Masters of Doom

by David Kushner

  Romero ran around in a special mode that allowed him to, for purposes of testing the game, pass through walls—effectively going behind the images the player would see in the game. He had just passed behind a wall in back of the Icon of Sin when he stopped cold. Did I just see my own face? Shrugging it off, he went on with his work, thinking maybe he had been there too long. But then, as he ran behind the beast again, he thought he saw his face once more. How weird, he thought, slowly creeping back. And then, to his shock, he saw it: a digital copy of his head, decapitated and bloody, writhing on a stick. “No fucking way!” he said.

  Romero raced his character back around and fired a shot at the Icon of Sin, then followed the trajectory of the rocket: it sailed through the beast, through a back wall, into the hidden chamber, and smack into Romero’s head—which would twitch in agony. Romero got the joke. The player thought he was winning the game by shooting the beast, but in fact he was shooting Romero. Romero was the Icon of Sin.

  The next morning, word spread around the office that Romero had found the Easter egg and left one of his own. Adrian and Kevin booted up the final scene of the game and began firing off the rockets at the beast. All the while, they heard demonic sounds—like a backward track of a Judas Priest song—coming from the hidden room. The words were indistinguishable but, when reversed, perfectly clear: “To win the game,” the voice bellowed, “you must kill me, John Romero.” With another blast of the rocket, the Icon of Sin was dead.

  On October 10, 1994, Doom II hit the Limelight. Limelight, a onetime church in New York City that had been converted into a gothic nightclub, was the site of the “Doomsday” press party for Doom II. TSI Communications, the high-powered public relations company hired by GTI to break id Software into the mainstream, used a sizable chunk of the game’s $2 million marketing budget to convert the club into a hellish mansion of demons and gore. A holograph machine near the front door projected beasts from the game. The techno-rock soundtrack from the game pumped through the halls. A giant deathmatch arena constructed in the center of the church pulsed with Doom players who had been flown in for the event.

  Reporters representing every paper from The Wall Street Journal to The Village Voice mingled through the crowd with awe and confusion. There was a growing fascination with computer culture and the Internet, buoyed by that month’s release of Netscape Navigator: the new Web browser from the creators of Mosaic. Though many had heard about the underground success of Doom, they had never witnessed the strange new world firsthand. Even Audrey Mann, the publicist in charge of the event for TSI, was taken aback. Her company had long represented two of the heaviest hitters in the high-tech industry, IBM and Sony, but they had never faced the unique challenges that came with the id Software account. Launching Doom II brought a whole new vernacular to the PR industry, words like deathmatch and frag and mods. They debated the appropriateness of terms like kick ass in a press release. “How many ways can we say ‘mutilate’?” they joked. But when they saw the response at the Limelight, they realized they had underestimated their client. “We didn’t think it was worth a story,” Audrey said. “We thought we were just launching a game.”

  Doom II, it was clear that night, would become not just a game but, in fact, a movement. Reporters who had previously ignored Jay’s pitches about the company now besieged any id gamer they could corner. Protesters muscled in too. With violent films like Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction on the radar, Doom was perceived as yet another threat to the youth of America. During Jay’s speech to the crowd, a man stood up in the rafters and screamed, “You should be ashamed for making such violent games that children can play!” Everyone fell silent, looking to Jay for a response.

  “Sir,” Jay said calmly, “I have two children, I would never do anything that would hurt them. To some extent we’re creating the Three Stooges of interactive media with guns. If you look at this from the top down, this is more humorous than it is damaging.” But the protester wouldn’t relent, screaming about violence and Satan until finally Shawn Green, who was sitting next to Jay onstage, rose to the microphone and yelled, “Suck it down, dude!” The crowd laughed. Everyone, it seemed, was on id’s side.

  Six hundred thousand copies of Doom II were sold to retail stores for the initial release, guaranteeing that it would be among the bestselling games in history. The inventory was supposed to last a quarter. It lasted one month. After the Doomsday event, the mainstream media snowballed around the game. Anyone who’d missed the so-called Doom cult the first time around jumped on board, while the ones who had been hip the whole time trumpeted their pioneer status.

