__ Updata __
__ Quake Damage at id __
Mozart and Salieri, Bill and Hillary, Beavis and Butt-head ... the world is full of twin talents who thrive better together than apart. Until recently, id Software had a pair of its own in John Romero and John Carmack - a powerful duo that was, respectively, design maven and tech genius.
No sooner were the last few bugs worked out on id's hot August release, Quake, than Romero announced he was leaving to launch his own company, tentatively called Ion. Romero's exuberant personality had sometimes clashed with Carmack's more introverted style and all-out emphasis on tech. Even so, the decision stunned colleagues. "It was a surprise," says Tim Willits, an id designer who worked closely with Romero. "He talked about it, but leaving id is a big deal."
Meanwhile, Romero's abrupt exit worried Quake addicts, an increasing number of whom are joining multiplayer "clans" or teams, which stage death matches and trash talk via elaborate Web pages. Already, there are more than 200 clans, with names like Dark Requiem, Damage Inc., and The Revolting Cocks. Says one clanner: "Romero always had the perfect image of how a game should be."
Carmack declined to comment on the split. But Romero calls it "totally" amicable and says it had more to do with his own corporate visions than any conflict among himself, Carmack, or id's third founder, Adrian Carmack (no relation).
"I wanted to grow the company more than they wanted to grow," says Romero. "id wanted to stay a one-team company, but I saw that as a waste of the potential, of the technology we had created. They didn't want to do more than one game, and I like to create more than one kind of game at a time." Romero adds that he wants to license id's engine for his own games.
Undoubtedly, Romero's exit was spurred by the long, exhausting job of creating Quake, one of the design maven's mind-bending medieval romps. Unsatisfied with his engine, Carmack repeatedly rebuilt it; meanwhile, Romero's design team would come up with new ideas only to find that the engine was missing or being rehauled for the nth time. The prospect of having to repeat the process or work on endless versions of Quake may have been more than Romero could take. "John Carmack won't put out anything that's less than the best," says id spokesperson Mike Wilson, adding, "It can be frustrating writing art" in that situation.
Now that he's gone solo, Romero has the perfect chance to do Carmack a favor by pushing id's engine to the max with three new titles: a role-playing game, a first-person action game, and a real-time strategy game similar to Warcraft, but better, because it'll run on Quake's 3-D engine. "I just want to take the stuff that's out there and push it further," says Romero.
For now, though, he's busy lining up financial backers. At press time, Romero had pitched a distribution deal, complete with an advance on royalties, to at least four game companies, including Activision, GT Interactive Software Corp., Origin International Inc., and Acclaim Entertainment. He's looking for US$10 million in seed money, plus royalties. Plans call for Ion to be based in Dallas, with 50 employees, half of them artists. All in all, not bad for a 29-year-old whose r�sum� includes one semester of college - plus a stint at Burger King.
Move over, Mozart.
- Beatrice Motamedi
__ [Original story in *Wired *4.08, page 122.] __
__ Parlez Vous ... __
Could this be a lingua franca for the Web? An Esperanto interface for Excite and AltaVista? At this year's World Wide Web Consortium, developers discussed adopting Z39.50, an Internet- ready, international standard used by certain libraries that share electronic bibliographical records. While the new standard might make queries more uniform, some developers say Z39.50 is too complex for most Web search engines, which generally demand a system more suited to large, highly structured, organization databases, says Clifford Lynch, director of library automation for the University of California system. "Z39.50 may not be realistic," Lynch said.
Still, Esperantists remain undeterred: a new video, Language Lessons (www.filmlinc.com/), highlights scenes from Angoro, the first horror movie in Esperanto, and reveals the tenacious demands of demonstrators in England to make Esperanto the official language of the European Union.
[Original story in *Wired *4.08, page 84.]
__ Muqing About __
Sandy Stone, director of the interactive multimedia lab at the University of Texas at Austin, is publicizing the next generation of MUD server, Muq, now in beta.
Designed by Stone's partner, Cynbe ru Taren, Muq is a virtual world environment designed to combat many of the problems MUD servers face: database bloat, memory leakage, and lag. Stone believes that the distributed technological base will lead to a truly egalitarian and democratic virtual community - something LambdaMOO appears to have failed at.
"One of the central tenets of Muqdom is that public virtual worlds should be built on free, nonproprietary software, for which the source code should be publicly available," Stone says. She and Cynbe hope to streamline the tech and get to the point: the people.
[Original story in *Wired *4.05, page 134.]
__ alt.war __
On August 22, attorneys for the Religious Technology Center (RTC) agreed to dismiss Los Angeles BBS operator Tom Klemesrud from a lawsuit. Filed in February 1995, the suit alleged copyright infringement by one of Klemesrud's subscribers, Dennis Erlich, in postings to the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion .scientology.
Klemesrud says the dismissal was mandated by his insurance company, which agreed to pay the RTC US$50,000.
"The insurance company has the right to settle as long as it doesn't trample on Klemesrud's rights," says Dan Leipold, Klemesrud's attorney. Leipold has defended 40 lawsuits brought by the Church of Scientology in the last five years.
Says Klemesrud, "I would have liked to have stayed in there and participated in total exoneration." The settlement means that the question of whether Internet service providers can be held liable for contributory infringement has still not been tested in court. In November 1995, US District Court Judge Ronald M. Whyte ruled that Klemesrud could not be found liable for direct infringement.
Erlich's case is still expected to go to trial.
[Original story in Wired3.12, page 172.]
