Masters of Doom (7 page)

“Would it be easy to do that?” Tom asked.

“Sure, mmm,” Carmack said. He would just need to know what resulting action to program
into the game when a player hit an animated tile. This was awesome, Tom understood,
because games like Super Mario Brothers 3 were all about animated tiles; for instance,
a player would jump up into a blinking block, which would then rain down a shower
of golden coins. Tom was intrigued. But there was more.

Carmack punched a few buttons on his keyboard and showed Tom his other new feat: side
scrolling. The effect, popularized by Defender and Mario, made it appear as if the
game world continued when a character moved toward either edge of the screen. After
a few nights of experimentation, Carmack had finally figured out how to simulate this
movement on a PC. He had approached the problem, as always, in his own particular
way. Too many people, he thought, went for the clever little shortcuts right away.
That didn’t make sense. First, he tried the obvious approach, writing a program that
would attempt to draw out the graphics smoothly across the screen. It didn’t work,
because the PC, as everyone knew, was too slow. Then he tried the next step: optimization.
Was there any way he could take greater advantage of the computer’s memory so the
images would draw more quickly? After a few attempts, he knew there wasn’t a solution.

Finally then he thought to himself, Okay, what am I trying to achieve? I want the
screen presented to move smoothly over as the user runs his character across the ground.
He thought of his earlier game, The Catacomb. In that one, he’d created an effect
that moved the screen over one big chunky strip at a time as a character ran toward
the edge of a dungeon. It was a common trick called tile-based scrolling, moving the
screen in the chunky way one set of tiles at a time. What he wanted now was to create
an effect that would be much more subtle, if a character moved just a hair. The problem
was that it simply took too much time and power for the computer to redraw the entire
screen for every slight move. And that’s when the leap came.

What if, Carmack thought, instead of redrawing everything, I could figure out a way
to redraw only the things that actually change? That way, the scrolling effect could
be rendered more quickly. He imagined looking at a computer screen that showed a character
running to the right underneath a big blue sky. If that character ran far enough,
a white puffy cloud would eventually pass from off screen over his head. The computer
created this effect in a very crude way. It would redraw every little blue pixel on
the entire screen, starting at the top left corner and making its way over and down,
one pixel at a time, even though the only thing that was changing in the sky was the
white puffy cloud. The computer couldn’t intuit a shortcut to this drudgery just because
a shortcut made sense. So Carmack did the next best thing. He tricked it into performing
more efficiently. Carmack wrote some code that duped the computer into thinking that,
for example, the seventh tile from the left was in fact the first tile on the screen.
This way the computer would begin drawing right where Carmack wanted it to. Instead
of spitting out dozens of little blue pixels on the way over to the cloud, the computer
could
start
with the cloud itself. To make sure the player felt the effect of smooth movement,
Carmack added one other touch, instructing the computer to draw an extra strip of
blue tile outside the right edge of the screen and store it in its memory for when
the player moved in that direction. Because the tiles were in memory, they could be
quickly thrown up on the screen without having to be redrawn. Carmack called the process
“adaptive tile refresh.”

In lay terms, as Tom immediately understood, this meant one thing:
They could do Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC!
Nobody, no one, nowhere had made the PC do this. And now they could do it, right
here, right now, take their all-time favorite video game and hack it together so it
could work on the computer. It was almost a revolutionary act of subversion, he thought,
especially considering Nintendo’s stronghold on its own platform. There was no way
to, say, copy a Nintendo game onto a PC as one would tape an album. But now they could
replicate it tile for tile, blip for blip. It was the ultimate hack.

“Let’s do it!” Tom said. “Let’s make the first level of Super Mario tonight!”

He fired up Super Mario on the TV in the Gamer’s Edge office and started to play.
Then he opened up the tile editor that they had running on their PCs. Like someone
copying a famous painting, he re-created every little tile of the first level of Super
Mario on the PC, hitting pause on the Nintendo machine to freeze the action. He included
everything—the gold coins, the puffy white clouds; the only thing he changed was the
character. Rather than re-create Mario, he used the stock graphics they had of Dangerous
Dave. Meanwhile, Carmack was optimizing his side-scrolling code, implementing the
features of the game that Tom barked out while he was pausing and playing. Dozens
of Diet Cokes later, they finished the first level. It was 5:30 a.m. Carmack and Tom
saved the level to a disk, set it on Romero’s desk, and went home to sleep.

