Masters of Doom

The Two Johns

The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanthropic programmer who built high-powered rockets in his spare time (and made Bill Gates’s short list of geniuses); his game and life aspired to the elegant discipline of computer code. The thirty-two-year-old Romero was a brash designer whose bad-boy image made him the industry’s rock star; he would risk everything, including his reputation, to realize his wildest visions. As Carmack put it shortly after their break-up: “Romero wants an empire, I just want to create good programs.”

Carmack and Romero pulled up one shortly after the other in the Ferraris they had bought together at the height of their collaboration.

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web of problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past—no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

Romero, by contrast, was immersed in all moments: past, future, and present. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast, as passionate about the present as about the time gone and the time yet to come. He didn’t just dream, he pursued: hoarding everything from the past, immersing himself in the dynamism of the moment, and charting out the plans for what was to come. He remembered every date, every name, every game. To preserve the past, he kept letters, magazines, disks, Burger King pay stubs, pictures, games, receipts.

…the bond between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day. It was like two tennis players who, after years of destroying their competition, finally had a chance to play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better programmer. Carmack pushed Romero to be a better designer. What they shared equally was their passion.

“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?”

Romero’s Origins

As he was about to complete a round, he felt a heavy palm grip his shoulder. “What the fuck, dude?” he said, assuming one of his friends was trying to spoil his game. Then his face smashed into the machine. Romero’s stepfather dragged him past his friends to his pickup truck, throwing the dirt bike in the back. Romero had done a poor job of hiding his bike, and his stepfather had seen it while driving home from work. “You really screwed up this time, little man,” his stepfather said. He led Romero into the house, where Romero’s mother and his visiting grandmother stood in the kitchen. “Johnny was at the arcade again,” his stepfather said. “You know what that’s like? That’s like telling your mother ‘Fuck you.’ ” He beat Romero until the boy had a fat lip and a black eye. Romero was grounded for two weeks. The next day he snuck back to the arcade.

One afternoon he found the six-year-old boy sketching a Lamborghini sports car at the kitchen table. The drawing was so good that his stepfather assumed it had been traced. As a test, he put a Hot Wheels toy car on the table and watched as Romero drew. This sketch too was perfect. Schuneman asked Johnny what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy said, “A rich bachelor.”

Romero was so good at Pac-Man that he could maneuver the round yellow character through a maze of fruit and dots with his eyes shut.

Romero grabbed his bike and raced with them to the college’s computer lab. There was no problem for them to hang out at the lab. This was not uncommon at the time. The computer underground did not discriminate by age; a geek was a geek was a geek. And since the students often held the keys to the labs, there weren’t professors to tell the kids to scram.

At issue were Romero’s grades, which had plummeted from A’s and B’s to C’s and D’s. He was bright but too easily distracted, they thought, too consumed by games and computers. Despite this being the golden age of video games—with arcade games bringing in $5 billion a year and even home systems earning $1 billion—his stepfather did not believe game development to be a proper vocation. “You’ll never make any money making games,” he often said. “You need to make something people really need, like business applications.”

Romero—now twenty-one years old with a wife, a baby boy, Michael, and another child on the way—was out of a job.

Romero had to call and tell her that there was nothing: no job, no apartment. He was sleeping on a friend’s couch. But Romero wasn’t going to lie down and die. He had a dream to pursue, a family he loved. He could be the dad he’d never had himself, the kind of dad who would not just support his kids’ games but play them.

Romero, who rarely drank, made this night a special occasion. It had been a great year but a tough year—one that had cost him his wife and kids. Faced with the choice, he’d chosen the game life over the family life. Though he spoke frequently with his boys and saw them as often as he could, he was living with a new family now: the gamers.

Carmack’s Origins

John Carmack was a late talker. His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.”

“Inga,” the boy’s father, Stan, told his wife, “perhaps we might have something a bit extraordinary on our hands.”

Carmack quickly distinguished himself. In second grade, only seven years old, he scored nearly perfect on every standardized test, placing himself at a ninth-grade comprehension level.

When assigned to write about his top five problems in life, he listed his parents’ high expectations—twice. He found himself at particular odds with his mother, the disciplinarian of the family. In another assignment, he wrote about how one day, when he refused to do extracredit homework, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door. Carmack began lashing out more at school—he hated the structure and dogma.

Once Carmack figured out where his character in Ultima resided in the code, he reprogrammed it to give himself extra capabilities. He relished this ability to create things out of thin air. As a programmer, he didn’t have to rely on anyone else. If his code followed the logical progression of the rules established, it would work. Everything made sense.

When Carmack was twelve, they suddenly got divorced. Tensions between Stan and Inga over how to rear their children had become too great. The aftermath for Carmack was traumatic, Inga felt. Just as he was finding himself in school, he was pulled out and separated from his brother. They alternated years between parents, switching schools in turn. Carmack hated being separated from his father. Worse, when he was living with his mother, he had to fend for himself alone.

Carmack didn’t want any of it. All he wanted was his own computer with which to pursue his worlds. He became increasingly obstinate. Inga took him to psychologists to see why her once compliant boy was becoming so uncontrollable and dark.

And he learned about bombs. For Carmack, bombs were less about cheap thrills than about chemical engineering—a neat way to play scientist and, for good measure, make things go boom. Before long he and his friends were mixing the recipes they found online.

One day they decided to use explosives for a more practical purpose: getting themselves computers.

A fat friend, however, had more than a little trouble squeezing inside; he reached through the hole instead and opened the window to let himself in. Doing so, he triggered the silent alarm. The cops came in no time. The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs … no empathy for other human beings.”

“You know, it’s not very smart to tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.” “I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!”

Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.

He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills.

After being partnered with him for an earth science project, a bully demanded that Carmack do all the work himself. Carmack agreed. They ended up getting an F. “How could you get an F?” the bully said. “You’re the smartest guy around.” Carmack had purposely failed the project, sacrificing his own grade rather than let the oaf prevail.

Having graduated high school, he was ready to cash in the trust fund that his father, years before, had told him would be available when he turned eighteen. But when he went to retrieve the money, he found that his mother had transferred it to her account in Seattle.

Carmack fired off a vitriolic letter: “Why can’t you realise [sic] that it isn’t your job to direct me anymore?”

He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting.

Though he was barely getting by, Carmack relished the freelance lifestyle. He was in control of his time, slept as late as he wanted, and, even better, answered to no one.

Early Game Industry

Since the seventies, the electronic gaming industry had been dominated by arcade machines like Asteroids and home consoles like the Atari 2600. Writing software for these platforms required expensive development systems and corporate backing. But computer games were different. They were accessible. They came with their own tools, their own portals—a way inside. And the people who had the keys were not authoritarian monsters, they were dudes.

Late at night, after the professors went home, students gathered to explore, play, and hack. The computer felt like a revolutionary tool: a means of self-empowerment and fantasy fulfillment. Programmers skipped classes, dates, baths. And as soon as they had the knowledge, they made games.

As the first accessible home computers, Apples were ideally suited for making and playing games.

But the Apple II, made the following year, was mass market, with a keyboard, BASIC compatibility, and, best of all, color graphics. There was no hard drive, but it came with two game paddles. It was made for games.

The real way to explore the world of graphics, he knew, was to make a game. Carmack didn’t believe in waiting for the muse. He decided it was more efficient to use other people’s ideas.

Softdisk & Meeting

With every new game, the company begged Carmack to come down for an interview. Who was this kid who’d taught himself an entirely new programming language in half the time it would take a normal person?

What Romero wanted to do was learn a hot new programming language called C. But he was told he couldn’t pursue it because the other programmers in the department didn’t know it. Romero felt limited by the others’ lack of skills.

When Al met Carmack, he was thrown off. This was the Whiz Kid he’d heard so much about? A nineteen-year-old in ripped jeans and a tattered T-shirt who, despite his muscles, seemed not to have reached puberty yet?

