The others at the table watched in disbelief. “Why are they doing this to you?” a woman asked.
“They think that I’m counting cards,” Carmack said.
“They think you can remember all those different cards?”
“Yeah,” Carmack replied, “something like that.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“I’m a computer programmer,” he said, as he was escorted out the door.
Casinos weren’t the only places Carmack sought escape in February 1998. His old desire for monkish seclusion brought him rather spontaneously one day to a small, anonymous hotel room somewhere in Florida. Despite the glowing reviews and great sales of Quake II, the stress of the office had finally proven too great: all the infighting, the bitching, the moaning, the real-life deathmatches between the increasingly dissatisfied staff. Things had gotten so bad that they even worked their way into the game. A secret level created by Tim Willits contained portraits of each id member on the wall. Each portrait triggered some type of animation that, in Tim’s mind, reflected the personality of the staffer: Carmack’s disappeared into the floor when anyone approached.
Now Carmack had vanished for real—sequestering himself in this faraway hotel room for a week. Pizza boxes littered the floor. The phone didn’t ring. The door didn’t open. The only distraction was when his throat dried out so much that he had to venture outside for another Diet Coke. He had even bought a special laptop for the occasion: a Dolch portable Pentium II system with full-length PCI slots—just roomy enough for his Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator. Ostensibly, he had come here to research what he was calling his Trinity engine, a new leap of a graphics system that he would develop while the rest of the team churned out a mission pack for Quake II. But when he arrived back in Mesquite the next week, he found himself as well with an uncommon need to reflect in a .plan file he posted online:
Name: John Carmack
Description: Programmer
Project: Quake 2
Last Updated: 02/1998 03:06:55 (Central Standard Time)
Ok, I’m overdue for an update.
The research getaway went well. In the space of a week, I only left my hotel to buy diet coke. It seems to have spoiled me a bit, the little distractions in the office grate on me a bit more since. I will likely make week long research excursions a fairly regular thing during non-crunch time. Once a quarter sounds about right.
I’m not ready to talk specifically about what I am working on for trinity. Quake went through many false starts (beam trees, portals, etc) before settling down on its final architecture, so I know that the odds are good that what I am doing now won’t actually be used in the final product, and I don’t want to mention anything that could be taken as an implied “promise” by some people.
I’m very excited by all the prospects, though.
Many game developers are in it only for the final product, and the process is just what they have to go through to get there. I respect that, but my motivation is a bit different.
For me, while I do take a lot of pride in shipping a great product, the achievements along the way are more memorable. I don’t remember any of our older product releases, but I remember the important insights all the way back to using CRTC wraparound for infinate [sic] smooth scrolling in Keen (actually, all the way back to understanding the virtues of structures over parallel arrays in apple II assembly language . . .). Knowledge builds
on knowledge.
I wind up catagorizing [sic] periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time.
My basic skills built up during school on apple II computers, but lack of resources limited how far and fast I could go. The situation is so much better for programmers today—a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools and resources necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for.
My first six months at Softdisk, working on the PC, was an incredible learning experience. For the first time, I was around a couple of programmers with more experience than I had (Romero and Lane Roath [sic]), there were a lot of books and materials available, and I could devote my full and undivided attention to programming. I had a great time.
The two years following, culminating in Doom and the various video game console work I did, was a steady increase in skills and knowledge along several fronts—more graphics, networking, unix, compiler writing, cross development, risc architectures, etc.
The first year of Quake’s development was awesome. I got to try so many new things, and I had Michael Abrash as my sounding board. It would probably surprise many classically trained graphics programmers how little I new [sic] about conventional
3-D when I wrote Doom—hell, I had problems properly clipping wall polygons (which is where all the polar coordinate nonsense came from). Quake forced me to learn things right, as well as find some new innovations.
The last six months of Quake’s development was mostly pain and suffering trying to get the damn thing finished. It was all worth it in the end, but I don’t look back at it all that fondly.
The development cycle of Quake 2 had some moderate learning experiences for me (glquake, quakeworld, radiosity, openGL tool programming, win32, etc), but it also gave my mind time to sift through a lot of things before getting ready to really push ahead.
I think that the upcoming development cycle for trinity is going to be at least as rewarding as Quake’s was. I am reaching deep levels of understanding on some topics, and I am branching out into several completely new (non-graphics) areas for me, that should cross-polinate [sic] well with everything else I am doing.
There should also be a killer game at the end of it.:)
The good mood didn’t last. Like Romero at Ion Storm, Carmack was discovering that the glory days of a small team and easy chemistry were gone. In their place was a palpable atmosphere of bitterness and dysfunction. The tension between Tim, American, and the other level designers had reached a boiling point. Adrian and Kevin were battling with Paul Steed. They disliked each other too strongly to work closely together on the mission pack, Carmack realized. The solution: build the next game around the company’s animosity. Quake III would be a deathmatch-only title, using most of his ideas for the Trinity engine, that would allow the map designers to work in complete isolation from each other.