  Journalists from all walks cooed over the game’s immersion, the marketing scheme, the violence, the great American success story. “It’s as close to virtual reality as you’re going to get,” gushed the Chicago Sun-Times. “Virtual Mayhem and Real Profits,” headlined The New York Times. The Economist published an essay titled “Doomonomics,” which academically explored how “the drippingly gory computer game took its creators from obscurity to riches. . . . [It’s a tale that] holds a lesson of striking relevance to tomorrow’s information economy.” The Red Herring marveled that id had “an entire file filled with letters from VCs and private investors who are just dying to sink cash into [the company]”—yet the company was remaining staunchly and profitably independent.

  Of course the millions of players who were living the game could give two flying fireballs about any of those things. What was really selling the game, they knew, was deathmatch. And the person who wanted to own deathmatch was DWANGO Bob.

  DWANGO Bob, a.k.a. Bob Huntley, was a thirty-four-year-old who looked and behaved like a Texas version of the Woodstock emcee, Wavy Gravy. He’d gotten into the high-tech industry by producing interactive kiosks for gas stations throughout Houston. After some years, though, he began to burn out on the fumes. He was looking for something else, and he found it in Doom.

  During the early part of 1994, the DWANGO guys were falling behind on work, staying at the office until 2:00 a.m., lying to their wives so they could play the game. Bob’s partner, Kee Kimbrell, had become yet another blissful victim of Doom addiction. Bob pulled Kee aside one night and said, “If every machine is not clear of Doom, you’re fired.” Kee didn’t have the nerve; instead of deleting the game, he renamed the file—so Bob wouldn’t find it—and kept on playing. When Bob found out the truth, something clicked. If these guys are this passionate about this game, maybe there’s something to it. Bob sat down for one round, and his life changed forever.

  The thrill, he found, was in the head-to-head competition, playing against real live people over a local area computer network. With some research online, he realized he was hardly alone. Doom deathmatch was taking over lives: fans hijacked their office networks to play all weekend, threw their kids out of their basements to wire together their own arenas, and put off so many trips to the bathroom that at least one player (who had been consuming Ding Dong cupcakes during a marathon match) explosively defecated in his pants midgame.

  How incredible would it be, Bob and Kee mused, if a gamer could just go out and pick up a game against random people who were far away—in some other house, some other room, some other state! What if there could be a computer hub or server that would turn the game into the virtual equivalent of a pickup basketball game on a neighborhood court—except that people could play together from anywhere in the world. Problem was, Doom didn’t work that way, it supported only modem-to-modem play. This meant that, to compete, one gamer would use a modem to telephone another’s computer; once connected, they could play against each other. Undaunted, Kee looked over at Bob and said, “You know, I think that we can get this to play over a phone line.”

  “Okay,” Bob said, seeing dollar signs, “you’ve got six weeks. If you get it together, then I promise to get us an introduction to id Software.” Bob was bluffing. He didn’t know id from Shinola. But, seeing as that they were Texas boys, he figured they’d be easy enough to en
list. They weren’t. His calls, like so many others, went unanswered. Five weeks later, Kee sped from his house on his bike to tell Bob the news. “I’ve got it!” he said, panting. “Give me ten minutes!”

  Bob sat down at his computer while Kee banged away at his keyboard in another room. Ten minutes later Bob got the signal and booted up the program Kee had created. He saw a simple little interface that streamlined all the difficulties of multiplayer action. With this program, anyone could dial up through a phone and connect to a computer system that hosted the game. Instead of having to be in one place, someone could just dial a number, join a chat room, then click off to play three other people in Doom. “Okay,” Kee said, smiling, “now we have to get ahold of id.”

  Bob lowered his eyes and broke the news. “Id’s not talking,” he said. “Hell, they ain’t even answering the phone.” He tried more faxes, letters, e-mails, but nothing worked.

