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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software (or, Quake and Its Discontents)

“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many millions of dollars, can be trade secrets as jealously guarded as the recipes for Coca-Cola or McDonald’s Special Sauce.

We can learn much about the tech zeitgeist from those algorithms the conventional wisdom thinks are most valuable. At the very beginning of the 1990s, when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the age and the future of games was believed to lie with “interactive movies” made out of video clips of real actors, the race was on to develop video codecs: libraries of code able to digitize footage from the analog world and compress it to a fraction of its natural size, thereby making it possible to fit a reasonable quantity of it on CDs and hard drives. This was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app in itself, when Philips’s ill-fated CD-i console could be delayed for years by the lack of a way to get video to its screen quickly and attractively.

It is a rule in almost all kinds of engineering that, the more specialized a device is, the more efficiently it can perform the tasks that lie within its limited sphere. This rule holds true as much in computing as anywhere else. So, when software proved able to stretch only so far in the face of the limited general-purpose computing power of the day, some started to build their video codecs into specialized hardware add-ons.

Just a few years later, after the zeitgeist in games had shifted, the whole process repeated itself in a different context.

By the middle years of the decade, with the limitations of working with canned video clips becoming all too plain, interactive movies were beginning to look like a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes. The games industry therefore shifted its hopeful gaze to another approach, one that would prove a much more lasting transformation in the way games were made. This 3D Revolution did have one point of similarity with the mooted and then abandoned meeting of Silicon Valley and Hollywood: it too was driven by algorithms, implemented first in software and then in hardware.

It was different, however, in that the entire industry looked to one man to lead it into its algorithmic 3D future. That man’s name was John Carmack.



Whether they happen to be pixel art hand-drawn by human artists or video footage captured by cameras, 2D graphics already exist on disk before they appear on the monitor screen. And therein lies the source of their limitations. Clever programmers can manipulate them to some extent — pixel art generally more so than digitized video — but the possibilities are bounded by the fundamentally static nature of the source material. 3D graphics, however, are literally drawn by the computer. They can go anywhere and do just about anything. For, while 2D graphics are stored as a concrete grid of pixels, 3D graphics are described using only the abstract language of mathematics — a language able to describe not just a scene but an entire world, assuming you have a powerful enough computer running a good enough algorithm.

Like so many things that get really complicated really quickly, the basic concepts of 3D graphics are disarmingly simple. The process behind them can be divided into two phases: the modeling phase and the rendering, or rasterization, phase.

It all begins with simple two-dimensional shapes of the sort we all remember from middle-school geometry, each defined as a collection of points on a plane and straight lines connecting them together. By combining and arranging these two-dimensional shapes, or surfaces, together in three-dimensional space, we can make solids — or, in the language of computerized 3D graphics, objects.

Here we see how 3D objects can be made ever more more complex by building them out of ever more surfaces. The trade-off is that more complex objects require more computing power to render in a timely fashion.

Once we have a collection of objects, we can put them into a world space, wherever we like and at whatever angle of orientation we like. This world space is laid out as a three-dimensional grid, with its point of origin — i.e., the point where X, Y, and Z are all zero — wherever we wish it to be. In addition to our objects, we also place within it a camera — or, if you like, an observer in our world — at whatever position and angle of orientation we wish. At their simplest, 3D graphics require nothing more at the modeling phase.

We sometimes call the second phase the “rasterization” phase in reference to the orderly two-dimensional grid of pixels which make up the image seen on a monitor screen, which in computer-science parlance is known as a raster. The whole point of this rasterization phase, then, is to make our computer’s monitor a window into our imaginary world from the point of view of our imaginary camera. This entails converting said world’s three dimensions back into our two-dimensional raster of pixels, using the rules of perspective that have been understood by human artists since the Renaissance.

We can think of rasterizing as observing a scene through a window screen. Each square in the mesh is one pixel, which can be exactly one color. The whole process of 3D rendering ultimately comes down to figuring out what each of those colors should be.

The most basic of all 3D graphics are of the “wire-frame” stripe, which attempt to draw only the lines that form the edges of their surfaces. They were seen fairly frequently on microcomputers as far back as the early 1980s, the most iconic example undoubtedly being the classic 1984 space-trading game Elite.

Even in something as simple as Elite, we can begin to see how 3D graphics blur the lines between a purely presentation-level technology and a full-blown world simulation. When we have one enemy spaceship in our sights in Elite, there might be several others above, behind, or below us, which the 3D engine “knows” about but which we may not. Combined with a physics engine and some player and computer agency in the model world (taking here the form of lasers and thrusters), it provides the raw materials for a game. Small wonder that so many game developers came to see 3D graphics as such a natural fit.

But, for all that those wire frames in Elite might have had their novel charm in their day, programmers realized that the aesthetics of 3D graphics had to get better for them to become a viable proposition over the long haul. This realization touched off an algorithmic arms race that is still ongoing to this day. The obvious first step was to paint in the surfaces of each solid in single blocks of color, as the later versions of Elite that were written for 16-bit rather than 8-bit machines often did. It was an improvement in a way, but it still looked jarringly artificial, even against a spartan star field in outer space.

The next way station on the road to a semi-realistic-looking computer-generated world was light sources of varying strengths, positioned in the world with X, Y, and Z coordinates of their own, casting their illumination and shadows realistically on the objects to be found there.

A 3D scene with light sources.

The final step was to add textures, small pictures that were painted onto surfaces in place of uniform blocks of color; think of the pitted paint job of a tired X-Wing fighter or the camouflage of a Sherman tank. Textures introduced an enormous degree of complication at the rasterization stage; it wasn’t easy for 3D engines to make them look believable from a multitude of different lines of sight. That said, believable lighting was almost as complicated. Textures or lighting, or both, were already the fodder for many an academic thesis before microcomputers even existed.

A 3D scene with light sources and textures.

In the more results-focused milieu of commercial game development, where what was possible was determined largely by which types of microprocessors Intel and Motorola were selling the most of in any given year, programmers were forced to choose between compromised visions of the academic ideal. These broke down into two categories, neatly exemplified by the two most profitable computer games of the 1990s. Those games that followed in one or the other’s footsteps came to be known as the “Myst clones” and the “DOOM clones.” They could hardly have been more dissimilar in personality, yet they were both symbols of a burgeoning 3D revolution.

The Myst clones got their name from a game developed by Cyan Studios and published by Brøderbund in September of 1993, which went on to sell at least 6 million copies as a boxed retail product and quite likely millions more as a pack-in of one description or another. Myst and the many games that copied its approach tended to be, as even their most strident detractors had to admit, rather beautiful to look at. This was because they didn’t attempt to render their 3D imagery in real time; their rendering was instead done beforehand, often on beefy workstation-class machines, then captured as finished rasters of pixels on disk. Given that they worked with graphics that needed to be rendered only once and could be allowed to take hours to do so if necessary, the creators of games like this could pull out all the stops in terms of textures, lighting, and the sheer number and complexity of the 3D solids that made up their worlds.

These games’ disadvantage — a pretty darn massive one in the opinion of many players — was that their scope of interactive potential was as sharply limited in its way as that of all those interactive movies built around canned video clips that the industry was slowly giving up on. They could present their worlds to their players only as a collection of pre-rendered nodes to be jumped between, could do nothing on the fly. These limitations led most of their designers to build their gameplay around set-piece puzzles found in otherwise static, non-interactive environments, which most players soon started to find a bit boring. Although the genre had its contemplative pleasures and its dedicated aficionados who appreciated them, its appeal as anything other than a tech demo — the basis on which the original Myst was primarily sold — turned out to be the very definition of niche, as the publishers of Myst clones belatedly learned to their dismay. The harsh reality became undeniable once Riven, the much-anticipated, sumptuously beautiful sequel to Myst, under-performed expectations by “only” selling 1 million copies when it finally appeared four years after its hallowed predecessor. With the exception only of Titanic: Adventure out of Time, which owed its fluke success to a certain James Cameron movie with which it happened to share a name and a setting, no other game of this style ever cracked half a million in unit sales. The genre has been off the mainstream radar for decades now.

The DOOM clones, on the other hand, have proved a far more enduring fixture of mainstream gaming. They took their name, of course, from the landmark game of first-person carnage which the energetic young men of id Software released just a couple of months after Myst reached store shelves. John Carmack, the mastermind of the DOOM engine, managed to present a dynamic, seamless, apparently 3D world in place of the static nodes of Myst, and managed to do it in real time, even on a fairly plebeian consumer-grade computer. He did so first of all by being a genius programmer, able to squeeze every last drop out of the limited hardware at his disposal. And then, when even that wasn’t enough to get the job done, he threw out feature after feature that the academics whose papers he had pored over insisted was essential for any “real” 3D engine. His motto was, if you can’t get it done honestly, cheat, by hard-coding assumptions about the world into your algorithms and simply not letting the player — or the level designer — violate them. The end result was no Myst-like archetype of beauty in still screenshots. It pasted 2D sprites into its world whenever there wasn’t horsepower enough to do real modeling, had an understanding of light and its properties that is most kindly described as rudimentary, and couldn’t even handle sloping floors or ceilings, or walls that weren’t perfectly vertical. Heck, it didn’t even let you look up or down.

And absolutely none of that mattered. DOOM may have looked a bit crude in freeze-frame, but millions of gamers found it awe-inspiring to behold in motion. Indeed, many of them thought that Carmack’s engine, combined with John Romero and Sandy Petersen’s devious level designs, gave them the most fun they’d ever had sitting behind a computer. This was immersion of a level they’d barely imagined possible, the perfect demonstration of the real potential of 3D graphics — even if it actually was, as John Carmack would be the first to admit, only 2.5D at best. No matter; DOOM felt like real 3D, and that was enough.

A hit game will always attract imitators, and a massive hit will attract legions of them. Accordingly, the market was soon flooded with, if anything, even more DOOM clones than Myst clones, all running in similar 2.5D engines, the product of both intense reverse engineering of DOOM itself and Carmack’s habit of talking freely about how he made the magic happen to pretty much anyone who asked him, no matter how much his colleagues at id begged him not to. “Programming is not a zero-sum game,” he said. “Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can because I’m in it for the love of programming.” Carmack was elevated to veritable godhood, the prophet on the 3D mountaintop passing down whatever scraps of wisdom he deigned to share with the lesser mortals below.

Seen in retrospect, the DOOM clones are, like the Myst clones, a fairly anonymous lot for the most part, doubling down on transgressive ultra-violence instead of majestic isolation, but equally failing to capture a certain ineffable something that lay beyond the nuts and bolts of their inspiration’s technology. The most important difference between the Myst and DOOM clones came down to the filthy lucre of dollar and unit sales: whereas Myst‘s coattails proved largely illusory, producing few other hits, DOOM‘s were anything but. Most people who had bought Myst, it seemed, were satisfied with that single purchase; people who bought DOOM were left wanting more first-person mayhem, even if it wasn’t quite up to the same standard.

The one DOOM clone that came closest to replacing DOOM itself in the hearts of gamers was known as Duke Nukem 3D. Perhaps that isn’t surprising, given its pedigree: it was a product of 3D Realms, the rebranded incarnation of Scott Miller’s Apogee Software. Whilst trading under the earlier name, Miller had pioneered the episodic shareware model of game distribution, a way of escaping the heavy-handed group-think of the major boxed-game publishers and their tediously high-concept interactive movies in favor of games that were exponentially cheaper to develop, but also rawer, more visceral, more in line with what the teenage and twenty-something males who still constituted the large majority of dedicated gamers were actually jonesing to play. Miller had discovered the young men of id when they were still working for a disk magazine in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had then convinced them to move to his own glossier, better-connected hometown of Dallas, Texas, and distributed their proto-DOOM shooter Wolfenstein 3D to great success. His protégées had elected to strike out on their own when the time came to release DOOM, but it’s fair to say that that game would probably never have come to exist at all if not for their shareware Svengali. And even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have made them so much money; Jay Wilbur, id’s own tireless guerilla marketer, learned most of his tricks from watching Scott Miller.

Still a man with a keen sense of what his customers really wanted, Miller re-branded Apogee as 3D Realms as a way of signifying its continuing relevance amidst the 3D revolution that took the games industry by storm after DOOM. Then he, his junior partner George Broussard, and 3D Realms’s technical mastermind Ken Silverman set about making a DOOM-like engine of their own, known as Build, which they could sell to other developers who wanted to get up and running quickly. And they used the same engine to make a game of their own, which would turn out to be the most memorable of all those built with Build.

Duke Nukem 3D‘s secret weapon was one of the few boxes in the rubric of mainstream gaming success that DOOM had failed to tick off: a memorable character to serve as both star and mascot. First conceived several years earlier for a pair of Apogee 2D platformers, Duke Nukem was Joseph Lieberman’s worst nightmare, an unrepentant gangster with equally insatiable appetites for bombs and boobies, a fellow who “thinks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a convenience store,” as his advertising trumpeted. His latest game combined some of the best, tightest level design yet seen outside of DOOM with a festival of adolescent transgression, from toilet water that served as health potions to strippers who would flash their pixelated breasts at you for the price of a dollar bill. The whole thing was topped off with the truly over-the-top quips of Duke himself: “I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck!”; “Your face? Your ass? What’s the difference?” It was an unbeatable combination, proof positive that Miller’s ability to read his market was undimmed. Released in January of 1996, relatively late in the day for this generation of 3D — or rather 2.5D — technology, Duke Nukem 3D became by some reports the best-selling single computer game of that entire year. It is still remembered with warm nostalgia today by countless middle-aged men who would never want their own children to play a game like this. And so the cycle of life continues…

In a porno shop, shooting it out with policemen who are literally pigs…

Duke Nukem 3D was a triumph of design and attitude rather than technology; in keeping with most of the DOOM clones, the Build engine’s technical innovations over its inspiration were fairly modest. John Carmack scoffed that his old friends’ creation looked like it was “held together with bubble gum.”

The game that did push the technology envelope farthest, albeit without quite managing to escape the ghetto of the DOOM clones, was also a sign in another way of how quickly DOOM was changing the industry: rather than stemming from scruffy veterans of the shareware scene like id and 3D Realms, it came from the heart of the industry’s old-money establishment — from no less respectable and well-financed an entity than George Lucas’s very own games studio.

LucasArts’s Dark Forces was a shooter set in the Star Wars universe, which disappointed everyone right out of the gate with the news that it was not going to let you fight with a light saber. The developers had taken a hard look at it, they said, but concluded in the end that it just wasn’t possible to pull off satisfactorily within the hardware specifications they had to meet. This failing was especially ironic in light of the fact that they had chosen to name their new 2.5D engine “Jedi.” But they partially atoned for it by making the Jedi engine capable of hosting unprecedentedly enormous levels — not just horizontally so, but vertically as well. Dark Forces was full of yawning drop-offs and cavernous open spaces, the likes which you never saw in DOOM — or Duke Nukem 3D, for that matter, despite its release date of almost a year after Dark Forces. Even more importantly, Dark Forces felt like Star Wars, right from the moment that John Williams’s stirring theme song played over stage-setting text which scrolled away into the frame rather than across it. Although they weren’t allowed to make any of the movies’ characters their game’s star, LucasArts created a serviceable if slightly generic stand-in named Kyle Katarn, then sent him off on vertigo-inducing chases through huge levels stuffed to the gills with storm troopers in urgent need of remedial gunnery training, just like in the movies. Although Dark Forces toned down the violence that so many other DOOM clones were making such a selling point out of — there was no blood whatsoever on display here, just as there had not been in the movies — it compensated by giving gamers the chance to live out some of their most treasured childhood media memories, at a time when there were no new non-interactive Star Wars experiences to be had.

Unfortunately, LucasArts’s design instincts weren’t quite on a par with their presentation and technology. Dark Forces‘s levels were horribly confusing, providing little guidance about what to do or where to go in spaces whose sheer three-dimensional size and scope made the two-dimensional auto-map all but useless. Almost everyone who goes back to play the game today tends to agree that it just isn’t as much fun as it ought to be. At the time, though, the Star Wars connection and its technical innovations were enough to make Dark Forces a hit almost the equal of DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D. Even John Carmack made a point of praising LucasArts for what they had managed to pull off on hardware not much better than that demanded by DOOM.

Yet everyone seemed to be waiting on Carmack himself, the industry’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, to initiate the real technological paradigm shift. It was obvious what that must entail: an actual, totally non-fake rendered-on-the-fly first-person 3D engine, without all of the compromises that had marked DOOM and its imitators. Such engines weren’t entirely unheard of; the Boston studio Looking Glass Technologies had been working with them for five years, employing them in such innovative, immersive games as Ultima Underworld and System Shock. But those games were qualitatively different from DOOM and its clones: slower, more complex, more cerebral. The mainstream wanted a game that played just as quickly and violently and viscerally as DOOM, but that did it in uncompromising real 3D. With computers getting faster every year and with a genius like John Carmack to hand, it ought to be possible.

And so Carmack duly went to work on just such an engine, for a game that was to be called Quake. His ever-excitable level designer John Romero, who had the looks and personality to be the rock star gaming had been craving for years, was all in with bells on. “The next game is going to blow DOOM all to hell,” he told his legions of adoring fans. “DOOM totally sucks in comparison to our next game! Quake is going to be a bigger step over DOOM than DOOM was over Wolf 3D.” Drunk on success and adulation, he said that Quake would be more than just a game: “It will be a movement.” (Whatever that meant!) The drumbeat of excitement building outside of id almost seemed to justify his hyperbole; from all the way across the Atlantic, the British magazine PC Zone declared that the upcoming Quake would be “the most important PC game ever made.” The soundtrack alone was to be a significant milestone in the incorporation of gaming into mainstream pop culture, being the work of Trent Reznor and his enormously popular industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails. Such a collaboration would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

While Romero was enjoying life as gaming’s own preeminent rock star and waiting for Carmack to get far enough along on the Quake engine to give him something to do, Carmack was living like a monk, working from 4 PM to 4 AM every day. In another sign of just how quickly id had moved up in the world, he had found himself an unexpectedly well-credentialed programming partner. Michael Abrash was one of the establishment’s star programmers, who had written a ton of magazine articles and two highly regarded technical tomes on assembly-language and graphics programming and was now a part of Microsoft’s Windows NT team. When Carmack, who had cut his teeth on Abrash’s writings, invited him out of the blue to come to Dallas and do Quake with him, Bill Gates himself tried to dissuade his employee. “You might not like it down there,” he warned. Abrash was, after all, pushing 40, a staid sort with an almost academic demeanor, while id was a nest of hyperactive arrested adolescence on a permanent sugar high. But he went anyway, because he was pretty sure Carmack was a genius, and because Carmack seemed to Abrash a bit lonely, working all night every night with only his computer for company. Abrash thought he saw in Quake a first glimmer of a new form of virtual existence that companies like Meta are still chasing eagerly today: “a pretty complicated, online, networked universe,” all in glorious embodied 3D. “We do Quake, other companies do other games, people start building worlds with our format and engine and tools, and these worlds can be glommed together via doorways from one to another. To me this sounds like a recipe for the first real cyberspace, which I believe will happen the way a real space station or habitat probably would — by accretion.”

