QuakeCon, the annual LAN party and celebration of "peace, love and rockets" inspired by id Software's first-person shooters, kicked off Thursday in Dallas.
Emphasis on the rockets.
In keeping with tradition, id Software co-founder and Doom lead programmer John Carmack will address the computer-toting QuakeCon masses with a keynote speech Thursday evening. Immediately following, Carmack will share the stage with fellow Texan Richard Garriott, creator of the classic Ultima role-playing games.
They won't be discussing videogames. Instead, they'll talk about their shared enthusiasm for space travel.
In 2008, Garriott spent millions of his own money and shed one-sixth of his liver to gain a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and visit the International Space Station.
Carmack hasn't been to space yet, but he founded Armadillo Aerospace in 2000. Armadillo rockets have participated in several X Prize competitions. In 2009, Carmack's team took second place and a $500,000 purse in the Lunar Lander Challenge.
This year, Carmack forged a deal with Space Adventures, the Virginia-based firm that made Garriott's trip to space possible. The plan: Use Carmack's knack for rocket science to put more tourists in space.
Wired.com spoke separately to both game designers ahead of their QuakeCon session to discuss their spaceflight ambitions.
Wired.com: Tell us about the talk you have planned for QuakeCon. What are you trying to accomplish by reaching out to gamers on this subject?
John Carmack: I expect many action gamers see the appeal of supersonic velocities, extreme conditions and catastrophic failure modes – rockets and space are pretty cool. I keep (mostly) joking that one of these years we will fire up one of our vehicles out in the hotel parking lot, which would really make an impression. Richard's tale of his trip to space by way of Russia is pretty epic and worth listening to even for people not interested in the small-scale space-development world that Armadillo lives in.
Richard Garriott: I think that gamers are excited about both the virtual explorations we're creating for them with the games that we make, but also the technology we're providing to allow ourselves and them to explore space together. I think we're at a very, very exciting crossroads.
Wired.com: Lets talk a little about the setbacks you both have experienced in your efforts to reach space. Mr. Carmack, your team looked poised to take first place in the X Prize competition. What happened there?
Carmack: It is all spilled milk at this point, but I am still a little bitter about it. The rules called for two attempts in two days for each team. We completed the challenge on the first attempt, on the first day, despite inclement weather. After Masten failed on their first two attempts, we thought everything was wrapped up. Then they got a third attempt, which they also failed. We thought for sure it was done at that point, and we were very upset when the judges decided to give them a fourth window on the third day, delaying the final competitor's slot. They finally completed the challenge, and beat our landing accuracy for first prize.
I don't blame the Masten team for taking every opportunity they could wrangle out of the judges, but I do think the judges exercised their discretion in an unfair manner. Ben Brockert, who we considered the driving force behind Masten's LLC effort, has since joined the Armadillo team.
Garriott: In 2001, we saw the internet stock market bubble burst as well as the Sept. 11 further crashing of the U.S. stock market. I was scheduled to be the first-ever private citizen to fly into space under their own financial support. I had recently sold Origin to Electronic Arts and had previously thought of myself as quite wealthy, but I had to sell my first scheduled seat to a guy named Dennis Tito, who became the first private citizen to fly into space.
Wired.com: How long have you been interested in spaceflight and rocketry?
Garriott: For, really, all of my life that I can remember. My father was an astronaut, as you probably know. My mother tells me stories that I don't even remember about when I was 5 or 6 years old and my dad would come home from NASA. My constant question to my dad was, "Hey, daddy. Did you go to the moon today?"
Carmack: I had a pretty standard geek-child level of interest, with model rockets and science fiction, but I didn't really think much about it for well over a decade while I was completely focused on software. I run into a lot of hard-core space proponents now that have been passionate about it their entire lives, but that isn't really the slot that I fall into. I'm an engineer, looking at a challenging and worthy problem, and thinking that I can make a difference.
Wired.com: Did those interests inspire you to work in games and inspire the setting of the games you made?
Carmack: It is a complete coincidence that we have made games involving Mars and rocket launchers, but it would be sort of interesting if somehow Armadillo Aerospace became the UAC.
Garriott: If you remember, Ultima one and two not only included swords and sorcery, but also spaceflight. So space was a part of the early Ultima series until medieval stuff kind of became the pattern.
Wired.com: What are your future plans to visit, or revisit, space?