Carmack was unprepared to meet anyone who could keep up with him intellectually, particularly in programming. Not only could these two guys talk the talk but they actually knew more than Carmack himself. They weren’t just good, they were better than he was, he thought. Romero was inspiring, not only in his knowledge of programming but in his all-around skills: his artistry, his design. Carmack was cocky, but if someone could teach him, he wasn’t going to let his ego get in the way. On the contrary, he was going to listen and stick around. He was going to take the Softdisk job.

Romero could tell that his old friend was not up to the task. And, as quickly as he had once decided to befriend Lane, Romero shut him out. In Romero’s eyes, Lane wasn’t up to the rigors of the death schedule. And Romero didn’t want anything standing in the way of the team’s profitability. With Carmack, he had everything he needed. One time when Lane left the room, Romero spun around and told Carmack, “Let’s get him out of here.”

Romero found Carmack leaning quietly against the kitchen wall. “Hey, man,” Romero said, “you feeling buzzed yet? You getting drunk, Carmack?” “I am losing control of my faculties,” Carmack replied. “Mmm.” Then he stumbled away.

Romero scoffed at his worries. “Dude, what’s Al going to do if he sues you? You don’t have anything for him to get. All you have is a piece-of-shit couch,” he said, pointing to the broken sofa in the living room. “I mean, what the fuck? What are you worried about losing?”

Al confronted Carmack, who he knew had a tough, if not impossible, time telling lies. It was like feeding questions into a computer or adding numbers on a calculator—the answer always came out right. “I admit it,” Carmack said. “We’ve been using your computers. We’ve been writing our own games on your time.”

Technical Breakthroughs

Because the tiles were in memory, they could be quickly thrown up on the screen without having to be redrawn. Carmack called the process “adaptive tile refresh.” In lay terms, as Tom immediately understood, this meant one thing: They could do Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC! Nobody, no one, nowhere had made the PC do this.

Romero could hardly breathe. He just sat in his chair with his fingers on the keys, scrolling Dave back and forth along the landscape, trying to see if anything was wrong, if somehow this wasn’t really happening, if Carmack had not just figured out how to do exactly what the fucking Nintendo could do, if he had not done what every other gamer in the universe had wanted to do, to break through, to do for PCs what Mario was doing for consoles. On the strength of Mario, Nintendo was on the way to knocking down Toyota as Japan’s most successful company, generating over $1 billion per year.

The PC was hot. It was heading into more homes each day. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t be just a luxury item, it would be a home appliance. And what better to make it a friendly part of life than a killer game. With such a hit, people wouldn’t even have to buy Nintendos; they could just invest in PCs.

He saw their destiny, their Future Rich Personages. It was so devastating that he found he couldn’t move, couldn’t get up out of his seat. He was destroyed. And it wasn’t until Carmack rolled back into the office a few hours later that Romero was able to muster the energy to speak. He had only one thing to tell his friend, his genius partner, his match made in gamer heaven. “This is it,” he said. “We’re gone!”

Carmack’s research into 3-D computer games was on a more intuitive level. Though he was a fan of science fiction, enamored of Star Trek’s Holodeck, his focus was not on chipping away at some grand design of such a virtual world but, rather, on solving the immediate problem of the next technological advance.

He approached the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think outside the box.

Carmack emerged from his research after six weeks, two weeks longer than he had spent on any other game.

Released in April 1991, Hovertank was the first fast-action, first-person shooter for the computer. Id had invented a genre.

This effect was known as parallax scrolling. In the past, a character might run past a static forest. In a parallax-scrolling game, the trees would move very slowly while the character ran past. It seemed more real.

Once again he had pushed the graphics of the PC into a place no one had gone this quickly before.

“Paul said he’s doing a game using texture mapping.” “Texture mapping?” Carmack replied, then took a few seconds to spin the concept around in his head. “I can do that.” The result was Catacomb 3-D, which incorporated texture-mapped walls of gray bricks covered in green slime.

There were two noticeable firsts: diminished lighting and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. Diminished lighting meant that, as in real life, distant vistas would recede into shadows. In Wolfenstein, every room was brightly lit, with no variation in hue.

It took a hefty amount of time for him to figure out how to get just the right perspective down for the floors. But his diligence and self-imposed isolation had paid off in a big way. He even had slopes on the floors, so the player could feel like he was running up or downhill.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Shareware Model

Instead of giving away the entire game, why not give out only the first portion, then make the player buy the rest of the game directly from him? No one had tried it before, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. The games Scott was making were perfectly suited to such a plan because they were broken up into short episodes or “levels” of play. He could simply put out, say, fifteen levels of a game, then tell players that if they sent him a check he would send them the remaining thirty.

An ideal shareware game had to have a few ingredients: short action titles that were broken up in levels. Because the shareware games were being distributed over BBSs, they had to be small enough for people to download them over modems.

Games had to be small but fun and fast, something adrenal and arcade-style enough to hook a player into buying more.

Scott received a package with the Super Mario Brothers 3 demo from Ideas from the Deep. When he fired up the game, he was knocked out. It looked just like the console version—smooth scrolling and everything. He grabbed the phone and talked to Carmack for hours. This guy is a genius, Scott thought. He’s outthinking everybody.

Romero asked Scott to show them his seriousness by sending them an advance. Scott responded with a check for two thousand dollars, half his savings. There was only one thing he wanted in return: A game by Christmas, two months away.

At this point Apogee was comfortably ruling not just the shareware gaming world but the entire shareware world. The Keen games were at the top of the charts, bringing in close to sixty thousand dollars per month.

“You’re telling me,” he said, “you’re making fifty thousand dollars a month just from shareware?”

There was virtually no overhead, they explained. The shareware model let Apogee keep ninety-five cents for every dollar that came in. “We make the best stuff in shareware,” Romero proclaimed, “that’s why we’re making so much money.

The conventional wisdom, at the time, was that at best 1 to 2 percent of the people who downloaded the shareware version would actually pay for the game. To make matters worse, there was nothing stopping someone from buying the game and simply copying it for friends. Despite all these forces, the sales continued to soar. Id was getting checks totaling $150,000 per month.

By releasing the first episode as shareware, they’d instantly hooked the gamers, leaving them craving more. It defied logic—the thought of giving something away for free. But Scott’s plan had worked.

Games distributed through the regular retail channels would bleed cash to middlemen. Every time someone bought a game at CompUSA, the retailer would take money, then pay the distributor, the distributor would take money, then pay the publisher, the publisher would take money, then pay the developer. By going shareware, id was cutting them all out, taking eighty-five cents for every dollar sold; the game would be listed at around forty dollars. Jay figured Doom, like Wolfenstein, would rely on word of mouth. While big guns like Nintendo were spending millions on marketing and advertising, id would take out only one small ad in a gaming magazine for Doom. The goal, then, was to get the Doom shareware into as many hands as possible.

“We don’t care if you make money off this shareware demo,” Jay told the retailers. “Move it! Move it in mass quantities!” The retailers couldn’t believe their ears—no one had ever told them not to pay royalties. But Jay was insistent. Take Doom for nothing, keep the profit! My goal is distribution. Doom is going to be Wolfenstein on steroids, and I want it far and wide! I want you to stack Doom deep! In fact, I want you to do advertising for it too, because you’re going to make money off it. So take this money that you might have given me in royalties and use it to advertise the fact that you’re selling Doom.” Jay got plenty of takers.

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.

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.

id Culture

Romero gleefully referred to the ensuing experience as “crunch mode” or “the death schedule”—a masochistically pleasurable stretch of programming work involving sleep deprivation, caffeine gorging, and loud music.

They became all the more efficient at “borrowing” the Softdisk computers. Every night after work they’d back their cars up to the office and load the machines. The next morning they’d come in early enough to bring the computers back.

