By hacking its engine and designing new levels, Doom's diehard fans helped make it the most popular PC game of all time. Now they are recruits in the real-world deathmatch between Doom creators John Carmack and John Romero.
By hacking its engine and designing new levels, Doom's diehard fans helped make it the most popular PC game of all time.
Now they are recruits in the real-world deathmatch between Doom creators John Carmack and John Romero.
By David McCandless
"Gun-and-knife show! Something for all the family!" screams a billboard as Sverre Kvernmo cuts through downtown Dallas in his dented BMW.
It's 103 degrees on a hot, thick day. Kvernmo cruises past a rotating restaurant shaped like a huge golf ball, peppered with lights and perched on a stick 580 feet high. In the distance a flag-bedecked castle and a replica of an Indian fortress peek through the haze. Crazy place, Dallas.
The LBJ Freeway slices between skyscrapers built by big oil and, more recently, Ross Perot. The Texas Commerce Tower, the second-tallest structure in town, is famous for having a hole in the middle - on purpose. The building's penthouse is even better known in other circles because of its resident - John Romero, owner of Ion Storm and cocreator of Doom and *Quake.*Six blocks down, on a touristy promenade just a gunshot away from a certain notorious book depository, resides Ritual Entertainment, maker of a Quake-powered game called Sin. Nearby Garland, Texas, is home to Apogee Software, creator of Duke Nukem 3D. A couple of miles south, in Mesquite, lies id Software, where Romero's erstwhile partner John Carmack continues to tap the profits of Doom. "That," Kvernmo says, "is where it all started." A grimy Holiday Inn sails by.
It's all here in this 30-mile stretch of asphalt that links Dallas's latest booming industry: the 10-gallon paychecks, the double deals, the internecine digital warfare. Indeed, the high-stakes gamesmanship is what makes Sverre Kvernmo call this gun-and-knife city home. He is a "Doom Baby," raw gamemaking talent spawned by Doom's release four years ago.
In the early '90s, Kvernmo was cleaning hospital hallways in Norway. Now he builds virtual environments for shoot-'em-ups. In a world gone 3-D crazy, he has become one of the industry's most valuable commodities.
"I'm being paid to do exactly what I want!" the 26-year-old shouts. "I can't believe I'm here. I'm from a town north of the polar circle in Norway - really exciting," he scoffs. "I would probably be killing whales or something if it weren't for the Internet and Doom."
In 1993 Doom arose from Dallas and went supernova, at once Game as Million-Dollar Revenue Machine and Game as Open System. Its code was semi-intentionally left ajar on release. A couple of signposts, a few backdoors, and some secret passages into its structure - enough to inspire a fevered community of hackers to dissect, reverse-engineer, and completely redesign the game thousands of times over.
Hacking Doom swiftly became a massive underground industry - gigabytes of add-ons, graphics, and levels were passed around the planet. By letting code and schematics filter into the public domain, id effectively licensed its game to the world.
Kvernmo, in the meantime, became a lord in Doom's amateur fiefdom. For if manipulating the engine was an art, level design - a combination of hard coding and high design - was its purest form. Sure, the engine powers the game and handles the placement of every entity - the chain guns, the moaning zombies, the blood-soaked walls. It defines the physics, creates the sound, and makes sure everything is combined in a seamless world. But here's a dirty little secret: an engine by itself is just a piece of mechanics. The game experience comes down to the enclosed environments where you do your fighting, exploring, and dying. The maps. The levels.
Of the hundreds of would-be level lords, only a handful showed true promise. Thanks to the Net, experts like Kvernmo swiftly became celebrities in their own crazy corner of game land. Adopting comic-book names like Dr Sleep, Paradox, and Cranium to increase their mystique, they spent days turned months turned years obsessively honing their skills.
Doom spawned these skilled fanatics, but it was id's next game, Quake, that reared them into professional talent. For while they ferreted away on the amateur scene, the fabled egos at id, John Romero and John Carmack, had split. Eccentric designer and game lover Romero left to form Ion Storm and begin work on one of its first product, the time-travel epic Daikatana. King coder and tech lover Carmack remained to pursue ever more revolutionary programming feats, all to be expressed in id's Quake II.
Meanwhile, other companies set about licensing the Quake engine as a platform for their own games. Almost overnight, demand for skilled designers triggered a feeding frenzy. id was there offering jobs to the very talent it had created. So was Ion Storm. So were the checkbooks of publishers like Activision, Sierra On-Line, and Eidos Interactive. And in the middle of it all, the Doom Babies.
Two years ago, Kvernmo left his native Norway to study art in Bristol, England. He barely made it to lectures, though, because he was addicted to Doom. Not just playing the game - changing it, building ever more convoluted killing arenas. "For three months solid I worked late into the night, fell asleep, woke up early, and started all over again."
His levels, meanwhile, traveled at warp speed through the wires, siphoned off to every corner of the globe. Kvernmo was soon spotted and snapped up by LA-based game developer Xatrix Entertainment. Despite the remonstrations of his parents, he flew out and joined the design team for a Doom-meets-Deliverance title, Redneck Rampage.
