Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  The violent revelry was not limited to Romero. Office destruction was even more a part of daily life. Keyboards smashed against tables. Old monitors crashed into the floor. The influx of sample America Online disks and computer sound cards ended up embedded like Chinese throwing stars in the walls. One day even Carmack joined in the action.

  This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate solution. “You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.

  Id was on a high. Though Doom had not penetrated the mainstream like Mortal Kombat or Myst, it was the hottest game in the computer underworld since, well, Wolfenstein and Keen. The guys at id were the indisputable rulers of the shareware market, heading toward a year of multimillion-dollar earnings. And that, they soon discovered, was just the beginning. With the help of a New Yorker named Ron Chaimowitz, they were going to conquer retail.

  Like the id guys, Ron had hustled his way into the computer industry. Short, balding, and in his forties, he entered the entertainment business by launching the industry’s first Hispanic record label in Miami in the eighties. His big coup was to sign an up-and-coming bar mitzvah band called Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine. He also broke Julio Iglesias in the United States. Naming his company Good Times, he pursued the emerging market for home videos with low-priced, twenty-nine-minute workout tapes starring Jane Fonda. This product landed him a big deal with the Wal-Mart chain, whose executives urged him to explore what they thought was another virgin marketplace: budget computer software. Ron expanded his company into Good Times Interactive, or GTI.

  Good Times Interactive first published a Richard Simmons “Deal-A-Meal” CD-ROM and a Fabio screensaver. But that was hardly enough to fill Wal-Mart’s shelves, so Ron went looking into the computer game world. At first he cut deals with well-known publishers like Electronic Arts and Broderbund to repackage previously released games that had outlived their shelf life. What would be more lucrative, he realized, would be to publish his own budget games. To do this, he needed budget developers—untapped by the Electronic Arts of the world. He found them in shareware.

  Shareware makers were like a farm league, he thought. He just needed to find the right team to release a retail product. Id Software, he discovered, had done gangbusters with Wolfenstein 3-D and now was causing an even greater firestorm underground with Doom. Yet Doom, to his amazement, had no retail representation. Ron had found his next Gloria Estefan.

  After flying to Texas to meet with the young millionaires at id, he was surprised to find a group of long-haired kids in shorts. The office was trashed with broken computer parts, rancid pizza boxes, and an artillery of crushed soda cans. But these appearances belied a true business savvy, Ron quickly learned. After he gave the guys the big pitch about his company and his exclusive deal to shelve 2,200 Wal-Mart stores, id played it cool. The guys knew that by selling shareware they were able to eliminate all middlemen and get full dollar value for their product. Furthermore, after the lackluster performance of the Spear of Destiny retail game, they weren’t about to throw the shareware model away. Why, they wanted to know, did they need GTI?

  Ron didn’t relent. “Look,” he said, “maybe you’ll sell a hundred thousand copies of Doom in shareware, but I believe if you give me a retail version of Doom and, let’s call it for lack of a better term, Doom II, I think I could sell five hundred thousand or more units.” Id remained unmoved. Ron went back to New York but returned to Texas two more times to plead his case. Finally, they told him their terms. If they were going to do retail, they didn’t want to be treated like ordinary developers. They wanted complete creative control. They wanted to own their intellectual property. And they wanted to be featured prominently on all the merchandise so that people would know the game was coming not from GTI but from id. Ron agreed and committed to a marketing budget of $2 million for Doom II. Two million dollars was more than id had spent to develop all its games combined. Doom, despite its success, was still relegated to the computer underground. Doom II, which they started working on immediately, would take them mainstream.

  For id, Doom II also fit into the now established and unique formula of putting out a retail product based on a shareware release, just as they had done following Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3-D. It was the best way to milk Carmack’s new graphic engines for all they were worth. Doom II would simply be a new set of levels built with the original Doom engine. While the artists and level designers worked on the sequel, Carmack could be free to research his next great graphic engine.

  With the influx of cash from Doom and the promise of Doom II, the guys didn’t wait long to start spending their money. They were philanthropic. Adrian bought his mother a new house in a safer neighborhood than where she had been living. Romero gave his car, a Cougar, to the manager of a local Mexican restaurant he frequented and paid for a Las Vegas vacation for his grandparents. Carmack bought $3,200 of computer equipment for his former computer teacher at Shawnee Mission East grade school. “I wanted to buy them things that will allow them to explore other areas,” he said, “not just what’s in books.” He also put aside $100,000 to bail an old high school friend out of jail.

  Mainly, though, the guys at id spent money on their cars. Kevin bought a Corvette. Adrian bought the Trans Am sports car he’d always wanted. Dave Taylor got an Acura NSX. (The guys even chipped in and bought a new leather couch for the office so, in part, Dave could have something nice to pass out on next time he got what was now widely known as Doom-induced motion sickness.) Carmack and Romero themselves celebrated by going Ferrari shopping.

