To some extent, Carmack thought, Romero was being reasonable. They could certainly work hard without requiring people to work the death schedules of the past. But Romero’s attitude was indicative of something deeper, something much more telling. After all these years, all the late nights, the collaborations, Romero was pulling himself out of the trenches of code for the ether of fame and notoriety. Where was Romero when he needed him to work, experiment, lead by example? Off building his mansion and being a celebrity!
Carmack knew what he had to do. He had to prove that Romero was slacking. And he knew just how. He wrote a program that would create a time log whenever Romero worked on his PC. According to the results, his partner wasn’t working much. When he confronted Romero with the data, his partner exploded. “You’re only doing that so you can fire me,” Romero snapped.
Well, Carmack thought, yeah!
After all his speculation, Carmack now had his proof—scientific proof—that Romero was not only not working but becoming toxic. With that evidence in hand, he didn’t feel the least bit of remorse when he arrived at his conclusion: Romero needed to be warned, officially warned, to shape up. He was talking too much to the press, talking too much to fans, deathmatching too much in the office, and now the rest of the company was suffering. Carmack approached Adrian and Kevin and said, “We need to put Romero on record that he is about to be fired.”
Carmack had a habit of being abrupt, they knew, but this statement took them aback. “No, no, no,” Adrian said. “I don’t want to do that, he’s a friend of mine, a partner. He’ll come back around.”
But Carmack insisted and, as was becoming the pattern, Kevin and Adrian did what Carmack wanted. There was no question in their minds—or the others’ at id for that matter—that Engine John was their key man. As Mike Wilson said, “If he takes his ball and goes home, the game’s over.” A meeting was called in November 1995. The owners solemnly gathered around the black conference table behind the black Venetian blinds. Carmack sat at the head of the table, as usual. “You’re still not doing your work,” he told Romero, “and you absolutely need to do all of this or you’re going to be fired.”
Romero was indignant. “I work as much as anyone else,” he said. “I’m here all the time.”
Carmack looked to Kevin and Adrian for help, but Adrian was just staring at the floor. “Well,” Kevin said in Romero’s defense, “John does come in and do his work.”
Carmack was flabbergasted. He thought Kevin and Adrian were going to support his argument. Everyone knew that, if it came down to it, he couldn’t fire Romero by himself—he needed their vote too. For now, they agreed to give Romero a so-called smackdown bonus, a lower bonus than usual to tell him that he had to get his act together on the game. Whatever, Romero thought; he didn’t need the cash right now and, when the game was finally done, he knew he’d prove them wrong.
By Thanksgiving, however, nothing had changed. The game was still far off track. Carmack called another meeting, this time for the entire company. “There’s no proof of concept for game design,” he declared. Everyone concurred that the game was taking forever. There was no cohesive plan. American McGee finally made the inevitable suggestion to abandon Romero’s ambitious idea of a hand-to-hand combat game for something more simple. “I think it will be better,” he said, “if we make a game with rocket launchers and stuff like that.”
“Yeah,” Sandy said, “let’s do Doom III, and the next game we’ll do something innovative.”
Romero was floored. First the smackdown bonus, now this? Who the fuck were these guys? What did they know? They had never worked on a new game from start to finish. They didn’t understand id. “Every id game proceeded just like this before!” he said. “Carmack makes a revolutionary engine, then we put a revolutionary game design on top of it. Let’s just get the engine done, then we can make this really cool game idea that no one’s seen before. Quake is going to be better than Doom; even if we just slap Doom on this new engine, it’ll still be a hit. We need to go beyond that and put the original great game idea that no one has done on top of this new engine and create something that’s as big as Doom was when it came out.”
But the ball was rolling. Newer guys like American began arguing passionately against Romero’s fantasy design. They felt they couldn’t be creative because there was nothing to work with. There were two paths in the road. They could just stick with Carmack’s technology and create a lean, mean game that could be done in a reasonable amount of time. Or they could go with Romero’s design and end up God knows where. They should just do another Doom.
