More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 26 - October 13, 2020
For the programming, there was no one better in Carmack’s mind than the veteran coder Michael Abrash. It was Abrash’s book on power graphics programming for computers that Carmack and Romero had used to learn how to program the graphics for their earlier games.
When he read Snow Crash and the description of the Metaverse, he’d thought, I know how to do 80 percent right now—at least theoretically. There was no question in his mind that he was sitting across from a twenty-four-year-old who had the skills and confidence to make it happen. 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.”
After living with a flurry of stepfathers, American’s mother finally settled on a man who thought he was a woman. One day when American was sixteen, he came home from school to every kid’s nightmare: an empty house. The only things left were his bed, his books, his clothes, and his Commodore 64 computer. His mother had sold the home to pay for two plane tickets and the fee for her boyfriend’s sex change operation. American packed up his computer. He was on his own.
Raven’s game Heretic was doing so well that Romero was already overseeing the sequel, Hexen. He had the big vision in his head: a trilogy of games from Raven based on the Doom engine, concluding with the final project, Hecatomb. He had also begun overseeing a Doom-driven game called Strife by a local group of developers called Rogue Entertainment.
In Quantico, Virginia, in 1995, a project officer in the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office named Scott Barnett created a modification called Marine Doom—complete with realistic military soldiers, barbed-wire fences, and marine logos. The game was perfect for training real-life soldiers in teamwork, Barnett’s supervisors agreed. Barnett contacted id, who gave their blessing, though they thought the idea of someone using their game to train soldiers was a joke. But it was the real deal. The game made its way across the Net and would be used by the marines for years.
D!Zone—a collection of nine hundred user-made Doom mods (which id obviously did not own); the D!Zone CD-ROM had, remarkably, surpassed Doom II to top the PC games sales charts, earning millions of dollars. It was a source of great consternation in the office—this was exactly what people like Kevin Cloud had been afraid would happen. In response, Romero initiated deals with a variety of mod makers to put out id-approved collections called The Master Levels for Doom II as well as one sprawling team project, Final Doom. They also put out a retail version of the shareware product Ultimate Doom.
When pushed at one point to create a design document for Quake, he grudgingly responded with a two-page sketch. The rest thought it was a lazy attempt. But, as Romero was quick to explain, independence had long been id’s modus operandi. They never had a design document, never wrote anything down; the only person who’d tried was his old cohort Tom Hall, and it got him fired.
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!”
Marathon, a Macintosh game from a small company called Bungie.
Check
Doom was featured on television shows like ER and Friends. It was in a Demi Moore movie. It was novelized in a series of books. Hollywood was developing a Doom movie. The marines were making a Doom training mod. Even Nintendo
Check
Alex took a deep breath. Then he handed Gates a shotgun.
!!! A book with this quote can't be bad
Alex St. John, dressed as Satan, was busy chasing Mike Wilson through the red lights and fog. He found him in a corner, sucking down beers with one gamer dressed as Jesus and another as the Pope; Mike and his wife came as the blood-soaked antiheroes of the movie Natural Born Killers.
But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina.
A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the top.
As the lights fell, a video screen lowered above the stage. 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
...more
!!!
Then he spun around in his chair and went back to work, no good-byes, no conversation ender, no nothing. Typical, Sandy thought. Carmack had long behaved this way, unconcerned with the conventional etiquette of how to begin, continue, and conclude a dialogue with another human being.
The most frustrating consequence was his engine’s inability to draw a complete visible world or, in technical terms, a potentially visible set.
Check
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
...more
“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.”
“Okay,” Carmack said, “we can’t put it off any longer.” Shortly after Quake’s release, he sat in a Mexican restaurant called Tia’s having lunch with Adrian and Kevin.
“I’m going to jump on this .plan bandwagon just this once,” he wrote for all the world to read online. “I have decided to leave id Software and start a new game company with different goals. I won’t be taking anyone from id with me.”
“There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects. I can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am trying to acomplish [sic], but all I promise is my best effort.”
Even the actor Robin Williams praised Quake on the David Letterman show.
3Dfx, convinced Carmack to port a version of Quake in a programming language called OpenGL, which could run with its debut line of Voodoo 3-D accelerator cards. Carmack completed the task in a weekend and uploaded the OpenGL version to the Web for free.