He may not have come down if he had known precisely what he was getting into; he would later compare making Quake to “being strapped onto a rocket during takeoff in the middle of a hurricane.” The project proved a tumultuous, exhausting struggle that very nearly broke id as a cohesive company, even as the money from DOOM was continuing to roll in. (id’s annual revenues reached $15.6 million in 1995, a very impressive figure for what was still a relatively tiny company, with a staff numbering only a few dozen.)

Romero envisioned a game that would be as innovative in terms of gameplay as technology, that would be built largely around sword-fighting and other forms of hand-to-hand combat rather than gun play — the same style of combat that LucasArts had decided was too impractical for Dark Forces. Some of his early descriptions make Quake sound more like a full-fledged CRPG in the offing than another straightforward action game. But it just wouldn’t come together, according to some of Romero’s colleagues because he failed to communicate his expectations to them, rather leading them to suspect that even he wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to make.

Carmack finally stepped in and ordered his design team to make Quake essentially a more graphically impressive DOOM. Romero accepted the decision outwardly, but seethed inwardly at this breach of longstanding id etiquette; Carmack had always made the engines, then given Romero free rein to turn them into games. Romero largely checked out, opening a door that ambitious newcomers like American McGee and Tim Willits, who had come up through the thriving DOOM modding community, didn’t hesitate to push through. The offices of id had always been as hyper-competitive as a DOOM deathmatch, but now the atmosphere was becoming a toxic stew of buried resentments.

In a misguided attempt to fix the bad vibes, Carmack, whose understanding of human nature was as shallow as his understanding of computer graphics was deep, announced one day that he had ordered a construction crew in to knock down all of the walls, so that everybody could work together from a single “war room.” One for all and all for one, and all that. The offices of the most profitable games studio in the world were transformed into a dystopian setting perfect for a DOOM clone, as described by a wide-eyed reporter from Wired magazine who came for a visit: “a maze of drywall and plastic sheeting, with plaster dust everywhere, loose acoustic tiles, and cables dangling from the ceiling. Almost every item not directly related to the completion of Quake was gone. The only privacy to be found was between the padded earpieces of headphones.”

Wired magazine’s August 1996 cover, showing John Carmack flanked by John Romero and Adrian Carmack, marked the end of an era. By the time it appeared on newsstands, Romero had already been fired.

Needless to say, it didn’t have the effect Carmack had hoped for. In his book-length history of id’s early life and times, journalist David Kushner paints a jittery, unnerving picture of the final months of Quake‘s development: they “became a blur of silent and intense all-nighters, punctuated by the occasional crash of a keyboard against a wall. The construction crew had turned the office into a heap. The guys were taking their frustrations out by hurling computer parts into the drywall like knives.” Michael Abrash is more succinct: “A month before shipping, we were sick to death of working on Quake.” And level designer Sandy Petersen, the old man of the group, who did his best to keep his head down and stay out of the intra-office cold war, is even more so: “[Quake] was not fun to do.”

Quake was finally finished in June of 1996. It would prove a transitional game in more ways than one, caught between where games had recently been and where they were going. Still staying true to that odd spirit of hacker idealism that coexisted with his lust for ever faster Ferraris, Carmack insisted that Quake be made available as shareware, so that people could try it out before plunking down its full price. The game accordingly got a confusing, staggered release, much to the chagrin of its official publisher GT Interactive. To kick things off, the first eight levels went up online. Shortly after, there appeared in stores a $10 CD of the full game that had to be unlocked by paying id an additional $50 in order to play beyond the eighth level. Only after that, in August of 1996, did the game appear in a conventional retail edition.

Predictably enough, it all turned into a bit of a fiasco. Crackers quickly reverse-engineered the algorithms used for generating the unlocking codes, which were markedly less sophisticated than the ones used to generate the 3D graphics on the disc. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get the entirety of the most hotly anticipated game of the year for $10. Meanwhile even many of those unwilling or unable to crack their shareware copies decided that eight levels was enough for them, especially given that the unregistered version could be used for multiplayer deathmatches. Carmack’s misplaced idealism cost id and GT Interactive millions, poisoning relations between them; the two companies soon parted ways.

So, the era of shareware as an underground pipeline of cutting-edge games came to an end with Quake. From now on, id would concentrate on boxed games selling for full price, as would all of their fellow survivors from that wild and woolly time. Gaming’s underground had become its establishment.

But its distribution model wasn’t the only sense in which Quake was as much a throwback as a step forward. It held fast as well to Carmack’s disinterest in the fictional context of id’s games, as illustrated by his famous claim that the story behind a game was no more important than the story behind a porn movie. It would be blatantly incorrect to claim that the DOOM clones which flooded the market between 1994 and 1996 represented some great exploding of the potential of interactive narrative, but they had begun to show some interest, if not precisely in elaborate set-piece storytelling in the way of adventure games, at least in the appeal of setting and texture. Dark Forces had been a pioneer in this respect, what with its between-levels cut scenes, its relatively fleshed-out main character, and most of all its environments that really did look and feel like the Star Wars films, from their brutalist architecture to John Williams’s unmistakable score. Even Duke Nukem 3D had the character of Duke, plus a distinctively seedy, neon-soaked post-apocalyptic Los Angeles for him to run around in. No one would accuse it of being an overly mature aesthetic vision, but it certainly was a unified one.

Quake, on the other hand,  displayed all the signs of its fractious process of creation, of half a dozen wayward designers all pulling in different directions. From a central hub, you took “slipgates” into alternate dimensions that contained a little bit of everything on the designers’ not-overly-discriminating pop-culture radar, from zombie flicks to Dungeons & Dragons, from Jaws to H.P. Lovecraft, from The Terminator to heavy-metal music, and so wound up not making much of a distinct impression at all.

Most creative works are stamped with the mood of the people who created them, no matter how hard the project managers try to separate the art from the artists. With its color palette dominated by shocks of orange and red, DOOM had almost literally burst off the monitor screen with the edgy joie de vivre of a group of young men whom nobody had expected to amount to much of anything, who suddenly found themselves on the verge of remaking the business of games in their own unkempt image. Quake felt tired by contrast. Even its attempts to blow past the barriers of good taste seemed more obligatory than inspired; the Satanic symbolism, elaborate torture devices, severed heads, and other forms of gore were outdone by other games that were already pushing the envelope even further. This game felt almost somber — not an emotion anyone had ever before associated with id. Its levels were slower and emptier than those of DOOM, with a color palette full of mournful browns and other earth tones. Even the much-vaunted soundtrack wound up rather underwhelming. It was bereft of the melodic hooks that had made Nine Inch Nails’s previous output more palatable for radio listeners than that of most other “extreme” bands; it was more an exercise in sound design than music composition. One couldn’t help but suspect that Trent Reznor had held back all of his good material for his band’s next real record.

At its worst, Quake felt like a tech demo waiting for someone to turn it into an actual game, proving that John Carmack needed John Romero as badly as Romero needed him. But that once-fruitful relationship was never to be rehabilitated: Carmack fired Romero within days of finishing Quake. The two would never work together again.

It was truly the end of an era at id. Sandy Petersen was soon let go as well, Michael Abrash went back to the comfortable bosom of Microsoft, and Jay Wilbur quit for the best of all possible reasons: because his son asked him, “How come all the other daddies go to the baseball games and you never do?” All of them left as exhausted as Quake looks and feels.

Of course, there was nary a hint of Quake‘s infelicities to be found in the press coverage that greeted its release. Even more so than most media industries, the games industry has always run on enthusiasm, and it had no desire at this particular juncture to eat its own by pointing out the flaws in the most important PC game ever made. The coverage in the magazines was marked by a cloying fan-boy fawning that was becoming ever more sadly prominent in gamer culture. “We are not even worthy to lick your toenails free of grit and fluffy sock detritus,” PC Zone wrote in a public letter to id. “We genuflect deeply and offer our bare chests for you to stab with a pair of scissors.” (Eww! A sense of proportion is as badly lacking as a sense of self-respect…) Even the usually sober-minded (by gaming-journalism standards) Computer Gaming World got a little bit creepy: “Describing Quake is like talking about sex. It must be experienced to be fully appreciated.”

Still, I would be a poor historian indeed if I called all the hyperbole of 1996 entirely unjustified. The fact is that the passage of time has tended to emphasize Quake‘s weaknesses, which are mostly in the realm of design and aesthetics, whilst obscuring its contemporary strengths, which were in the realm of technology. Although not quite the first game to graft a true 3D engine onto ultra-fast-action gameplay — Interplay’s Descent beat it to the market by more than a year — it certainly did so more flexibly and credibly than anything else to date, even if Carmack still wasn’t above cheating a bit when push came to shove. (By no means is the Quake engine entirely free of tricksy 2D sprites in places where proper 3D models are just too expensive to render.)

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to fully convey today just how revolutionary the granular details of Quake seemed in 1996: the way you could look up and down and all around you with complete freedom; the way its physics engine made guns kick so that you could almost feel it in your mouse hand; the way you could dive into water and experience the visceral sensation of actually swimming; the way the wood paneling of its walls glinted realistically under the overhead lighting. Such things are commonplace today, but Quake paved the way. Most of the complaints I’ve raised about it could be mitigated by the simple expedient of not even bothering with the lackluster single-player campaign, of just playing it with your mates in deathmatch.

But even if you preferred to play alone, Quake was a sign of better things to come. “It goes beyond the game and more into the engine and the possibilities,” says Rob Smith, who watched the Quake mania come and go as the editor of PC Gamer magazine. “Quake presented options to countless designers. The game itself doesn’t make many ‘all-time’ lists, but its impact [was] as a game changer for 3D gaming, [an] engine that allowed other game makers to express themselves.” For with the industry’s Master of 3D Algorithms John Carmack having shown what was possible and talking as freely as ever about how he had achieved it, with Michael Abrash soon to write an entire book about how he and Carmack had made the magic happen, more games of this type, ready and able to harness the technology of true 3D to more exciting designs, couldn’t be far behind. “We’ve pretty much decided that our niche is in first-person futuristic action games,” said John Carmack. “We stumble when we get away from the techno stuff.” The industry was settling into a model that would remain in place for years to come: id would show what was possible with the technology of 3D graphics, then leave it to other developers to bend it in more interesting directions.

Soon enough, then, titles like Jedi Knight and Half-Life would push the genre once known as DOOM clones, now trading under the more sustainable name of the first-person shooter, in more sophisticated directions in terms of storytelling and atmosphere, without losing the essence of what made their progenitors so much fun. They will doubtless feature in future articles.

Next time, however, I want to continue to focus on the technology, as we turn to another way in which Quake was a rough draft for a better gaming future: months after its initial release, it became one of the first games to display the potential of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, marking the beginning of a whole new segment of the microcomputer industry, one worth many billions of dollars today.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.



(Sources: the books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, The Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, and Computer Graphics from Scratch: A Programmer’s Introduction by Gabriel Gambetta. PC Zone of May 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996 and October 1996; Wired of August 1996 and January 2010. Online sources include Michael Abrash’s “Ramblings in Realtime” for Blue’s News.

Quake is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com, as is Star Wars: Dark Forces. Duke Nukem 3D can be found on Steam.)

 
 

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Titanic Visions, Part 2: A Night to Remember

Why does the sinking of the Titanic have such a stranglehold on our imaginations? The death of more than 1500 people is tragic by any standard, but worse things have happened on the world’s waters, even if we set aside deliberate acts of war. In 1822, for example, the Chinese junk Tek Sing ran into a reef in the South China Sea, drowning all 1600 of the would-be immigrants to Indonesia who were packed cheek-by-jowl onto its sagging deck. In 1948, the Chinese passenger ship Kiangya struck a leftover World War II mine shortly after departing Shanghai, killing as many as 4000 supporters of Chiang Kai-shek’s government who were attempting to flee the approaching Communist armies. In 1987, the Philippine ferry Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker near Manila, killing some 4300 people who were just trying to get home for Christmas.

But, you may object, these were all East Asian disasters, involving people for whom we in the West tend to have less immediate empathy, for a variety of good, bad, and ugly reasons. It’s a fair point. And yet what of the American paddle-wheel steamer Sultana, whose boiler exploded as it plied the Mississippi River in 1865, killing about 1200 people, or only 300 fewer than died on the Titanic?

I’m comfortable assuming that, unless you happen to be a dedicated student of maritime lore or of Civil War-era Americana, you probably don’t know much about any of these disasters. But everyone — absolutely everyone — seems to know at least the basic outline of what happened to the Titanic. Why?

It seems to me that the sinking of the Titanic is one of those rare occasions when History stops being just a succession of one damn thing after another, to paraphrase Arnold Toynbee, and shows some real dramatic flair. The event has enough thematic heft to curl the toes of William Shakespeare: the pride that goeth before a fall (no one will ever dare to call a ship “unsinkable” again); the cruelty of fate (experts have estimated that, if the Titanic somehow could have been raised and put into service once again, it could have made a million more Atlantic crossings without bumping into any more icebergs); the artificiality of money and social status (a form of communism far purer than anything ever implemented in the Soviet Union or China reigned in the Titanic‘s lifeboats); the crucible of character in the breach (some people displayed tremendous, selfless bravery when faced with the ultimate existential impasse of their lives, while others behaved… less well). Unlike the aforementioned shipwrecks, all of which were short, sharp shocks, the sinking of the Titanic was a slow-motion tragedy that took place over the course of two and a half hours. This gave ample space for all of the aforementioned themes to play out. The end result was almost irresistibly dramatic, if you’ll excuse my callousness in writing about it like a film prospectus.

And then, of course, there is the power of the Titanic as a symbol of changing times, as an almost tangible way point in history. The spirit of a century doesn’t always line up neatly with the numbers in our calendars; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were actually unusual in setting the tone for our muddled, complicated 21st-century existences so soon after we were all cheering our escape from the Y2K crisis and drinking toasts to The End of History on January 1, 2000. By way of contrast, one might say that the nineteenth century didn’t really get going in earnest until Napoleon was defeated once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Similarly, one could say that the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 makes for a much more satisfying fin de siècle than anything that occurred in 1900. On that cold April night in the North Atlantic, an entire worldview sank beneath the waves, a glittering vision of progress as an inevitability, of industry and finance and social refinement as a guarantee against any and all forms of unpleasantness, of war — at least war between the proverbial great powers — as a quaint relic of the past. Less than two and a half years after the Titanic went down, the world was plunged into the bloodiest war it had ever known.

That, anyway, is how we see the sinking of the Titanic today. Many people of our own era are surprised, even though they probably shouldn’t be, that the event’s near-mythic qualities went completely unrecognized at the time; the larger currents of history tend to make sense only in retrospect. While the event was certainly recognized as an appalling tragedy, it was not seen as anything more than that. Rather than trying to interrogate the consciousness of the age, the governments of both Britain and the United States took a more practical tack, endeavoring to get to the bottom of just what had gone wrong, who had been responsible, and how they could prevent anything like this from ever happening again. There followed interminable hearings in the Houses of Parliament and the Capitol Building, while journalists gathered the stories of the 700-odd survivors and wrote them up for a rapt public. But no one wrote or spoke of the event as any sea change in history, and in due course the world moved on. By the time the British luxury liner Lusitania, the queen of the Atlantic-crossing trade prior to the construction of the Titanic and its two sister ships, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915 — loss of life: 1200 — the Titanic was fading fast from the public consciousness, just another of those damn things that had happened before the present ones.

“Had the Titanic been a mud scow with the same number of useful workingmen on board and had it gone down while engaged in some useful social work,” wrote a muckraking left-wing Kansan newspaper, “the whole country would not have gasped with horror, nor would all the capitalist papers have given pages for weeks to reciting the terrible details.” This was harsh, but undeniably true. The only comfort for our Kansan polemicists, if it was comfort, was that the Titanic looked likely to be forgotten just as completely as that hypothetical mud scow would have been in the fullness of time.

But then, in the 1950s, the Titanic was scooped out of the dustbin of history and turned into an icon for the ages by a 30-something American advertising executive and part-time author named Walter Lord, who had crossed the Atlantic as a boy aboard the Titanic‘s sister the Olympic and been fascinated by the ships’ stories ever since. Lord’s editor was unenthusiastic when he proposed writing the first-ever book-length chronicle of that fateful night, but grudgingly agreed to the project at last, as long as Lord wrote “in terms of the people involved instead of the ship.” Accordingly, Lord interviewed as many of the living survivors and their progeny as he could, then wove their stories together into A Night to Remember, a vividly novelistic minute-by-minute account of the night in question that has remained to this day the classic book about the Titanic, a timeless wellspring of lore and legend. It was Lord, for example, who first told the story of the ship’s band bravely playing on in the hope of comforting their fellow passengers, until the musicians and their music were swallowed by the ocean along with their audience. Ditto the story of the ship’s stoic Captain Edward Smith, who directed his crew to save as many passengers as they could and then to save themselves if possible, while he followed the unwritten law of the sea and went down with his ship. Published in November of 1955, A Night to Remember became an instant bestseller and a veritable cultural sensation. Walter Lord became Homer to the Titanic‘s Trojan War, pumping tragedy full of enough heroism, romance, and melodrama to almost — almost, mind you — make us wish we could have been there.

The book was soon turned into an American teleplay that was reportedly seen by an astonishing 28 million people. “Millions, perhaps, learned about the disaster for the first time,” mused Lord later about the evening it was broadcast. “More people probably thought about the Titanic that night than at any time since 1912.” (Sadly, every trace of this extraordinary cultural landmark has been lost to us because it was shot and broadcast live without ever touching film or videotape, as was the norm in those days). The book then became a lavish British feature film in 1958. Surprisingly, the movie was a failure in the United States. Walter Lord blamed this on poor Stateside distribution on the part of the British producers and a newspaper strike in New York. A more convincing set of causes might begin with its lack of big-name stars, continue with the decision to shoot it in stately black and white rather than garish Technicolor, and conclude with the way it echoed the book in weaving together a tapestry of experiences rather than giving the audience just one or two focal points whom they could get to know well and root for.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1950s the Titanic had been firmly lodged in the public’s imagination as mythology and metaphor, and it would never show any sign of coming unstuck. The first Titanic fan club — for lack of a better term — was founded in Massachusetts in 1960, whence chapters quickly spread around the country and the world. Initially called the Titanic Enthusiasts Society, the name was changed to the Titanic Historical Society after it was pointed out that being an “enthusiast” of a disaster like this one was perhaps not quite appropriate.  But whatever the name under which they traveled, these were obsessive fans in the classic sense, who could sit around for hours debating the minutiae of their favorite ship’s brief but glamorous life in the same way that others of their ilk were dissecting every detail of the starship Enterprise. (Doug Woolley, the first person to propose finding the wreck and raising it back to the surface, was every inch a product of this milieu.)