Carmack, in particular, seemed almost inhumanly immune to distraction. One time, Jay tested Carmack’s resolve by popping a porno video into the VCR and cranking it to full volume. Romero and the others immediately heard the “oohs” and “aahs,” and turned around cracking up. Carmack, though, stayed glued to his monitor. Only after a minute or so did he acknowledge the increasingly active groans. His sole response was “Mmm.” Then he returned to the work at hand.

By Thanksgiving, the guys were immersed in the death schedule back at the lake house. Sleep was not an issue. Neither was showering. Eating was something they essentially had to remind themselves to do.

Nothing could distract them. One night Beth and a few other women showed up at the apartment. The guys were hard at work. Beth did her best to attract Romero’s attention. When nothing elicited a response, she threw up her hands and said, “Why can’t we just have our men come home and have sex with us?” “Because we’re working,” Romero said. Carmack laughed.

…life in Madison was turning increasingly ugly. The drug-dealing neighbors had been arrested after the cops pounded down their door. Someone siphoned gasoline from their cars. Adrian was particularly miserable because he lost the cap to his water bed and couldn’t find a replacement. He spent months in a sleeping bag on the floor. Carmack had been sleeping on the floor for months too, though by choice. He simply didn’t feel he needed a mattress.

With the extra levels ordered by Scott, the id guys were putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week.

Despite their success, id didn’t rest on their laurels. The work ethic, if anything, got more intense.

Because Spear of Destiny was built using the original Wolfenstein engine, Carmack could work on new technology while the rest of the guys completed the game.

After months of shutting out the paper fights and answering machine messages and assorted screams, he finally gave way. Carmack stood up and began to unplug his machine. Everyone else stopped what he was doing and watched. “I think I’m going to get more done doing this by myself in my apartment,” Carmack said. He picked up his stealth black NeXT machine and walked out the door. He wouldn’t return for weeks.

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.

One of the main sources of distrust among the employees was id’s competitive bonus structure. Every quarter or so the owners would meet to assign a dollar amount to each employee. They would then split up a bonus payment based on those decisions. One quarter someone might get $100,000; the next, $20,000. The owners admitted that it was an arbitrary and imperfect plan, but it was the only one they could surmise. As a result, the employees realized that the easiest way to get the higher bonuses was to outwit, outplay, and outsmart each other. It was a business deathmatch.

Wolfenstein 3D

Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D.

To their surprise and relief, they discovered that Muse had gone bankrupt in the mid-1980s and let the trademark on the Wolfenstein name lapse. It would be Wolfenstein 3-D.

FormGen’s first game with them, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Babysitter, didn’t sell well. Id blamed in part what they thought was a terrible box cover, designed by a company that had done packages for Lipton tea.

Tom, deep down, was still closer to Keen, concerned about violence, about being too controversial, too bloody. Adrian liked the gore; he sketched out dead Nazis lying in pools of blood. But he still harbored a desire to get back to something more gothic and horrific, like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion. Carmack and Romero, however, were in sync. Carmack didn’t so much care about the accoutrements of the game as he enjoyed Romero’s passion for showing off what his engine could do. Romero got what he was doing—trying to make a sleek, simple, fast game engine. And he was the one who dreamed up the sleek, simple, fast game to go around it. Romero even began excising parts of the game just to adhere to that dictum.

Romero groaned as he watched Tom drag a body across the screen. “That’s not going to help the game be bad ass, it’s slowing the game down. It’s a neat idea, but when you’re running down hallways and blowing down everything you see, who cares if you drag shit? We gotta rip that code right out of there. Anything that’s going to stop us from mowing shit down—get rid of it!”

The weapons had to sound suitably killer. To accomplish this, they would, for the first time, use digital sound.

When the id guys showed up at Sierra’s offices, it was clear that they hadn’t left their apartments for a month. Romero had been growing out his hair. Tom had an unkempt beard. Carmack had holes in his shirt.

For the guys, particularly Romero and Tom, it was a tour of the gamers’ hall of fame. Back in a CD duplication room, they were introduced to Warren Schwader. Romero and Tom looked at each other and immediately fell to their knees, bowing. “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” they said. Schwader, they knew, had designed one of their favorite old Apple II games, Threshold. “Dude!” Romero beamed. “Threshold! You are the Daddy!”

When Ken Williams showed up at a fancy restaurant called Edna’s Elderberry House with this ragtag group of guys in shabby clothes, he was pulled aside by the maître d’. Williams had to explain that these were important guests before they were led to a private room with a long oak table and a burning fire.

In big words in the middle it said: “id Software: Part of the Sierra Family?” “Do you mind removing the question mark?” Williams said. Then he offered them $2.5 million.

Romero suggested. “Let’s ask for a hundred thousand down. If they’re interested, then we’ll sell. If they don’t, then we don’t do it.” When presented with the request, Williams balked. Though he was impressed by their work, he wasn’t ready to fork over such a large chunk of cash. The deal was over. Clearly, id thought, he just didn’t get what they were doing. He didn’t understand the potential of Wolfenstein 3-D. If he had, he would have immediately handed over the cash. It was a disappointment, not so much because they missed out on the money but because their hero and his company had let them down. This game was going to change things, they knew; there was nothing on a computer like it. Fuck Sierra and their loser programmers, Romero told them, id would remain independent. And, independently, they would rule.

Carmack wasn’t biting. It was, he said, “an ugly hack.” This meant that it was an inelegant solution to an unnecessary problem. Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible. The Wolfenstein engine simply wasn’t designed to have walls sliding back into secret rooms. It was designed to have doors slide open and shut, open and shut. It was a matter of streamlining. The simpler Carmack kept his game, the faster the world would move, therefore, the deeper the immersion.

“How about just this one thing? Put push walls there and we’ll be happy. We’ll put ‘em fucking everywhere.” Carmack still said no. It was, notably, the first time since they had begun that the team experienced creative conflict.

They decided to include a screen at the beginning of the game that would say, “This game is voluntarily rated PC-13: Profound Carnage.” Though tongue-in-cheek, it was the first voluntary rating of a video game.

With the game nearing completion, there was one major issue left unresolved: the push walls. Romero and Tom figured it was worth one last try and asked Carmack to put them in. To their surprise, he spun around in his chair and said it was already done. Carmack, in the end, agreed that it was, as he was fond of saying, the Right Thing to Do. Secrets were fun. Tom and Romero were right.

“Who knows?” Tom said. “If gamers like this, Wolfenstein might do twice as well as Keen.” Keen was currently number one on the shareware market.

They really had no idea what they would make. Keen was bringing in about $30,000 per month; they expected, at best, to double that. Wolf, after all, was still being distributed through the relative underworld of shareware catalogs and BBSs, without advertising.

The game had cost, if one considered id’s only overhead—the rent of the apartments and their $750 per month salaries—roughly $25,000 to make. The check was for $100,000. And this reflected only the first month.

…not long after Wolfenstein came out, the guys at id booted up a modified version. It seemed the same except for one notable difference. The music had been replaced by the “I Love You, You Love Me” theme song from the children’s show Barney. And instead of killing the SS boss at the end of the episode, players had to destroy the smiling purple dinosaur. Carmack and Romero couldn’t have been more pleased.

Despite having turned id away when they tried to sell Nintendo on a PC version of Mario, the company had changed its tune. Id was paid $100,000 to port Wolfenstein for the Super Nintendo machine. But Nintendo had one condition: tone the game down. Nintendo was a family system, and they wanted a family version of the game. This meant, first of all, getting rid of the blood. Second, they didn’t like the fact that players could shoot dogs. Why not substitute something else, Nintendo suggested, like rats? This being Nintendo, id agreed.

Doom

Carmack, of course, had a long history with demons. There were the demons of Catholic school, the demons Romero had summoned in their Dungeons and Dragons game, the demons who’d destroyed the D&D world. Now it was time for them to make another appearance.