  At a showroom, they admired a gleaming new Testarossa that listed at $90,000. Carmack was treating cars like he treated his games; he had already grown somewhat tired of his current engine. What he really wanted was one of these. “Oh my God,” said Romero. “Holy shit! Now that is a car. That is fucking daddy car right there! Dude, I can’t believe you’re getting that car.” Carmack paid cash for a red one to match his 328. Romero bought a “fly yellow” Testarossa for himself. They parked them side by side in id’s lot—just in the right place so that, during work, they could gaze down at their ultimate machines.

  But Carmack’s Ferrari didn’t stay in the lot for long. Within days he drove it over to Norwood Autocraft and started on the modifications—he wanted to get the car, which ran at four hundred horsepower, at least twice as strong. Bob Norwood, who had become Carmack’s automotive mentor, had a master plan: to install a twin turbo system that would not just double but triple the car’s horsepower. For added energy, they put in a computer-controlled device that would inject a burst of nitrous oxide. While Romero was enthralled enough by the pure aesthetics of the Ferraris, for Carmack the cars were now less means of a joyride than new engineering materials to be modified to his liking.

  As the id guys soon discovered, Carmack wasn’t the only gamer who liked getting under the hood.

  “Hey,” Romero told Carmack one day at the office, “there’s something you have to see.” He booted up Doom—or at least what was supposed to be Doom—on his computer. Instead, the trumpeting theme of the Star Wars movie began to play. The screen filled with not Doom’s familiar opening chamber but instead a small, steel-colored room. Romero hit the space bar, and a door slid open. “Stop that ship!” a voice commanded from within the game. Carmack watched as Romero jolted down the hall past bleeping droids, white Stormtroopers, laser guns, the deep bellows of Darth Vader. Some hacker had completely altered Doom into a version of Star Wars. Wow, Carmack thought. This is gonna be great. We did the Right Thing after all.

  The Right Thing was programming D
oom in such a way that willful players could more easily create something like this: StarDoom, a modification, or mod, of their original game. It was an idea hatched after seeing the early modifications that players were creating for Wolfenstein 3-D. That small phenomenon had caught Carmack by surprise, even though he had long hacked games like Ultima himself. The Wolfenstein modifications were different, however, because players weren’t just finding the code that they could change to increase their characters’ health; instead, they were changing their characters altogether, replacing the bosses with Barney.

  Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions, they were concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players had to erase the original Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images; once a Nazi was changed into Barney, there was no way to bring the Nazi back quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized the data so players could replace sound and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He created a subsystem that separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym suggested by Tom Hall, it stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every time someone booted up the game, the program would look for the WAD file of sounds and images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the main program to a different WAD without damaging the original contents. Carmack would also upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and utilities program so that the hackers could have the proper tools with which to create new stuff for the game.

  This was a radical idea not only for games but for any media. It was as if a Nirvana CD came with tools to let listeners dub their own voices for Kurt Cobain’s or a Rocky video let viewers excise every cranny of Philadelphia for ancient Rome. Though there had been some level-editing programs released in the past, no programmer—let alone owner—of a company had released the guts of what made his proprietary program tick. Gamers would not have access to Carmack’s graphical engine, but the stuff he was making available was more than just subtly giving them the keys. It was not only a gracious move but an ideological one—a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations. Carmack was no longer a boy dreaming of computers in his Kansas City bedroom; he was the twenty-three-year-old owner of a multimillion-dollar company, and he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. He could live the Hacker Ethic big time.

  It wasn’t a popular way to rule. With the exception of Romero, the only other hacker-minded programmer at id, Carmack’s generosity caused much consternation at the company—especially among the more conservative-minded businessmen, like Jay and Kevin. “This is a crazy idea,” Kevin said. “No one’s ever given away their tools to make new content. And we have to worry about legal questions. What if someone takes our content and combines it with their product and releases it? What if someone takes all the content that’s developed on the Internet and sells it on the shelf and suddenly we’re competing with our own product?”

  Carmack rolled his eyes. They didn’t get this at all, he thought, because they weren’t programmers so they didn’t get the hacker joy of it. They weren’t really gamers either. They weren’t part of the gaming community that was growing up there. To Carmack’s appreciation, Romero came loudly to his defense. “Dudes,” Romero told the others, “we’re not going to lose that much money. We’re making a ton of money right now. Big deal. Who cares?”

  Even before Doom was officially released, plenty of people certainly did care about the ability to modify it. One group was so eager, they hacked the leaked alpha version of Doom. As the official release approached, Carmack had e-mailed the Wolfenstein mod makers about the new faculties in Doom. He didn’t anticipate how far these gamers would go. In only a matter of weeks after Doom’s release, hackers began releasing crude level or map-editing programs. These tools let players modify existing rooms of the game, say, adjusting walls, moving around floors, or making other minor adjustments.