“The story of the Titanic is a curious one because it rolled on and on,” said Walter Lord decades after writing his seminal book, “becoming more newsworthy as time went by.” Needless to say, A Night to Remember has never come close to going out of print. Even as the 83 survivors who were still around in 1960 died off one by one and the mass-media spotlight shifted from them to the prospects of finding the wreck of the ship on which they had sailed all those years ago, it was always the stories of that one horrible night, with all of their pathos and their bizarre sort of glamour, that undergirded the interest. If there had been no Walter Lord to turn a disaster into a mythology, it would never have occurred to Jack Grimm and Robert Ballard to go in search of the real ship. It was thanks to 30 years of tellings and retellings of the Titanic story that those first pictures of the ship sent up from the depths by Ballard felt like coming face to face with Leviathan. For by the 1980s, you could use the Titanic as a simile, a metaphor, a parable, or just a trope in conversation with absolutely anyone, whether aged 9 or 90, and be certain that they would know what you were talking about. That kind of cultural ubiquity is extremely rare.

Thus we shouldn’t be stunned to learn that this totem of modern culture also inspired the people who made computer games. Even as some of their peers were casting their players as would-be Robert Ballards out to find and explore the wreck, others were taking them all the way back to the night of April 14, 1912, and asking them to make the best of a no-win situation.


The very first Titanic computer game of any stripe that I know of was written by an American named Peter Kirsch, the mastermind of SoftSide magazine’s “Adventure of the Month” club, whose members were sent a new text adventure on tape or disk every single month. Dateline Titanic was the game for May of 1982. Casting you as the ship’s captain, it begins with one of the cruelest fake-outs in any game ever. It seems to let you spot and dodge the deadly iceberg and change the course of history — until the message, “Oh, my God! You hit another one!” pops up. Simple soul that I am, I find this kind of hilarious.

Anyway, we’re back in the same old boat, so to speak. The game does permit you to be a bit less of a romantic old sea dog than the real Captain Smith and to save yourself, although you’re expected to rescue as many passengers as you can first. In an article he wrote for SoftSide a few months after making the game, Kirsch noted that “the days of simply finding treasure and returning it to a storage location are gone forever.” But, stuck as he was with an adventure engine oriented toward exactly this “points for treasures” model, he faced a dilemma when it came time to make his Titanic game. He ended up with a design where, instead of scarfing up treasures and putting them in your display case for safe keeping, you have to grab as many passengers as possible and chunk them into lifeboats.

That said, it’s a not a bad little game at all, given the almost unimaginable technological constraints under which it was created. The engine is written in BASIC, and it combined with the actual game it enables have to be small enough to fit into as little as 16 K of memory. You can finish the game the first time whilst rescuing no one other than yourself, if necessary, then optimize your path on subsequent playthroughs until you’ve solved all of the puzzles in the right order, collected everyone, and gotten the maximum score; the whole experience is short enough to support this style of try-and-try-again gameplay without becoming too annoying. Whether it’s in good taste to treat a tragedy in this cavalier way is a more fraught question, but then again, it’s hard to imagine any other programmer doing much better under this set of constraints. It’s hard to pay proper tribute to the dead when you have to sweat every word of text you include as if you’re writing a haiku.

(Although Dateline Titanic was made in versions for the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit line, only the last appears to have survived. Feel free to download it from here. Note that you’ll need an Atari emulator such as the one called simply Atari800. And you’ll also need Atari’s BASIC cartridge. Unfortunately, the emulator is not a particularly user-friendly piece of software, with an interface that is entirely keyboard-driven. You access the menu by hitting the F1 key. From here, you want to first mount the BASIC cartridge: “Cartridge Management -> Cartridge.” Press the Escape key until you return to the emulator’s main screen. You should see a “READY” prompt. Now you can run the “.atr” file by pressing F1 again, then choosing “Run Atari Program.” Be patient; it will take the game a moment to start up fully.)


Four years later, in the midst of the full-blown Titanic mania ignited by Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck, another Titanic text adventure appeared, again as something other than a standard boxed game. Beyond the Titanic by Scott Miller is interesting today mostly as a case of humble beginnings. After releasing this game and a follow-up text adventure as shareware to little notice and less profit, Miller switched his focus to action games. He and his company Apogee Entertainment then became the primary impetus behind an underground movement which bypassed the traditional publishers and changed the character of gaming dramatically in the early 1990s by providing a more rough-and-ready alternative to said publishers’ obsession with high-concept “interactive movies.” For all that it belongs to a genre whose commercial potential was already on the wane by 1986, Beyond the Titanic does display the keen instinct for branding that would serve Miller so well in later years. The Titanic was a hot topic in 1986, and it was a name in the public domain, so why not make a game about it?

Beyond the Titanic itself is a strange beast, a game which is soundly designed and competently coded but still manages to leave a laughably bad final impression. Miller obviously didn’t bother to do much if any research for his game. Playing the role of a sort of anti-Captain Smith, you escape from the sinking ship all by yourself in one of its lifeboats and leave everyone else to their fate. Luckily for you, in Miller’s world a lifeboat is apparently about the size of a canoe and just as easy for one person to paddle. (In reality, the lifeboats were larger than many ocean-going pleasure boats, being 30 feet long and 9 feet wide.)

Your escape doesn’t mark the end of the game but its real beginning. Now aliens enter the picture, sucking you into a cave complex hidden below the ocean. From this point on, the game lives up to its title by having nothing else to do with the Titanic; the plot eventually sends you into outer space and finally on a trip through time. “Overstuffed” is as kind a descriptor as I can find for both the plot and the writing. This one is best approached in the spirit of an Ed Wood film; Miller tries valiantly to grab hold of the right verbs and adjectives, but they’re forever flitting out of his grasp like fireflies on a summer night. Suffice to say that Beyond the Titanic won’t leave anyone regretting that he abandoned text adventures for greener pastures so quickly.

(Beyond the Titanic has been available for free from Scott Miller’s company 3D Realms since 1998. In light of that, I’ve taken the liberty of hosting a version here that’s almost ready to run on modern computers; just add your platform’s version of DOSBox.)


A relatively more grounded take on the Titanic‘s one and only voyage appeared in 1995 as one of the vignettes in Jigsaw, Graham Nelson’s epic time-travel text adventure, which does have the heft to support its breadth. Indeed, Nelson’s game was the first ever to deliver a reasonably well-researched facsimile of what it was actually like to be aboard the doomed ship before and after it struck the iceberg. A fine writer by any standard, he describes the scenes with the appropriate gravity as you wander a small subsection of the ship’s promenades, staterooms, lounges, and crew areas.

Making a satisfying game out of the sinking of the Titanic presents a challenge for a designer not least in that really is the very definition of a no-win scenario: to allow the player to somehow avert the disaster would undercut the whole reason we find the ship so fascinating, yet to make a game simply about escaping doesn’t feel all that appropriate either. Many designers, including Scott Miller and now Graham Nelson in a far more effective way, therefore use the sinking ship and all of the associated drama as a springboard for other, original plots. (Because you’re a time traveler in Jigsaw, escape isn’t even an issue for you; you can ride the time stream out of Dodge whenever you feel like it.) Nelson imagines that the fabulously wealthy Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the glitterati who went down with the ship, is also a spy carrying a vital dispatch meant for Washington, D.C. Because Guggenheim, honorable gentleman that he is, would never think of getting into a lifeboat as long as women and children are still aboard the ship, he entrusts you with getting the message into the hands of a co-conspirator whose gender gives her a better chance of surviving: the “rich and beautiful heiress Miss Shutes.”

It must be emphasized that the Titanic is only a vignette in Jigsaw, one of fifteen in the complete game. Thus it comes as no surprise that the espionage plot isn’t all that well developed, or even explained. In addition, there are also a few places where Nelson’s background research falls down. The Titanic was not the first vessel ever to send an “SOS” distress signal at sea, as he claims. And, while there was an Elizabeth Shutes aboard the ship, she was a 40-year-old governess employed by a wealthy family, not a twenty-something socialite. On the more amusing side, Jigsaw walkthrough author Bonni Mierzejewska has pointed out that the compass directions aboard the ship would seem to indicate that it’s sailing due east — a good idea perhaps in light of what awaits it on its westward progress, but a decidedly ahistorical one nonetheless.

Still, Jigsaw gets more right than wrong within the limited space it can afford to give the Titanic. I was therefore surprised to learn from Graham Nelson himself just a couple of years ago that “the Titanic sequence is the one I would now leave out.” While it’s certainly a famous event in history and an enduring sign of changing times, he argues, it wasn’t of itself a turning point in history like his other vignettes, at least absent the insertion of the fictional espionage plot: “Rich people drowned, but other rich people took their place, and history wasn’t much dented.” This is true enough, but I for one am glad the Titanic made the cut for one of my favorite text adventures of the 1990s.

(Jigsaw is available for free from the IF Archive. Note that you’ll need a Z-Machine interpreter such as Gargoyle to run it.)



Yet the most intriguing Titanic text adventure of all is undoubtedly the one that never got made. Steve Meretzky, one of Infocom’s star designers, was one of that odd species of Titanic “fan”; his colleagues remember a shelf filled with dozens of books on the subject, and a scale model of the ship he built himself that was “about as big as his office.” Shortly after his very first game for Infocom, the 1983 science-fiction comedy Planetfall, became a hit, Meretzky started pushing to make a Titanic game. Just like the previous two designers in this survey, he felt he had to add another, “winnable” plot line to accompany the ship’s dramatic sinking.

You are a passenger on the Titanic, traveling in Third Class to disguise the importance of your mission: transporting a MacGuffin from London to New York. As the [game] opens and you feel a long, drawn-out shudder pass through the ship, you must begin the process of escaping the restricted Third Class section, retrieving the MacGuffin from the purser’s safe amidst the confusion, and surviving the sinking to complete your delivery assignment. The actual events of those 160 minutes between iceberg and sinking would occur around you. I see this as a game of split-second timing that would require multiple [playthroughs] to optimize your turns in order to solve the puzzles in the shortest possible time. But you could also ignore all the puzzles and simply wander around the ship as a “tourist,” taking in the sights of this amazing event.

To his immense frustration, Meretzky never was able to drum up any enthusiasm for the idea at Infocom. In 1985, he was finally allowed to make a serious game as his reward for co-authoring the third best-selling text adventure in history, but even then his colleagues convinced him to opt for a science-fiction exercise called A Mind Forever Voyaging instead of the Titanic game. The latter remained something of a running joke at Meretzky’s expense for years. “It was almost a cliché,” says his colleague Dave Lebling. “Steve would say, ‘We should do a Titanic game!’ And we would all say, “No, no Titanic game. Go away, Steve.'”

The dream didn’t die for Meretzky even after Infocom closed up shop in 1989, and he moved on to design games for Legend Entertainment, a company co-founded by his fellow Infocom alum Bob Bates. Sadly, Bates too saw little commercial potential in a Titanic game, leaving Meretzky stuck in his comedy niche for all four of the games he made for Legend.

And still the fire burned. When Meretzky and Mike Dornbrook, another old Infocom colleague, decided to start their own studio called Boffo Games in 1994, the Titanic game was high on the agenda. The changing times meant that it had by now evolved from a text adventure into a point-and-click graphic adventure, with a fully fleshed-out plot that was to place aboard the ship the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, which really was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. (Ever since the painting was recovered from the thieves two years later, conspiracy theories claiming that the Mona Lisa which was hung once again in the Louvre is a face-saving forgery have abounded.) Meretzky and Dornbrook pitched their Titanic game to anyone and everyone who might be willing to fund it throughout Boffo’s short, frustrating existence, and even created a couple of rooms as a prototype. But they never could get anyone to bite. “We were saying, you know, there’s this new movie coming out,” says Dornbrook. “And it might do well. It will come out about the time the game will. It’s [James] Cameron. He sometimes does good stuff…” But it was to no avail. Meretzky made his very last adventure game to date in 1997, and it had nothing to do with the Titanic.

Instead it was left to another graphic adventure to ride the wave kicked up by the movie Dornbrook mentioned to sales that bettered the combined totals of all of the other Titanic games I’ve mentioned in these last two articles by an order of magnitude. I’ll examine that game in detail in the third and final article in this series. But first, allow me to set the table for its success via the origin story of the highest-grossing movie of the twentieth century.


After the failures of the film versions of A Night to Remember and Raise the Titanic, the Hollywood consensus had become that nothing sank a feature film’s prospects faster than the Titanic. This was weird, given that the book A Night to Remember had spawned a cottage industry in print publishing and a whole fannish subculture to go along with it, but box-office receipts didn’t lie. The movers and shakers of Hollywood could only conclude that the public wanted a happy ending when they handed over their hard-earned money on a Friday night, which spelled doom for any film about one of the most infamously unhappy endings of all time. Even the full-fledged Titanic mania that followed Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck failed to sway the conventional wisdom.

But one prominent Hollywood director begged to differ. James Cameron was coming off the twin triumphs of The Terminator and Aliens in 1987, when he saw a National Geographic documentary that prominently featured Ballard’s eye-popping underwater footage of the wreck. An avid scuba diver, Cameron was entranced. He began to imagine a film that could unite the two halves of the Titanic‘s media legacy: the real sunken ship that lay beneath the waves and the glamorously cursed vessel of modern mythology. He jotted his thoughts down in his journal:

Do story with bookends of present-day scene of wreck using submersibles inter-cut with memory of a survivor and re-created scenes of the night of the sinking. A crucible of human values under stress. A certainty of slowly impending doom (metaphor). Division of men doomed and women and children saved by custom of the times. Many dramatic moments of separation, heroism, and cowardice, civility versus animal aggression. Needs a mystery or driving plot element woven through with all this as background.

The last sentence would prove key. Just like Scott Miller, Graham Nelson, and Steve Meretzky in the context of games, Cameron realized that his film couldn’t succeed as a tapestry of tragedy only. If it was to capture a wide audience’s interest, it needed the foreground plot and obvious set of protagonists that the film of A Night to Remember had so sorely lacked.

Yet Cameron’s own Titanic film would be a long time in coming. The melancholy splendor of that National Geographic documentary first did much to inform The Abyss, his moody 1989 movie about an American nuclear submarine’s close encounter with aliens. There then followed two more straightforward action vehicles starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 2 and True Lies.

Always, though, his Titanic movie stayed in the back of his mind. By 1995, he had more than a decade’s worth of zeitgeist-defining action flicks behind him, enough to make him the most bankable Hollywood crowd-pleaser this side of Steven Spielberg, with combined box-office receipts to his credit totaling more than $1.7 billion. With his reputation thus preceding him, he finally managed to convince an unusual pairing of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures to share the risk of funding his dream project. Hollywood’s reluctance was by no means incomprehensible. In addition to the Titanic box-office curse, there was the fact that Cameron had never made a film quite like this one before. In fact, no one was making films like this in the 1990s; Cameron was envisioning an old-fashioned historical epic, a throwback to the likes of War and Peace, Cleopatra, and Gone with the Wind, complete with those films’ three-hour-plus running times.

Cameron’s plan for his movie had changed remarkably little from that 1987 journal outline. He still wanted to bookend the main story with shots of the real wreck. He filmed this footage first, borrowing a Russian research vessel and deep-ocean submersible in September of 1995 in order to do so. Then it was time for the really challenging part. The production blasted out a 17-million-gallon pool on Mexico’s Baja coast and replicated the Titanic inside it at almost a one-to-one scale, working from the original builder’s blueprints. The sight of those iconic four smokestacks — the Titanic is the one ship in the world that absolutely everyone can recognize — looming up out of the desert was surreal to say the least, but it was only the beginning of the realization of Cameron’s vision. Everything that came within the view of a camera was fussed over for historical accuracy, right down to the pattern of the wainscotting on the walls.

Still hewing to the old-school formula for Hollywood epics, Cameron decided to make his foreground protagonists a pair of starstruck lovers from different sides of the economic divide: a prototypical starving artist from Steerage Class and a pampered young woman from First Class. This suited his backers very well; the stereotype-rooted but nevertheless timeless logic of their industry told them that men would come for the spectacle of seeing the ship go down, while women would come for the romance. The lead roles went to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, a pair of uncannily beautiful young up-and-comers. Pop diva Celine Dion was recruited to sing a big, impassioned theme song. For, if it was to have any hope of earning back its budget, this film would need to have something for everyone: action, romance, drama, a dash of comedy, and more than a little bit of sex appeal. (DiCaprio’s character painting Winslet’s in the altogether remains one of the more famous female nude scenes in film history.) But whether that would make it an entertainment spectacle for the ages or just an unwieldy monstrosity was up for debate.

The press at least knew where they were putting their money. When the project passed the $170 million mark to officially become the most expensive movie ever made, they had a field day. The previous holder of the record had been a deliriously misconceived 1995 fiasco called Waterworld, and the two films’ shared nautical theme was lost on no one. Magazines and newspapers ran headlines like “A Sinking Sensation” and “Glub! Glub! Glub!” before settling on calling Titanic — Cameron had decided that that simple, unadorned name was the only one that would suit his film — “the Waterworld of 1997.” By the time it reached theaters on December 19, 1997, six months behind schedule, its final cost had grown to $200 million.

And then? Well, then the press and public changed their tune, much to the benefit of the latest Titanic game.

(Sources: the books Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic by Daniel Stone, Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by Paula Parisi, A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, and The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books edited by Jenny Lawrence; SoftSide of August 1982; the Voyager CD-ROM A Night to Remember. The information on Steve Meretzky’s would-be Titanic game is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me many years ago now, and from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Another online source was “7 of the World’s Deadliest Shipwrecks” at Britannica. My thanks to reader Peter Olausson for digging up a vintage newspaper headline that labels the Titanic “unsinkable” and letting me link to it.)

 
 

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The Shareware Scene, Part 4: DOOM

The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid episodes, yet that number hardly begins to express the game’s real reach. Most people who acquired the free episode were content with it alone, or couldn’t afford to buy the other installments, or had friends who had bought them already and were happy to share. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the total number of Wolfenstein 3D players reached well into seven digits, putting the game’s exposure on a par with The 7th Guest, the boxed industry’s biggest hit of 1993, the game generally agreed to have put CD-ROM on the map. And yet Wolfenstein 3D‘s impact would prove even more earthshaking than that of The 7th Guest in the long run.

One telling sign of its influence — and of the way that it was just a fundamentally different type of game than The 7th Guest, that stately multimedia showpiece — is the modding scene that sprang up around it. The game’s levels were stored in a rather easily decipherable format: the “WAD” file, standing for “Where’s All the Data?” Enterprising hackers were soon writing and distributing their own level editors, along with custom levels. (The most popular of them all filled the corridors of the Nazi headquarters with facsimiles of the sickly sweet, thuddingly unclever, unbelievably grating children’s-television character Barney the Dinosaur and let you take out your frustrations with an automatic weapon.) The id boys debated fiercely among themselves whether they should crack down on the modders, but John Carmack, who had read Steven Levy’s landmark book Hackers at an impressionable age and thoroughly absorbed its heroes’ ethos of openness and transparency, insisted that people be allowed to do whatever they wished with his creation. And when Carmack put his foot down, he always got his way; at the end of the day, he was the one irreplaceable member of the id collective, and every one of the others knew it.

With Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity soaring, the id boys started eyeing the territory of the boxed publishers greedily. They struck a deal with a company called FormGen to release a seventh, lengthier installment of the game exclusively as a boxed retail product; it appeared under the name of Spear of Destiny in September of 1992. Thus readers of magazines like Computer Gaming World could scratch their heads over two separate luridly violent full-page advertisements for Wolfenstein 3D games, each with a different publisher’s name at the bottom. Spear of Destiny sold at least 100,000 copies at retail, both to hardcore Wolfenstein 3D addicts who couldn’t get enough and to many others, isolated from the typical means of shareware distribution, who came upon the game for the first time in this form.