Romero came in the next morning at ten and found the floppy disk on his keyboard with
a Post-it note that read merely, “Type DAVE2.” It was in Tom’s handwriting. Romero
popped the disk into his PC and typed in the file location. The screen went black.
Then it refreshed with the words

DANGEROUS
DAVE
IN
“COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”

On one side of the words was a portrait of Dangerous Dave in his red baseball cap
and green T-shirt. On the other was a dour looking judge with a white wig, brandishing
a gavel. Romero hit the spacebar to see what would come next. There it was, the familiar
milieu of Super Mario Brothers 3: pale blue sky, the puffy white clouds, the bushy
green shrubs, the animated tiles with little question marks rolling over their sides
and, strangely, his character Dangerous Dave standing ready on the bottom of the screen.
Romero tapped his arrow key, moved Dave along the floor, and watched him scroll smoothly
across the screen. That’s when he lost it.

Romero could hardly breathe. He just sat in his chair with his fingers on the keys,
scrolling Dave back and forth along the landscape, trying to see if anything was wrong,
if somehow this wasn’t really happening, if Carmack had not just figured out how to
do
exactly what the fucking Nintendo could do,
if he had not done what every other gamer in the universe had wanted to do, to break
through, to do for PCs what Mario was doing for consoles. On the strength of Mario,
Nintendo was on the way
to knocking down Toyota as Japan’s most successful company, generating over $1 billion
per year. Shigeru Miyamoto, the series’s creator, had gone from being a poor country
boy in Japan to being the gaming industry’s equivalent of Walt Disney. Super Mario
Brothers 3 sold 17 million copies, the equivalent of seventeen platinum records—something
only artists like Michael Jackson had pulled off.

Romero saw it all come pouring down in front of him: his future, their future, scrolling
across the room in brightly colored dreams. The PC was hot. It was heading into more
homes each day. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t be just a luxury item, it would be a home
appliance. And what better to make it a friendly part of life than a killer game.
With such a hit, people wouldn’t even have to buy Nintendos; they could just invest
in PCs. And here Romero was sitting in his crappy little office building in Shreveport
looking at the technology that could make the first big league games for the PC. He
saw their destiny, their Future Rich Personages. It was so devastating that he found
he couldn’t move, couldn’t get up out of his seat. He was
destroyed.
And it wasn’t until Carmack rolled back into the office a few hours later that Romero
was able to muster the energy to speak. He had only one thing to tell his friend,
his genius partner, his match made in gamer heaven.

“This is it,” he said. “We’re gone!”

FOUR

Pizza Money

An early and apparent difference
between the Two Johns’ internal human engines was the way they processed time. It
was the kind of difference that made them perfect complements and the kind that could
cause irreparable conflict.

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 (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

Romero, by contrast, was immersed in
all
moments: past, future, and present. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast, as passionate
about the present as about the time gone and the time yet to come. He didn’t just
dream, he pursued: hoarding everything from the past, immersing himself in the dynamism
of the moment, and charting out the plans for what was to come. He remembered every
date, every name, every game. To preserve the past, he kept letters, magazines, disks,
Burger King pay stubs, pictures, games, receipts. To inflate the present, he pumped
up any opportunity for fun, telling a better joke, a funnier story, making a crazier
face. Yet he wasn’t manic, he knew how to focus. When he was on, he was on—loving
everything, everybody. But when he was off, he was off—cold, distant, short. Tom Hall
came up with a nickname for the behavior. In computers, information is represented
in bits. A bit can be either on or off. Tom called Romero’s mood swings the bit flip.

That fateful morning of September 20, 1990, Romero’s bit flipped right on. It was
a date he seared into his memory and Carmack would soon forget, but it was equally
important to both. Carmack had used his laser focus to solve an immediate challenge:
how to get a PC game to scroll. Romero used Carmack’s solution, Dangerous Dave in
Copyright Infringement, to envision what would come. Carmack had created a palette
that Romero used to paint the future. And the future, it became clear, had nothing
to do with Softdisk.

After seeing Carmack, Romero couldn’t contain his excitement. He darted around the
office, pulling others to come in and check out the game. “Oh my God, look at this,”
he said, as a couple of employees watched the demo play. “Is that the fucking coolest
thing on the planet or what?”

“Oh,” one of the guys replied lethargically, “that’s pretty neat.”

“That’s pretty neat?” Romero responded. “Wait a minute: this is like the fucking coolest
thing ever! Don’t you understand?”

The guys shrugged and said, “Whatever,” then returned to their offices.

“Fucking idiots!” Romero declared. By the time everyone else arrived, he was on the
verge of exploding. Tom, Jay, Lane, and Adrian were all in the Gamer’s Edge office,
watching amusedly as Romero held court, playing the demo. “Oh my God,” Romero said,
“this is the fucking coolest thing ever! We are fucking gone! We have to do this!
We have got to start our own company and get out of here with this, because Softdisk
ain’t doing anything with it! No one’s going to see this! We need to do this on our
own! This is too big to waste on this company!”