Six months later, John Romero called. "He really wanted me to be a part of his new project," Kvernmo says, "and it was Romero, phoning me. I, we - all of us - loved Romero."
Beyond the allure of the fat paycheck, "creativity and design were the focus of Ion Storm, so it seemed like the perfect place to work," Kvernmo says. "I had to go." He completed the final leg of his pilgrimage in March 1997, arriving in Dallas to find that his contemporaries had already made the journey.
Ion Storm is not just the domain of twentynothings, however. John W. Anderson (aka Dr Sleep) works in a booth alongside Kvernmo. Forty-one and graying, he brought his baby grand piano from Pennsylvania so he could play Schumann when not building classical Greek-inspired Daikatana maps.
Like Kvernmo's mania, Anderson's obsession with Doom changed his life. The fixation first drew him out of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare to the Action Games Forum on CompuServe, which, in 1994, had become a mecca for Doom heads and architectural aspirants. At its height, anyone who was anyone in the community hung out there.
Within weeks of Doom's shareware release in December 1993, map editors appeared, allowing items to be repositioned, floors to be raised or lowered. Yet the first levels were mere reworkings of the existing maps - nobody had sufficiently reverse-engineered the technology to start new levels from scratch.
The breakthrough came three months later, when a group of students working at England's University of Bradford combined the efforts of hackers worldwide and cracked the final layer of Doom's map format. They recompiled the BSP tree - a mathematical representation of a 3-D level - which allowed them to reconstruct the geometry of the maps. And that was it. Building on the existing work of amateur hacker Brendon Wyber, Belgian student Raphaël Quinet built a level editor called DEU around an algorithm and uploaded it March 30, 1994. Literally overnight, the first all-new levels arrived and the community was in place. Levels swamped FTP sites and CompuServe file libraries.
These new worlds, though, were only outposts in the universe created by John Romero. He is the first 3-D level designer, the Yoda of the Doom Babies. Romero's opus, "Knee Deep in the Dead," was the first eight-level episode of Doom - regarded as the seminal work, it's still played by tens of millions of people worldwide. His artistry, eccentricity, obsession with a good deathmatch, and pop-star looks made Romero the public face of Doom, the frontman for thousands of adoring nerds.
"For us," says Anderson, "Romero was id."
"I really wanted to be with Romero," Kvernmo confesses.
Sitting in a small booth opposite Kvernmo, Romero is playing a "milkmatch" - a deathmatch with a twist. "Whoever loses the best of two out of three has to drink rotten milk out of a jug that's been sitting there for months," Romero explains, laughing maniacally. His eyes are rooted to the screen. "You pour it into a big cup. It comes out in like yellow blocks."
Romero clearly loves what he does and goes at it with a shrewd yet childlike intensity. "Kvernmo's so cool," he says, wide-eyed. "And we've got Dr Sleep. He's cool, too." It's not boasting or a marketing ploy. Romero is genuinely excited by the talent that surrounds him. But then, he played hard to get it.
"He said: 'Pack your stuff and come down,'" recalls Anderson. "'What, next week?' I asked. 'No,' he said. 'Put your stuff in a car and come down now.'" Two days later, Dr Sleep settled into one of Romero's many spare rooms.
Like deathmatching, game design is a bloodthirsty business. It's an industry that has already jumped into Hollywood's billion-dollar bracket. Now, with more than a jug of rotten milk at stake, Romero is playing a bigger match - against his former colleagues at id, and against the many companies that have licensed the Quake engine as the backbone of new games.
"Why bother paying the best guys in the universe to build you a brand-new game engine when you can hire one?" says Romero. "Everyone can have John Carmack working for them."
Well, not everyone. If you're making less than US$5,000 a month from Quake, you have nothing to fear. However, id claims 12.5 percent of your net income over that amount. And if you license the Quake engine for your own title, it comes with a hefty price tag, currently around $500,000. The flat fee is negotiable, depending on royalty agreements, but either way, a percentage of every Quake engine game sold goes to id.
id had additional incentive to tighten the financial reins. "A shitty cottage industry sprang up out of Doom," explains Kvernmo. "Loads of people were doing crap maps or collecting them off the Internet and then sticking them on a CD and selling them for like 40 bucks each."
Poor-quality maps meant bad PR for Doom. Ironically, the profusion of crappy levels created huge demand for quality level designers. To overshadow the poor imitations, id produced its own compendium called "The Doom Master Levels." The company recruited four celebrity Doom heads - Kvernmo, Anderson, Tim Willits, and Tom Mustaine.
This was the start of a Cambrian-like explosion in the professional evolution of the level designer. Until then, despite their professional-quality work, they were essentially consumers. They were humble. They dreamed of doing it for a living, but no one really believed it would happen to them.
To the contrary, all four would interview for their dream job: a full-time position at id.