Even Nintendo came calling with hat in hand, just a couple of years after summarily rejecting id’s offer to make a version of Super Mario Bros. 3 that ran on computers. The id boys now heeded Nintendo’s plea to port Wolfenstein 3D to the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whilst also grudgingly agreeing to abide by the dictates of Nintendo’s infamously strict censors. They had no idea what they had signed up for. Before they were through, Nintendo demanded that they replace blood with sweat, guard dogs with mutant rats, and Adolf Hitler, the game’s inevitable final boss, with a generic villain named the “Staatmeister.” They hated this bowdlerization with a passion, but, having agreed to do the port, they duly saw it through, muttering “Never again!” to themselves all the while. And indeed, when they were finished they took a mutual vow never to work with Nintendo again. Who needed them? The world was id’s oyster.

By now, 1992 was drawing  to a close, and they all felt it was high time that they moved on to the next new thing. For everyone at id, and most especially John Carmack, was beginning to look upon Wolfenstein 3D with a decidedly jaundiced eye.


The dirty little secret that was occluded by Wolfenstein 3D‘s immense success was that it wasn’t all that great a game once it was stripped of its novelty value. Its engine was just too basic to allow for compelling level design. You glided through its corridors as if you were on a branching tram line running past a series of fairground shooting galleries, trying to shoot the Nazis who popped up before they could shoot you. The lack of any sort of in-game map meant that you didn’t even know where you were most of the time; you just kept moving around shooting Nazis until you stumbled upon the elevator to the next level. Anyone who made it through seven episodes of this — and make no mistake, there were plenty of players who did — either had an awful lot of aggression to vent or really, really loved the unprecedented look and style of the game. The levels were even boring for their designers. John Romero:

Tom [Hall] and I [designed] levels [for Wolfenstein 3D] fast. Making those levels was the most boring shit ever because they were so simple. Tom was so bored; I kept on bugging him to do it. I told him about Scott Miller’s 300ZX and George Broussard’s Acura NSX. We needed cool cars too! Whenever he got distracted, I’d tell him, “Dude, NSX! NSX!”

Tom Hall had it doubly hard. The fact was, the ultra-violence of Wolfenstein 3D just wasn’t really his thing. He preferred worlds of candy-apple red, not bloody scarlet; of precocious kids and cuddly robots, not rabid vigilantes and sadistic Nazis. Still, he was nothing if not a team player. John Romero and Adrian Carmack had gone along with him for Commander Keen, so it was only fair that he humored them with Wolfenstein 3D. But now, he thought, all of that business was finally over, and they could all start thinking about making a third Commander Keen trilogy.

Poor Tom. It took a sweetly naïve nature like his to believe that the other id boys would be willing to go back to the innocent fun of their Nintendo pastiches. Wolfenstein 3D was a different beast entirely than Commander Keen. It wasn’t remarkable just for being as good as something someone else had already done; it was like nothing anyone had ever done before. And they owned this new thing, had it all to themselves. Hall’s third Commander Keen trilogy just wasn’t in the cards — not even when he offered to do it in 3D, using an updated version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. Cute and whimsical was id’s yesterday; gritty and bloody was their today and, if they had anything to say about it, their tomorrow as well.

Digging into their less-than-bulging bag of pop-culture reference points, the id boys pulled out the Alien film franchise. What a 3D game those movies would make! Running through a labyrinth of claustrophobic corridors, shooting aliens… that would be amazing! On further reflection, though, no one wanted the hassle that would come with trying to live up to an official license, even assuming such a thing was possible; id was still an underground insurgency at heart, bereft of lawyers and Hollywood contacts. Their thinking moved toward creating a similar effect via a different story line.

The id boys had a long-running tabletop Dungeon & Dragons campaign involving demons who spilled over from their infernal plane of existence into the so-called “Prime Material Plane” of everyday fantasy. What if they did something like that, only in a science-fiction context? Demons in space! It would be perfect! It was actually John Carmack, normally the id boy least engaged by these sorts of discussions, who proposed the name. In a scene from the 1986 Martin Scorsese movie The Color of Money, a young pool shark played by Tom Cruise struts into a bar carrying what looks like a clarinet case. “What you got in there?” asks his eventual patsy with an intimidating scowl. As our hero opens the case to reveal his pool cue, he flashes a 100-kilowatt Tom Cruise smile and says a single word: “Doom.”

Once again, Tom Hall tried to be supportive and make the best of it. He still held the official role of world-builder for id’s fictions. So, he went to work for some weeks, emerging at last with the most comprehensive design document which anyone at id had ever written, appropriately entitled The DOOM Bible. It offered plenty of opportunity for gunplay, but it also told an earnest story, in which you, as an astronaut trapped aboard a space station under assault by mysterious aliens, gradually learned to your horror that they were literal demons out of Hell, escaping into our dimension through a rift in the fabric of space-time. It was full of goals to advance and problems to solve beyond that of mowing down hordes of monsters, with a plot that evolved as you played. The history of gaming would have been markedly different, at least in the short term, if the other id boys had been interested in pursuing Hall’s path of complex storytelling within a richly simulated embodied virtual reality.

As it was, though, Hall’s ambitions landed with a resounding thud. Granted, there were all sorts of valid practical reasons for his friends to be skeptical. It was true enough that to go from the pseudo-3D engine of Wolfenstein 3D to one capable of supporting the type of complex puzzles and situations envisioned by Hall, and to get it all to run at an acceptable speed on everyday hardware, might be an insurmountable challenge even for a wizard like John Carmack. And yet the fact remains that the problem was at least as much one of motivation as one of technology. The other id boys just didn’t care about the sort of things that had Tom Hall so juiced. It again came down to John Carmack, normally the least articulate member of the group, to articulate their objections. “Story in a game,” he said, “is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

Tom Hall held out for several more months, but he just couldn’t convince himself to get fully onboard with the game his friends wanted to make. His relationship with the others went from bad to worse, until finally, in August of 1993, the others asked him to leave: “Obviously this isn’t working out.” By that time, DOOM was easily the most hotly anticipated game in the world, and nobody cared that it wouldn’t have a complicated story. “DOOM means two things,” said John Carmack. “Demons and shotguns!” And most of its fans wouldn’t have it any other way, then or now.


Tom Hall doesn’t look very happy about working on DOOM. Note the computer he works with: a NeXT workstation rather than an MS-DOS machine. John Carmack switched virtually all development to these $10,000 machines in the wake of Wolfenstein 3D‘s success, despite their tiny market footprint. The fact that the DOOM code was thus designed to be cross-platform from the beginning was undoubtedly a factor in the plethora of ports that appeared during and after its commercial heyday — that in fact still continue to appear today any time a new platform reaches a critical mass.

Making DOOM wound up requiring more than three times as many man-hours as anything the id boys had ever done before. It absorbed their every waking hour from January of 1993 to December of that year. Early on in that period, they decided that they wouldn’t be publishing it through Apogee. Cracks in the relationship between the id boys and Scott Miller had started forming around the latter’s business practices, which were scrupulously honest but also chaotic in that way dismayingly typical of a fast-growing business helmed by a first-time entrepreneur. Reports kept reaching id of people who wanted to buy Wolfenstein 3D, but couldn’t get through on the phone, or who managed to give Apogee their order only to have it never fulfilled.

But those complaints were perhaps just a convenient excuse. The reality was that the id boys just didn’t feel that they needed Apogee anymore. They had huge name recognition of their own now and plenty of money coming in to spend on advertising and promotion, and they could upload their new game to the major online services just as easily as Scott Miller could. Why keep giving him half of their money? Miller, for his part, handled the loss of his cash cow with graceful aplomb. He saw it as just business, nothing personal. “I would have done the same thing in their shoes,” he would frequently say in later interviews. He even hired Tom Hall to work at Apogee after the id boys cast him adrift in the foreign environs of Dallas.

Jay Wilbur now stepped into Miller’s old role for id. He prowled the commercial online services, the major bulletin-board systems, and the early Internet for hours each day, stoking the flames of anticipation here, answering questions there.

And there were lots of questions, for DOOM was actually about a bit more than demons and shotguns: it was also about technology. Whatever else it might become, DOOM was to be a showcase for the latest engine from John Carmack, a young man who was swiftly making a name for himself as the best game programmer in the world. With DOOM, he allowed himself to set the floor considerably higher in terms of system requirements than he had for Wolfenstein 3D.

System requirements have always been a moving target for any game developer. Push too hard, and you may end up releasing a game that almost no one can play; stay too conservative, and you may release something that looks like yesterday’s news. Striking precisely the right point on this continuum requires knowing your customers. The Apogee shareware demographic didn’t typically have cutting-edge computers; they tended to be younger and a bit less affluent than those buying the big boxed games. Thus id had made it possible to run Wolfenstein 3D on a two-generations-behind 80286-based machine with just 640 K of memory. The marked limitations of its pseudo-3D engine sprang as much from the limitations of such hardware as it did from John Carmack’s philosophy that, any time it came down to a contest between fidelity to the real world and speed, the latter should win.

He still held to that philosophy as firmly as ever when he moved on to DOOM, but the slow progression of the market’s trailing edge did give him more to work with: he designed DOOM for at least an 80386-based computer — 80486 recommended — with at least 4 MB of memory. He was able to ignore that bane of a generation of programmers, MS-DOS’s inability to seamlessly address memory beyond 640 K, by using a relatively new piece of software technology called a “DOS extender,” which built upon Microsoft’s recent memory-management innovations for their MS-DOS-hosted versions of Windows. DOS/4GW was included in the latest versions of what had heretofore been something of an also-ran in the compiler sweepstakes: the C compiler made by a small Canadian company known as Watcom. Carmack chose the Watcom compiler because of DOS/4GW; DOOM would quite literally have been impossible without it. In the aftermath of DOOM‘s prominent use of it, Watcom’s would become the C compiler of choice for game development, right through the remaining years of the MS-DOS-gaming era.

Rational Systems, the makers of DOS/4GW, were clever enough to stipulate in their licensing terms that the blurb above must appear whenever a program using it was started. Thus DOOM served as a prominent advertisement for the new software technology as it exploded across the world of computing in 1994. Soon you would have to look far and wide to find a game that didn’t mention DOS/4GW at startup.

Thanks not only to these new affordances but also — most of all, really — to John Carmack’s continuing evolution as a programmer, the DOOM engine advanced beyond that of Wolfenstein 3D in several important ways. Ironically, his work on the detested censored version of Wolfenstein 3D for the Super NES, a platform designed with 2D sprite-based games in mind rather than 3D graphics, had led him to discover a lightning-fast new way of sorting through visible surfaces, known as binary space partitioning, in a doctoral thesis by one Bruce Naylor. It had a well-nigh revelatory effect on the new engine’s capabilities.

That said, the new engine did remain caught, like its predecessor, in a liminal space between 2D and true 3D; it was just that it moved significantly further on the continuum toward the latter. No longer must everything and everyone exist on the same flat horizontal plane; you could now climb stairs and walk onto desks and daises. And walls must no longer all be at right angles to one another, meaning the world needed no longer resemble one of those steel-ball mazes children used to play with.

The DOOM level editor was a much more complicated tool than its Wolfenstein 3D equivalent, reflecting the enhanced capabilities of John Carmack’s latest engine. Most notably, the designer now had variable height at his disposal.

On the other hand, walls must still all be exactly vertical, and floors and ceilings must all be exactly horizontal; DOOM allowed stairs but not hills or ramps. These restrictions made it possible to map textures onto the environment without the ugly discontinuities that had plagued Blue Sky Productions’s earlier but more “honest” 3D game Ultima Underworld. DOOM makes such a useful study in game engineering because it so vividly illustrates that faking it convincingly for the sake of the player is better than simulating things which delight only the programmer of the virtual world. Its engine is perfect for the game it wants to be.

In a telling sign of John Carmack’s march toward a more complete 3D engine, the monsters in DOOM were sculpted as three-dimensional physical models by Adrian Carmack and Greg Punchatz, an artist hired just for the task. (The former is shown above.) The id boys then took snapshots of the models from eight separate angles for insertion into the game.

The value of the simple addition of height to the equation was revealed subtly — admittedly not an adverb often associated with DOOM! — as soon as you started the game. Instead of gliding smoothly about like a tram, your view now bobbed with uncanny verisimilitude as you ran about. You might never consciously notice the effect, but it made a huge difference to your feeling of really being in the world; if you tried to go back to Wolfenstein 3D after playing DOOM, you immediately had the feeling that something was somehow off.

But the introduction of varying height was most important for what it meant in terms of the game’s tactical possibilities. Now monsters could stand on balconies and shoot fireballs down at you, or you could do the same to them. Instead of a straightforward shooting gallery, the world of DOOM became a devious place of traps and ambushes. Carmack’s latest engine also supported variable levels of lighting for the first time, which opened up a whole new realm of both dramatic and tactical possibility in itself; entering an unexplored pitch-dark room could be, to say the least, an intimidating prospect.

This outdoor scene nicely showcases some of the engine’s capabilities. Note the fireball flying toward you. It’s implemented as a physical object in the world like any other.

In addition, the new engine dramatically improved upon the nearly non-existent degree of physics simulation in Wolfenstein 3D. Weight and momentum were implemented; even bullets were simulated as physical objects in the world. A stereo soundscape was implemented as well; in addition to being unnerving as all get-out, it could become another vital tactical tool. Meanwhile the artificial intelligence of the monsters, while still fairly rudimentary, advanced significantly over that of Wolfenstein 3D. It was even possible to lure two monsters into fighting each other instead of you.

John Carmack also added a modicum of support for doing things other than killing monsters, although to nowhere near the degree once envisioned by Tom Hall. The engine could be used to present simple set-piece interactions, such as locked doors and keys, switches and levers for manipulating parts of the environment: platforms could move up and down, bridges could extend and retract. And in recognition of this added level of complexity, which could suddenly make the details of the geography and your precise position within it truly relevant, the engine offered a well-done auto-map for keeping track of those things.


The DOOM automap, an impressive technical achievement in itself.

Of course, none of these new affordances would matter without level designs that took advantage of them. The original plan was for Tom Hall and John Romero to create the levels. But, as we’ve seen, Hall just couldn’t seem to hit the mark that the id boys were aiming for. After finally dismissing him, they realized that Romero still needed help to shoulder the design burden. It arrived from a most unlikely source — from a fellow far removed from the rest of the id boys in age, experience, and temperament.

Sandy Petersen was already a cult hero in certain circles for having created a tabletop RPG called Call of Cthulhu in 1981. Based on the works of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, it was the first RPG ever to convincingly transcend the kill-monsters-to-level-up-so-you-can-kill-bigger-monsters dynamic of Dungeons & Dragons. But Call of Cthulhu remained a cult game even when the tabletop-RPG boom was at its height, and by the early 1990s Petersen was serving as an in-house design consultant at the computer-game publisher MicroProse. Unhappy in this role, he sent his résumé to the upstart id.

The résumé was greeted with considerable skepticism. It’s doubtful whether any of the id boys fully grasped the significance of Petersen’s achievement with Call of Cthulhu; while they were hardcore tabletop-RPG players, they were perfectly happy with the traditional power-gaming approach of Dungeons & Dragons, thank you very much. Still, the résumé was more impressive than any other they had received, and they did urgently need a level designer… they called him in for an interview.

Their initial skepticism wasn’t lessened by the man himself. Petersen was pudgy and balding, looking even older than his already ancient 38 years, coming across rather like a genial university professor. And he was a devout Mormon to boot, washed up among this tribe of atheists and nihilists. Surely it could never work out.

Nevertheless, they decided to grant him the favor of a test before they rejected him; he had, after all, flown all the way from Baltimore to Dallas just to meet with them. They gave him a brief introduction to the DOOM engine and its level editor, and asked him to throw something together for them. Within minutes, Petersen produced a cunningly dramatic trap room, featuring lights that suddenly winked out when the player entered and a demon waiting in ambush behind a hidden door. He was hired.

Romero and Petersen proved to complement each other very well, with individual design aesthetics that reflected their personalities. Romero favored straight-up carnage — the more demon blood the better — while Petersen evinced a subtler, more cerebral approach in levels that could almost have a puzzle-like feel, where charging in with shotgun blazing was usually not the best tactic. Together the two approaches gave the game a nice balance.

Indeed, superb level design became DOOM‘s secret weapon, one that has allowed it to remain relevant to this day, when its degree of gore and violence seems humdrum, its pixels look as big as houses, and the limitations of its engine seem downright absurd. (You can’t even look up or down, for Pete’s sake. Nor is there a “jump” command, meaning that your brawny super-soldier can be stopped in his tracks by an inconveniently high curb.)

It’s disarmingly easy to underestimate DOOM today on your first encounter with it, simply because its visual aesthetic seems so tossed-off, so hopelessly juvenile; it’s the same crude mixture of action movies, heavy-metal album covers, and affected adolescent nihilism that defined the underground game-cracking scene of the 1980s. And yet behind it all is a game design that oozes as much thought and care as it does blood. These levels were obsessed over by their designers, and then, just as importantly, extensively critiqued by the other id boys and their immediate hangers-on, who weren’t inclined to pull their punches. Whatever your opinion of DOOM as a whole and/or the changes it wrought to the culture of gaming — I for one have thoroughly mixed feelings at best on both of those subjects — one cannot deny that it’s a veritable clinic of clever level design. In this sense, it still offers lessons for today’s game developers, whether they happen to be working inside or outside of the genre it came to define.


Subtle DOOM isn’t…

DOOM‘s other, not-so-secret weapon went by the name of “deathmatch.”

There had been significant experimentation with networked gaming on personal computers in the past: the legendary designer Dani Bunten Berry had spent the last half-decade making action-strategy games that were primarily or exclusively intended to be played by two humans connected via modem; Peter Molyneux’s “god game” Populous and its sequels had also allowed two players to compete on linked computers, as had a fair number of others. But computer-to-computer multiplayer-only games never sold very well, and most games that had networked multiplayer as an option seldom saw it used. Most people in those days didn’t even own modems; most computers were islands unto themselves.

By 1993, however, the isolationist mode of computing was slowly being nibbled away at. Not only was the World Wide Web on the verge of bursting into the cultural consciousness, but many offices and campuses were already networked internally, mostly using the systems of a company known as Novell. In fact, the id boys had just such a system in their Dallas office. When John Carmack told John Romero many months into the development of DOOM that multiplayer was feasible, the latter’s level of excitement was noteworthy even for him: “If we can get this done, this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history.” And it turned out that they could get it done because John Carmack was a programming genius.