Jay was hanging on the doorway, his fingertips gripping the frame. “Eh, come on,”
he said, chortling. He’d seen Romero’s giddiness before. It was an enthusiasm that
bordered on hyperbole. Romero got this excited when he won a round of Pac-Man. He
was a human exclamation point.

Romero froze, hands in the air. “Dude,” he said gravely, “I’m totally serious.”

Jay stepped in and shut the door behind him. Romero explained his rationale. First
off, this was a robust, sixteen-color game; Softdisk was interested only in doing
four-color games that appealed to the lowest common denominator of users. Second,
this was essentially the Nintendo-style game made for a PC, something on par with
the bestselling console title in the world: Mario. That meant the game was sure to
sell, because everyone was getting a PC and, naturally, everyone would want a fun
video game to play. It was perfect.

They already had the ideal team: Carmack, the graphics guru and resident Whiz Kid;
Romero, the multitalented programmer and company cheerleader; Adrian, the artist and
dark visionary; and Tom, game designer and comic book surrealist. Although Romero
was still displeased with Lane, he was willing to give him one more chance to pull
through. Regardless, the core chemistry was potent. Carmack’s steadfastness balanced
Romero’s effusive passion, Adrian’s grisly tastes countered Tom’s cartoon comedy.
All they needed was someone to do the business side—handle the finances, balance the
books, manage the team. Everyone looked to Jay. “Dude,” Romero told him, “you’ve got
to be a part of this too.”

Jay gave them his biggest bartender smile and agreed. “Here’s what I think we should
do,” he said. “This needs to be taken right to the top of Nintendo. Now!” If they
could get a deal to do a PC port of Super Mario Brothers 3, they could be in business,
serious
business. They decided to take the weekend to make a complete demo of the game, with
a few added levels as well as the inclusion of the Mario character, and Jay would
send it off.

There was only one problem, but it was sizable. If they were going to moonlight this
game, they didn’t want Softdisk to know. This meant they couldn’t do it in the office.
They would have to work on it at home. Thing was, they didn’t have the computers they
needed to get the job done. The five of them sat quietly in the Gamer’s Edge office,
pondering the problem as Dangerous Dave looped across the screen.

Carmack and Romero had both been without the computers they wanted earlier in life.
So this wouldn’t be the first time they came up with a way to get them.

The cars backed up
to the Softdisk office, trunks open, waiting in the night. It was late Friday night,
long after all the other employees had returned home to their families and television
sets. No one would use the PCs from the office on Saturday and Sunday, so they might
as well make use of them, the gamers figured. They weren’t
stealing
the computers, they were
borrowing
them.

After loading Softdisk’s computers in their cars, Romero, Jay, Carmack, Tom, and Lane
caravanned out of downtown. They drove away from the run-down buildings, down the
highway, until the scenery began to change to low-hanging trees and swamps. Late-night
fishermen lined a bridge with their lines in the purple-black murk. A bridge led them
to South Lakeshore Drive, the border of Shreveport’s main recreational front and main
water supply, Cross Lake.

Carmack, Lane, Jay, and an Apple II programmer at Softdisk named Jason Blochowiak
had scored a enviable coup not long before when they found a four-bedroom house for
rent right along these shores. Jay had bought a cheap boat, which they docked there
and used for frequent outings of kneeboarding and skiing. In the large backyard was
a swimming pool and a barbecue, with which Jay, a cooking enthusiast, grilled up Flintstonean
slabs of ribs. The house itself had plenty of windows looking out on the scene, a
large living room, even a big tiled bathroom with a deep earth-tone-tiled Jacuzzi
tub. Jay had installed a beer keg in the fridge. It was a perfect place to make games.

Over the weekend while making the Super Mario demo, the gamers put the house to the
ultimate test. They hooked two of the Softdisk computers up on a large table that
Carmack had been using to hold all-night Dungeons and Dragons sessions with the guys.
Romero and Carmack sat there programming together. Tom did all the graphics and Lane
animated the familiar little turtle. Earlier they had videotaped the entire game play
of Super Mario Brothers 3. To capture all the elements, Tom kept running back and
forth, pressing pause on the VCR so he could copy the scenes.

Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. No one slept. They consumed
huge quantities of caffeinated soda. Pizza deliveries came repeatedly. Jay worked
the grill, churning out a stream of burgers and hot dogs, which often went uneaten.
They got the game down to a T: Mario’s squat little walk, the way he bopped the animated
tiles, sending out the coins, the way he leapt on the turtles and kicked their shells,
the clouds, the Venus’s-flytraps, the pipes, the smooth scrolling. By the time they
finished, the game was virtually identical to the bestselling hit in the world. The
only noticeable difference was the title screen, which, under the Nintendo copyright,
credited the makers, a company name the guys borrowed from Romero and Lane, Ideas
from the Deep.