Carmack: I can't imagine myself spending six months in Russia to prepare for a flight on a Soyuz, and I would rather put the $20 million-plus into technology development, so I expect that I will be going on one of my own vehicles. I'm not a test pilot, but I do plan to be in the club of the first thousand humans to reach space. Richard was somewhere around 490. There will be some distinction between those that have been to orbit and those that have just been on suborbital spaceflights, but nobody wants to say Alan Shepard didn't fly to space in '61.
Garriott: When I look at what John has done, my way, of course, took not only a lot of training but also a lot of wealth to be able to pull it off – a lot of investment. I was lucky enough to be able to do that. I actually think John's route of "build your own spaceship from scratch" is actually much harder.... I'm very confident that my next trip to space will be on John's vehicle.
Wired.com: How long have you two known each other? Have you always known that you share interest in spaceflight? Is there collaboration in your future?
Carmack: As a teenager, I was quite envious of "Lord British" – I felt that if only I had my own Apple II, I would be writing games like Ultima. I finally met him many years later when PC Gamer had a "Game Gods" cover shoot with me, Richard and Sid Meier, but that was still pre-Armadillo. We are now partners on some level, since Richard is involved with Space Adventures, which has a development arrangement with Armadillo Aerospace for suborbital passenger vehicles.
Garriott: We've known about each other throughout both of our tenures in the industry. But I did not know that he had interest in space until he signed up to be an X Prize competitor and I was already one of the initial founding members of the X Prize. That was the first time that I became aware of his interest in space.
To be honest, when John signed up, my first thought about it was, "Wow, what a crazy idea." Because I think of John as me. I would never be bold enough or crazy enough to think I could pull off building an actual X Prize competitive vehicle. And so when John first signed up I'm going, "What is this guy thinking?" And then almost instantly you begin to see his plan and his strategy, then you suddenly go, "OK, I get it."
Wired.com: How much of your mental bandwidth is dedicated toward your spaceflight projects? Is it hard to balance your dedication to spaceflight endeavors against gamemaking?
Garriott: Other than 2008, the amount of time I spend planning for space activities is a very tiny fraction of my time. Because I'm not, again, building the rocket. And I'm not currently training for a spaceflight.
Carmack: It varies, but usually I devote about 25 percent of my efforts to Armadillo, as well as a few weeks a year of more intense effort. We now have seven full-time employees, so the team can do a lot of work autonomously, but I still write all the software and run mission control for our R&D flights. I do miss the hands-on machining and assembly work that I used to do for Armadillo, but the full-time guys do it better than I do now.
Wired.com: The financial windfall of selling your respective companies seems to have been very helpful in financing these expensive efforts.
Garriott: My spaceflight was a $30 million event. That was the majority of my net worth at the time. I was so devoted to doing this that I was willing to give, basically, all the money I had in the world to it. Because it was that important to me. I'm still a wealthy person, but I'm much less wealthy than I was before doing that. And, no, I couldn't go on another orbital spaceflight without building and selling another company.
Carmack: I was very proud that Armadillo has been able to support itself for a while now with work for NASA and the Rocket Racing League, but being an aerospace contractor is really a dead end, and it would be easy to settle in as another largely irrelevant small engineering company. Pursuing our own designs for cost-effective reusable rockets is where I think the real impact can be made, and now that I have more financial resources at my disposal, I am able to prioritize internal R&D over continuing to chase contract work.
Wired.com: Putting a rocket into space involves solving engineering problems, but the feat also requires navigating a series of other, more earthbound hurdles like raising money, getting permits, etc. Seems a lot like making a videogame. How do you find the two pursuits different or similar?
Garriott: If you look at the early days of vidoegames where one person made a game by themselves, which both John and I started in those days, and compared it to now, where it takes a team of people often years and often many millions of dollars, in that way they're very similar. And they're both technological and they're both a lot of trial and error in their process.
Carmack: Game developers should thank their lucky stars that they do not need to interact with the government to the degree that an aerospace company does. The world of regulators, bureaucrats and congressional bills isn't a fun place for people that just want to create value. Rather depressing, actually.
The more we can make aerospace resemble software, the better off we will be. That brings in the inevitable "blue screen of death" and "your airplane running Windows" jokes, but vibrant technical progress is worth a lot. We try hard to have a tight design-build-test-fly-crash-redesign cycle for our vehicles, but it is still hard to do more than a couple cycles a year, which pales next to the radical changes you can make over a weekend in a software project.
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