Masters of Doom (23 page)

How incredible would it be, Bob and Kee mused, if a gamer could just go out and pick
up a game against random people who were far away—in some other house, some other
room, some other state! What if there could be a computer hub or server that would
turn the game into the virtual equivalent of a pickup basketball game on a neighborhood
court—except that people could play together from anywhere in the world. Problem was,
Doom didn’t work that way, it supported only modem-to-modem play. This meant that,
to compete, one gamer would use a modem to telephone another’s computer; once connected,
they could play against each other. Undaunted, Kee looked over at Bob and said, “You
know, I think that we can get this to play over a phone line.”

“Okay,” Bob said, seeing dollar signs, “you’ve got six weeks. If you get it together,
then I promise to get us an introduction to id Software.” Bob was bluffing. He didn’t
know id from Shinola. But, seeing as that they were Texas boys, he figured they’d
be easy enough to enlist. They weren’t. His calls, like so many others, went unanswered.
Five weeks later, Kee sped from his house on his bike to tell Bob the news. “I’ve
got it!” he said, panting. “Give me ten minutes!”

Bob sat down at his computer while Kee banged away at his keyboard in another room.
Ten minutes later Bob got the signal and booted up the program Kee had created. He
saw a simple little interface that streamlined all the difficulties of multiplayer
action. With this program, anyone could dial up through a phone and connect to a computer
system that hosted the game. Instead of having to be in one place, someone could just
dial a number, join a chat room, then click off to play three other people in Doom.
“Okay,” Kee said, smiling, “now we have to get ahold of id.”

Bob lowered his eyes and broke the news. “Id’s not talking,” he said. “Hell, they
ain’t even answering the phone.” He tried more faxes, letters, e-mails, but nothing
worked.

Just as they were about to lose hope, Bob came across an article about the upcoming
Doom II press event at the Limelight in New York. He called id’s publicity firm. “I’ve
got a big opportunity for id,” he said, “and just
have
to get into the event.” The guy on the phone told him people from all over the world
were trying to get in. Forget about it. But Bob persisted and sweet-talked him down.
“Okay,” the guy finally relented, “if you want to fly up from Houston, I’ll see what
I can do.” Bob hung up the phone and turned to Kee. “We’re going to New York,” he
said.

Kee and Bob bought plane tickets with frequent flier mileage and booked a room at
a Holiday Inn in New Jersey. With their last business in shambles, they were living
off bread crumbs. They banked everything on their new service for Doom, which they
had dubbed the Dial Up Wide Area Network Games Operation, or DWANGO. Hours before
the event, Bob and Kee showed up at the club and met the guy from TSI. “Okay,” he
said hurriedly, handing them two T-shirts, “put these on.”

Bob and Kee squeezed into the small black T-shirts, which had the militaristic Doom
logo on the front and “contestant” on the back. The only way they could get in, the
publicist told them, was to pose as contestants for the Doom deathmatch. Bob and Kee
looked around. Behind them were dozens of skinny guys half their age in the same T-shirts.
Bob gulped. Sure he and Kee had played Doom, but they sucked compared with the hard-core
gamers. Now they were supposed to
play
the game against these champs on a stage
in front of the national press
? They thanked the guy, then snuck across the street to fuel up at a bar.

They stumbled back later to find the TSI guy screaming. “You missed the lineup! Hurry
up. Get inside!” Bob was first up for battle. He got wiped out within minutes. Kee
lost just as quickly. Games done, they went to find id. They ended up tracking down
Jay Wilbur, who looked at these beer-soaked, middle-aged guys in tight contestant
shirts and shrugged them off. “No time, not interested, go away,” he said, and disappeared
into the crowd.

Just as they were moping toward the door, Kee spotted Romero, with his unmistakable
long, dark hair and Doom “Wrote It” T-shirt. They waited nervously for their break,
then closed in. “We made this software!” Kee said eagerly. “You can dial in with your
modem to a server and you can play other people over the modem! Here’s the only disk
we got! Guard it with your life!”

After the party, Romero told Jay about the disk. The DWANGO idea wasn’t breakthrough—id
had thought of it themselves but just hadn’t gotten around to programming it; since
Quake was going to be playable over the Internet, they had figured they would hold
off on creating the multiplayer online feature. Anyway, Jay concurred, he certainly
didn’t want some bozos doing the job, not when they had companies like AOL and Time
Warner calling. “Well,” Romero said, “maybe I’ll take five minutes and see what this
disk does.”

Back home in Texas, Romero popped the disk in his hard drive and dialed up the Houston
number. After his modem whooshed, he saw a message on screen from Kee: “Come on, let’s
try a game.” Next thing he knew, there they were—Kee in Houston, Romero in Dallas—playing
a spontaneous pickup game of Doom II deathmatch. Romero picked up the phone. “That
is fucking cool!” he said. “Cuz my whole thing is, I like staying up late and I want
to play people whenever the fuck I want to and I don’t want to have to wake up my
buddy at three in the morning and go, ‘Hey, uh, wanna get your skull cracked? Heh
heh?’ That’s just not cool. And I want to do it 24/7. At any time. This is it! This
is the thing that you can dial into and just play!”