At first, Adrian and Kevin seemed to take Romero’s side. “Holy crap, guys,” Adrian said. “We’ve done a shitload of work here.” They had spent nearly a year churning out art specifically designed for a medieval fantasy, not a futuristic marine game. And after all that work, they were just getting to the fun part: putting blood on the walls, making specialized areas. “Just because some of you guys haven’t gotten anything done,” Adrian snapped, “there’s no reason to scrap the project. If we switch games, it’s going to take us another year to get to the point where we are right now. We’re not talking about an easy change.”
The others didn’t seem to care. As they continued to argue against Romero’s ambitious design, Romero watched Carmack in disbelief. Oh my God, he realized, Carmack agrees with them. He’s giving validity to the idea of not doing a revolutionary game design. Romero burst. “We’re already slaves to technology in this company,” he said, “and at least we can do what we can to make a great game on top of it like we did with Doom. Now these guys just want to slap out a game using the Doom stuff? We can still make a great game if we take the time to program it.”
Carmack could see both sides. But there was a key flaw in Romero’s argument: he had nothing to support himself. The only workable levels of Quake that existed were the high-tech Doom-style ones coming from American. If Romero had created an amazing fantasy world, that would have been a different story. But, in Carmack’s mind, Romero had done practically nothing. Clearly their old ambitious idea for Quake—the one that went back to the lake house in Shreveport—was misguided.
“You have to give yourself the freedom to back away from something when you make a mistake,” Carmack said. “If you pretend you’re infallible and bully ahead on something, even when there are many danger signs that it’s not the right thing, well, that’s a sure way to leave a crater in the ground. You want to always be reevaluating things and say, Okay, it sounded like a good idea but it doesn’t seem to be working out very well and we have this other avenue which is looking like it’s working out better—let’s just do that.”
That was when it really hit Romero: We’re not of a single mind anymore. We’re not an agreeing entity. He couldn’t believe that Carmack wasn’t saying, “Calm down guys, you’ll see, it’s going to be a bad-ass game.” As much as Carmack thought Romero had stopped being a programmer, Romero thought Carmack had stopped being a gamer. The fact that Carmack was listening to these guys showed that he was actually worried, that he didn’t have the faith in the big ambitious game anymore, that he didn’t have the faith in Romero.
After hours of arguing, Romero threw in the towel. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll redesign the whole game with Doom-style weapons and we’ll get it out.” But to himself he said something else entirely, words that echoed the statement he had uttered long ago to Carmack at Softdisk, the day he saw their future, their destiny. This is it, he thought, I’m gone.
Despite Quake’s new direction and a release date that would now surely slip into 1996, id’s publisher, GTI, cashed in heavily in December 1995. Sales for Doom II in the United States would eventually top the $80 million mark. The game sold overseas as well, with another $20 million from Europe, 30 percent of which came from Germany—a country that had banned the game from its shelves. Meanwhile all of id’s old games were continuing to sell, as were the spin-offs. Ultimate Doom, which was essentially a retail versi
on of the Doom shareware, was bringing in over $20 million in the United States. And Raven’s games, Hexen and Heretic, were doing just as well, accounting for nearly another $20 million.
Buoyed by the success, GTI began striking deals with other developers, including Midway, creators of the lucrative Mortal Kombat series; the arcade magnate Williams Entertainment; and WizardWorks, a publisher of budget games. With Doom’s help, computer games had skyrocketed GTI’s sales from $10 million to a projected $340 million in just two years. When the company went public in December 1995, it was the largest venture-capital-backed IPO of the year, even ahead of the Internet browser company Netscape. “[GTI] came out of nowhere to conquer a host of competitors,” declared Crain’s New York Business, “and become the country’s third largest interactive entertainment company.” It was valued at $638 million.