With the game done, Jay put together a letter explaining who they were and how they
wanted Nintendo to take the unprecedented step of licensing Super Mario for the PC.
Hopes high, the boys taped up the box and sent it on its way to Nintendo. When the
response came back a few weeks later, it was short and sweet. Nice work, the company
said, but Nintendo had no interest in pursuing the PC market. It was happy where it
was as the world leader in consoles. It was a disappointment for the group, especially
following the elation of the lake house programming marathon. But it was not the end
by any means. There had to be someone out there who would appreciate their accomplishment.
Romero knew just the guy.

Not long before,
Romero had received his very first fan letter while working at Softdisk. It was typewritten
and cordial.
“Dear John,” it read, “Loved your game
. Just wanted to let you know it was a great game and I think you are very talented.
Have you played The Greatest Pyramid? It is almost the same as your game. I was wondering
if you made that game too? Or if you were inspired by it? I can send you a copy if
you want. Also what’s your high score for your game? Have you been programming long
and what language did you use? I am thinking about writing a game and any tips you
have would be helpful. Thanks from a big fan! Sincerely, Byron Muller.”

Romero, the pack rat, had immediately taped the letter up on his wall and showed it
off to Carmack, Tom, Lane, and Adrian. A couple weeks later, he got another fan letter,
handwritten and a bit more urgent.
“Dear John,” it read, “I loved your game
(Pyramids of Egypt), it is better than another pyramid type game that was in Big
Blue Disk a few issues ago. I finished the game after staying up until 2:00 a.m. last
night! Great fun! What’s your best score on the game? Is there a secret key that advances
to the next level automatically? Do you know of any similar games? Please call me
collect if you want . . . or please write. Thanks a million, Scott Mulliere. P.S.
I think I found a minor bug (undocumented feature?) in the game!”

Wow
—Romero beamed—
another fan!
He taped this letter up on the wall next to the other one and, again, bragged to
Carmack and Adrian, who rolled their eyes. Soon after, Romero was flipping through
PC Games Magazine
when he came to
a brief article
about Scott Miller, a twenty-nine-year-old programmer who was having great success
distributing his own games. Intrigued, Romero read to the bottom of the article, where
it listed Scott’s address: 4206 Mayflower Drive, Garland, Texas 75043.

He paused. Garland, Texas. Garland, Garland, Texas? Who did he know in Garland, Texas,
on Mayflower Drive? He set down the magazine and looked up on his wall. The fan letters!
By now he had accumulated several of them and, to his amazement, though they all were
signed by different names, each and every one had the same return address: Mayflower
Drive, Garland.

Romero was pissed. Here he was showing off to the other guys about all his supposed
fans, when in fact it was just some loser fucking with his mind.
Who the fuck does Scott Miller think he is?
Romero whipped around to his keyboard and banged out a letter in fury:
“Scott: You, sir, have serious psychological problems
. . . . What’s the deal with the 15 million odd names you’ve been writing under to
reach me? Huh, Byron Muilliere, Brian Allen, Byron Muller? How old are you, really?
15?” Romero fumed for a couple pages, then left the letter on his desk. The next day,
he came back cooled off and wrote another note.

“Dear Mr. Miller,”
he typed, “I have taken a considerable amount of time to reply to your last letter.
The reason is because I was infuriated when I found out that you had written to me
previously about 3–4 other times, all under different names and I didn’t know what
was going on. My previous reply is a real scorcher; that’s why I didn’t send it earlier.
I am sending it anyway just so you can see how pissed I was at the time. I am writing
this cover letter to soften the previous reply and to tell you that I am somewhat
intrigued by your numerous approaches.” He sealed up both letters together and sent
them to Garland once and for all.

A few days later, Romero’s home phone rang. It was Scott Miller. Romero laid into
him about sending those fake fan letters, but Scott had other things on his mind.
“Fuck those letters!” Scott said breathlessly. “The only reason I did that was because
I knew my only chance to get ahold of you was to go through the back door.”

Game companies at the time were extremely competitive and secretive, especially when
it came to their programming talent. When Romero had been a young gamer, programmers
like Richard Garriott or Ken and Roberta Williams always got top billing, their names
advertised in big letters on the box. But by the early nineties, times had changed.
Companies were not above poaching. As a precaution, many game publishers would loom
over their staffs, monitoring calls to make sure that no one was trying to make a
steal. Scott, well aware of the sensitivity of his call, had chosen instead to try
to lure Romero into contacting him. It worked, though ironically not as originally
intended. He hadn’t meant to piss Romero off. But now that he had his attention, he
wasn’t about to let it go.