Masters of Doom (28 page)

The hard-core gamers flipped at the results, which made the game at least 20 percent
faster and smoother. Once they saw 3-D acceleration, they would never go back, and
they eagerly spent the few hundred dollars to upgrade their machines. Other game programmers,
as was becoming protocol, followed Carmack’s lead and programmed for 3Dfx’s cards.
More card manufacturers jumped into the game. A new high-tech industry had begun.
The success buoyed Carmack’s other pet project, Quakeworld, a free program he wrote
and distributed to improve Quake’s multiplayer capabilities. With OpenGL improving
Quake’s graphics and Quakeworld improving Quake’s networking, the game had never looked
or played better.

But Carmack’s hard work couldn’t save id from the reverberations of Quake’s stressful
development. Before long, id began to hemorrhage employees. It started with biz guy
Jay Wilbur, who quit after his four-year-old son asked him, “How come all the other
daddies go to the baseball games and you never do?” Programmer Michael Abrash soon
followed suit, returning to the structure and sanctity of Microsoft. Level designer
Sandy Petersen, who had been on the skids with the management since clashing over
Quake’s design, was let go. Mike Wilson, marketing whiz, and Shawn Green, tech supporter
and deathmatch fiend, gave notice: they were going to work for Romero.

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.”

Romero hit
the highest button inside the gilded elevator of the Texas Commerce Building—fifty-five
floors of bankers, lawyers, and oil moguls in the heart of downtown Dallas; now a
twenty-nine-year-old gamer was bound for the top. Romero had been called here abruptly
late one night by his real estate agent, who said he
had
to see this amazing penthouse that had become available. He was skeptical. Since
leaving id to open his own company, he had seen dozens of spaces, but nothing was
right. And there was
everything
at stake.

Romero was essentially starting from scratch. Though he’d received an undisclosed
multimillion-dollar buyout from his partners at id (
Time
magazine estimated
his net worth to be $10 million), the terms required that he relinquish all rights
to id products and royalties—no more money from Doom or Quake. More important, 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.

When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero
was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to
spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view
of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling. Anywhere Romero
spun, he saw the kaleidoscopic twinkle of lights—evening lights from below, the celestial
bodies up high. It was raw, waiting to be designed. Romero imagined a room full of
pillows, a Vegas room with slot machines, a “Break Shit” room where you could just
go around destroying things!

But there were problems, the agent explained. 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. For these reasons and the fact
that the space was just too weird for tenants like Paine Webber, Texas Commerce Bank,
or the Petroleum Club, the penthouse remained empty. 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.

With his old friend and sidekick Tom Hall, Romero pitched the Dream to eager publishers.
Neither technology nor Carmack would be his ruler. In fact, he would simply license
the Quake engine—which id had agreed to do—and make a game around it. He would have
three designers, working on three games at a time in different genres. And he would
give each designer a large enough staff to get the jobs done quickly. It wouldn’t
be just a game company, it would be an
entertainment
company. And the mantra of anything they produced would be loud and clear: “Design
is law,” Romero said. “What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going
to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t
handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make
it and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking
design.
”

His terms for publishers were brash: $3 million per game with a 40 percent royalty,
plus, he wanted to keep all the intellectual property rights as well as rights to
port his company’s games to other platforms. Companies balked but didn’t back away.
This was the age of vanity game development houses. Sid Meier, legendary designer
of Civilization strategy games, had his own company, Firaxis. Will Wright, creator
of the bestselling SimCity series, had his company, Maxis. Richard Garriott had Origin;
a former employee of his named Chris Roberts would spawn off his own, Digital Anvil.
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.

With Romero planning to do a shooter and Tom a role-playing adventure game, Dream
Design needed one other designer for balance. That person would be Todd Porter, who
was then heading up a Dallas developer called 7th Level. Todd, whom Romero had met
through an old Softdisk friend, seemed energetic, upbeat, and, most important, a gamer,
a
real
gamer—a veteran Apple II guy. The thirty-six-year-old had originally gone to school
to be a minister. But preaching, he discovered to his dismay, was as much about business
as it was about spirituality. He didn’t like the pressure he felt to have to land
a sweet spot in some big church. So he dropped out of school and used the money to
buy a computer.

