Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

by David Kushner

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.

In D&D, there was no winning in the traditional sense. It was more akin to interactive fiction.

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.

They didn’t need any help getting motivated, however. Carmack, in particular, seemed almost inhumanly immune to distraction.

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.

Since leaving Softdisk, they had more time to devote to their recreational D&D campaign. It was truly evolving into an alternate world, which, like all fiction, deeply reflected their own. It wasn’t just a game, it was an extension of their imaginations, hopes, dreams. It mattered.

He relished the feeling of creating a place others could explore.

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

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.

“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!”

Within two weeks, Carmack had two computers networked to each other in his office. One represented his first-person point of view, the other represented the other player’s. On cue, he hit the button on his keyboard; his character moved forward on the computer in front of him. He pictured the little packets of data traveling across the network line flowing into the computer across his office, translating instantly into the space marines on screen. The computers were talking to each other. And Carmack knew the result. He glanced over at the computer to the right and saw his character, now represented in third-person, running across that screen. He had made a consensual virtual world, and it was alive. Romero flipped when he came into the office. “Oh my God,” he screamed, “that is sooooo awesome!” He dashed back into his office, and Carmack started the game again, this time with Romero connected from his own machine. Romero watched as the space marine Carmack controlled ran down a hall. Romero chased after him, unleashing a shot from his gun—boom!—sending Carmack flying back through the air in a spray of blood and screams. “Suck it down!” Romero cried. Soon everyone in the company was taking turns in multiplayer mode, chasing each other, hurling off explosions. The office filled with screams, not just digital screams, but real screams, human screams. It was an arena, and they were all in it, competing, running, escaping, killing. They began playing one-on-one matches as well,...

The longer he played, the faster he cruised through the streaming corridors, the more his head would spin. After a few minutes, he would have to lay down on the floor to steady himself. Sometimes, he’d just end up falling asleep. It got to be such a frequent display that, late one night, the rest of the guys took a roll of masking tape and taped a body outline around him.

This wasn’t the first time that America’s political and moral establishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as “Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new corrupter of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; MAD magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons, with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanism, particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock ’n’ roll—dangerous and uncontrolled.

Hours after the game was released, Carnegie-Mellon’s computer systems administrator posted a notice online saying, “Since today’s release of Doom, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt. . . . Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do not play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom in network-mode causes serious degradation of performance for the player’s network and during this time of finals, network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing the game in network-mode. Again, please do not play Doom in network-mode.”

It was also a cash cow. The day after Doom’s release, id saw profit. 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.

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.

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.

The Economist published an essay titled “Doomonomics,” which academically explored how “the drippingly gory computer game took its creators from obscurity to riches. . . . [It’s a tale that] holds a lesson of striking relevance to tomorrow’s information economy.”

In the e-mail, Gates asked Alex, the chief strategist for Microsoft’s graphics division, if he thought he should buy id Software outright. Alex, a large redheaded man with a quick wit and easy laugh, couldn’t help but chuckle. By 1995 everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of id.

The buzzword in the industry was multimedia, and no one had seen a multimedia display for the computer quite as impressive as Doom. Since Microsoft was embarking on a battle to rule the emerging age of multimedia with its new operating system Windows 95, Alex thought it was time to enlist Doom in the fight.

Carmack thought Romero had lost touch with being a programmer. Romero thought Carmack had lost touch as a gamer. Carmack wanted to stay small, Romero wanted to get big.

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.

because two phenomena are both disturbing and coincident in time does not make them causally connected

“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.”

To me, the story of John Carmack and John Romero was a classic American adventure that captured the birth of a new medium and the coming of age of two compelling and gifted young people. By telling it, I hoped to give gamers the respect and understanding they deserved. And I wanted the reader to have a good time.