  Just as they were about to lose hope, Bob came across an article about the upcoming Doom II press event at the Limelight in New York. He called id’s publicity firm. “I’ve got a big opportunity for id,” he said, “and just have to get into the event.” The guy on the phone told him people from all over the world were trying to get in. Forget about it. But Bob persisted and sweet-talked him down. “Okay,” the guy finally relented, “if you want to fly up from Houston, I’ll see what I can do.” Bob hung up the phone and turned to Kee. “We’re going to New York,” he said.

  Kee and Bob bought plane tickets with frequent flier mileage and booked a room at a Holiday Inn in New Jersey. With their last business in shambles, they were living off bread crumbs. They banked everything on their new service for Doom, which they had dubbed the Dial Up Wide Area Network Games Operation, or DWANGO. Hours before the event, Bob and Kee showed up at the club and met the guy from TSI. “Okay,” he said hurriedly, handing them two T-shirts, “put these on.”

  Bob and Kee squeezed into the small black T-shirts, which had the militaristic Doom logo on the front and “contestant” on the back. The only way they could get in, the publicist told them, was to pose as contestants for the Doom deathmatch. Bob and Kee looked around. Behind them were dozens of skinny guys half their age in the same T-shirts. Bob gulped. Sure he and Kee had played Doom, but they sucked compared with the hard-core gamers. Now they were supposed to play the game against these champs on a stage in front of the national press? They thanked the guy, then snuck across the street to fuel up at a bar.

  They stumbled back later to find the TSI guy screaming. “You missed the lineup! Hurry up. Get inside!” Bob was first up for battle. He got wiped out within minutes. Kee lost just as quickly. Games done, they went to find id. They ended up tracking down Jay Wilbur, who looked at these beer-soaked, middle-aged guys in tight contestant shirts and shrugged them off. “No time, not interested, go away,” he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Just as they were moping toward the door, Kee spotted Romero, with his unmistakable long, dark hair and Doom “Wrote It” T-shirt. They waited nervously for their break, then closed in. “We made this software!” Kee said eagerly. “You can dial in with your modem to a server and you can play other people over the modem! Here’s the only disk we got! Guard it with your life!”

  After the party, Romero told Jay about the disk. The DWANGO idea wasn’t breakthrough—id had thought of it themselves but just hadn’t gotten around to programming it; since Quake was going to be playable over the Internet, they had figured they would hold off on creating the multiplayer online feature. Anyway, Jay concurred, he certainly didn’t want some bozos doing the job, not when they had companies like AOL and Time Warner calling. “Well,” Romero said, “maybe I’ll take five minutes and see what this disk does.”

  Back home in Texas, Romero popped the disk in his hard drive and dialed up the Houston number. After his modem whooshed, he saw a message on screen from Kee: “Come on, let’s try a game.” Next thing he knew, there they were—Kee in Houston, Romero in Dallas—playing a spontaneous pickup game of Doom II deathmatch. Romero picked up the phone. “That is fucking cool!” he said. “Cuz my whole thing is, I like staying up late and I want to play people whenever the fuck I want to and I don’t want to have to wake up my buddy at three in the morning and go, ‘Hey, uh, wanna get your skull cracked? Heh heh?’ That’s just not cool. And I want to do it 24/7. At any time. This is it! This is the thing that you can dial into and just play!”

  But Carmack and the other owners weren’t enthused. As far as Carmack was concerned, this smacked of yet another of Romero’s diversions—like interviews, Raven, deathmatching—to distract him from the real work at hand, making games. Romero argued that if they could get online play going and further build the Doom community, it would surely help grow the company.

  After having Jay negotiate a deal for 20 percent of the DWANGO revenues, Romero spent every night working on the project, which would be released with the shareware of Heretic—the game Romero had been overseeing for Raven. On December 23, 1994, he phoned Bob and Kee and said, “I’m fixing to upload this. Do you think you can handle it? Because when it hits it’s going to overwhelm you guys.” He was right.

  News of DWANGO spread immediately through the burgeoning Doom fan base. By January 1995, ten thousand people were paying $8.95 per month to dial up to Bob and Kee’s Houston server. People were dialing from as far as Italy and Australia. At this rate, DWANGO would break $1 million with just one server. They had to expand. And expanding wasn’t that difficult to do. The guts of a DWANGO computer server was simply a computer and a few dozen modems with phone lines. All they had to do was buy the parts and strike deals with people across the country who would host the machines in their own homes or offices.