Carmack’s idea did not go over well. Adrian was vocally upset with yet another marines and shotguns shoot-’em-up game. He felt like they had been making the same title for years, and he wanted something different. So did American. Paul agreed, lobbying to do a title that had more of a story, more characters, more freshness. He drafted a long design document detailing a story for the game. Carmack shot it down, saying that story was not important. Even Kevin, long the ultimate team player of the group, expressed his dismay, telling Carmack that if he wanted to do this game he’d have to find a different project manager. This was Carmack’s company now more than ever. Quake III would be Carmack’s game.
For American, it was the beginning of the end. He was called into a meeting with the owners and told that he was being fired for not performing. Carmack thought American had served his purpose but had now gone the route of Romero. When American wanted more of an explanation he was told, ultimately, that it was because no one liked him. Typical, he thought. It was indicative of what the company had become since Romero had left. There was no balance anymore.
He wasn’t the only one feeling newfound empathy for Romero. Even though Paul Steed had never worked with him, he was beginning to think that firing Romero had been a terrible mistake. “Romero is chaos and Carmack is order,” he said. “Together they made the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?”
The emerald green elevator doors slid open on the penthouse of the Texas Commerce Building. In February 1998, Romero stepped out to see at last the completed renovation of his Willy Wonka factory. Everything he had imagined was there: the game
room with the vintage arcade machines, the Foosball, the pool table. A deathmatch arena with shiny twenty-one-inch monitors wrapped around a fine oak kiosk. A bank of twelve television sets flashing MTV. A maze of corrugated steel cubicles that resembled a level of a game. A kitchen overflowing with candy and junk food. And, wrapping around and on top of the 22,500 square feet, windows that scraped the clouds. Romero took it all in and had one thought: Holy shit, we gotta fucking make some great games.
They needed to make great games because the expenses, Romero knew, were even greater. The office renovations had cost over $2.5 million. Dominion, which was supposed to have taken only six weeks to complete, had eaten up more than $3 million. The original $13 million was gone, and Eidos was now sending in cash on a monthly run rate. Between the lease, the salaries for the nearly one hundred employees, and the other expenses, the bills were nearly $1.2 million per month.
But there was another problem, a big problem: Carmack’s Quake II code. The engine was completely different than what he had expected. All this time he’d had his programmers preparing Daikatana in a way that would make it easy to switch over to what he assumed Carmack’s new engine would require. But it turned out that Carmack had trashed his expected direction and instead produced a structure of code that caught Romero completely by surprise. It certainly wasn’t done to dupe Romero into a delay, it was just Carmack making his own idiosyncratic, intuitive leap—a leap that, once again, cramped Romero’s grand designs.
“This is going to take a while,” Romero told Eidos and his staff. “This code is jacked.” Completing Daikatana for his promised March 1998 deadline was impossible, but Romero thought they could turn it around in a few months. Others weren’t so confident, lobbying him to forget about competing with id’s technology and just release the game using the original Quake engine. “You can’t keep up with Carmack,” said Romero’s lead programmer, “so why even try?” But Romero wouldn’t waver. His ambitions only grew larger.
Later that month, Romero told the gaming press that Ion Storm was going to begin work on Daikatana II. Co-owners Todd Porter and Jerry O’Flaherty initiated a plan of their own: to launch a comic book division within the company using the artists of Jerry’s who had worked in that industry. The owners approved the plan to hire up a staff and release a comic book for each of the company’s games as, essentially, free public relations. When Eidos got wind of the plan, however, they immediately shut it down. “You guys are supposed to be making games,” they said. “Why should we pay you to make comics?”
Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all one saw were rows of caves.
By the spring of 1998, the mood around the company was growing similarly black. Despite their working in what felt like perpetual crunch mode—twelve-hour days, six days a week—Daikatana was nowhere near being done. Many felt the project was out of control. One guy produced a series of levels that proved unusable. An artist created a graphical icon for an arrow in the game that was a thousand times the appropriate size. Factions within the Daikatana team began breaking apart. Even Romero’s most devout fans—Will Loconto, Sverre Kvernmo, and about a half dozen others—began getting more clandestine, opting out of rambunctious deathmatches and keeping to themselves. Others started lashing out. One employee was found alone at his desk, screaming. Romero fired him.
But more were concerned about Todd Porter’s and Jerry O’Flaherty’s increased sense of ownership. The two, they felt, were running the company into the ground. Todd had been showing up more frequently at Daikatana meetings, making what they thought were fruitless suggestions about how to alter the game. Meanwhile, Dominion was a shambles, to their minds, a sorry-looking title that was, unfortunately, going to be Ion Storm’s first release. They soon took action.