But Carmack and the other owners weren’t enthused. As far as Carmack was concerned,
this smacked of yet another of Romero’s diversions—like interviews, Raven, deathmatching—to
distract him from the real work at hand, making games. Romero argued that if they
could get online play going and further build the Doom community, it would surely
help grow the company.

After having Jay negotiate a deal for 20 percent of the DWANGO revenues, Romero spent
every night working on the project, which would be released with the shareware of
Heretic—the game Romero had been overseeing for Raven. On December 23, 1994, he phoned
Bob and Kee and said, “I’m fixing to upload this. Do you think you can handle it?
Because when it hits it’s going to overwhelm you guys.” He was right.

News of DWANGO spread immediately through the burgeoning Doom fan base. 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. They had to expand. And expanding
wasn’t that difficult to do. The guts of a DWANGO computer server was simply a computer
and a few dozen modems with phone lines. All they had to do was buy the parts and
strike deals with people across the country who would host the machines in their own
homes or offices.

Bob, Kee, and Mike Wilson, a former daiquiri bar manager and childhood buddy of Adrian
Carmack’s, went on a cross-country spree to set up DWANGO franchises. It was a tantalizing
pitch. For $35,000, DWANGO would set up a server and then let the franchisee rake
in the cash. “It was,” Mike said, “a guaranteed moneymaking machine.”

Lawyers, programmers, musicians, people from all walks of life—including Adrian Carmack—snatched
up the deals. The DWANGO guys put one in a private loft in New York, apartments in
Seattle, warehouses in San Jose. They set up twenty-two servers in about four months.
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.

With the deathmatch fever
and rising publicity, Doom II not only broke into the retail market but destroyed
it. To Ron Chaimowitz’s and GTI’s delight, the game shot up the charts. A few months
after its release, Romero and Jay cruised through the drive-through window of the
local bank to deposit their first royalty check. The teller pulled the check out of
the deposit tube and nearly collapsed. It was for $5 million. For that amount, she
figured, the two guys in the Ferrari should at least have come inside.

By the time Romero returned to Austin Virtual Gaming for the next Doom tournament,
he was no longer the only one screaming insults and punching walls. Deathmatch was
now a way of life. The room brimmed with guys telling each other to “Suck it down!”
and “Fuck a monkey skull!” There were broken keyboards and ripped-up mouse cords on
the floor. One far wall was punched through to the core, the lingering wound inflicted
by a frustrated gamer’s fist. And, for the first time, Romero got beaten at his own
game.

It wasn’t the last time. Fueled by the success of DWANGO and Doom II, Romero deathmatched
more than ever with his office mate, Shawn Green. One day in the summer of 1995, Carmack
had enough. He was tired of Romero wasting his time, tired of hearing the screams,
the profanity, the fists beating on the walls, the broken keyboards flying down by
his door. So, unbeknownst to Romero, he plotted some revenge.

The next day Shawn came into Romero’s office, beaming with confidence, and challenged
Romero to a game. “Jesus, dude,” Romero said, “yesterday I beat you down so hard.
Come on, get in there, I’m ready any time!”

Everyone gathered around. Romero cracked open a Dr Pepper and began to play. 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. “What’s wrong with this fucking
mouse?” He banged the mouse on the table, inadvertently spilling his soda. “Oh shit!”

Everyone started to laugh. “What?” Romero said, mopping the Dr Pepper from his leg.
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.

If deathmatch was a release
from stress, work, family, and drudgery, it was a release that Carmack didn’t need
or, for that matter, understand. In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most
people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken
spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute. A lot of people didn’t
seem to enjoy their work.

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.

The game, he quickly realized, was going to be a greater challenge than he had anticipated.
His objective was to create an arbitrary 3-D world with Internet play. 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. To make matters
worse, for the first time at such a crucial moment in a game’s birth, he felt his
ally Romero was nowhere to be found.

It had been coming, of course, he thought. Though Carmack had considered Romero a
better programmer when they met at Softdisk, he’d soon left Romero behind. At that
point, Romero willfully took on other roles: developing the extraneous tools that
he and Tom Hall could use to create levels of a game, conceptualizing design, plotting
how id would rule the world. 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.

But, as Carmack discovered, there were others who were more than ready to fill the
spots. 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. Since then, Abrash had become something of an icon in the programming world.
In recent years he had led graphics programming for Microsoft, where he worked on
their Windows NT operating system. But, like anyone who lived for graphics, he knew
there was no better place to see results than in games. And there was no game that
impressed him quite like Doom.

On a trip to Seattle to visit his mother, Carmack took Abrash out to lunch to tell
him about his plans for Quake. The challenge, as Abrash heard it, was to increase
cyberspace through 3-D graphics and a persistent online world—an alternate world that
would live and breathe around the clock, waiting for players to cohabit. Abrash’s
blood pulsed. Like most graphics programmers, he often theorized about virtual worlds.
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.”