With his parents divorced, Todd had to do what he could to provide for the family.
He moved to Iowa to study business. He took a brief stint as an exotic dancer with
the stage name Preacher Boy. With the money he saved, Todd refined his programming
skills and eventually landed a job with Richard Garriott’s Origin company in Austin.
He soon left to found his own company with an artist, Jerry O’Flaherty, in Dallas.
Tough times forced him to sell out to 7th Level, however, and his dreams of his own
company seemed dashed. That was, until Romero walked in. Todd told Romero he had the
business sense that would round out the team. Romero felt Todd indeed had a knack
for selling the company. Plus, he could bring on Jerry, who could head up the art
department. Over lunch at McDonald’s, the four gamers agreed to join forces. They
took notes on a napkin.

All they needed was a name. Dream Design wasn’t good enough, Romero decided; he wanted
something more original, something short, punchy, powerful, scientific, intelligent.
Tom suggested Ion. The competition had better watch out, a friend quipped, “or they’re
going to get caught up in an Ion storm.” Ion Storm it would be.

On Christmas Eve, Ion Storm closed a publishing deal with Eidos Interactive. Eidos
was a British company that had been founded on the riches of South African gold mines
and had recently scored a hit with a female-led shooter, kind of a sexy variation
of Indiana Jones, called Tomb Raider. They were looking to develop more brand names;
Romero was already among the biggest. They agreed to almost all Ion’s terms: $3 million
per game, but they offered to pay another $4 million for console rights. They also
wanted to have an option on Ion’s next three games, making it potentially a six-game
deal. In total, it valued Ion Storm at $100 million.

With the money in place, Romero, Tom, and Todd sketched plans for their dream games.
Tom began cobbling together ideas for a sprawling and comedic intergalactic adventure
game called Anachronox. Todd announced plans for a strategy title about body-snatching
slugs called Doppelganger. And 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.

In Daikatana, the player would become Hiro Miyamoto, a Japanese biochemical student
in twenty-fifth-century Kyoto who must save the world from Kage Mishima, an evil scientist
who has stolen the Daikatana (Japanese for “big sword”)—a magical blade invented by
Miyamoto’s ancestors. Using the sword’s time-traveling powers, Mishima is altering
history to his own corrupt ends, such as hijacking the cure for an AIDS-like disease.
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. For added drama, Hiro is teamed with sidekicks, the Shaft-like Superfly
Johnson and the beautiful, brainy heroine Mikiko.

Daikatana embodied Romero’s greatest ambitions. Every polygon of these grandiose worlds
would have to be coded from scratch, interacting seamlessly with the characters and
action. In addition to the complex nuances of the artificially intelligent characters,
the game would require over one hundred unique levels and monsters spread throughout
what were essentially four games—roughly four times the size of Quake. Romero had
spent years making games almost completely on his own. But for John Romero’s Daikatana,
as the game was officially named, there was no way to do everything himself, as he
would have preferred.

Romero proceeded to fill the ultimate gaming company with the ultimate gamers. Mike
Wilson hoped finally to exercise all the outlandish marketing schemes he could never
pull off at id. Shawn Green, Romero’s old deathmatch partner from id, was ready to
help with coding. After Romero put the word out on the Internet, rabid Doom and Quake
fans swamped Ion Storm’s e-mail server with résumés and mods. Romero handpicked his
favorites, figuring that any who could wow him with a fresh character or monster or
level had a place in his dream posse. Romero, after all, was once just like them:
flipping burgers, eschewing sleep, school, and relationships to make and play games.
So what if all these young dudes never actually
worked
in the business before? If they had the passion, the predisposition for crunch, that
was qualification enough.

By early 1997, hard-core gamers who had been living and breathing Romero’s games for
years were road-tripping to Ion Storm’s temporary offices to work—and deathmatch—with
their mentor. Brian Eiserloh, who had achieved notoriety in college for his nude Doom
hacking parties, took a job after sending in an application essay written in the form
of a medieval short story. Will Loconto gave up his gig in the industrial band Information
Society to be Ion Storm’s sound designer. 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.

Few were more struck than Stevie Case. Stevie was the University of Kansas Quake fan
who had become known as one of the sharpest-shooting players on the scene. During
a pilgrimage to Dallas, she’d managed to score a deathmatch with Romero. She lost,
but just barely, and challenged him to a rematch. The next time around, Romero got
clocked. As penance, he uploaded a Web shrine in Stevie’s honor. Later he offered
her a job.

Stevie and the other gamers weren’t the only ones enamored. The press rejoiced over
the vision of Ion Storm. 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. Working with id’s former PR company in New York, Mike regaled
the press about an office that, when built out, would be
“the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of Gaming!”
—complete with an in-house movie theater, a massive game room, and a specially designed
area of networked computers made specifically for deathmatching.
Time
named Romero among the country’s top fifty
“cyber elite.”
Fortune
anointed Ion Storm one of the country’s twenty-five
“cool companies.”