On May 13, Sverre, Will, and six other members of Romero’s team asked Bob Wright, Ion’s chief operating officer, whom they had perceived as an ally back when he was working closely with Mike Wilson, to join them for lunch. They had an ultimatum for Romero, they said—Todd and Jerry had to go or they would walk out the door. Bob urged them to put their complaints in writing.
Word about the meeting leaked back to Tom Hall—Bob had told the guys that he could help them to finance their own company if they did quit or get fired. Tom called Romero. It was bad timing. Romero was out of the office with his wife, Beth, who had just given birth to their first child, Lillia. He had been on something of a roll in his family life, having convinced his ex-wife, Kelly, to move with his boys, Steven and Michael, to Texas so he could see his sons more often. Before long he was right there by their side—playing games. The birth of his daughter was supposed to be a joyous day. But there was another fate in store.
“What the fuck?” Romero screamed when Tom told him about Bob’s interference. “That’s it. Bob fucked with my team. He’s gone.” Bob was fired the next week, but this didn’t begin to quell Ion’s burgeoning problems. The company once again had a disappointing showing at E3, which took place the last week of May. Competing shooters, such as the recently released Unreal and the upcoming Half-Life, garnered most of the attention, as did id’s upcoming game, Quake III. When Ion Storm’s Dominion hit shelves the following week, it flopped. Another fantasy-based strategy game, StarCraft, had been released to rave reviews just a couple months before and made Todd’s title look stale. Not only did it die in the marketplace but it confirmed to the already bitter gaming community that all might not be well in Romero’s dream factory. And that community, the very people who had grown up on Romero’s games, bit back.
On game sites with names such as Evil Avatar, Shugashack, Blue’s News, and Daily Radar, players had a feeding frenzy around Ion Storm. “All talk, no game,” a typical post read. “Reasons I Won’t Buy Daikatana,” read another. A comic strip online lampooned Romero with long hair saying, “Hi . . . I’m here to tell you that Daikatana will be great. You guys know I’m good for it. Like Doom! You remember Doom? I did that! And Quake, right? That was me too! Design is law!” The final frame showed that Romero was, in fact, pitching a hot-dog seller to get a free meal. “Nice try John,” the vendor replied. “No game, no wiener.”
Another death rumor surfaced. This time it came after a photo of Romero in a morgue with a bullet hole in his head leaked onto the Web. Gamers joked that he’d killed himself after losing a Quake game to Carmack. But when a gaming magazine online issued—and later retracted—a report that “sources at Ion Storm” confirmed Romero’s demise, gamers went ballistic. Still reeling from the bitch ad, they resented what seemed to be another publicity stunt—despite the fact that the leaked photo had actually come from an upcoming Texas Monthly magazine article about Ion Storm.
The biggest blow came on September 30, when a scribe named Bitch X posted on a site called Gaming Insider broke news of a plan by Eidos to buy Ion Storm. For months now, the owners had been in talks with their publisher to hatch some kind of bailout plan. The idea had started back in May, with Eidos buying 19 percent of Ion Storm’s equity for $12.5 million in exchange for forgiving the $15 million advance; Ion’s royalty would be lowered from 40 to 25 percent as well. Bob Wright would even sue the company, alleging that they’d fired him specifically to cut him out of profiting from the Eidos deal.
Months
later the deal was still being negotiated. How Bitch X knew, no one could surmise. When, over the next couple of weeks, the Bitch talked of various firings and e-mails at Ion Storm, the guy who ran Ion Storm’s website told the owners, “Either people who are no longer with the company know a whole lot more than the people who are here, or we’ve got a leak that the Titanic can sail through.”
No one admitted to leaking the news, so Romero tried unsuccessfully tracing employees’ e-mail activity to see who might be sending information to the sites in question. But the damage was done. The company grew rife with suspicion and distrust. The employees began to grumble quite loudly about Ion Storm’s financial future. From the beginning, they had expected to be cut in to some kind of royalty or bonus or ownership. And the more rumors spread, the more depression set in. Romero confronted his lead programmer, Kee Kimbrell—who had cofounded DWANGO—one day for playing too many games and not getting his work done, a complaint whose irony didn’t go unnoticed.
“What the fuck, dude?” Romero said. “You stopped working. And we need to get this game done. It’s serious, you know.” Kee told Romero he was worried about the business; he had seen a spreadsheet of Ion Storm’s financials and had been hearing rumors that Eidos was going to shut the company down. Romero exploded. “Rumor! Rumor! Rumor! Rumor! Rumor! Bullshit!” he said. “You don’t understand business, don’t try to fuck with business stuff. You don’t understand the deal that we have with Eidos. You don’t understand a lot of things. You’re letting it affect the way that you are not working and you’re bringing other people down and all this shit.” But Kee wouldn’t back down, and Romero fired him on the spot.
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