While Carmack also implemented support for a modem connection or a direct computer-to-computer cable, it was under Novell’s IPX networking protocol that multiplayer DOOM really shined. Here you had a connection that was rock-solid and lightning-fast — and, best of all, here you could have up to four players in the same world instead of just two. You could tackle the single-player game as a team if you wanted to, but the id boys all agreed that deathmatch — all-out player-versus-player anarchy — was where the real fun lived. It made DOOM into more of a sport than a conventional computer game, something you could literally play forever. Soon the corridors at id were echoing with cries of “Suck it down!” as everyone engaged in frenzied online free-for-alls. Deathmatch was, in the diction of the id boys, “awesome.” It wasn’t just an improvement on what Wolfenstein 3D had done; it was something fundamentally different from it, something that was genuinely new under the sun. “This is the shit!” chortled Romero, and for once it sounded like an understatement.



The excitement over DOOM had reached a fever pitch by the fall of 1993. Some people seemed on the verge of a complete emotional meltdown, and launched into overwrought tirades every time Jay Wilbur had to push the release date back a bit more; people wrote poetry about the big day soon to come (“The Night Before DOOM“), and rang id’s offices at all hours of the day and night like junkies begging for a fix.

Even fuddy-duddy old Computer Gaming World stopped by the id offices to write up a two-page preview. This time out, no reservations whatsoever about the violence were expressed, much less any of the full-fledged hand-wringing that had been seen earlier from editor Johnny Wilson. Far from giving in to the gaming establishment, the id boys were, slowly but surely, remaking it in their own image.

At last, id announced that the free first episode of DOOM would go up at the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, on, of all places, the file server belonging to the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. When the id boys tried to log on to do the upload, so many users were already online waiting for the file to appear that they couldn’t get in; they had to call the university’s system administrator and have him kick everyone else off. Then, once the file did appear, the server promptly crashed under the load of 10,000 people, all trying to get DOOM at once on a system that expected no more than 175 users at a time. The administrator rebooted it; it crashed again. They would have a hard go of things at the modest small-town university for quite some time to come.



Legend had it that when Don Woods first uploaded his and Will Crowthers’s game Adventure in 1977, all work in the field of data processing stopped for a week while everyone tried to solve it. Now, not quite seventeen years later, something similar happened in the case of DOOM, arguably the most important computer game to appear since Adventure. The id boys had joked in an early press release that they expected DOOM to become “the number-one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.” Even they were surprised by the extent to which that prediction came true.

Network administrators all over the world had to contend with this new phenomenon known as deathmatch. John Carmack had had no experience with network programming before DOOM, and in his naïveté had used a transmission method known as a broadcast packet that forced every computer on the network, whether it was running DOOM or not, to stop and analyze every packet which every DOOM-playing computer generated. As reports of the chaos that resulted poured in, Carmack scrambled to code an update which would use machine-to-machine packets instead.

In the meantime, DOOM brought entire information-technology infrastructures to their knees. Intel banned the game; high-school and university computers labs hardly knew what had hit them. A sign posted at Carnegie Mellon University before the day of release was even over was typical: “Since today’s release of DOOM, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt. Computing Services asks that all DOOM players please do not play DOOM in network mode. Use of DOOM in network mode causes serious degradation of performance for the players’ network, and during this time of finals network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing the game in network mode. Again, please do not play DOOM in network mode.” One clever system administrator at the University of Louisville created a program to search the hard drives of all machines on the network for the game, and delete it wherever it was found. All to no avail: DOOM was unstoppable.

But in these final months of the mostly-unconnected era of of personal computing — the World Wide Web would begin to hit big over the course of 1994 — a game still needed to reach those without modems or network cards in their computers in order to become a hit on the scale that id envisioned for DOOM. Jay Wilbur, displaying a wily marketing genius that went Scott Miller one better, decided that absolutely everyone should be allowed to distribute the first episode of DOOM on disk, charging whatever they could get for it: “We don’t care if you make money off this shareware demo. Move it! Move it in mass quantities.” For distribution, Wilbur realized, was the key to success. There are many ways to frame the story of DOOM, but certainly one of them is a story of guerrilla marketing at its finest.

The free episode of DOOM appeared in stores under many different imprints, but most, like this Australian edition, used the iconic cover id themselves provided. John Romero claims that he served as the artist’s model for the image.

The incentives for distribution were massive. If a little mom-and-pop operation in, say, far-off Australia could become the first to stick that episode onto disks, stick those disks in a box, and get the box onto store shelves, they could make a killing, free and clear. DOOM became omnipresent, inescapable all over the world. When you logged into CompuServe, there was DOOM; when you wandered into your local software store, there was DOOM again, possibly in several different forms of packaging; when you popped in the disk or CD that came with your favorite gaming magazine, there it was yet again. The traditional industry was utterly gobsmacked by this virulent weed of a game.

As with Wolfenstein 3D, a large majority of the people who acquired the first episode of DOOM in one way or another were perfectly satisfied with its eight big levels and unlimited deathmatch play; plenty of others doubtless never bothered to read the fine print, never even realized that more DOOM was on offer if they called 1-800-IDGAMES with their credit card in hand. And then, of course, there was the ever-present specter of piracy; nothing whatsoever stopped buyers of the paid episodes from sharing them with all of their DOOM-loving friends. By some estimates, the conversion rate from the free to the paid episodes was as low as 1 percent. Nevertheless, it was enough to make the id boys very, very rich young men.

Sometimes $100,000 worth of orders would roll in on a single day. John Carmack and John Romero each went out and bought a new Ferrari Testarossa; now it was the turn of Scott Miller and George Broussard to look on the id boys’ cars with envy. Glossy magazines, newspapers, and television news programs all begged to visit the id offices, where they wondered over the cars in the parking lot and the unkempt young men inside screaming the most horrid scatological and sexual insults at one another as they played deathmatch. If nothing else, the id boys were certainly a colorful story.

The id boys’ cars got almost as much magazine coverage as their games. Here we see John Carmack with his Ferrari, which he had modified to produce 800 horsepower: “I want dangerous acceleration.”

Indeed, the id story is as close as gaming ever came to fulfilling one of its most longstanding dreams: that of game developers as rock stars, as first articulated by Trip Hawkins in 1983 upon his founding of Electronic Arts. Yet if Hawkins’s initial stable of developers, so carefully posed in black and white in EA’s iconic early advertisements, resembled an artsy post-punk band — the interactive version of Talking Heads — the id boys were meat-and-potatoes heavy metal for the masses — Metallica at their Black Album peak. John Romero, the id boy who most looked the part of rock star, particularly reveled in the odd sort of obsequious hero worship that marks certain corners of gamer culture. He almost visibly swelled with pride every time a group of his minions started chanting “We’re not worthy!” and literally bowed down in his presence, and wore his “DOOM: Wrote It!” tee-shirt until the print peeled off.

The impact DOOM was having on the industry had become undeniable by the time of the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1994. Here everyone seemed to want in on id’s action. The phrase “first-person shooter” had yet to be invented, so the many soon-to-be-released games of the type were commonly referred to as “DOOM clones” — or, as Computer Gaming World preferred, “DOOM toos.” The same magazine, still seeming just a trifle ambivalent about it all, called it the “3D action fad.” But this was no fad; these games were here to stay. The boxed publishers who had scoffed at the shareware scene a year or two before were now all scrambling to follow id’s lead. LucasArts previewed a DOOM clone set in the Star Wars universe; SSI, previously known for their complicated strategic war games and licensed Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs, dipped a toe into these very different waters with something called CyClones.

And then, inevitably, there was id’s own DOOM II: Hell on Earth. As a piece of game design, it evinced no sign of the dreaded sophomore slump that afflicts so many rock groups — this even though it used the exact same engine as its predecessor, and even though John Romero, id’s rock-star-in-chief, was increasingly busy with extracurriculars and contributed only a handful of levels. His slack was largely taken up by one American McGee, the latest scruffy rebel to join the id boys, a 21-year-old former auto mechanic who had suffered through an even more hardscrabble upbringing than the two Johns. After beginning at id as a tester, he had gradually revealed an uncanny talent for making levels that combined the intricacy of Sandy Petersen’s with the gung-ho flair of John Romero’s. Now, he joined Petersen and, more intermittently, Romero to create a game that was if anything even more devious than its predecessor. The id boys had grown cockier than ever, but they could still back it up.

John Romero in 1994, doing something the other id boys wished he would do a bit more of: making a level for DOOM II.

They were approached by a New York City wheeler-and-dealer named Ron Chaimowitz who wanted to publish DOOM II exclusively to retail. His was not an established name in the gaming world; he had come of age in the music industry, where he had broken big acts like Gloria Estefan and Julio Iglesias during the previous decade, and he was now publishing Jane Fonda’s workout videos through a company called GoodTimes Entertainment. But he had distribution connections — and, as Jay Wilbur has so recently proved, distribution often means everything. GoodTimes sold millions of videotapes through Wal-Mart, the exploding epicenter of heartland retail, and Chaimowitz promised that the new software label he had in mind would be able to leverage those connections. He further promised to spend $2 million on advertising. He would prove as good as his word in both respects. The new GT Interactive manufactured an extraordinary 600,000 copies of DOOM II prior to its release, marking by far the largest initial production run in the history of computer gaming to date.

In marked contrast to the simple uploading of the first episode of the original DOOM, DOOM II was launched with all the pomp and circumstance that a $2 million promotional budget could provide. A party to commemorate the event took place on October 10, 1994, at a hip Gothic night club in New York City which had been re-decorated in a predictably gory manner. The party even came complete with protesters against the game’s violence, to add that delicious note of controversy that any group of rock stars worth their salt requires.

At the party, a fellow named Bob Huntley, owner of a small Houston software company, foisted a disk on John Romero containing “The Dial-Up Wide-Area Network Games Operation,” or “DWANGO.” Using it, you could dial into Huntley’s Houston server at any time to play a pick-up game of four-player DOOM deathmatch with strangers who might happen to be on the other side of the world. Romero expressed his love for the concept in his trademark profane logorrhea: “I like staying up late and I want to play people whenever the fuck I want to and I don’t want to have to wake up my buddy at three in the morning and go, ‘Hey, uh, you wanna get your skull cracked?’ This is the thing that you can dial into and just play!” He convinced the other id boys to give DWANGO their official endorsement, and the service went live within weeks. For just $8.96 per month, you could now deathmatch any time you wanted. And thus another indelible piece of modern gaming culture, as well as a milestone in the cultural history of the Internet, fell into place.

DOOM was becoming not just a way of gaming but a way of life, one that left little space in the hearts of its most committed adherents for anything else. Some say that gaming became better after DOOM, some that it became worse. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that it changed; it’s by no means unreasonable to divide the entire history of computer gaming into pre-DOOM and post-DOOM eras. Next time, then, in the concluding article of this series, we’ll do our best to come to terms with that seismic shift.

(Sources: the books Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D and Game Engine Black Book: DOOM by Fabien Sanglard, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke; Retro Gamer 75; Game Developer premiere issue and issues of June 1994 and February/March 1995; Computer Gaming World of July 1993, March 1994, July 1994, August 1994, September 1994. Online sources include “Apogee: Where Wolfenstein Got Its Start” by Chris Plante at Polygon, “Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Era of First-Person Shooters” by David L. Craddock at Shack News, Benj Edwards’s interview with Scott Miller for Game Developer, Jeremy Peels’s interview with John Romero for PC Games N, and Jay Wilbur’s old Usenet posts, which can now be accessed via Google Groups. And a special thanks to Alex Sarosi, better known in our comment threads as Lt. Nitpicker, for pointing out to me how important Jay Wilbur’s anything-goes approach to distribution of the free episode of DOOM was to the game’s success.

The original Doom episodes and Doom II are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.)

 

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The Shareware Scene, Part 3: The id Boys

On December 14, 1990, Scott Miller of Apogee Software uploaded the free first installment of his company’s latest episodic game. He knew as he did so that this release would be, if you’ll pardon the pun, a game changer for Apogee. To signal that this was truly a next-generation Apogee game, he doubled his standard paid-episode asking price from $7.50 to $15.

Rather than relying on the character graphics or blocky visual abstractions of Apogee’s previous games, Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars was an animated feast of bouncy color. Rather than looking like a typical boxed game of five to ten years earlier, it looked quite literally like nothing that had ever been seen on an MS-DOS-based computer before. In terms of presentation at least, it was nothing less than computer gaming’s answer to Super Mario Bros., the iconic franchise that had done so much to help Nintendo sell more than 30 million of their videogame consoles in the United States alone.

Yet even Miller, who has been so often and justly lauded for his vision in recognizing that many computer owners were craving something markedly different from what the big game publishers were offering them, could hardly have conceived of the full historical importance of this particular moment. For it introduced to the world a small group of scruffy misfits with bad attitudes and some serious technical chops, who were living and working together at the time in a rundown riverfront house in Shreveport, Louisiana. Within a few months, they would begin to call themselves id Software, and under that name they would remake the face of mainstream gaming during the 1990s.



I must admit that I find it a little strange to be writing about humble Shreveport for the second time in the course of two articles. It’s certainly not the first place one would look for a band of technological revolutionaries. The perpetually struggling city of 200,000 people has long been a microcosm of the problems dogging the whole of Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the nation. It’s a raggedly anonymous place of run-down strip malls and falling-down houses, with all of the crime and poverty of New Orleans but none of that city’s rich cultural stew to serve as compensation.

Life in Shreveport has always been defined by the Red River which flows through town. As its name would imply, the city was founded to serve as a port in the time before the nation’s rivers were superseded by its railroads and highways. When that time ended, Shreveport had to find other uses for its river: thanks to a quirk of Louisiana law that makes casinos legal on waterways but not on dry land, residents of northeastern Texas and southern Arkansas have long known it primarily as the most convenient place to go for legal gambling. The shabbily-dressed interstate gamblers who climb out of the casino-funded buses every day are anything but the high rollers of Vegas lore. They’re just ordinary working-class folks who really, really should find something more healthy to do with their time and money than sitting behind a one-armed bandit in a riverboat casino, dropping token after token into the slot and staring with glazed eyes at the wheels as they spin around and around. This image rather symbolizes the social and economic condition of Shreveport in general.

By 1989, Al Vekovius of Shreveport’s Softdisk Publications was starting to fear that the same image might stand in for the state of his business. After expanding so dramatically for much of the decade, Softdisk was now struggling just to hold onto its current base of subscribers, much less to grow their numbers. The original Softdisk and Loadstar, their two earliest disk magazines, catered to aged 8-bit computers that were now at the end of their run, while Big Blue Disk and Diskworld, for MS-DOS computers and the Apple Macintosh respectively, were failing to take up all of their slack. Everything seemed to be turning against Softdisk. In the summer of 1989, IBM, whose longstanding corporate nickname of “Big Blue” had been the source of the name Big Blue Disk, threatened a lawsuit if Softdisk continued to market a disk magazine under that name. Knowing better than to defy a company a thousand times their size, Softdisk felt compelled to rename Big Blue Disk to the less catchy On Disk Monthly.

While the loss of hard-won brand recognition always hurts, Softdisk’s real problems were much bigger and more potentially intractable than that of one corporate behemoth with an overgrown legal department. The fact was, the relationship which people had with the newer computers Softdisk was now catering to tended to be different from the one they had enjoyed with their friendly little Apple II or Commodore 64. Being a computer user in the era of Microsoft’s ascendancy was no longer a hobby for most of them, much less a lifestyle. People had less of a craving for the ramshackle but easily hackable utilities and coding samples which Softdisk’s magazines had traditionally published. People were no longer interested in rolling up their sleeves to work with software in order to make it work for them; they demanded more polished programs that Just Worked right off the disk. But this was a hard field for Softdisk to compete on. Programmers with really good software had little motivation to license their stuff to a disk magazine for a relative pittance when they could instead be talking to a boxed-software publisher or testing the exploding shareware market.

With high-quality submissions from outside drying up just as he needed them most, Vekovius hired more and more internal staff to create the software for On Disk. Yet even here he ran up against many of the same barriers. The programmers whom he could find locally or convince to move to a place like Shreveport at the salaries which Softdisk could afford to pay were generally not the first ones he might have chosen in an ideal world. For all that some of them would prove themselves to be unexpectedly brilliant, as we’ll see shortly, virtually every one of them had some flaw or collection thereof that prevented him from finding gainful employment elsewhere. And the demand that they churn out multiple programs every month in order to fill up the latest issue was, to say the least, rather inimical to the production of quality software. Vekovius was spinning his wheels in his little programming sweatshop with all the energy of those Shreveport riverboat gamblers, but it wasn’t at all clear that it was getting him any further than it was getting them.

Thus he was receptive on the day in early 1990 when one of his most productive if headstrong programmers, a strapping young metalhead named John Romero, suggested that Softdisk start a new MS-DOS disk magazine, dedicated solely to games — the one place where, what with Apogee’s success being still in its early stages, shareware had not yet clearly cut into Softdisk’s business model. After some back-and-forth, the two agreed to a bi-monthly publication known as Gamer’s Edge, featuring at least one — preferably two — original games in each issue. To make it happen, Romero would be allowed to gather together a few others who were willing to work a staggering number of hours cranking out games at an insane pace with no resources beyond themselves for very little money at all. Who could possibly refuse an offer like that?


The id boys: John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Jay Wilbur.

The team that eventually coalesced around Romero included programmer Tom Hall, artist Adrian Carmack, and business manager and token adult-in-the-room Jay Wilbur. But their secret weapon, lured by Wilbur to Shreveport from Kansas City, Missouri, was a phenomenal young programmer named John Carmack. (In a proof that anyone who says things like “I don’t believe in coincidences” is full of it, John is actually unrelated to Adrian Carmack despite having the same not-hugely-common last name.) John Carmack would prove himself to be such a brilliant programmer that Romero and Hall, no slouches themselves in that department by most people’s standards, would learn to leave the heavy lifting to his genius, coding themselves only the less important parts of the games along with the utilities that they used to build them — and they would also design the games, for Carmack was in reality vastly more interested in the mathematical abstraction of code as an end unto itself than the games it enabled.

But all of these young men, whom I’ll call the id boys from here on out just because the name suited them so well even before they started id Software, will be more or less important to our story. So, we should briefly meet each of them.

Jay Wilbur was by far the most approachable, least intimidating member of the group. Having already reached the wise old age of 30, he brought with him a more varied set of life experiences that left him willing and able to talk to more varied sorts of people. Indeed, Wilbur’s schmoozing skills were rather legendary. While attending university in his home state of Rhode Island, he’d run the bar at his local TGI Friday’s, where his ability to mix drinks with acrobatic “flair” made him one of those selected to teach Tom Cruise the tricks of the trade for the movie Cocktail. But his love for the Apple II he’d purchased with an insurance settlement following a motorcycle accident finally overcame his love for the nightlife, and he accepted a job for a Rhode Island-based disk magazine called UpTime. When that company was bought out by Softdisk in 1988, he wound up in Shreveport, working as an editor there. The people skills he’d picked up tending bar would never desert him; certainly his new charges at Gamer’s Edge had sore need of them, for they were an abrasive collection of characters even by hacker standards.

These others loved heavy metal and action movies, and aimed a well-sharpened lance of contempt at anything outside their narrow range of cultural and technical interests. Their laser focus on their small collection of obsessions would prove one of their greatest strengths, if perhaps problematic for gaming writ large in the long run, in the way that it diminished the scope of what games could do and be.