  Bob, Kee, and Mike Wilson, a former daiquiri bar manager and childhood buddy of Adrian Carmack’s, went on a cross-country spree to set up DWANGO franchises. It was a tantalizing pitch. For $35,000, DWANGO would set up a server and then let the franchisee rake in the cash. “It was,” Mike said, “a guaranteed moneymaking machine.”

  Lawyers, programmers, musicians, people from all walks of life—including Adrian Carmack—snatched up the deals. The DWANGO guys put one in a private loft in New York, apartments in Seattle, warehouses in San Jose. They set up twenty-two servers in about four months. Every day, the guys would run to the nearest Home Depot to load up on shelving and cables, then hightail it over to install a new machine and walk out the door with $35,000. Cash. On one night they spent $10,000 at a strip club. The strippers were intrigued when they heard the guys made all this money selling deathmatch. Whatever that drug was, they figured, it must be some powerful stuff.

  With the deathmatch fever and rising publicity, Doom II not only broke into the retail market but destroyed it. To Ron Chaimowitz’s and GTI’s delight, the game shot up the charts. A few months after its release, Romero and Jay cruised through the drive-through window of the local bank to deposit their first royalty check. The teller pulled the check out of the deposit tube and nearly collapsed. It was for $5 million. For that amount, she figured, the two guys in the Ferrari should at least have come inside.

  By the time Romero returned to Austin Virtual Gaming for the next Doom tournament, he was no longer the only one screaming insults and punching walls. Deathmatch was now a way of life. The room brimmed with guys telling each other to “Suck it down!” and “Fuck a monkey skull!” There were broken keyboards and ripped-up mouse cords on the floor. One far wall was punched through to the core, the lingering wound inflicted by a frustrated gamer’s fist. And, for the first time, Romero got beaten at his own game.

  It wasn’t the last time. Fueled by the success of DWANGO and Doom II, Romero deathmatched more than ever with his office mate, Shawn Green. One day in the summer of 1995, Carmack had enough. He was tired of Romero wasting his time, tired of hearing the screams, the profanity, the fists beating on the walls, the broken keyboards flying down by his door. So, unbeknownst to Romero, he plotted some revenge.

&nbs
p; The next day Shawn came into Romero’s office, beaming with confidence, and challenged Romero to a game. “Jesus, dude,” Romero said, “yesterday I beat you down so hard. Come on, get in there, I’m ready any time!”

  Everyone gathered around. Romero cracked open a Dr Pepper and began to play. He chased Shawn online, running through the levels, but to no avail. Shawn was annihilating him. Every time Romero ran behind him, Shawn spun around and unloaded a shotgun into Romero’s face. “Fucking bullshit!” Romero screamed. “What’s wrong with this fucking mouse?” He banged the mouse on the table, inadvertently spilling his soda. “Oh shit!”

  Everyone started to laugh. “What?” Romero said, mopping the Dr Pepper from his leg. It was a setup, they told him. Carmack had programmed an option on Shawn’s computer that enabled him to travel at ten times the average speed just by typing in a special little command. Romero looked around and, sure enough, there was Carmack, standing in the hallway. Carmack rarely laughed. But at the moment, he was visibly amused.

  If deathmatch was a release from stress, work, family, and drudgery, it was a release that Carmack didn’t need or, for that matter, understand. In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute. A lot of people didn’t seem to enjoy their work.

  Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that. Beginning with Doom, he had decided to adjust his biological clock to accommodate a more monkish and solitary work schedule, free from Romero’s screams, the reporters’ calls, and the mounting distractions of everyday life. He began by pushing himself to stay up one hour later every evening and then coming in one hour later the next day. By early 1995, he had arrived at his ideal schedule: coming in to work at around 4:00 p.m. and leaving at 4:00 a.m. He would need all the concentration he could muster for Quake.