All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks. Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world. “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”

Sure Scott was their friend, and he’d given them their start, but now he was unnecessary. Why give up 50 percent of their sales when they could do the self-publish completely on their own?

The only dissonant voice was Carmack’s. In an increasingly stark opposition to Romero, Carmack expressed a minimalist point of view with regard to running their business. As he often told the guys, all he cared about was being able to work on his programs and afford enough pizza and Diet Coke to keep him alive. He had no interest in running a big company. The more business responsibilities they had—things like order fulfillment and marketing—the more they would lose their focus: making great games.

Scott took the news in stride. In fact, he had suspected for some time that id would jump ship. He felt grateful that the relationship had lasted as long as it did.

Apogee’s own title, Duke Nukem, was number one on the shareware charts, right above Wolfenstein, with a sequel on the way. Though Scott didn’t want to lose id, he was confident he’d survive.

Scott Miller wasn’t the only one to go before id began working on Doom. Mitzi would suffer a similar fate. Carmack’s cat had been a thorn in the side of the id employees, beginning with the days of her overflowing litter box back at the lake house. Since then she had grown more irascible, lashing out at passersby and relieving herself freely around his apartment. The final straw came when she peed all over a brand-new leather couch that Carmack had bought with the Wolfenstein cash. Carmack broke the news to the guys. “Mitzi was having a net negative impact on my life,” he said. “I took her to the animal shelter. Mmm.” “What?” Romero asked. The cat had become such a sidekick of Carmack’s that the guys had even listed her on the company directory as his significant other—and now she was just gone? “You know what this means?” Romero said. “They’re going to put her to sleep! No one’s going to want to claim her. She’s going down! Down to Chinatown!” Carmack shrugged it off and returned to work. The same rule applied to a cat, a computer program or, for that matter, a person. When something becomes a problem, let it go or, if necessary, have it surgically removed.

Though Romero was somewhat supportive at first, Carmack had other ideas. “Story in a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

He didn’t want to do another game consisting of levels and episodes. Instead, he said, “We’ve got to make this one contiguous world, a seamless world.” Rather than running through a door, say, and having an entire new level load up, the player would have a sense of invisibly progressing through one massive space.

It was clear that Doom would look like no other game. All the features Carmack had experimented with in the Shadowcaster engine were coming to life.

Romero immediately saw the potential in Carmack’s technology, potential that Carmack was, by his own admission, not capable of envisioning himself. And because Romero was a programmer, he could speak to Carmack in a language he understood, translating his own artistic vision into the code Carmack would employ to help bring it to life.

Every decision he made was based on how he could best show off Carmack’s technology. Carmack couldn’t have been happier; what more could someone want, after all, than to be both appreciated and celebrated? Romero was just as energized; with Carmack’s innovations, he too could reach new heights.

Carmack casually announced that he was no longer interested in pursuing a seamless world for Doom. The game could return to a more traditional level design. “But I’ve spent the last two months writing a design document based entirely on that seamless world you wanted!” Tom exclaimed. Carmack’s remark meant that Tom had to revise everything he’d done. “This Doom Bible is not helping us get the game done,” Carmack said. Id had never written down anything in the past, why start now? Doom didn’t need a back story. It was a game about fight or flight. The player just needed to be scared all the time; he didn’t need to know why. Carmack told Tom to drop the Bible and start playing around with the technology, like Romero was doing. “I’m still working on this technology,” he explained, “but please experiment. Figure out what can be done with this.”

Id hated Myst. It had none of the elements they liked: no real-time interaction, no pace, no fear, no action. If Myst was like Shakespeare, Doom was going to be Stephen King.

…the game turned out Romero’s stepfather, John Schuneman. On a trip to Dallas, Schuneman sat across the table from Romero at a dinner at Outback Steakhouse and, for the first time, opened his heart. “You know, I’ve been a bear sometimes,” he said, “but I’m a man, and I remember telling you if you were going to make your mark you had to do business applications. Well, I want you to know that I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. I think this is great. And I want you to know I was wrong.” Romero accepted the apology. Times were moving on, and there was no reason to hold a grudge. Doom was about to be finished. The best was yet to come.

Deathmatch

Oh my God, he thought, no one has ever seen that in a game. Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer. Now gamers could play against spontaneous human beings—opponents who could think and strategize and scream. We can kill each other! “If we can get this done,” Romero said, “this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!” Carmack couldn’t have said it better himself.

And that was not all, Romero realized. Since they could have four people in a game at one time, why not have them playing cooperatively, moving through a level of monsters as a team? Carmack said it was possible. Romero couldn’t contain himself. “Don’t tell me you can have a four-people co-op game in here mowing through the monsters?” He gasped. “That is the shit!” Romero paced. This was big—bigger than the Dangerous Dave moment, bigger than anything he’d seen.

What was this? Romero thought. It was like a match, like a boxing match, but the object wasn’t just to knock the other guy out or some wimpy shit like that. This was, like, kill the guy! This was a match to the death. He stopped cold. “This,” he said, “is deathmatch.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doom Launch

The university, like most, had high-speed bandwidth for the time, which meant it could accommodate more users. The plan was that id would upload the shareware on cue, then the gamers could download it and transfer it around the world. So much for high-priced distribution. The gamers would do all the work for id themselves.

There was a problem. The University of Wisconsin FTP site could accommodate only 125 people at any given moment. Apparently, 125 gamers were waiting online. Id couldn’t get on.

After a half hour, the final bit of Doom data made its way to Wisconsin. The moment it did, ten thousand gamers swamped the site. The weight of their requests was too much. The University of Wisconsin’s computer network buckled. David Datta’s computer crashed. “Oh my God,” he stammered to Jay over the phone. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Neither had the world.

The success of the Sega version had dealt a staggering blow to Nintendo, which had demanded that the developer of the game, Acclaim, remove the controversial “death moves” to adhere to the company’s family values. By choosing to release the blood-and-guts version, Sega became the new must-have system, racking up nearly 15 million units in sales. Nintendo’s squeaky clean perch, for the first time in the industry’s history, was gone.

After much debate and media fanfare, the hearings ended at 1:52 p.m. on December 9. Senator Lieberman declared that the video game industry had one year to develop some kind of voluntary ratings system or the government would step in with its own council. He would call a follow-up meeting in February to determine how the publishers and developers were coming along. The gamers had been warned. It was time to change their ways. The next day, id Software released Doom.

Without an ad campaign, without marketing or advance hype from the mainstream media, Doom became an overnight phenomenon in an online domain that, as fate would have it, was simultaneously beginning to explode.

Even though only an estimated 1 percent of people who downloaded shareware bought the remaining game, $100,000 worth of orders were rolling in every day. Id had once joked in a press release that they expected Doom to be “the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.” The prophecy was true everywhere, it seemed, including their own.

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.”

Like any good rock stars, the company had an air of controversy. Because of the violence, China was considering banning Doom; Brazil, in fact, would later outlaw the game. Even Wal-Mart, which would be the major retail outlet for Doom II’s release, was beginning to balk at the content.

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.

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.

Romero the Rock Star

“We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” the gamers chanted, bowing at Romero’s feet.

Though few if any of the gamers had seen pictures of Romero, they figured he was the guy wearing the black T-shirt with the militaristic Doom logo on the front and the bold white words “Wrote It” on the back. The shirt was Romero’s own modification. After id had printed up a bunch of promotional tees, he suggested they add the phrase “Wrote It” for their own. He even sent his mother a Doom shirt with the words “My Son Wrote It” on the back.

Romero had taken to wearing the “Wrote It” shirt everywhere—around the office, around town, around gaming conventions. The shirt had a Moses-like effect. Gamers would spot him in the shirt and do a celebrity double take, parting as he moved through the crowd.