But the success was by no means endearing GTI to id. When GTI offered that year to buy id for $100 million, id declined. The publisher was a shitty company, the guys thought, and they didn’t want to sell id to people they didn’t believe in. Furthermore, they felt too frazzled to make any kind of rational business decision. Money wasn’t exactly a problem either. In 1995, id’s earnings had doubled to $15.6 million, and they would surely continue to rise. With the overhead still low, the owners were each making millions. Id also thought GTI was claiming too much credit for the success of Doom II. The guys didn’t like how GTI was throwing around its money at so many other unworthy companies. At the urging of Mike Wilson, id’s increasingly brash biz guy, they decided to use Quake as a way to bring GTI down.
The weapon: shareware. In most publishers’ minds by the end of 1995, shareware was a thing of a past, a cute way to distribute software that was losing its relevance in the increasingly big business of video games. So when id negotiated to retain shareware rights for Quake, GTI’s Ron Chaimowitz didn’t think much of it. He would regret that choice. Mike pitched the id guys on a new way to capitalize on the shareware plan. Instead of just distributing Quake shareware over the Internet for free, id could sell a CD-ROM containing both the shareware and an encrypted version of the full game. Someone would buy the shareware for $9.95, then could call up id directly and pay $50.00 for the code to unlock the complete game. As a result, id, despite not owning the retail publishing rights to Quake, could succinctly cut GTI out of the equation.
Though Carmack had reservations, the rest of the company was more than eager to embark on an even more radical experiment in self-publishing. The deal was hatched. Ron Chaimowitz read about it in the newspaper. Wilson—that prick! he thought. He’s an immature kid who doesn’t know how to deal in a professional manner! But id had every right to do the deal, even though it was not a move anyone had ever imagined. There was nothing GTI could do to stop them.
As 1996 rolled around, not only was id at war with GTI but it was at war with itself. The decision to abandon Romero’s design for Carmack’s technology created incinerating pressure. The company was in perpetual crunch mode, trying to get the Doom-style shooter done by March. Carmack, feeling like he was the only one running the ship, decided it was time to turn up the heat. For weeks he had been working out in the hallway to keep an eye on everyone else. But now he suggested they tear the walls down.
The decision was made, ostensibly, because the company had long been talking about doubling its work space. With the purchase of a suite next door, they could begin the remodeling right away. Carmack saw this as a key opportunity to get everyone out of isolated offices and into one big communal work space while the renovations would be done. Reluctantly, they agreed to the new arrangement. They called it the war room.
They had no idea how messy the war room would be. Within days, walls began crashing around them, blanketing the area in plaster dust. They lined tables up against the windows and piled on their computers, sitting by each other with barely enough room to grab a soda without knocking elbows. Carmack and Romero sat side by side. To get all their computers networked they had to run cables through the ceiling and bust out the acoustic tiles to rope the wires down to their machines. Shades drawn, lights low, long gray cables stretching from the ceiling to their desks, it looked as though they were all sitting inside a computer’s dark web of wires. There was nowhere to go without getting caught.
Without the privacy of personal space, the tension began to mount. They worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. They had to listen to their music on headphones. At any given moment a visitor might walk in to find a room full of guys quietly typing with headphones on their ears. Romero had taken a liking to instrumental video game soundtracks—available as Japanese imports. He popped one in and bitterly slipped on his headphones. This is not the id of the past, he thought, the id of “let’s make a great game together and have fun.” This is the id of “shut up and work.”
Competition rose within the ranks. With Romero vulnerable, aspiring designer American McGee jockeyed for supremacy. But now even he had competition: Tim Willits. Tim had the distinction of being the first employee drafted from the Doom mod community. He had discovered the game while studying at the University of Minnesota. At the time, the twenty-three-year-old was a hardworking computer science major who lived at home with his parents—his father, a pipe fitter, his mother, a radiation technician. It was a competitive household, and Tim frequently butted heads with his sister—a graphics design major at the university. Short and balding with an occasional nervous stutter, he overachieved as best he could, not only signing up for ROTC but volunteering to slip into a life-size rodent costume to portray the school mascot, Goldie Gopher, at football games and events.