Yet even this band of four, the ones who actually made the games for Gamer’s Edge under Wilbur’s benevolent stewardship, was not a monolith. Once one begins to look at them as individuals, the shades of difference quickly emerge.

Like Wilbur, the 25-year-old Wisconsinite Tom Hall was a middle-class kid with a university degree, but he had none of his friend and colleague’s casual bonhomie with the masses. He lived in a fantasy world drawn from the Star Wars movies, the first of which he’d seen in theaters 33 times, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels, which he could all but recite from heart. At Softdisk, to which he’d come after deciding that he couldn’t stand the idea of a job in corporate data processing, he ran around talking in a cutsey made-up alien language: “Bleh! Bleh! Bleh!” He was the kind of guy you either found hilarious or were irritated out of your mind by.

The 21-year-old Adrian Carmack also lived in a world of fantasy, but his fantasies had a darker hue. Growing up right there in Shreveport, he had spent many hours at arcades, attracted not so much by the games themselves as by the lurid art on their cabinets. He worked for a time as an aide at a hospital, then went home to sketch gunshot wounds, severed limbs, and festering bedsores with meticulous accuracy. Instead of a cat or a dog, he chose a scorpion as a pet. He’d come to Softdisk on a university internship after telling his advisor he wanted to work in “fine art” someday.

Still, and with all due respect to these others, the id boys would come to be defined most of all by their two Johns. The 22-year-old John Romero was pure id, a kettle of addled energy that was perpetually spilling over, sending F-bombs spewing every which way; David Kushner, author of the seminal history Masters of Doom, memorably describes him as “a human exclamation point.” The not-quite-20-year-old John Carmack was as quiet and affectless as Romero was raucous, often disturbingly so; Sandy Petersen, a game designer who will come to work with him later in our story, remembers musing to himself after first meeting Carmack that “he doesn’t know anything about how humans think or feel.”

Yet for all their surface differences, the two Johns had much in common. Both were brought up in broken homes: Romero was physically abused by his stepfather while growing up in the Sacramento area, while Carmack suffered under the corporeal and psychological rigors of a strict private Catholic school in Kansas. Both rebelled by committing petty crimes among other things; Carmack was sentenced to a year in a boys’ detention center at age 14 after breaking into his school using a homemade bomb. (The case notes of the police officer who interviewed him echo the later impressions of Sandy Petersen: “Boy behaves like a walking brain… no empathy for other human beings.”)

Both found escape from their circumstances through digital means: first via videogames at the local arcades, then via the Apple II computers they acquired by hook or by crook. (Carmack’s first computer was a stolen one, bought off the proverbial back of a truck.) They soon taught themselves to program well enough to put professionals to shame.

Romero got his games published regularly by print magazines as type-in listings, then parlayed that into a job with the disk magazine UpTime, where he became friends with Jay Wilbur. After that, he got a job as a game porter for Origin Systems of Ultima fame. Meanwhile Wilbur moved on to Softdisk while Romero was at Origin. When Romero found himself bored by the life of a porter, he came to Shreveport as well to join his friend.

John Carmack, being more than two years younger than Romero and much more socially challenged, brought a shorter résumé with him to Shreveport when he became the only id boy to be hired specifically to work on Gamer’s Edge rather than being transferred there from another part of Softdisk. He had mostly sold his games for $1000 apiece to a little mom-and-pop company near his home called Nite Owl Productions, who had made them a sideline to their main business of supplying replacement batteries for Apple II motherboards. But he had also sold one or two games to Jay Wilbur at Softdisk. Finding these to be very impressive, the id boys asked Wilbur to deploy his considerable charm to recruit the new kid for Gamer’s Edge. After a concerted effort, he succeeded.

Gamer’s Edge was far more than just a new job or a workplace transfer for the young men involved. It was a calling; they spent virtually all day every day in one another’s company. Pooling all of their meager salaries, Wilbur rented them a rambling old four-bedroom house on the Red River, complete with a Jacuzzi and a swimming pool and a boat deck which he soon complemented with a battered motorboat. It was an Animal House lifestyle of barbecuing, water skiing, and beer drinking in between marathon hacking sessions, fueled by pizza and soda. Wilbur — in many ways the unsung hero of this story — acted as their doting den mother, keeping the lights on, the basement beer keg filled, the refrigerator stocked with soda and junk food, and the pizza deliveries coming at all hours of the day and night.


Inside the riverfront house in Shreveport. John Carmack sits near center frame, while John Romero is to his left, mostly hidden behind a pillar.

For the first issue of Gamer’s Edge, the two Johns agreed to each port one of their old Apple II games to MS-DOS. Romero chose a platformer called Dangerous Dave, while Carmack chose a top-down action-adventure called Catacomb. They raced one another to see who could finish first; it was after losing rather definitively that Romero realized he couldn’t hope to compete with Carmack as a pure programmer, and should probably leave the most complicated, math-intensive aspects of coding to his friend while he concentrated on all the other things that make a good game. For the second issue, the two Johns pooled their talents with that of the others to make a completely original shoot-em-up called Slordax: The Unknown Enemy. So far, so good.

And then came John Carmack’s first great technical miracle — the first of many that would be continually upending everything the id boys were working on in the best possible way. To fully explain this first miracle, a bit of background is necessary.

Although they were making games for MS-DOS, the id boys had little use for the high-concept themes of most other games that were being made for that platform in 1990; neither complicated simulations nor elaborate interactive movies did anything for them. They preferred games that were simple and visceral, fast-paced and above all action-packed. Tellingly, most of the games they preferred to play these days lived on the Nintendo Entertainment System rather than a personal computer.

Much of the difference between the two platforms’ design aesthetics was cultural, but there was also more to it than that. As I’ve often taken pains to point out in these articles, the nature of games on any given platform is always strongly guided by that platform’s technical strengths and weaknesses.

When first looking at the NES and an MS-DOS personal computer of 1990 vintage, one might assume that the latter so thoroughly outclasses the former as to make further comparison pointless. The NES was built around a version of the MOS 6502, an 8-bit CPU dating back to the 1970s, running at a clock speed of less than 2 MHz; a state-of-the-art PC had a 32-bit CPU running at 25 MHz or more. The NES had just 2 K of writable general-purpose memory; the PC might have 4 MB or more, plus a big hard drive. The NES could display up to 25 colors from a palette of 48, at a resolution of 256 X 240; a PC with a VGA graphics card could display up to 256 colors from a palette of over 262,000, at a resolution of 320 X 200. Surely the PC could effortlessly do anything the NES could do. Right?

Well, no, actually. The VGA graphics standard for PCs had been created by IBM in 1987 with an eye to presenting crisp general-purpose displays rather than games. In the hands of a talented team of pixel artists, it could present mouth-watering static illustrations, as adventure-game studios like Sierra, LucasArts, and Legend were proving. But it included absolutely no aids for fast animation, no form of graphical acceleration whatsoever. It just gave the programmer a big chunk of memory to work with, whose bytes represented the pixels on the screen. When she wanted to change said pixels, she had to sling all those bytes around by main force, using nothing but the brute power of the CPU. All animation on a PC was essentially page-flipping animation, requiring the CPU to redraw every pixel of every frame in memory, at the 20 or 30 frames per second that were necessary to create an impression of relatively fluid motion, and all while also finding cycles for all of the other aspects of the game.

The graphics system of the NES, on the other hand, had been designed for the sole purpose of presenting videogames — and in electrical engineering, specialization almost always breeds efficiency. Rather than storing the contents of the screen in memory as a linear array of pixels, it operated on the level of tiles, each of which was 8 X 8 or 8 X 16 pixels in size. After defining the look of each of a set of tiles, the programmer could mix and match them on the screen as she wished, at a fairly blazing speed thanks to the console’s custom display circuitry; this enabled the smooth scrolling of the Super Mario Bros. games among many others. She also had up to 64 sprites to work with; these were little 8 X 8 or 8 X 16 images that were overlaid on the tiled background by the display hardware, and could be moved about almost instantaneously, just by changing a couple of numbers in a couple of registers. They were, in other words, perfect for showing Super Mario bouncing around on a scrolling background, at almost no cost in CPU cycles. Freed from the heavy lifting of managing the display, the little 6502 could concentrate almost entirely on the game logic.

The conventional wisdom of 1990 held that the PC, despite all its advantages in raw horsepower, simply couldn’t do a game like Super Mario Bros. The problem rankled John Carmack and his friends particularly, given how much more in tune their design aesthetic was with the NES than with the current crop of computer games. And so Carmack turned the full force of his giant brain on the problem, and soon devised a solution.

As so often happens in programming, said solution turned out to be deceptively simple. It hinged on the fact that one could define a virtual screen in memory that was wider and/or taller than the physical screen. In this case, Carmack made his virtual screen just eight pixels wider than the physical screen. This meant that he could scroll the background with silky smoothness through eight “frames” by changing just two registers on the computer — the ones telling the display hardware where the top left corner of the screen started in the computer’s memory. And this in turn meant that he only had to draw the display anew from scratch every eighth frame, which was a manageable task. Once he had the scrolling background working, he added some highly optimized code to draw and erase in software alone bouncing sprites to represent his pseudo-Mario and enemies. And that was that. His technique didn’t even demand VGA graphics; it could present a dead ringer for the NES Super Mario Bros. 3 — the latest installment in the franchise — using the older MS-DOS graphics standard of EGA.

I should note at this point that the scrolling technique which John Carmack “invented” was by no means entirely new in the abstract; programmers on computers like the Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga had in fact been using it for years. (I point readers to my article on the techniques used by the Commodore 64 sports games of Epyx and particularly to my book-length study of the Amiga for more detailed explanations of it than the one I’ve provided here.) A big part of the reason that no one had ever done it before on an MS-DOS computer was that no one had ever been hugely motivated to try, in light of the types of games that were generally accepted as “appropriate” for that platform; technological determinism is a potent force in game development, but it’s never the only force. And I should also note a certain irony that clings to all this. As we’ll see, John Carmack would soon toll the death knell for the era of bouncing sprites superimposed over scrolling 2D backgrounds. How odd that his first great eureka moment should have come in imitation of just that classic videogame style.

Carmack first showed his innovation to Tom Hall, the biggest Super Mario fan of all among the id boys, late in the afternoon of September 20, 1990. Hall recognized its significance immediately, and suggested that he and Carmack recreate some of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 right then and there as a proof of concept. They finally stumbled off to bed at 5:30 the following morning.

A few hours later, John Romero woke up to find a floppy disk sitting on his keyboard. He popped it into the drive, and his jaw hit the floor when he saw a Nintendo game playing there on his computer monitor. He went off to find Jay Wilbur and Adrian Carmack. They all agreed that this was big — way too big for the likes of Softdisk.

In one 72-hour marathon, the id boys recreated all of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3, along with bits and pieces of those that followed. Then Wilbur typed up a letter to Nintendo of America and dropped it in the mail along with the disk; it said that the id boys were ready and willing to license their PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 back to the Nintendo mother ship. This was a profoundly naïve thing to do; virtually anyone in the industry could have told them that Nintendo never let any of their intellectual property escape from the walled garden of their own console. And sure enough, the id boys would eventually receive a politely worded response saying no thank you. Given Nintendo’s infamous ruthlessness when it came to matters of intellectual property, they were probably lucky that a rejection letter was all they received, rather than a lawsuit.

At any rate, the id boys weren’t noted for their patience. Long before Nintendo’s response arrived, they would be on to the next thing: an original game using John Carmack’s scrolling technique.



For some time now, John Romero had been receiving fawning fan mail care of Softdisk, not a usual phenomenon at all. His gratification was lessened somewhat, however, by the fact that the letters all came from the same address near Dallas, Texas, all asked him to call the fan in question at the same phone number, and were all signed with suspiciously similar names: “Byron Muller,” “Scott Mulliere,” etc.

It was in fact our old friend Scott Miller. His attention had been captured by Romero’s games for On Disk and Gamer’s Edge; they would be perfect for Apogee, he thought. But how to get in touch? The only contact information he had was that of Softdisk’s main office. He could hardly write them a letter asking if he could poach one of their programmers. His solution was this barrage of seemingly innocent fan mail. Maybe, just maybe, Romero really would call him…

Romero didn’t call, but he did write back, and included his own phone number. Miller rang it up immediately. “Fuck those letters!” he said when Romero started to ask what kind of prank he thought he was pulling. “We can make a ton of money together selling your games as shareware.”

“Dude, those old games are garbage compared to the stuff we can make now,” said Romero, with John Carmack’s new scrolling technique firmly in mind. They struck a deal: Miller would send the id boys an advance of $2000, and they would send him a brand-new three-part game as soon as possible.

The Gamer’s Edge magazine, which just six months ago had seemed like the perfect job, now fell to the back burner in light of the riches Miller was promising them. Since they were making a Nintendo-like game in terms of action, it seemed logical to copy Nintendo’s bright and cheerful approach in the new game’s graphics and fiction as well. This was Tom Hall’s moment to shine; he already seemed to live every day in just such a primary-colored cartoon fantasy. Now, he created an outline for Commander Keen, blending Nintendo with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and old science-fiction serials — the last being perfect for an episodic game.

Billy Blaze, eight-year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse, has created an interstellar spaceship from old soup cans, rubber cement, and plastic tubing. While his folks are out on the town and the babysitter is asleep, Billy sneaks out to his backyard workshop, dons his brother’s football helmet, and transforms into… Commander Keen, Defender of Justice! In his ship, the Bean with Bacon Megarocket, Keen dispenses justice with an iron hand!

In this episode, aliens from the planet Vorticon VI find out about the eight-year-old genius and plan his destruction. While Keen is out exploring the mountains of Mars, the Vorticons steal his ship and leave pieces around the galaxy! Can Keen recover all the pieces of his ship and repel the Vorticon invasion? Will he make it back before his parents get home? Stay tuned!

Commander Keen

When Miller received the first Commander Keen trilogy in the post barely two months later, he was thrilled beyond his wildest dreams. He had known that the id boys were talented, but this… he had never imagined this. This wasn’t a throwback to the boxed games of yore, wasn’t even on a par with the boxed games of current times. It was something entirely different, something never seen on an MS-DOS computer at all before, as visually striking and technically innovative within its chosen sphere as any of the latest boxed games were within theirs. Just like that, shareware games had come of age.

All of Apogee’s games together had been earning about $7000 per month. Commander Keen alone made $20,000 in the first month of its availability. It caused such a stir online that the established industry took a casual notice for the first time of this new entity called Apogee with this odd new way of selling games. Computer Gaming World magazine even deigned to give Commander Keen a blurb in the new-releases section. It was “of true commercial quality,” they noted, only slightly condescendingly.

Despite their success in shareware and the big checks that started coming in the mail from Apogee as a result, the id boys continued to make games for Gamer’s Edge throughout 1991. Betwixt and between, they provided Miller with a second Commander Keen trilogy, which did every bit as well as the first. No one could ever accuse them of being lazy.



But making a metaphorical name for themselves outside of Softdisk meant that they needed a literal name for the world to know them by. When they had sent their Super Mario Bros. 3 clone to Nintendo, they had called themselves “Ideas from the Deep.” Deciding that was too long-winded, they became “ID” when they started releasing games with Apogee — short for “In Demand.” The only one of their number who cottoned onto the Freudian implications of the acronym was Jay Wilbur; none of the other id boys knew Sigmund Freud from Siegmund the Norse hero. But when Wilbur explained to them how Freud’s id was the seat of a person’s most basic, impulsive desires, they were delighted. By this happenstance, then, id Software got a name which a thousand branding experts could never have bettered. It encapsulated perfectly their mission to deconstruct computer gaming, to break it down into a raw essence of action and reaction. The only ingredient still missing from the eventual id Software formula was copious violence.

And that too was already in the offing: Tom Hall’s cheerful cartoon aesthetic had started to wear thin with John Romero and Adrian Carmack long before they sent the first Commander Keen games to Scott Miller. Playing around one day with some graphics for the latest Gamer’s Edge production, Adrian drew a zombie clawing out the eyes of the player’s avatar, sending blood and gore flying everywhere. Romero loved it: “Blood! In a game! How fucking awesome is that?”

Adrian’s reply was weirdly pensive. “Maybe one day,” he said in a dreamy voice, “we’ll be able to put in as much blood as we want.”

In September of 1991, the id boys’ lease on their riverside frat house expired, and they decided that it was time to leave the depressing environs of Shreveport, with its crime, its poverty, and its homeless population who clustered disturbingly around the Softdisk offices. Their contract stipulated that they still owed Gamer’s Edge a few more games, but Al Vekovius had long since given up on trying to control them. The id boys decamped for Madison, Wisconsin, at the suggestion of Tom Hall, who had attended university there. He promised them with all of his usual enthusiasm that it was the best place ever. Instead they found the Wisconsin winter to be miserable. Cooped up inside their individual apartments, missing keenly their big old communal house and their motorboat, they threw themselves more completely than ever into making games. Everyone, with the exception only of Tom Hall, was now heartily sick and tired of Commander Keen. It was time for something new.

Whilst working at Origin Systems in the late 1980s, John Romero had met Paul Neurath, who had since gone on to start his own studio known as Blue Sky Productions. During their occasional phone calls, Neurath kept dropping hints to his friend about the game his people were working on: an immersive first-person CRPG, rendered using texture-mapped 3D graphics. When Romero mentioned it to John Carmack, his reply was short, as so many of them tended to be: “Yeah, I can do that.”

Real-time 3D graphics in general were hardly a new development. Academic research in the field stretched back to well before the era of the microchip. Bruce Artwick had employed them in the original Radio Shack TRS-80 Flight Simulator in 1980, and Ian Bell and David Braben had used them in Elite in 1984; both games were among the best sellers of their decade. Indeed, the genre of vehicular simulations, one of the most popular of them all by the late 1980s, relied on 3D graphics almost exclusively. All of which is to say that you didn’t have to look very hard in your local software store to find a 3D game of some stripe.

And yet, according at least to the conventional wisdom, the limitations of 3D graphics made them unsuitable for the sort of visceral, ultra-fast-paced experience which the id boys preferred. All of the extra affordances built into gaming-oriented platforms like the NES to enable 2D sprite-based graphics were useless for 3D graphics. 3D required radical compromises in speed or appearance, or both: those early versions of Flight Simulator were so slow that it could take the program a full second or two to respond to your inputs, which made flying their virtual airplanes perversely more difficult than flying the real thing; Elite managed to be more responsive, but only by drawing its 3D world using wire-frame outlines instead of filled surfaces. The games-industry consensus was that 3D graphics had a lot of potential for many types of games beyond those they were currently being used for, but that computer hardware was probably five to ten years away from being able to realize most of it.

John Carmack wasn’t that patient. If he couldn’t make true 3D graphics run at an acceptable speed in the here and now, he believed that he could fake it in a fairly convincing way. He devised a technique of presenting a fundamentally 2D world from a first-person perspective. Said world was a weirdly circumscribed place to inhabit: all angles had to be right angles; all walls had to stretch uniformly from floor to ceiling; all floors and ceilings had to be colored in the same uniform gray. Only interior scenes were possible, and no stairways, no jumping, no height differences of any kind were allowed; in this egalitarian world, everything and everyone had to stay permanently on the same level. You weren’t even allowed to look up or down. But, limited though it was, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen.