Gamers began not only asking for autographs but literally falling to their knees and echoing the “we’re not worthy!” refrain that Saturday Night Live characters Wayne and Garth bestowed upon rock royalty. The other guys at id couldn’t believe it. In fact, they were embarrassed by it: We aren’t Metallica, we’re gamers.

But he didn’t look at the bowing gamers as his minions. He saw them as his peers, his friends. Here were all these people, he thought as he looked down on their bowing skulls, who loved games as much as he did.

When the press wanted to strut out one of the Doom gods, one of the guys who Wrote It, Romero fit the bill. And as Carmack, Adrian, and the rest readily acknowledged, Romero was good at it—funny, likable, bouncing off the walls with energy. He had been the company’s biggest cheerleader from the moment he saw the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement demo. When he hyped the company, it wasn’t merely the hype of an owner, it was the hype of id’s biggest fan.

“We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy,” the gamers cooed to John Romero or, as he was lately referring to himself, God. Romero had accepted the divine moniker as a tongue-in-cheek descriptor of himself in his .plan file, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. As far as the press and fans were concerned, Romero was a rock god.

Carmack’s Focus

But for Carmack it wasn’t the cash that was intriguing, it was the opportunity to get back into the trenches. This was what he truly loved: the work, the rolling up of the sleeves, the challenging of his intellect.

Nothing pleased him quite like sharpening his chops with low-level programming work. He would need the skills, he knew, when he went off to create his next big game engine.

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.

Carmack began the project as he often did, by reading as much research material as he could gather. He paid thousands of dollars for textbooks and papers, but everything was purely academic. There was no such thing as a computer program that could create an interactive, real-time, fast-action, 3-D gaming world. To create such an experience would tax not only every ounce of his skills but every drop of power a modern PC could muster.

When Abrash mentioned how after a project he always wondered if he could do anything quite as good again, Carmack narrowed his brow and said, “I never wonder that. Mmm.”

Gates had caught wind of the id deal and wanted to talk. Abrash was shocked; a meeting with Gates was like a meeting with the Pope. Gates was aware of id.

Abrash chose Carmack over Gates. The potential at id was too great, he thought; he wanted to have a front-row seat to see that breakthrough virtual world, that networked 3-D world, evolve. Furthermore, he was touched by the subtext of Carmack’s invitation. Carmack seemed lonely, Abrash thought, like he didn’t have anyone who appreciated the beauty of his ideas.

More and more, Carmack wanted to grab his laptop and disappear into a hotel room in some strange state. All he wanted to do was code. That was all he had ever wanted. The problems at id, he thought, were precisely the kinds of problems that he could avoid by keeping the company small, the team tight. “For any given project,” he posted in his .plan file online, “there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for id is very small.” With Romero gone, Carmack’s life could aspire to the elegance of his code: simple, efficient, lean. This was how he would lead his company. This was how he would make his games. He would not succumb to internal pressures or grand aspirations that would lead to infinite delays. He would deliver. And on December 9, 1997, he did just that.

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.

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…

I wind up catagorizing [sic] periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time.

Open Source Philosophy

Al had never seen a side scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.” Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.”

All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to his life: writing code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he couldn’t solve a problem without infringing on someone’s patents, he would be very unhappy living there.

“If you guys ever apply for software patents,” Carmack barked, “I quit, that’s it, end of discussion.”

Carmack—long an advocate of giving away source code for the greater good of the technology—seemed almost disdainful of Microsoft’s proprietary stance.

The Growing Rift

But while he had been here, he was beginning to notice, Romero was gone: deathmatching, doing interviews, corresponding with fans online. Something was changing, slipping away. And the work, Carmack thought, was beginning to suffer. Doom II was falling behind schedule. While Romero was out being the company rock star, the levels that he had promised to create were not getting done.

Romero had his explanation—the levels he made simply took more time. But Carmack suspected something else: Romero was losing his focus.

Romero had approached Carmack at one point with the idea to milk the Doom engine for all it was worth. “Let’s make some more games using our technology,” he said. “Let’s get some stuff out there because we can get some money off of this. And Raven’s a good group that would be perfect for licensing the engine and making a great game that we can publish.” Carmack agreed but without enthusiasm. How much bigger did they need to get?

This night in Carmack’s office, Romero spelled out his new life code: It was time to enjoy id’s accomplishments. No crunch mode. No more bloodshot nights. “No more death schedules,” he happily said. Carmack remained quiet. The cursor on his monitor pulsed. In the past, Romero would have stayed here by his side, experimenting with the engine on screen, testing bugs until the sun came up. Tonight, Carmack watched the guy in the “Wrote It” shirt walk out the door.

American wanted to appease Carmack, so he said, “Yeah, I think Romero’s slacking off too.” As Carmack listened, his mood turned. Who did American think he was? He was no Romero. Carmack thought Romero, despite his flaws, was still the best level designer at the company. His levels were the best ones in Doom, and the best ones in Doom II. There was no reason he couldn’t still be the best one for Quake. “Romero is a really strong finisher,” Carmack said, “and until you see it, you’re not going to understand.”

Carmack’s technology was getting more complicated and, as a result, taking longer to produce. Why not use that time to pursue other projects? Id didn’t have to just be a company, it could be a gaming empire. Though Carmack had been skeptical, Romero felt that Heretic’s success had proven his vision. As the Doom II phenomenon grew, the obvious way to build the company was to release more Doom product. The answer: cash in on the Doom mods.

The guys at id responded by resenting both Romero and Carmack. Romero was off being a rock god. Carmack was off being a tech god. And everyone else was left out to dry. Something had to change. Months were passing, and Carmack’s engine was nowhere close to being done. The Wolfenstein engine had taken only a couple of months. Doom had taken six. Already Quake’s engine was passing a half year of development with no end in sight. Forget about the promised release date of Christmas 1995, they resolved. From now on if people wanted to know the completion date of an id game, the reply was “When it’s done!”

Their attitude was starting to piss him off. So what if he was going home at 7:00 p.m.? He had a wife. He was building a home. He was making a life. And he deserved it. Now that id finally had some more employees to take up the slack, he should be able to take it easier. If the company were hurting, he could understand the complaints. But the company was doing well, in no small part thanks to his multiple projects. And if he wasn’t going to oversee these projects, who was?

…despite his best efforts, Carmack for the first time in his life felt like nothing was falling into place. Quake was requiring him essentially to reinvent everything. Little from Doom could be extended into Quake’s 3-D world. Doom supported four players in deathmatch in somewhat tricky network mode, but Quake would support sixteen people easily over the Internet. Doom had a limited three-dimensional perspective, but Quake would deliver full-blown immersion, allowing players to look in any direction and see a convincing virtual world. The most frustrating consequence was his engine’s inability to draw a complete visible world or, in technical terms, a potentially visible set. As a result, the world of Quake was filled with holes. Carmack would be running down a hallway of the game only to find it abruptly end in a hideous blue void.

“You always leave early,” Carmack said one evening as Sandy was walking out the door. Sandy was stunned; he was putting in eleven-hour days at least, but his days started at 9:00 a.m., whereas Carmack didn’t even get in the office until 4:00 in the afternoon. “I don’t leave early,” he said. “You’re just not here when I’m here.”

He began firing off disciplinary e-mails. First, he banned deathmatching in the office. Then he sent out grades. Everyone in the company was given a letter grade based on his performance: Sandy got a D, Romero a C.

One night he dragged his desk outside his office and planted himself to work in the hallway—the better to keep an eye on everyone around him. Employees began living in fear of their jobs and staying later and later, trying to keep up with Carmack’s relentless pace.

