand dollars, Norwood rigged the Ferrari with a turbo system that would activate when Carmack floored the gas pedal. It was a ballsy bit of hacking, and Carmack immediately felt a kinship with the veteran racing man. The day it was finished, Carmack planned to celebrate by driving to his brother’s graduation in Missouri; though his success with Keen and Wolfenstein had helped him mend bridges with his mother, pulling up in a car like this was guaranteed to close the deal.

  He showed up at Norwood’s with his duffel bag, threw it in the trunk, then hit the road. Just outside Dallas, he saw an open stretch of highway. Slowly, he pushed the pedal down to the floor. As it lowered, he felt a force build until the pedal hit the metal and the car accelerated almost twice as fast, reaching nearly 140 miles per hour. Life was good. He was living his dream: working for himself, programming all night, dressing how he pleased. All those long, hard years without a computer, without a hacker community, were fading behind him. Contrary to what the other guys might have thought, he did have feelings. And at this moment, with the cows and corn blurring beside him, he felt unbelievably happy. He drove the rest of the way with a huge grin on his face.

  His car wasn’t the only engine Carmack wanted to go faster. Doom, though quick, was still not quite quick enough for his taste. The game had considerable challenges for speed, such as the textured ceilings and floors, as well as the walls of varying heights. While porting Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo System, Carmack had read about a programming process known as Binary Space Partitioning, or BSP. The process was being used by a programmer at Bell Labs to help render three-dimensional models on screen. In the simplest terms, it broke the model into larger sections or leaves of data, as opposed to sluggishly drawing out many little polygons at a time. When Carmack read this, something clicked. What if you could use a BSP to create not just one 3-D image but an entire virtual world?

  No one had tried this. No one, it seemed, had even thought about this because, after all, not many people were in the business of creating virtual worlds. With BSPs, the image of a room in Doom would be essentially split up into a giant tree of leaves. Rather than trying to draw the whole tree every time the player moved, the computer would draw only the leaves he was facing. Once this process was implemented, Doom, already fast, soared.

  To keep Doom’s development going, however, Carmack, Romero, and the rest knew they had to deal with one pressing problem: replacing Tom Hall. As a friend, of course, Tom was irreplaceable, particularly for Romero. There was just no one who possessed that hysterically comic streak. Worse, the split from id was so painful that Romero and Tom had hardly spoken since the firing. But at least Tom had managed to land on his feet. Scott Miller, another casualty on the way to id’s success, offered him a job as a game designer for Apogee. It was bittersweet, but Tom accepted; maybe now he would be able to make the games he had always imagined.

  Back at id, the guys started sifting through résumés for a new game designer of their own. Kevin had received a résumé from a promising-looking gamer named Sandy Petersen. At thirty-seven years old, Sandy was ancient compared with the id guys and an admirable veteran of the gaming scene. In the early eighties, he had created a pen-and-paper role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu, that featured flesh-eating zombies and tentacle-legged alien parasites. The game became a cult favorite around the world, selling over a hundred thousand copies. Eventually, Sandy went on to create computer games at MicroProse, a company in Baltimore founded by Sid Meier, legendary designer of the historically based strategy series Civilization.

  But Romero had a concern about Sandy. At the bottom of Sandy’s résumé, he noted that he was Mormon. “Dude,” Romero told Kevin, “I don’t want anyone who’s religious here. We’re fucking writing a game about demons and hell and shit, and the last thing we need is someone who’s going to be against it.”

  “Nah,” Kevin said. “Let’s just meet him, he might be really cool.”

  Romero sighed. “Okay, dude, but I wouldn’t do it.”

  Several days later, Sandy showed up. He was a heavyset, balding guy with glasses and suspenders. He had a rapid-fire, high-pitched voice that got more excited as he spoke about games. Encouraged, Romero sat him down in front of a computer to see how he could put together a makeshift level of Doom. Within minutes Sandy was drawing what seemed like a mess of lines on screen. “Um,” Romero said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Well,” Sand
y chirped speedily, “I’m going to have you come through here and this wall’s going to open up behind you and the monster’s going to come through it and you’re going down this way and I’m going to turn the lights off and all this stuff . . .”

  All right, Romero thought, this guy’s getting it like—bam! With Sandy on board as id’s game designer, Romero would be free to do all the different things he enjoyed—programming, making sounds, creating levels, overseeing business deals.

  Sandy was given an offer, but he told Jay he needed more money to support his family. Later that day Carmack approached him and said, “The stuff you’ve done is really good. I like your work, and I think you’d be good in the company.” The next day Carmack stopped him in the hall again. “When I said your work was good,” he said, “that was before I knew that you’d asked Jay for more money. So I don’t want you to think I told you your work was good in an attempt to get you to ask for less money. Mmm.” Then he walked off. It seemed to Sandy like a weird thing to say, as if Carmack thought that he could cajole him out of wanting a higher salary. He doesn’t know anything about how humans think or feel, Sandy thought.

  It didn’t take long for Romero to appreciate Sandy’s speed, sense of design, and encyclopedic knowledge of games. Sandy regaled him about the payback a player should receive when blasting the lungs out of a demon with the shotgun. “You really should get rewarded on several levels,” he said. “You hear the gun go off, you see the big, manly guy cocking his shotgun, you see the bad guy go flying backwards, or an explosion. It’s always you’re rewarded for doing the right thing!”