“You know,” said John Romero one day when they were all sitting around discussing what to do with the new technology, “it’d be really fucking cool if we made a remake of Castle Wolfenstein and did it in 3D.” With those words, id’s next game was born, one that would make all the success of Commander Keen look like nothing.


The original Castle Wolfenstein.

Written by Silas Warner, one of the Apple II scene’s early superstar programmers, and published by the long-defunct Muse Software, Castle Wolfenstein was an established classic from 1981, a top-down action-adventure that cast you as a prisoner of the Nazis who must escape, preferably taking his captors’ secret war plans with him. It remains historically notable today for incorporating a significant stealth component; ammunition was scarce and your enemies tough, which often made avoidance a better strategy than confrontation.

But avoidance wasn’t the id boys’ style. Very early on, they jettisoned everything beyond the core theme of the original Castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein 3D was to be, as Romero put it, “a totally shocking game. There should be blood, lots of blood, blood like you never see in games. When the player gets really low in health, at like 10 percent, he could run over the bloody guts of a dead Nazi soldier and suck those up for extra energy. It’s like human giblets. You can eat up their gibs!” In other words, Tom Hall’s aesthetic vision was out; John Romero and Adrian Carmack’s was in. “Hey, you know what we should have in here? Pissing! We should make it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down! That would be fucking awesome!”

In early 1992, the id boys came face to face with the gaming establishment for the first time thanks to Wolfenstein 3D. They sent an early demo of the game to Sierra, and that company’s founder and CEO Ken Williams invited them to fly out to California and have a chat. Sierra was one of the three biggest computer-game publishers in the world, and was at the forefront of the interactive-movie trend which the id boys loathed. King’s Quest VI, the upcoming new installment in Sierra’s flagship series, would be so weighted down with multimedia that most reviewers, hopelessly dazzled, could spare only a few sentences for the rather rote little adventure game underneath it all. Williams himself was widely recognized as one of the foremost visionaries of the new era, proclaiming that by the end of the decade much or most of the Hollywood machine would have embraced interactivity. A meeting between two more disparate visions of gaming than his and that of the id boys can scarcely be imagined.

And yet the meeting was a cordial one on the whole. Williams had been quick to recognize when he saw Wolfenstein 3D that id had some remarkable technology, while the id boys remembered the older Apple II games of Sierra fondly. Williams took them on a tour of the offices where many of those games had come from, and then, after lunch, offered to buy id Software for $2.5 million in Sierra stock. The boys discussed it for a bit, then asked for an additional $100,000 in cash. Williams refused; he was willing to move stock around to pay for the Wolfenstein 3D technology, but he wasn’t willing to put his cash on the table. So, the negotiation ended. Instead Williams bought Bright Star Technologies, a specialist in educational software, for $1 million in cash later that year — for educational software, he believed, would soon be bigger than games. Time would prove him to be as wrong about that as he was about the future of Hollywood.

Not long after the Sierra meeting, the id boys left frigid Wisconsin in favor of Dallas, Texas, home of Scott Miller, who had been telling them about the warm weather, huge lakes, splendid barbecue, and nonexistent state income tax of the place for more than eighteen months now. One Kevin Cloud, who had held the oft-thankless role of being the id boys’ liaison with Softdisk but also happened to be a talented artist, joined them in Dallas as a sixth member of their little collective, thereby to relieve some of the burden on Adrian Carmack.

After making the move, they broke the news to Softdisk that they wouldn’t be doing Gamer’s Edge anymore. Al Vekovius was disappointed but not devastated. Oddly given how popular Commander Keen had become, the gaming disk magazine had never really taken off; it still only had about 3000 subscribers.

And so Softdisk Publications of Shreveport, Louisiana, that unlikely tech success story in that most unlikely of locales, finally exits our story permanently at this point. Nothing if not a survivor, Vekovius would keep the company alive through the 1990s and beyond by transitioning into the next big thing in computing: he turned it into an Internet service provider. He was bought out circa 2005 by a larger regional provider.


Wolfenstein 3D

This screenshot of the Wolfenstein 3D map editor illustrates why the game’s name is a misnomer: the environment is really a 2D maze much like that of the original game, albeit shown from a first-person perspective. At bottom, the engine understands just two dimensions rather than three.

If the id boys were worried about how Scott Miller would react to the ultra-violence of Wolfenstein 3D, they needn’t have been. Apogee had already been moving in this direction with considerable success; their only game to rival Commander Keen in sales during 1991 had been Duke Nukum by Todd Replogle, whose titular protagonist was a cigar-chomping Arnold Schwarzenegger facsimile with a machine gun almost as big around as his biceps. When Miller saw Wolfenstein 3D for the first time, he loved the violence as much as he did John Carmack’s pseudo-3D graphics engine. He knew what his customers craved, and he knew that they would swoon over this. He convinced the id boys to make enough levels to release a free episode followed by five paid ones rather than the usual two. On May 5, 1992 — the very same day on which the boys had handed the final version to Miller — the free installment appeared on Software Creations, Apogee’s new online service.

As it happened, Paul Neurath’s Blue Sky Productions had released their own immersive first-person 3D game, which had spent roughly five times as long in production as Wolfenstein 3D, just two months before. It was called Ultima Underworld, and was published as a boxed product by Origin Systems. It boasted a far more complete implementation of a 3D world than did id’s creation. You could look up, down, and all around; could jump and climb ledges; could sneak around corners and hide in shadows; could swim in rivers or fly through the air by means of a levitation spell. But Ultima Underworld was cerebral, old school — dull, as the id boys and many of their fan base saw it. Combat was only a part of its challenge. You also had to spend your time piecing together clues, collecting spells, solving puzzles, annotating maps, leveling up and assigning statistics and skills to your character. Even the combat happened at a speed most kindly described as “stately” if you didn’t have a cutting-edge computer.

Wolfenstein 3D, by contrast, ran like greased lightning on just about any computer, thanks to John Carmack’s willingness to excise any element from his graphics engine that he couldn’t render quickly. After all, the id boys really only wanted to watch the blood spurt as they mowed down Nazis; “just run over everything and destroy” was their stated design philosophy. And many others, it seemed, agreed with their point of view.

For, while Ultima Underworld became a substantial hit, Wolfenstein 3D became a phenomenon. It made $200,000 in the first month, then kept selling at that pace for the next eighteen months. It was, as Scott Miller would later put it, a “paradigm shift” in shareware games. Whatever that elusive “it” was that so many gamers found to be missing in the big boxed offerings — immediacy? simplicity? violence? id in the Freudian sense? all of the above? — Wolfenstein 3D had it in spades.

The shareware barbarians were truly at the gates now; they could no longer be ignored by the complacent organs of the establishment. This time out, id got a feature review in Computer Gaming World to go along with the full-page color advertisements which Apogee was now able to pay for. “I can’t remember a game making such effective use of perspective and sound and thereby evoking such intense physiological responses from its player,” the review concluded. “I recommend gamers take a look at this one, if only for a cheap peek at part of interactive entertainment’s potential for a sensory-immersed ‘virtual’ future.”

Yet, as that “if only” qualifier intimates, the same magazine was clearly bothered by all of the gleefully gory violence of the game. An editorial by editor-in-chief Johnny Wilson, the former pastor who had built Computer Gaming World into the most thoughtful and mature journal in the industry, drove the point home: “What are we saying when we depict lifelike carnage in a game where the design is geared for you to kill nearly everyone you encounter?”

If Wilson thought id’s first 3D shooter was disturbing, he hadn’t seen anything yet. Their next game would up the ante on the violence and gore even as their first competitors jumped into the act, starting a contest to see who could be most extreme. Everyone working in games or playing them would soon have to reckon with the changes — distributional, technical, and cultural — which a burgeoning new genre, born on the streets instead of in the halls of power, was wreaking.

Crashing the halls of power: Tom Hall, Jay Wilbur, and John Romero in black tie for the Shareware Industry Awards of 1992.

(Sources: the books Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D by Fabien Sanglard, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer by Steven Weyhrich, and I Am Error by Nathan Altice; PC Magazine of September 12 1989; InfoWorld of June 12 1989; Retro Gamer 75; Game Developer premiere issue and issues of June 1994 and February/March 1995; Computer Gaming World of August 1991, January 1992, August 1992, and September 1992; The Computist 88; inCider of November 1989. Online sources include “Apogee: Where Wolfenstein Got Its Start” by Chris Plante at Polygon, “Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Era of First-Person Shooters” by David L. Craddock at Shack News, Samuel Stoddard’s Apogee FAQ, Benj Edwards’s interview with Scott Miller for Game Developer, Jeremy Peels’s interview with John Romero for PC Games N, Lode Vandevenne’s explanation of the Wolfenstein 3D rendering engine, and Jay Wilbur’s old Usenet posts, which can now be accessed via Google Groups.

The company once known as Apogee, which is now known as 3D Realms, has released many of their old shareware games for free on their website, including Commander Keen. All of the Wolfenstein 3D installments are available as digital purchases at GOG.com.)

 

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The Shareware Scene, Part 2: The Question of Games

In one of the last interviews he gave before his death, shareware pioneer Jim Button said that he “had written off the idea of shareware games” prior to the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, it seemed a reasonable position to take, one based on quite a bit of evidence. While any number of people had tried to sell their games this way, there had been no shareware success stories in games to rival those of Andrew Fluegelman, Jim Button, or Bob Wallace.

Naturally, many pondered why this should be so. The answers they came up with were often shot through with the prejudices of the period, which held that programming or playing frivolous games was a less upstanding endeavor than that of making or using stolid business software. Still, even the prejudiced answers often had a ring of truth. You had a long-term relationship with your telecommunications program, database, or word processor, such that sending its author a check in order to join the mailing list, acquire a printed manual, and be assured of access to updates felt as much like a wise investment as merely “the honest thing to do.” But you had a more transient relationship with games; you played a game only until you beat it or got tired of it, then moved on to the next one. Updates and other forms of long-term support just weren’t a factor at all. No one could seem to figure out how to untangle this knot of motivation and contingency and make shareware work for games.

Luckily, there was an alternative to the shareware model for those game programmers who lacked the right combination of connections, ambitions, and talents to go the traditional commercial route — an alternative that offered a better prospect than shareware during the 1980s of getting paid at least a little something for one’s efforts. It was the odd little ghetto of the disk magazines, and so it’s there that we must start our story today.


The core idea behind the disk magazines is almost as old as personal computing itself. In February of 1978, Ralph McElroy of Goleta, California, published the first issue of CLOAD, a monthly collection of software for the Radio Shack TRS-80, the first pre-assembled microcomputer to rack up really impressive sales numbers. “To join the somewhat elite club of computer users,” wrote McElroy in his introductory editorial, “one [previously] had to learn the mysterious art of speaking in a rather obscure tongue” — i.e., one had to learn to program. Before any commercial software industry to speak of existed, CLOAD proposed to change that by offering “vast quantities of software to be shared.” It was actually distributed on cassette tape rather than floppy disk — a disk drive was still a very exotic piece of hardware in 1978 — but otherwise it put all the pieces into place.

By 1981, the TRS-80’s early momentum was beginning to flag and the more capable Apple II was coming on strong. Jim Mangham, a programmer at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in Shreveport, decided that the market was ready for a CLOAD equivalent for the Apple II — albeit published not on cassettes but on floppy disks, which were now steadily gaining traction. He recruited a buddy named Al Vekovius to join him in the venture, and the two prepared the first issue of something they called The Harbinger. They called up Softalk magazine, the journal of record for early Apple II users, to discuss placing an advertisement, whereupon said magazine’s founder and editor Al Tommervik got so excited by their project that he asked to become an investor and official marketing partner. Thus The Harbinger acquired the rather less highfalutin name of Softdisk to connote its link with the print magazine.

Starting with just 50 subscribers, Mangham and Vekovius built Softdisk into a real force in Apple II computing. Well aware that they couldn’t possibly write enough software themselves to fill a disk every single month, they worked hard from the beginning to foster a symbiotic relationship with their readership; most of the programs they published came from the readers themselves. In the early days, the spirit of reciprocity extended to the point of expecting readers to mail their disks back each month; this both allowed Mangham and Vekovius to save money on media and provided a handy way for readers to send in their programs and comments. Even after this practice was abandoned in the wake of falling disk prices, Softdisk subscribers felt themselves to be part of a real digital community, long before the rise of modern social media made such things par for the course. At a time when telecommunications was a slow, difficult, complicated endeavor, Softdisk provided an alternative way of feeling connected with a larger community of people who were as passionate as oneself about a hobby which one’s physical neighbors might still regard as hopelessly esoteric.

Thus Mangham and Vekovius’s little company Softdisk Publishing slowly turned into a veritable disk-magazine empire. In time, Mangham stepped back from day-to-day operations, becoming a nearly silent partner to Vekovius, always the more business-focused of the pair. He expanded Softdisk to two disks per issue in August of 1983; started reaching retail stores by January of 1984; launched a companion disk magazine called Loadstar for the Commodore 64 in June of 1984. Softdisk survived the great home-computer bust of the second half of 1984, which took down Softalk among many other pioneering contemporaries, then got right back to expanding. In November of 1986, Vekovius launched a third disk magazine by the name of Big Blue Disk, for MS-DOS-based computers; it soon had a monthly circulation of 15,000, comparable to that of Softdisk and Loadstar. A fourth disk magazine, for the Apple Macintosh this time, followed in 1988. At least a dozen competitors sprang up at one time or another with their own disk magazines, but none seriously challenged the cross-platform supremacy of the Softdisk lineup.


In order to encourage software submissions, all of the Softdisk magazines ran a periodic programming competition called CodeQuest. Readers were encouraged to send in programs of any type, competing for prizes of $1000 for the top submission, $500 for second place, and $250 for third place, on top of the money Softdisk would pay upon eventually publishing the winning software. Big Blue Disk‘s second incarnation of the contest ended on January 31, 1988, yielding two winners that were fairly typical disk-magazine fare: the gold-winning The Compleat Filer was a file-management program to replace the notoriously unfriendly MS-DOS command line, while the bronze-winning Western was a sort of rudimentary text-based CRPG set in, you guessed it, the Old West. But it was the silver winner — a game called Kingdom of Kroz, submitted by one Scott Miller from a suburb of Dallas, Texas — that interests us today.

At the time of the contest, Miller didn’t seem to be going much of anywhere in life. In his late twenties, he was still attending junior college in a rather desultory fashion whilst working dead-end gigs at the lower end of the data-processing totem pole, such as babysitting his college’s computer lab. His acquaintances hardly expected him to ever move out of his parents’ house, much less change an industry. Yet this seeming slacker had reserves of ambition, persistence, marketing acumen, and sheer dogged self-belief that would in the end prove a stick in the eye to every one of his doubters. Scott Miller, you see, wanted to make money from videogames — make a lot of money. And by God, he was going to find a way to do it.

The young Scott Miller.

Before entering the CodeQuest contest, he’d written a column on games for the local newspaper, written a book on how to beat popular arcade games, and, last but not least, tested the early shareware market for games: he’d written and distributed a couple of shareware text adventures under the name of Apogee Software — a name which would later become very, very famous among a certain segment of gamers. But on this occasion he was disappointed by the response, just like everyone else making shareware games at the time. Unlike most of those others, though, Miller didn’t give up. If shareware text adventures wouldn’t do the trick, he’d just try something else.

Put crudely, Kingdom of Kroz was a mash-up of the old mainframe classic Rogue and the arcade game Gauntlet — or, if you like, a version of Rogue that played in real time and had handcrafted levels instead of procedurally-generated ones. It wasn’t much to look at — like classic Rogue, it was rendered entirely in ASCII graphics — but many people found it surprisingly addictive once they got into it. It went over very well indeed with Big Blue Disk‘s subscribers when it appeared in the issue dated June 1988 — went over so well that Miller provided two sequels, called Dungeons of Kroz and Caverns of Kroz, almost immediately, although the magazine wouldn’t find an opening for them in its editorial calendar until the issues dated March and September of 1989.

While he waited on Big Blue Disk to release those sequels, Miller started to explore a new idea for marketing games outside the traditional publishing framework. In fact, this latest idea would eventually prove his greatest single stroke of marketing genius, even if its full importance would take some time yet to crystallize. He would later sum up his insight in an interview: “People aren’t willing to pay for something they’ve already got in their hands, but they are willing to pay if it gets them something new.” Call it a cynical notion if you must, but, in the context of games at least, it would prove the only way to make shareware pay on a scale commensurate with Scott Miller’s ambitions.

Miller and George Broussard, his longtime best friend and occasional partner in the treacherous world of shareware, made an engine for multiple-choice trivia games — not exactly a daunting programming challenge after the likes of Kroz. They compiled sets of questions dealing with different topics: general trivia, vocabulary, the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. They created “volumes” in each category consisting of 100 questions. Then they released the first volume of each category online, accompanied by an advertisement for additional volumes for the low, low price of $4 each.

Alas, the scheme proved not to be a surefire means of selling trivia games; the economics of getting just 100 questions for $4 were perhaps a bit dodgy even in the late 1980s, when just about everything involving computers cost exponentially more than it does today. But a seed had been planted; the next time Miller tried something similar, he would finally hit pay dirt.

The next time in question came in the second half of 1989, just after Big Blue Disk published the last Kroz game. The magazine’s contract terms were far more generous than those of any traditional software publisher: Miller had retained the Kroz copyright throughout, and the magazine’s license to it became non-exclusive as soon as it published the third and last game of the trilogy. Miller, in other words, could now do whatever he wished with his three Kroz games, while still benefiting from the buzz their appearance in Big Blue Disk had caused in some quarters.

Kingdom of Kroz

So, he decided to try the same scheme he had used with his trivia games: release the first part of the trilogy for free, but ask people to send him $7.50 each for the second and third parts. A tactic that had prompted an underwhelming response the first time around worked out much better this time. Unlike those earlier exercises in multiple choice, the Kroz trilogy was made up of real games — or, perhaps better said, was actually one real game artificially divided into three. After you’d played the first part of said game, you wanted to see the rest of it through.

In short, Scott Miller — and shareware gaming in general — finally got their equivalent to that day when Jim Button returned home from a Hawaiian vacation to find his basement drowning in paid registrations. Suddenly Miller as well was drowning in mail, making thousands of dollars every month. He’d done it; his dogged persistence had paid off. He’d found a way around the machinations of the big publishers, found a way to sell games on his own terms, cracked the code of shareware gaming. His sense of vindication after so many years of struggle must defy description.

From here, things happened very, very quickly. Miller whipped up a second trilogy of Kroz games to sell under the same model — first part free, second and third must be paid for — and was rewarded with more checks in the mail. Most people at this point would have been content to continue writing lone-wolf games and reaping huge rewards — but Miller was, as I’ve already noted, a man of unusual ambition. At heart, he was more passionate about marketing games than programming them; in fact, he would never program another game at all after the second Kroz trilogy.