One afternoon Carmack was sitting in his office when he heard a woman’s voice down the hall asking if someone had ordered a pizza. Romero replied, “No, I didn’t order a pizza.” She asked again, “Did you order a pizza?” Someone else said, “Uh, no.” Carmack heard his door open. “Did you order a pizza?” the woman asked. He spun around to see an attractive young woman, topless, carrying a pizza box. The stripper was a practical joke arranged by Mike Wilson in an attempt to lighten the mood. “No,” Carmack told her flatly, “I didn’t order a pizza”; then he too went back to work. “Boy,” the stripper said, “you guys are boring as hell!” Then she walked out the door.

All Carmack wanted was to be left alone to work or, even better, just be cast adrift, left as a hermit. The only person who had any empathy for him, it seemed, was Romero. One night Romero pulled him aside. “Dude, I know you’re being hard on yourself,” he said, “but you can’t be superhuman.”

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!

“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.

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.

The Split

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.

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.

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.

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.”

At 5:00 p.m. he tapped the button on his keyboard and sent Quake to the world. It felt weird, he thought, that none of the other guys were here with him, but it all added up. They weren’t gamers. They didn’t even play games anymore. They were broken.

The next day at id, Romero was beckoned to the conference room. Carmack, Adrian, and Kevin sat around the table. Adrian stared at the floor. Kevin was silent. Carmack finally spoke. “We’re still not happy with how everything’s going, you know,” he said. He reached for a piece of paper and handed it to Romero. “This is your resignation. You can sign it.” Romero, despite all the warnings, all his plans, felt nothing but shock. “Wait,” he said, “don’t you mean a year ago that I wasn’t working? Because these last seven months I’ve been killing myself! I’ve been killing myself to make Quake!” “No,” Carmack said, “you’re not doing your work! You’re not living up to your responsibilities. You’re hurting the project. You’re hurting the company. You’ve been poisonous to the company, and your contribution has been negative over the past couple years. You needed to do better and you didn’t. Now you need to go! Here’s a resignation and here’s a termination! You’re going to resign now!” I don’t want to be here, Adrian thought, staring more deeply into the carpet, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here. Despite the fact that both Carmack and Romero were each somewhat justified, he knew there was no way out. But then everything stopped. Romero fell quiet. Deep inside him, the bit began to flip, as it had so many times in his life: he would not let this get him down just like he hadn’t let anything else—his father, his stepfather, his own broken families, and now his own broken company. I was making plans to go start a company with Tom anyway, he reminded himself. I guess I’ll go now. He wasn’t bowing out from a fight, he was starting his new life. Romero signed the form, handed it to Carmack, and headed out.

The only place that wasn’t in the throes of Quake deathmatch as 1997 arrived, it seemed, was a tiny company in Texas: id Software. No one was screaming or cursing, or smashing keyboards into the ground. With the renovations complete, the war room was divided into a suite of small private offices. The pool table had been sold, the Foosball shipped away. Everything was, if not respectable, respectably quiet. And everyone in the company knew why: John Romero—Ace Programmer, Current Rich Person, Deathmatch Surgeon—was gone.

Carmack didn’t take into account that he had let go more than just John Romero, American thought. He had let go the soul of any video game company: the fun.

Kevin and Adrian were intrigued by the idea but knew it was Carmack’s decision. Even though they were now the majority owners, there was no question about who was really in charge. Carmack’s technology had long been the heart of id—with Romero out of the way, it was completely unfettered.

Despite Carmack’s battles with his mother’s conservative fiscal ideals, he himself had become quite the conservative businessman. As long as he was in the company, he told Adrian and Kevin, id was going to stay small and let a new publisher, like Activision, handle their next game.

Before long, id began to hemorrhage employees.

The gaming community, already reeling from the split of Carmack and Romero, became ablaze with speculation until Carmack finally addressed them in an unusually personal and lengthy e-mail interview. “Lots of people will read what they like into the departures from id,” he wrote, “but our development team is at least as strong now as it has ever been. Romero was pushed out of id because he wasn’t working hard enough… . I believe that three programmers, three artists, and three level designers can still create the best games in the world… . We are scaling back our publishing biz so that we are mostly just a developer. This was allways [sic] a major point of conflict with Romero—he wants an empire, I just want to create good programs. Everyone is happy now.”

Ion Storm

Romero was on a mission. After years of feeling repressed by Carmack’s shackles, he was finally free to pursue his vision of what a game, a game company, and, ultimately, a life could be. Not only was that vision big but it was everything that id Software was not. “At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls,” Romero lamented. “It was the whole Carmack idea of ‘I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair’ instead of ‘Okay we’ve got a lot of money, why not make it a really bad-ass office?’ ” Romero’s new office wouldn’t only be a fun place to work, it would be where a gamer could show the press, family, and friends that games had built an empire and that the empire would be the ultimate place to make more games.

The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition. It was also expensive: $15 per square foot, or roughly $350,000 per month.

No more, Romero said, eyes gleaming. “This is amazing. There is nothing like this. This is it,” he declared. “This is a game company.” He named it Dream Design.

After the success of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, Romero was not just famous, he was bankable. Publishers flew him and Tom out first-class, putting them up in thousand-dollar-a-night suites in Beverly Hills and whisking them around in limousines to the best restaurants in town. The two felt giddy with the freedom and sense of possibilities. They washed away id’s baggage with champagne.

Romero outlined his ultimate title ever, an epic first-person shooter that would take its name from the mystical sword Carmack had tantalized him with in their Dungeons and Dragons game long ago. It was the weapon for which Romero had risked everything—the dreams of his partners, the fate of Carmack’s game; he had made a deal with the demons to get the sword Daikatana. That time, it led to the end of the world. This time, it would lead to his conquering it.

Anyone who visited the temporary office was treated to the spirit of a real game company. Deathmatching wasn’t just permitted, it was celebrated. At any given moment, Romero and dozens of others would be screaming obscenities while hunting each other down in Quake.

Time named Romero among the country’s top fifty “cyber elite.” Fortune anointed Ion Storm one of the country’s twenty-five “cool companies.”

“Id is a technology-oriented company,” said Mike Wilson, “whereas our main focus is to indulge our artistic sensibilities. At id, by the time the 3-D engine was finished, there wasn’t enough time to work on aspects of the game. We didn’t think this was a well-balanced approach.” Romero agreed. “After I left,” he told Wired News, “the mood at id turned dark and gloomy… . No more plans to expand the company; no one to confront Carmack on important issues. I want to create more types of games with no limits on creativity, and I want as many resources (i.e., people) as I need to get the job done. That is why I left.”

Every day, it seemed, someone from the office would wander in with some new outrage Romero had told the press. It was bad enough that he kept deriding id as an out-of-touch technology company. Worse, the id guys thought he was claiming sole credit for their success. Even Romero’s official press release broadly credited him with being “responsible for the programming, design, and project management of the [id’s] games.”

Carmack, up until this point, had stayed aloof. But as the competitive bile built in the office, even he felt himself getting swept up in the fervor. So, in what he described as “an experiment in mood manipulation,” Carmack decided to feel what it was like to take the gloves off. He chose quite a forum for his first public salvo: Time magazine.

The ad ran in all the major gaming publications in April with simply these words written in black against a red background: “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.” Underneath was the tag line “Suck It Down!”—a phrase Mike had recently trademarked. The ad achieved its intended effect and then some. Gamers were not only provoked, they were pissed. Who did Romero think he was? Had all this fame gotten to his head? But they were willing to give him a chance, to see if his game would really be, as he was promising, the coolest one planet Earth had ever seen. Since it was coming from the ego at id, the Surgeon of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, they certainly wanted to believe. At E3 they were ready for their first chance.