On a lark one day, Tim downloaded this game a lot of kids were talking about called Doom. Though he had played games before, he never had the sense of entering a world. But here, his actions affected the world; he could move doors, trigger buttons. He was amazed at the size of the place he had entered, the scope of this strange new universe. Tim began experimenting with the hacker-made Doom level-editing programs that were floating around the bulletin board services. He started to get recognition for some of the levels he had made and uploaded. Soon enough, he got the ultimate response: an e-mail from id.
Tim was hired by American to work on the id-produced title Strife. But as Quake began to grow, he was brought in to help the team. Tim immediately aligned himself with Romero and started learning as much as he could about the art of level design. In the war room, he sat at Romero’s side. He proved himself to be not only highly skilled but highly efficient, able to complete a level design in record time. Soon Romero found himself competing just to keep up with Tim’s output. Carmack immediately began to show appreciation for Tim’s work. Though he still considered American his close friend, American felt left out to dry.
Long enamored of Romero’s rock-star lifestyle, American started living the life himself. This came after id struck a deal with Trent Reznor of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, a die-hard Doom fan, to provide the music and sound effects for Quake. Overseeing the project, American began to change his look: shaving his beard, styling his hair, dressing in black. He felt increasingly disconnected from Carmack, who, despite having originally approved of his work on Quake’s music, now seemed only to chastise him for not spending more time making levels for the game. For American, it was the beginning of the end. Even his best friend at id, Dave Taylor, had left to pursue his own game company. American had never felt more alone. His days as id’s wonder boy were over.
It didn’t take long to find out who had replaced him and Romero. Carmack abruptly announced one day that Tim’s levels would have the coveted honor of being the opening levels of the shareware release—players’ first taste of Quake. Everyone was silent in disbelief. It was an insult to Romero, who they all assumed would get that distinction. But the backlash had been coming. Since the meeting to change Quake’s direction, Romero had seemed to distance himself even more from the project.
“What?” Romero said. “I’m the le
ad designer!”
“That’s my decision,” Carmack replied. “Tim’s levels are more cohesive.” Romero, as always, was quick to let the bad vibes go and wished Tim well. As far as everyone was concerned, Carmack had just passed the torch.
It was late one night in January when Romero picked up the phone in his Tudor mansion and dialed the number of Tom Hall, his ex-partner at id. The two had rekindled their friendship some months before with no hard feelings. Romero knew that Tom wasn’t happy at Apogee. Tom had been running into the same old problems he’d had at id, feeling like he wasn’t able to implement his own creative ideas. Apogee started doing business under the name 3D Realms, making games that would one-up id Software. Their first release, Duke Nukem 3D, was in fact doing just that. The game was like a comic book version of Doom set in a realistic modern-day world. Players would shoot through abandoned porno theaters and strip clubs. There were even strippers. Though Carmack hated it, feeling that its engine was “held together with bubble gum,” the gamers bought it in droves. People were dubbing it the “Quake killer.” Tom, however, was stuck working on another project for 3D Realms called Prey that was barely getting off the ground. Romero’s call couldn’t have come at a better time.
“Dude,” Romero told him, “the same thing that you ran into at id just happened to me.” He explained how he had been trying to push Carmack into doing something new and creative but Carmack just wanted to play it safe and do the same old Doom game over again. Romero had even suggested splitting the company in two, with Carmack leading a technology side and him leading a design side, but the suggestion went over with a thud. “I’m going to leave after Quake,” he concluded. “What do you think about starting another company? It’ll be a company where any kind of design we want to do, that’s what we make. Technology has to work with our design, not the other way around. How would you like to have a company where design is law?”
Masters of Doom Page 24