Already before 1989 was over, he had reached out to a Silicon Valley youth named Todd Replogle, who had created and uploaded to various bulletin-board systems a little action-adventure called Caves of Thor that was similar in spirit to the Kroz games. Miller convinced Replogle to re-release his free game under the Apogee imprint, and to make two paid sequels to accompany it. Replogle followed that trilogy up with a tetralogy called Monuments of Mars. Meanwhile George Broussard returned on the scene to make two more four-volume series, called Pharaoh’s Tomb and Arctic Adventure.

By 1991, Apogee was off and running as a real business. Miller quit his dead-end day jobs, moved out of his parents’ house, convinced Broussard to join him as a full-time partner, found an accountant, leased himself an office, and started hiring helpline attendants and clerical help to deal with a workload that was mushrooming for all the right reasons. His life had undergone a head-spinning transformation in the span of less than two years.

At this point, then, we might want to ask ourselves in a more holistic way just why Apogee became so successful so quickly. Undoubtedly, a huge part of the equation is indeed the much-vaunted “Apogee model” of selling shareware: hook them with a free game, then reel them in with the paid sequels. Yet that wasn’t a silver bullet in and of itself, as Miller’s own early lack of success with his trivia games illustrates. It had to be executed just right — which tells us that Miller got it just right the second time around. The price of $7.50 was enough to make the games extremely profitable for Apogee in relation to the negligible amounts of money it took to create and market them, but cheap enough that customers could take the plunge without feeling guilty about it or needing to justify it to a significant other. Likewise, each game was perfectly calibrated to be just long enough for the customer not to feel cheated, but not so long that she spent hours playing it which she could have sunk into another Apogee game.

If all of this sounds a bit mercenary, so be it; Miller was as hard-nosed as capitalists come, and he certainly wasn’t running Apogee as a charity. Yet it’s seldom good business, at least in the long run, to sell junk, and this too Miller understood. Apogee maintained a level of quality control that was often lacking even from the big publishers, who often felt compelled to release a game before its time to meet the Christmas market or to pump up the quarterly numbers. Apogee games, on the other hand, seldom appeared under a Christmas tree, and Miller had no shareholders other than his best friend to placate. “Our philosophy is never to let an arbitrary date dictate when we release a game,” said Miller in an interview. As a result, their games were small but also tight: bug-free, stable, consistent. They evinced a sense of care, felt like creations worth paying a little something for. Soon enough, people learned that they could trust Apogee. If none of Apogee’s early games were revolutionary advances within the medium, there were few to no complete turkeys among them either.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Apogee style of game does little for me. Still, my personal tastes in no way blind me to the reality that these unprepossessing but well-crafted little games filled a space in the market of the early 1990s that the big publishers were missing entirely as they rushed to cement a grand merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and begin the era of the “interactive movie.” While the boxed-games industry went more and more high-concept, with prices and system requirements to match, Apogee kept things simple and fun, as befit their slogan: “Apogee means action!” Apogee games were quick to play, quick to get in and out of; they had some of the same appeal that the earliest arcade games had, albeit implemented in a more user-friendly way, with the addictive addition of a sense of progression through their levels. The traditional industry regarded this sort of thing as hopelessly passé on a personal computer, suitable only for videogame consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. But, as the extraordinary success of Nintendo and the only slightly less extraordinary success of Apogee both demonstrated, people still wanted these sorts of games. Their near-complete absence from the boxed-computer-game market left a massive hole which Scott Miller was happy to fill. Younger people with limited disposable income found Apogee particularly appealing; they could buy six or seven Apogee games for the price of one boxed production that would probably just bore them anyhow.

But of course a business model as profitable as Miller’s must soon attract rivals who hope to execute it even better. Already in 1992, a company called Epic MegaGames appeared to challenge Apogee for the title of King of Shareware; they as well employed Scott Miller’s episodic approach, and also echoed Apogee’s proven action-first design aesthetic. Shareware gaming was becoming a thriving shadow industry of its own, right under the noses of the big boys who were still chasing after their grand cinematic fantasias. They would have gotten the shock of their lives if they had ever bothered to compare their slim profit margins to the fat ones of Apogee and Epic. As it was, though, they felt nary an inkling in their ivory towers that a proletarian revolution in ludic aesthetics was in the offing out there on the streets. But even they wouldn’t be able to ignore it for much longer.


This shareware sales chart from July of 1993 shows how dominant Apogee was at that time. Seven out of the top ten games are theirs, with a further two going to Epic MegaGames, their only remotely close competitor. Although the fast-and-simple design aesthetic in which those companies specialized ruled the charts, they pulled with them a long tail of many other types of shareware games, as we’ll see in the next part of this article. The very fact that there existed a sales chart like this one at all says much about how quickly shareware had exploded in a very short time.

Many of you doubtless have an inkling already of where this series of articles must go from here — of how not only the story of Apogee Software but also that of Softdisk Publications will feed directly into that of the most transformative computer game in history. And never fear, I’ll get to all of that — but in my next article rather than this one.

For in addition to that other story which threatens to suck all the oxygen out of the room, there are a thousand other, smaller ones of individual creators being inspired to program all kinds of games and sell them as shareware in the wake of Apogee’s success. Exactly none of them made as much money from their endeavors as did Scott Miller, but some became popular enough to still be remembered today. Indeed, many of us who were around back then still have our obscure little hobby horses from the shareware era that we like to take out and ride from time to time. My personal favorite of the breed might just be Pyro II, a thunderously non-politically-correct puzzle game in which you play a pyromaniac who must burn down famous buildings all over the world. Truly, though, the list of old shareware games that come up in any given discussion is guaranteed to be almost as long as the list of old-timers reminiscing about them. The shareware gaming scene in the aggregate which took off after Apogee’s success touched a lot of people’s lives, regardless of how much money this or that individual game might have earned.

Like the Apogee games, many other shareware titles identified holes in the market which the big publishers, who all seemed to be rushing hell-bent in the exact same direction, were failing to fill. In many cases, these were genres from which the traditional industry had actually done very well in the past, but which it had now judged to no longer be worth its while. For example, the years between the collapse of Infocom in 1989 and the beginning of the Internet-based Interactive Fiction Renaissance circa 1995 were marked by quite a number of shareware text adventures. Likewise, as boxed CRPGs got ever more plot- and multimedia-heavy at the expense of the older spirit of free-form exploration, other shareware programmers rushed to fill that gap. Still others mimicked the look and feel of the old ICOM Simulations graphic adventures, while lots more catered to the eternal need just to blow some stuff up after a long, hard day. There were shareware card games, board games, strategy games, fighting games, action puzzlers, proto-first-person shooters of various stripes, and even ballistics simulators.

In terms of presentation, most of these shareware games were dead ringers for the games that had been sold on store shelves five to ten years earlier. And by the same token, the people who made them in the 1990s were really not all that different from the bedroom programmers who had built the boxed-games industry in the 1980s. Just as many creators of non-game shareware were uncomfortable with time-limited or otherwise crippled software, not all creators of shareware games embraced the Apogee model — not even after it had so undeniably demonstrated its efficacy. Even then, some idealistic souls were still willing to place their faith in people sending in checks simply because it was the right thing to do. All of which is to say that shareware gaming encompassed a vast swath of motivations, styles, and approaches. Apogee, Epic, and that other company which we’ll get to in my next article tend to garner all the press when the early 1990s shareware scene is remembered today, but they were by no means the sum total of its personality.

By way of illustration, I’d like to conclude this article with a short case study of a shareware partnership that didn’t make its principals rich, that didn’t even allow them to quit their day jobs. In fact, neither partner ever really even tried to achieve either of those things. They just made games in two unfashionable styles which they still happened to love, and said games made some other people with the same tastes very happy. And that was more than enough for Daniel Berke and Matthew Engle.


Excelsior Phase I: Lysandia

Matthew remembers his best childhood Christmas ever as the one in 1983, when he was twelve years old and his family got an Apple IIe computer. A sheet of Apple-logo stickers came in the box that housed the computer, and Matthew stuck one of them on his notebook. Soon Daniel, another student at his Los Angeles-area school, noticed the sticker and came over to chat. “I’ve got an Apple II also!” he said. Just like that, a lifelong friendship was born.

The two joined an informal community of fellow travelers, the likes of which could be found in school cafeterias and playgrounds all over the country, swapping tips and exploits and most of all games. Their favorites of the games they traded were the text adventures of Infocom and the Ultima CRPGs of Origin Systems; if the pair’s friendship was born over the Apple II, it was cemented during the many hours they spent plumbing the depths of Zork together. Matthew and Daniel eventually joined the minority of kids like them who took the next step beyond playing and trading games: they started to experiment with making them. Their roles broke down into a classic game-development partnership: the analytical Daniel took to programming like a duck takes to water, while the more artistically-minded Matthew was adept at drawing and storytelling.

So many things in life are a question of timing — not least the careers of game developers. One story which Matthew Engle shared with me when I interviewed him in preparation for this article makes that point disarmingly explicit. In 1986, Daniel, Matthew, and another friend created a BASIC text adventure called Zapracker, which they attempted to sell through their local software stores. Matthew:

We made our own boxes and packaged the game with the floppy disk and the manual, just like Richard Garriott did back in the day. Our box was designed to hang on a peg in a software store. We got on a bus with 25 or so copies and visited a few different stores. We’d say, “Hey, would you like to sell this on consignment? You get half the money and we get half.” A few stores took us up on it, and we sold a few copies.


Zapracker (A Lost Classic?)



This tale is indeed almost eerily similar of that of Richard Garriott selling a Ziploc-bagged Akalabeth through his local Computerland just six years earlier; if anything, our heroes in 1986 would appear to have put more effort into their packaging, and perhaps into their game as well, than Garriott did into his. But in the short span of barely half a decade, the possibility of parlaying a homemade game hanging on a rack in a local computer store into an iconic franchise had evaporated. Instead Daniel and Matthew would have to go another route.

Their game-making efforts were growing steadily more sophisticated, as evinced by Daniel’s choice of programming languages: after starting off in Apple II BASIC, he moved on to an MS-DOS C compiler. Adopting unknowingly the approach that had already been used by everyone from Scott Adams to Infocom, from Telarium to Polarware to Magnetic Scrolls, Daniel wrote an interpreter in C which could present a text adventure written in a domain-specific language of his own devising. Matthew then wrote most of the text for what became Skyland’s Star, a science-fiction scenario.

During the pair’s last year in high school, the Los Angeles school district and the manufacturing conglomerate Rockwell International co-sponsored a contest for interesting student projects in computer science. Once Daniel and Matthew decided to enter it, it gave them a thing which many creators find invaluable: a deadline. They finished up their game, and submitted it alongside the technological framework that enabled it. They were soon informed that their project was among the finalists, and were invited to a dinner and awards ceremony at a fancy hotel. Matthew:

All of the finalists were there, demonstrating their entries. We did a couple of interviews for a local TV station. Then the dinner started. They started running down the list of winners, and before we knew it, it was down to two finalists: my and Dan’s project and another one. Then they announced the other one as second place; we had won. It was quite a night!

Matthew Engle and Daniel Berke win the contest with Skyland’s Star in 1989. That’s Daniel’s Apple II GS running the game; he wrote it on that machine in MS-DOS via a PC Transporter emulator card.

Daniel and Matthew gave little initial thought to monetizing their big win. After finishing high school in 1989, they went their separate ways, at least in terms of physical location: Daniel moved to New York to study computer science, while Matthew stayed in Los Angeles to study film. But they kept in touch, and soon started talking about making another game, this time in the spirit of their other favorite type from the 1980s: an old-school Ultima.

It was 1991 by now, and, fed by the meteoric success of Apogee, shareware games of many different stripes were appearing. Daniel and Matthew as well finally caught the fever. They belatedly released Skyland’s Star as shareware for $15, using it as a sort of test case for the eventual marketing of their Ultima-alike. They were among those noble or naïve souls who eschewed the Apogee model in favor of releasing their whole game at once. Instead of offering the rest of the game as an enticement, Daniel and Matthew offered a printed instruction manual, hint book, and map — nice things to have, to be sure, but perhaps not things that played on the psychological compulsions of gamers so powerfully as the literal rest of a game which they dearly wanted to finish. Daniel and Matthew weren’t overwhelmed with registrations.

Progress on the Ultima-like game, which was to be called Excelsior Phase I: Lysandia, was inevitably slowed by their respective university studies; the biggest chunk of the work got done in the summers of 1991, 1992, and 1993, when Daniel came back to Los Angeles and they both had more free time. Then they would sit for hours many days at their favorite pizza restaurant, sketching out their plans. Matthew did most of the scenario design, graphics, and writing, while Daniel did all of the programming.

Calling themselves by now 11th Dimension Entertainment, they finished and released Excelsior in 1993 as shareware, with a registration price of $20. Once again, they relied on a manual, a hint book, and a map alongside players’ consciences to convince them to register. Although it certainly didn’t become an Apogee-sized success story, Excelsior did garner more attention and registrations than had Skyland’s Star. It was helped not only by its being in a (marginally) more commercially viable genre, but also by its coming into a world that was just on the cusp of the Internet Revolution, with the additional distribution possibilities which that massive change to the way that everyday people used their computers brought with it.

As they were finishing Excelsior, Daniel and Matthew had also been finishing their degree programs. Daniel got a programming job at Electronic Arts after a few false starts, while Matthew started a career in Hollywood that would put him, ironically given the retro nature of Excelsior, on teams making cutting-edge CD-ROM-enabled multimedia products at companies like Disney Interactive. Despite their busy lives, they were both still excited enough by independent game development, and gratified enough by the response to Excelsior I, that they embarked on a sequel in 1994. Whereas Excelsior I had aimed for a point somewhere between Ultima IV and Ultima V, Excelsior II took Ultima VI as its model, with all of the increased graphics sophistication that would imply. For this reason not least, the partners wound up spending fully five years making it, communicating almost entirely electronically.

The sheer quantity of labor which Matthew in particular put into this retro-game with limited commercial prospects could have been motivated only by love. Matthew:

We went all out. I ultimately made about 3800 16 X 16-pixel tiles. It was an exhausting process. For every tile, I had to specify whether you could walk on it or it would block you. There was also transparency; we had layers of tiles, overlaid upon one another. There might be a grass tile, then the player-character tile. Then, if you’re walking through a doorway, for example, the arch at the top of the doorway.

Then, after that exhausting process, began the arduous process of putting the tiles down to create the map, which was 500 X 500 tiles if I’m not mistaken — so, 250,000 tiles to place. Plus all of the town and castle and dungeon maps had to be created.

By the time they released Excelsior Phase II: Errondor in 1999, software distribution had changed dramatically from what it had been six years before. It was now feasible to accept credit-card registrations online, and to offer registrants the instant satisfaction of downloadable PDF documents and the like. The motivating ethic of the original shareware movement was alive and well in its way, but, just as with other types of software, the phrase “shareware games” was soon to fall out of use. The more tactile, personal side of the shareware experience, entailing mailed checks, documents, and disks, had already mostly faded into history. Excelsior II did reasonably well for a niche product in this brave new world, but even before its release Daniel and Matthew knew that it would be their last game together. “We realized we just didn’t have it in us to do an Excelsior III,” says Matthew.

In the end, the two of them sold roughly 500 copies each of Excelsior I and II — “small potatoes” by any standard, as Matthew freely admits. He believes that they made perhaps $5000 to $10,000 in all on their games, after the cost of postage and all those printed manuals was subtracted.

I must confess that I personally have some reservations about the 11th Dimension games. It seems to me that Skyland’s Star‘s scenario isn’t quite compelling enough to overcome the engine’s limited parser and lack of player conveniences, and that the Excelsior games, while certainly expansive and carefully put-together, rely a bit too much on needle-in-the-haystack hunting over their enormous maps. Then again, though, I have the exact same complaints about the Ultima games which Excelsior emulates, which would seem to indicate that Daniel and Matthew actually achieved their goal of bringing old-school Ultima back to life. If you happen to like those Ultima games a little more than I do, in other words, you’ll probably be able to say the same about the Excelsior games. One thing that cannot be denied is that all of the 11th Dimension games reflect the belief on the part of their makers that anything worth doing at all is worth doing well.

Shareware gave a place for games like those of Daniel and Matthew to live and breathe when the only other viable mode of distribution was through the boxed publishers, who interested themselves only in a fairly small subset of the things that games can do and be. Long before the likes of Steam, the shareware scene was the indie-games scene of its time, demonstrating all of the quirky spirit which that phrase has come to imply. While the big boys were all gazing fixedly at the same few points in the middle distance, shareware makers dared to look in other directions — even, as in the case of Daniel and Matthew, to look behind them. In the face of a mainstream industry which seemed hell-bent on forgetting its history, that was perhaps the most radically indie notion of them all.

(Sources: the books Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, and Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer by Steven Weyhrich; Computer Gaming World of December 1992, January 1993, March 1993, May 1993, June 1993, July 1993, September 1993, January 1994, February 1994, and June 1994; Game Developer of January/February 1995; PC Powerplay of May 1996; Questbusters of November 1991; Los Angeles Times of February 6 1987; the tape magazine CLOAD of February 1978; the disk magazine Big Blue Disk of January 1988, May 1988, June 1988, March 1989, April 1989, September 1989, and August 1990. Online sources include the archives on the old 3D Realms site, the M & R Technologies interview with Jim Knopf, Samuel Stoddard’s Apogee FAQ, Al Vekovius’s old faculty page at Louisiana State University Shreveport, Stephen Vekovius’s appearance on All Y’all podcast, “Apogee: Where Wolfenstein Got Its Start” at Polygon, Benj Edwards’s interview with Scott Miller for Game Developer, and Matt Barton’s interview with Scott Miller. Most of all, I owe a warm thank you to Matthew Engle for giving me free registered copies of the 11th Dimension games and talking to me at length about his experiences in shareware games.

In the interest of full disclosure as well as a full listing of sources, I have to note that a small part of this article is drawn from lived personal experience. I actually knew Scott Miller and George Broussard in the late 1980s and early 1990s, albeit only in a very attenuated, second-hand sort of way: Scott dated my sister for several years. Scott and George came by my room from time to time to see the latest Amiga games when I was still in high school. Had I known that my sister’s love life had provided me with a front-row seat to gaming history, and that I would later become a gaming historian among other things, I would doubtless have taken more interest in them. As it was, though, they were just a couple of older guys with uncool MS-DOS computers wanting to see what an Amiga could do.

A year and a half to two years after finishing high school, I interviewed for a job at Apogee, which was by then flying high. Again, had I known what my future held I would have paid more attention to my surroundings; I retain only the vaguest impression of a chaotic but otherwise unremarkable-looking office. Scott and George were perceptive enough to realize that I would never fit in with them, and didn’t hire me. For this I bear them no ill will whatsoever, given that their choice not to do so was the best one for all of us; I’m pretty sure I would have been miserable there. I got a job at a record store instead, which remains the best job I’ve ever had, except for the pay.

I believe that the day of that interview in 1992 was the last time I ever saw Scott and George. Scott and my sister broke up permanently shortly thereafter if not before.

The company once known as Apogee, which is now known as 3D Realms, has released all of their old shareware games for free on their website. Daniel Berke and Matthew Engle continue to maintain their old games in updated versions that work with modern incarnations of Windows; you can download them and purchase registrations on the 11th Dimension Entertainment home page.)

 

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