The last time Kvernmo visited id Software, he recounts, he collided head-on "with greed." Carmack had just offered to hike his salary considerably if he jumped ship. Concentrating on dollar signs rather than stop signs, Kvernmo was broadsided by a sedan on his way home. He stayed with Ion Storm, but it wasn't an easy decision.
id is, after all, the place where it all began. Inside the black building - in suite 666 - resides a 14-strong team including the most highly regarded game developers in the world. Here sits John Carmack, pale, 27, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.
The soft, carpeted offices are quieter than they used to be. In the game biz, the personality of the dominant player in the group trickles down. At Ion Storm, Romero's troops impersonate their general - shouting words like "dumbass" and "hardcore." At id, it's quiet - coder quiet, Carmack quiet, key-tapping and hushed conversations. The words here are "sweet spot" and "ship date."
Carmack's not surprised that so many "amateurs" are being hired. It makes good business sense: fully trained mapmaking ninjas with years of experience, no previous salary to barter with, and a passion for their job. The talented people shine like beacons.
Accordingly, all the top Doom Babies have been courted by id. And a few years ago, they would have blinded themselves for the chance. Says Anderson: "It seemed inconceivable that we would turn them down."
But only Tim Willits took the job. In 1995 he was at the University of Minnesota, studying computer science and business; he might have been the little guy you used to kick around at school.
Now payback means buying a 1997 Porsche with cash and plummeting you through six floors into a lava pit lined with nails. And then there's his office - nice furniture, comfy chairs, and two computers. This used to be Romero's office.
"I spent months working with Romero in here - picked his brain," says Willits, hired in '95 to shore up id's design team when things started to go pear-shaped during Quake's development. Strife turned to acrimony after the game was released. Romero was fired. "He was a great guy, but a shitty manager," concludes Willits.
After Romero's departure, they took away the pool table and the foosball. Deathmatching was even banned in id's office during crunch time. The team was too busy knuckling down on Quake II.
"After Quake II we're washing our hands of it," explains Carmack. "We're on to other things. Let everyone else fight it out over content."
Those fights will feature, among other things, Quake II's considerably ramped-up gore - the fine sprays of blood, the imploding walls of cartilage, and the airborne body parts that actually glisten. Yet Willits isn't worried, though they're his walls being splattered with ichor. For him, level designing is an underappreciated art form. He's molded frightening realism from the rawest of raw materials - triangles and pixels. "It's all about form, shape, and style rather than textures and walls, about conveying feeling to the player." He looks suddenly serious. "We're working with incredible technology here. And John's good. John's the pimp. There's no one like Carmack."
Except, maybe, Romero. Two generals, two camps, two sets of talented foot soldiers.
"There's some sniping about who's doing what and all that, and when people start treading on each other's release dates, then it gets a bit ugly," admits Carmack. "But even if Ion Storm is a spectacular success, we'll probably make more money than anyone there makes off it, because we've got a big chunk of the royalty."
Late at night, in the Ion Storm penthouse, the community has gathered to watch the Fourth of July fireworks.
Despite the rivalries, and the Romero-versus-Carmack thing, the Doom Babies still get along. Even in this deranged city, they've maintained the sense of community from the CompuServe days. Then, they were united under a frontier mentality, working to push the open system to its limits. Now they get paid to compete.
Still, they share a vision borne by Doom.
And they see inspiration everywhere. Every book, film, and real-life Dallas landmark and eyesore is examined, mentally photocopied, and rendered in Quake-o-vision. A conversation between two Doom Babies goes something like this:
"Hey, look at that balcony."
"Yeah, nice ivy texture."
"What happens when it joins the wall there?"
"Nothing. It's seamless."
"Wow."
"You're standing in the bathroom, pissing," says a Doom Baby appropriately called Levelord. "You're looking at the wallpaper and you notice, on the corner, it doesn't line up. And you think, 'Couldn't they spend the time to line that up?' I do it in my levels."
You can see why most of the Doom Babies spurned id. Romero is romantic, organic. Talent is the passport to his Game as Open System - your only résumé is your level, or your 3-D model, or your new evisceration animation. At id, things Carmackian are mechanical, planned, and meticulous. Productivity is the key to his Game as Machine. Sure, Carmack hits the Quake II Christmas deadline, while Romero watches Daikatana slip until April. But working at Ion Storm isn't a job, it's a daily visit to an amusement park.
id is unconcerned. Carmack is working on his next engine - code-named Trinity - which will bring even more realism to the desktop. He's unworried by rival technology. First-class developers like Epic MegaGames and 3D Realms are working on next-generation front ends. Even Microsoft, it seems, is hankering to muscle in on the open-game posse with the DirectEngine, which was coded by Monolith Productions. "They're all a year behind," Carmack says, adding with a hint of uncharacteristic sarcasm, "and like, I'm supposed to be scared of Monolith."
Atop Ion Storm, you have to squint to see the fireworks flare on the horizon. It seems the Commerce Tower is too tall, too high in the clouds. Disappointed, the crew departs to play a deathmatch, leaving only the security guard on the roof. Asked if he plays Quake, the guard chuckles, "I don't need to. I've got 70 handguns and 150 rifles. I'm mad."
Crazy place, Dallas.