It was subtle, but when Romero saw the dynamic colored lighting, it was a moment just like that one back at Softdisk when he saw Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement for the first time. “Holy fuck,” he muttered. Carmack had done it again. Romero thought Quake II was the best thing he had ever seen on a computer. By programming the game specifically to take advantage of hardware acceleration, Carmack had forged a true thing of beauty. Colored lighting brought the world magnificently to life. This was the next wave, Romero knew; Carmack’s game was also, alas, his competition. The difference between his game and id’s was like that between a piece of paper and a color TV set, Romero thought. There’s no way in hell Daikatana can come out against this, not the way this looks. Part of Romero’s license deal with id was that he could upgrade to use their next engine, but he’d never anticipated the leap would be so great. Now he knew he had to scrap all the existing work on Daikatana and redo the game using the Quake II engine. But there was a problem: id’s contract specifically stipulated that a licensee couldn’t use the new engine until id’s game was on the shelves. This meant that Romero would not get the Quake II engine until after Christmas. He would have to finish Daikatana using the existing technology, then spend about a month, he estimated, converting it when he got the Quake II engine. Carmack’s technology had once again forced him to change his plans.

“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.

Romero seemed more interested in playing games and courting the press, they thought, than in telling them what they needed to do to realize his game. And the game, as a result, was feeling further and further from completion. Unlike Romero, most on his staff didn’t like the idea of switching Daikatana to the Quake II technology. In fact, they hated it. Romero seemed to have no idea how much work it was going to take just to implement the bare essentials of his four-hundred-page Daikatana design document.

“Bodies plus manpower,” he said, was going to be the formula of success. The company already had eighty people, and it was still growing. With all those people at work, of course the work would get completed. Just look at what we did at id with barely thirteen guys! Eidos had no choice but to take his word, since he was managing the development of the game without intervention on their part.

After less than a year, Eidos’s original $13 million deal—which was supposed to fund all three games—was starting to dwindle away. Eighty people on staff meant eighty salaries and, with two computers per person, 160 state-of-the-art machines with twenty-one-inch monitors. The office renovations were now approaching the $2 million mark. In all, there was no end in sight.

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.

“We heard a rumor,” she said, “that your entire Daikatana team is going to leave tomorrow.” Romero remained defiant. “Fuck them if they’re going to leave,” he said. The next day Romero and Tom were called into the conference room, where they found the Daikatana team waiting. “We can’t keep working under these conditions,” they were told by Will Loconto. “We don’t think this game is ever going to get done, so we’re going to go and start our own company.” Romero wandered back through the maze of cubicles and sat down at his desk, where he would remain long after the sun came down on the glass tower. Everything is bullshit! he thought. Why did I hire these people? It shouldn’t have been this big. This was too many people, too much money. It should have been just me and Tom and a small team of people with a common goal. It should have been like the way it was when we weren’t biz guys. We were just gamers.

The dream of the Big Company seemed to be proving too big after all, too loose, too high, too ambitious. All those things Carmack had berated him about—the hyperbole, the lack of focus, the dangers of a large team—had come back with a vengeance. Even Eidos, Romero’s publisher, agreed. In return for their sinking by now nearly $30 million into the company, Romero had to change his ways once and for all. As the Eidos president, Rob Dyer, put it: “Shut up and finish the game.”

Shawn, like the others on the Daikatana team, was deep into crunch mode. Despite Romero’s pledge years before to Carmack that his death schedule days were over, he had upped the team’s core hours to include weekends; the staff was now elbowing for bed space in the lounge.

Romero had even taped a sign to the office’s most popular arcade game that said, “No More Tekken 3 Until Daikatana Ships!”

Post-Romero id

The development of every id game began with Carmack telling the other guys what his next graphic engine would be capable of doing. When Carmack first described his vision of the Quake technology, Romero nearly combusted. They had talked about doing Quake, after all, for years. The idea came straight out of their old Dungeons and Dragons games; Quake was the character Carmack had invented who possessed a powerful hammer, capable of demolishing buildings, as well as a supernatural conjuring object, Hellgate Cube, floating above his head.

Not only would Quake be id’s most ambitious game yet but it could be the world’s.

Through Doom, Romero had become the ideal collaborator for Carmack, someone who could sit by his side and knowledgably experiment with the new technology. With Quake, Carmack realized, he wanted both a programmer who could work with his engine and someone who could experiment with his early work. Romero had once assumed both roles. With the distractions of Doom’s success, it seemed to Carmack, he would assume neither.

Word had it that that there were 10 million copies of the shareware installed on computers—more than the company’s new operating system, Windows 95. Microsoft had spent millions to promote the Windows 95 release in August 1995, blanketing the country with ads that asked “Where do you want to go today?” Gates wondered how this little company in Mesquite—the same one that had seduced Michael Abrash—was outperforming him with some game.

…there was no technical solution that would allow a game in all its multimedia splendor to play safely and effectively on a variety of machines. As a result, game developers were steering clear of Windows in favor of DOS, the old operating system that Microsoft was trying to put out to pasture. If Microsoft was going to convince the masses to upgrade to Windows 95, it needed the game developers to come on board.

The age of Windows and DirectX had begun.

“So what do I need to do for this video?” Gates asked. Alex took a deep breath. Then he handed Gates a shotgun.

But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone’s relief, they burst out laughing.

It was time for the main event. The crowd cheered as footage of Doom’s familiar corridors began to roll. But it was not the Doom soldier chasing the demons, it was … Bill Gates. Microsoft’s fearless leader was superimposed running inside the game in a long black trench coat and brandishing a shotgun. Gates stopped running and addressed the crowd about the wonders of Windows 95 as a gaming platform, a platform that could deliver cutting-edge multimedia experiences like Doom. But no sooner had he begun than an imp monster from the game jumped out and, through a voice-over, asked Gates for an autograph. Gates responded by raising his shotgun and blowing the beast into gory chunks. “Don’t interrupt me while I’m speaking,” he said, then finished his speech.

This is it, Alex thought, I’m going to be fired.

In Romero’s mind Quake was coming along just fine. Carmack was busy working on what he knew would be the next killer game program. There was no reason to rush Engine John. The rest of the company had to just be patient and get ready to throw on the great game design. The best thing they could do was find ways to be productive. Romero chose to spend this time by immersing himself in side projects that he felt would have direct benefit to the company.

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.

“So,” he said, “you’re Mormon?” “Yep,” Sandy replied. “Well,” Romero said with a chuckle, “at least you’re like not a Mormon that keeps pumping out tons of kids and stuff.” Sandy stopped typing. “Actually, I’ve got five kids.” “Oh, okay,” Romero stammered. “But that’s not like ten or anything. But you know five’s a lot but, um, at least you’re not a really hard-core card-carrying Mormon.” “Oh, I got my Mormon card right here!” Sandy pulled it out. “Well, at least you don’t wear those garments and stuff, right?” Sandy lifted his shirt. “Got my garments on right here!” “Okay, okay,” Romero said, “I’m going to shut up.” “Look,” Sandy said, “don’t worry. I have no problems with the demons in the game. They’re just cartoons. And, anyway,” he added, smiling, “they’re the bad guys.”

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.

This was Carmack’s company now more than ever. Quake III would be Carmack’s game.

“I bought my first Ferrari after the success of Wolfenstein 3-D,” Carmack told the press. “Doom and Quake have bought three more. Four Ferraris is too many for me. Rather than sell off one of them or stick it in a warehouse, I’m going to give it back to the gamers that brought it to me in the first place. The king of this Quake deathmatch is going to get a really cool crown.”

Carmack walked onstage and handed Thresh the keys. “So how are you planning on getting the car home?” he asked. “I don’t know,” Thresh said. “I guess I’ll ship it.” Carmack came back a half hour later and handed Thresh five thousand dollars in cash to cover the costs.

By the summer of 1997, Dallas had become to gamers what Seattle was to musicians in the early 1990s; id was Nirvana. In the five years since the Two Johns had rolled into town with a Pac-Man machine in the back of their truck, the game developer community there had more than tripled. The growth extended to Austin, where just as many were popping up around Richard Garriott’s flagship company, Origin. Time called the Texas gamers the “New Cowboys.” Wired called them “Doom babies.” The Boston Globe dubbed the state’s video game renaissance “the new Hollywood.”