  On January 26, 1994, the hackers got all the more real. A student at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand named Brendon Wyber uploaded a free program called the Doom Editor Utility, or DEU. Wyber had created the program with the help of an international online coalition of gamers who, through bone-breaking hack work, had found a way to break apart Doom’s code. Though Carmack had provided source code, he gave no clue of how actually to tear the goods apart. The DEU broke everything apart and explained how to make a level from the ground up. Soon a Belgian student named Raphael Quinet collaborated with Wyber to release a more readable version of the DEU, which hit the Net on February 16, 1994. “You can do almost anything to any level,” they promised in the program, “move, add or remove monsters and powerups, change the wall colours and positions, create new lifts, doors, acid pools, crushing ceilings . . . or even create a new level from scratch!”

  The DEU was a watershed. Suddenly, all those with the gumption could make a level of a game. They didn’t need to be programmers or artists or anything. If they wanted they could just tweak what was there. Or they could dress it up, using their own sounds, images, ideas. There could be Doom Barneys, Doom Simpsons, Doom shopping malls, Doom subways. A University of Michigan student named Greg Lewis delved further into the netherworld of Doom code and created a program called DeHackEd. This software—also distributed for free—did the unthinkable by allowing a user to modify not the WADs containing the graphics, sounds, and levels but the very core of the game itself, known as the executable file. The executable contained all the technical information for how the game was played: how monsters behaved, how weapons fired, how text was displayed.

  “DeHackEd is capable of heavily restructuring the way Doom works,” Lewis wrote in the file describing his program. “Make fireballs invisible, make missiles do 2000 points of damage, make demons float! Edit the Ammo tables to help your struggling Marine with more ammo. Edit the Frame tables, and create new looking items, or extra-fast shooting weapons. And save your changes in patch files to distribute to your friends. Create new types of deathmatches, with plasma ‘mines’ and super-fast wimpy rockets. Wad developers can modify monster types to distribute with their levels . . . great new possibilities!”

  Hacker tools for Doom became another means of immersion in what was already the most immersive game around. Doom immersed players in a fast-action 3-D world. It immersed competitors in an arena of deathmatching where they could hunt each other down. The Doom mod tools immersed programmers as creators, as ones who could take this incredible world and sculpt it to their own divine desires. The game made them into little gods. Doom hackers began swapping their levels for free in forums on AOL, CompuServe, and across the Internet. Gamers who had been failing out of school because of deathmatching now had an even more addictive compulsion: hacking. They hacked all night. They hacked all day. They even hacked naked; at the Taylor University computer lab, gamers stripped down for regular “skinny-hacking” parties. Doom wasn’t just a game, it was a culture.

  And it was a culture that made the skeptics within id even more queasy. After much arguing in the company, Jay was granted permission to post legal terms for prospective Doom hackers. “Id Software requires no fees or royalties,” he posted online. “You may require user payment for your work; Your utility must not work with the shareware version of Doom; You must represent that your utility is not an id Software product and id Software cannot and will not provide support for your product, nor for Doom after the data has been changed by your product; You may be required to include some legal text in your utility to make our lawyers happy; There may be more or some of the above may not be in the final document. It depends on my frame of mind at the time.:) . . . I am sorry to have to resort to the post,” he concluded, “but . . . there is no other way to keep this process under control.”

  But control at id Software was all the more difficult to be found.

  By the spring of 1994, id had a new answering machine message: “If you are calling to discuss some great idea you have on how you can make money with our product,” it said, “please pr
ess five now.”

  As the Doom phenomenon grew, the big leagues began to take notice. Universal Pictures with Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters and Stripes, optioned the rights for a Doom movie. Other companies, including George Lucas’s LucasArts, began developing Doom-like games. Even Microsoft, the powerhouse of the industry, was entranced; the company saw Doom as the perfect program to flaunt the bold new multimedia features of its upcoming operating system called Windows.

  To show off Windows’s potential, Microsoft enticed John Carmack to port a short demonstration of the game. The company ended up using the game at the Computer Game Developers Conference to promote the power of the platform. “Microsoft is committed to delivering top-notch multimedia functionality in Windows,” said Brad Chase, a general manager of the personal operating systems division at Microsoft. He said games were one of the “largest, most important categories of multimedia applications.”

  Soon, however, many began to marvel at how id might make companies like Microsoft or IBM look obsolete. Id had taken the shareware phenomenon and transformed it into a recipe for addiction. Doom was so compelling that people just had to have the full dose. Some dubbed it “heroinware.” Forbes magazine published a gushing article titled “Profits from the Underground” about how id, in fact, was making companies like Microsoft obsolete. “Privately held id Software doesn’t release financials,” it read, “but from what I can flush out about the company’s profit margin, it makes Microsoft look like a second-rate cement company.” The writer calculated that id’s estimated $10 million in revenues would give them a profit margin that would rival Microsoft’s. “What happens to this kind of business when the data superhighway arrives? . . . No sales force, no inventory costs, no royalties to Nintendo or Sega, no marketing costs, no advertising costs, no executive parking spaces. This is a new and exciting business model, not just for games, and not even just for software, but for a host of products and services that can be sold or delivered via an electronic underground.”