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

by David Kushner

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);

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. Religion, he thought, was irrational. He began challenging his classmates’ beliefs after mass on Wednesdays. On at least one occasion, the other kid left the interrogation in tears.

The book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was a revelation.

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

Shadowforge, his first game, resembled Ultima in many ways but featured a couple of inventive programming tricks,

Carmack was impressed to see a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals, the magazine for hackers, which grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club.

from the challenges of double resolution 16-bit graphics for the Apple II to the nuances of 8086 assembly language. They talked nonstop,

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, the erudite gamer who had played nearly every available title for the PC, had never seen anything like it; here was a chance at being the first. They called the game Slordax; it would be a straightforward shoot-the-spaceships descendant of arcade hits like Space Invaders and Galaga. They had four weeks.

DANGEROUS DAVE IN “COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”

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

Iggy Pop or Dokken playing on the stereo,

“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.

Later he commented to Carmack that Romero was acting strangely, which struck Al as odd since Romero was always so nice. Carmack considered this momentarily, then, as always, blurted out his unedited perception of the truth: “Romero was just being friendly,” Carmack said. “When you turn your back, he hates your guts.”

“A completely new approach to fantasy gaming. You start not as a weakling with no food—you start as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent. You start off with the hammer of thunderbolts, the ring of regeneration, and a trans-dimensional artifact . . . all the people you meet will have their own personalities, lives, and objectives. . . .

The first engine had enabled the primary breakthrough of side-scrolling action; now he wanted to create more elaborate and immersive effects.

It was also the first video game to be banned.

What he and the others preferred was the fast action of arcade games like Defender, Asteroids, and Gauntlet.

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

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.

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!”

Mesquite, as it so happened, had what the guys considered a suitably killer place to live. La Prada Apartments, off Interstate 635,

“How Tough Are You?” Below were four responses; each had an accompanying image of the player’s imagined face, ranging from the hardest (“I Am Death Incarnate”), with the face of a snarling, red-eyed B.J., to the easiest (“Can I Play Daddy?”),

they added taunts that would appear on the screen when the player tried to quit. “Press N for more carnage; Press Y to be a weenie” or “For guns and glory, press N; For work and worry, press Y.”

Most people weren’t protesting much about shooting human beings; they were upset that players could shoot dogs.

In May 1992, when Wolfenstein was released, an author named Neal Stephenson published a book called Snow Crash, which described an inhabitable cyberspace world called the Metaverse. Science fiction, however, wasn’t inspiring Carmack’s progress; it was just his science. Technology was improving. So were his skills.

Evil Dead II and Aliens, horror and hell, blood and science. 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.”

they’d relocated to this suitably dark workplace: a seven-story, black-windowed, cube-shaped building called the Town East Tower.

Why give up 50 percent of their sales when they could do the self-publish completely on their own? Doom would surely be as big as, if not bigger than, Wolfenstein. Jay, Tom, Adrian, and especially Romero—who, from the moment he suggested they leave Softdisk, had always been looking for ways to grow the business—agreed. 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 was continuing to publish many other authors, such as Tim Sweeney, a gifted programmer from Maryland who churned out popular titles under his company, Epic MegaGames. 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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

Instead, Jay—determined to make id’s business style as innovative as its games—focused on setting up the company’s distribution and marketing. He established a toll-free number to field orders and set up a deal with a fulfillment house. Since they were self-publishing Doom, they would be getting twice the earnings they had on Wolfenstein. 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 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 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.”

Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. “After watching these violent video games,” he said, “I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them.” 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.

This sentiment was a long time coming. The roots were in the thirties, when pinball arcades were thought to be havens for hoodlums and gamblers. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia placed a ban on pinball that lasted until the mid-seventies.

countries including Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia not only banned video games but shut down arcades.

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.

“The Plan,” he posted online, “[is] to get the entire world running NeXTSTEP for development, get everyone connected on the Internet, and own a Testarossa TR512.” Romero lashed out at the popular and emerging operating systems. “DOS blows. DOS-Extenders create developer Hell. Windows sux.”

Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.”

He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,”

The Economist published an essay titled “Doomonomics,” which academically explored how “the drippingly gory computer game took its creators from obscurity to riches. .

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.

Though Carmack had considered Romero a better programmer when they met at Softdisk, he’d soon left Romero behind.