Id did much to increase the community by licensing out its technology. In addition to Ion Storm, other companies were now paying close to $250,000, as well as royalties, to use the Quake engine.

Valve, a Seattle-based company founded by some former Microsoft employees, had licensed the Quake engine to make Half-Life, a game that had previewed at E3 to a favorable response.

“Oh my god. Quake 2 is the most impressive game I’ve ever played on a computer… . What game have you played lately that was better than Quake 2? I predict the answer is none.” Among the most gushing reviews—and there were many—of Quake II was this one from Romero.

In light of the success of Half-Life, a shooter in which story was everything, the free-for-all plan sounded heretical, if not out of touch. Others bristled at the notion that id’s next title would be, essentially, its most elitist ever: not just suggesting that a player had a high-end machine but requiring it by making the game compatible only for players who had 3-D graphics cards installed.

Inspired by Half-Life, everyone, it seemed, wanted a more ambitious design. But no matter what they came up with, Carmack shot it down. For Adrian, it was just more of the same: further proof that after all these years since their lake house in Shreveport, id had become Carmack’s company. Adrian felt frustrated, wanting to do something, anything, that was different. It was a criticism that was starting to bubble up in the community as well: id was rehashing the same game over and over without any consideration for story and design. But Adrian resigned himself to go along. What was he going to do, he thought, fire John Carmack?

Carmack grew increasingly frustrated. Here he was, creating the most powerful graphics engine the company had ever seen, and no one on his staff seemed to be taking advantage of the opportunities. No one was pushing the technology, pushing the design, pushing him. Though Carmack never came out and said that he pined for the days of Romero’s giddy experimentations, it was clear to him that something was missing. The magic of the self-motivated id Software team was gone.

Graeme discovered that the egos at id were stronger than he’d surmised. Though people felt like they were working without direction, at the same time no one wanted really to be told what to do.

Carmack had decided, for the first time, to delegate the job of creating these bots to another programmer in the company. But he failed to follow up. Once again, Carmack incorrectly assumed that everyone was as self-motivated and adept as he was. He was wrong.

…id employees got their first look at Unreal Tournament, a new game by Epic, the creators of the 1998 shooter Unreal. Epic had quietly become formidable competition.

Unreal was a surprise hit, bringing, like Half-Life, more of a cinematic story feel to the genre. But their new game took id by even greater surprise. Unreal Tournament was a deathmatch-only multiplayer game, just like Quake III. Epic, some thought, had flat out stolen id’s idea. They resented the fact that Carmack, as usual, had been so open about the company’s direction in his .plan file.

By the end of the project, Graeme wasn’t producing, he was programming.

New Beginnings

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.

By the end of 2000, Carmack didn’t just have a new game release to celebrate, he had a marriage: his own. A couple of years earlier he had received an e-mail from a young businesswoman and Quake fan in California named Anna Kang. She wanted to start an all-female Quake tournament. Carmack said that’d be fine, but she’d probably get only twenty-five people. She got fifteen hundred. He respected anyone who could prove him wrong. Who was Anna Kang?

Carmack ended up, with his staff’s approval, offering Anna a job in business development so that she could have a reason to move to Dallas. She came, but the days at id wouldn’t last. Her relationship with Carmack would. They wed in Hawaii in front of a small crowd of family and friends. It was one of the only vacations Carmack had taken in his life. And, like the other times, he brought his laptop. There was work to be done.

In Carmack’s opinion, Quake III was—like all his other games—ancient history compared with what he was ready for now.

Upon returning to Dallas, he decided to unveil his new direction to the rest of the team. “We should focus on doing a generalized infrastructure,” he told them, “and doing a game as one element of this generalized infrastructure which can have a lot of the 3-D web environment that people always are thinking about and wishing about. We can do it now.” This was it—the culmination of his work, his engineering, the dreams of science-fiction writers from Aldous Huxley to William Gibson. The Holodeck, Cyberspace, the Metaverse, the Virtual World, it had been called by many names, but the technology was never ready to bring a true glimpse of that place—however primordial—to life. That time, Carmack concluded, had come. He looked around the conference room and waited for the response. All he got were blank stares. “But we’re a game company,” Adrian said, “we make games.” Carmack sighed. He knew that despite his power and prestige, he couldn’t do this alone. He needed an experimenter who could use his technology to paint the new world. He needed a person who was so blown away he couldn’t speak, someone who committed every cell of his body to bringing Carmack’s visions to life, someone who understood that this was the coolest fucking thing planet Earth had ever seen! He needed Romero. The meeting was done.

While the prospect of Quest became all the more grim in Carmack’s mind, he hatched a plan to get his way once and for all. He walked into Paul’s office one night and said, “Trent Reznor wants to do sounds for Doom.” “Doom?” Paul said. “We’re not doing Doom, we’re doing Quest.” “Well, I decided that I want to do Doom. Are you on board?” “Fuck yeah!” Paul said. Tim agreed. The next day Carmack walked into Kevin and Adrian’s office and said, “I want to do Doom. Paul wants to do Doom. Tim wants to do Doom. If we don’t do Doom, I’m leaving.” Then he turned and walked out the door. Kevin and Adrian couldn’t believe it. But what could they do, fire Carmack? What was id without the Whiz Kid? They discussed the possibility of splitting the company in two teams or maybe, as Adrian thought, just throwing in the towel altogether. Carmack had threatened to quit before. And Adrian was beginning to feel like maybe the time had really come, maybe Carmack was through. Later he approached him and asked what was preventing him from just walking out the door once they started working on a new project. Carmack said, “Nothing.”

The office was bigger, cleaner, but minimalist as ever. Carmack sat before a large monitor angled in the corner. Through the blinds, he could keep a watchful eye on his Ferrari out back. “Hey,” Romero said. “Hey,” Carmack said. Romero told him the reason for his visit and gave a brief pitch: “How would you feel about me licensing the Quake name to develop a game based on the franchise but set in a persistent world?” Carmack nodded. “Sure, why not.”

It all started with a house. Romero knew that he wanted a company like the early id, something intimate, something communal. And for that he needed just the right environment, like the lake house in Shreveport.

It was the kind of house he had dreamed of when he was a boy. Now he would do what his own father never could—sit down and play games with his sons when they came to town. He could even play with his biological dad, Alfonso Antonio Romero, for whom, after he fell on hard times, Romero had bought a house not far away in town.

But these were all just grand designs, and their new company, Monkeystone Games, was going to be everything but. This time it would be something small, something personal, something fun. “It will be just good friends,” Romero said, arriving home, “good friends making games.”

Rockets & Legacy

Not long after the Doom III announcement hit, the rumor in Silicon Alamo started to spread: this would be Carmack’s last game. And there seemed to be increasing evidence—tension between the owners and, more important, Carmack’s new hobby, building rocket ships. Real rocket ships.

Rockets weren’t just arbitrary things based on a market or a sanctioning body of rules or regulations. Here the goalposts were set by the way nature worked. It wasn’t him against the computer, it was him against gravity. Carmack bought thousands of dollars’ worth of rocket science research books and got to work.

Carmack, the programmer who had once spent a hundred hours per week hunched over his computer, was now spending nearly half his time with grease and soldering irons.

“There are people who argue that you can just simulate reality,” he said, “but I think there’s value in coming out here and dealing with the wind.”

“In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

This period saw John Carmack elevated to legendary status. His innovations in graphics programming were among the reasons why, as MIT’s Technology Review magazine put it, “video games drive the evolution of computing.” And his philanthropy—including the source code he continued to give away for free online—was surpassed by none. At an annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose, a twenty-nine-year-old Carmack became the third and youngest person ever inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame—the Oscars of the gaming business.

…after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he had achieved an almost Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. “These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,” he said. “I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.”