!!
Faced with Hiro’s threat, Mishima sends the young warrior on a wild, time-traveling goose chase between Kyoto, ancient Greece, dark-ages Norway, and post-apocalyptic San Francisco.
Sverre Kvernmo, a star mapper from the Doom community, left his home country of Norway to become Romero’s lead level designer. These weren’t hard sacrifices for them to make. “We were all starstruck by the Romero phenomenon,” Sverre said.
!!
The job at id was a dream, Paul thought, when he was presented with the offer. He didn’t know he’d be walking into a war.
Paul noticed that one of Romero’s artists seemed to be using an antiquated program to create his animations. So he came back to id and questioned Ion’s direction in a public .plan file. The comment ignited what became known as the .plan wars.
Colored lighting! Romero couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The setting was a dungeonlike military level, but when the gamer fired his gun, the yellow blast of the ammunition cast a corresponding yellow glow as it sailed down the walls. 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.
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.
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.
In a pinch, Carmack had once called the mayor of Mesquite and asked him if he would shut down the local airport long enough for the company to have a few little drag races. The mayor was happy to oblige.
!!!!
Ion Austin. He set to work on an idea for his own dream product—a sci-fi counterterrorist game that would be a most realistic and gripping immersive simulation. The title was Deus Ex.
when Romero opened the file, he took one look at the code and froze. Oh my God, he thought, what had Carmack done?
He had even bought a special laptop for the occasion: a Dolch portable Pentium II system with full-length PCI slots—just roomy enough for his Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator.
Didn’t know laptops with full length pci existed.
Quake went through many false starts (beam trees, portals, etc) before settling down on its final architecture,
It would probably surprise many classically trained graphics programmers how little I new [sic] about conventional 3-D when I wrote Doom—hell, I had problems properly clipping wall polygons (which is where all the polar coordinate nonsense came from). Quake forced me to learn things right, as well as find some new innovations.
The development cycle of Quake 2 had some moderate learning experiences for me (glquake, quakeworld, radiosity, openGL tool programming, win32,
One guy produced a series of levels that proved unusable. An artist created a graphical icon for an arrow in the game that was a thousand times the appropriate size.
One employee was found alone at his desk, screaming. Romero fired him.
Rather than blame violent media, Jones argued, adults needed to understand the role make-believe violence plays in human development: “Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden . . . is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.”
Researchers since the 1980s had been finding positive effects of video games; a report in the Journal of American Academic Child Psychiatry argued that games not only didn’t inspire aggression, they released it. An academic study in England would find that gamers “seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge similarity with top-level athletes. The skills they learnt on computers seem to transfer to the real world.” In Finland, researchers used computer games to help treat children with dyslexia.
There is not, I submit, a single research study which is even remotely predictive of [events like] the Columbine massacre.” Murderers, after all, had proven that they could find inspiration in anything—the White Album, Taxi Driver, Catcher in the Rye. How many acts of violence had the Bible inspired?
“The real issue should be how teenagers get their hands on machine guns and bombs—not about a Web site and video games.”
It was 1:34 a.m. in Suite 666, days after the Columbine shootings. Carmack sat at his desk behind the black windows in the black night, cursor blinking on his computer, awaiting a response. He thought over his words carefully. Writing his .plan updates was becoming increasingly laborious because, as Carmack knew, everyone seemed to be hanging so much on what he said. “Some of you,” he finally typed, “are busy getting all bent out of shape about this.” Carmack was talking about the gaming community’s reaction to id’s announcement that the first test of their next game, Quake III Arena, would be
...more
Raven, id’s old friends from Wisconsin, showed their violent shooter, Soldier of Fortune, only behind closed doors; the same was true for one of the year’s other hotly anticipated shooters, Kingpin.
One of her greatest role models was the author Ayn Rand; Anna wanted to be a powerful person like Gail Wynand, a character from The Fountainhead. She never felt as fierce as when she played Quake.
Temerararia’s Restaurante and Club,
“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.” Without warning he pressed the launch button, unleashing a thick black trail of smoke with a bang. High above the cows, the rocket soared.
“This was a tragic situation,” a U.S. district judge declared, “but tragedies such as this simply defy rational explanation and the courts should not pretend otherwise.”
