Quote from: John RomeroThen one day we were playing Dungeons & Dragons at the Texas HQ of our company, id Software, like we had done for years. John Carmack, lead programmer, was Dungeon Master as usual. I got greedy trying to procure a magic sword and caused the entire world to be overrun by demons. Something just clicked. We all loved sci-fi, especially Aliens: it was a fast-action movie and id wanted fast-action games. So what if – instead of finding aliens, like in every movie in the world – a player opened up a portal to hell? Your character, a space marine on a Martian base, would then have to fight all the demonic monsters pouring out.

Quote from: Ladybird;727118I've got Masters of Doom, he goes into a lot more detail about that anecdote in it.

Carmack gave them exactly enough rope to hang themselves, and they did.

Quote from: The Butcher;727121Don't be a tease and do share. Carmack sounds like my sort of DM!

Quote from: Masters of Doom, Chapter 6For once,reality didn't live up to Romero's hype. The id guys arrived
at the apartment in Madison on a gray day in September 1991 to find it
considerably less fun than he and Tom had described. They were in a
sprawling complex in which every building looked the same. Compared with
their Shreveport house, it was a dump: no lake, no yard, no boat. When they
walked down the hall they didn't pass trees, they passed two scary-looking
guys dealing drugs.
At least they had some semblance of an id office: a three-bedroom apartment in the complex. Because Carmack didn't care, he agreed to live in the
upstairs bedroom, while all the other guys got their own apartments elsewhere in the complex. Adrian, who was instantly miserable being out of his
element, had even more problems because his apartment was on the far side
of the development. While the other guys walked across a parking lot to get
to the id office, Adrian had to drive.
But Romero was delighted. He was starting fresh: he had a new girlfriend
and new games. Tom shared in the enthusiasm, happy to be back home,
refreshed by the collegiate environment. The only real sore point for the two
of them was Jason, who had become Carmack's friend. He seemed to be on a
completely different wavelength. Still, Carmack wasn't ready to let him go.
Despite their mixed feelings about their new situation, the id team buckled down to finish the second Commander Keen trilogy. After their long months
working together, the team had formed into a collective personality. Romero
and Carmack were now in a perfect groove, with Carmack improving the new
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Green And Pissed
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Keen engine–the code that made the graphics–while Romero worked on the
editor and tools–the software used to create the game elements. Nothing could
distract them. One night Beth and a few other women showed up at the
apartment. The guys were hard at work. Beth did her best to attract Romero's
attention. When nothing elicited a response, she threw up her hands and
said, "Why can't we just have our men come home and have sex with us?"
"Because we're working," Romero said. Carmack laughed.
Tom was just as dedicated, feeling particularly giddy about the success of
the project, which inspired him to new heights of creative design. He populated Keen's world with gun-toting potato men, tongue-wagging poisonous
mushrooms and, his favorite, the Dopefish–a green fish with big dopey eyes
and giant front teeth.
Adrian, as usual, didn't share Tom's glee. But he put all his efforts into
bringing the silly characters to life. His artwork was taking on more color and
precision, rivaling that of the best games on the market. He was also finding a
way to vent his mounting frustrations with Tom, Keen, and Madison. One
time he played around with the Commander Keen image, creating a graphic
of Keen with his eyes gouged out and his throat ripped open. Adrian had a
good laugh switching between the images of Keen, all happy and chipper and
Keen sliced and diced.
With the work on the new Keens progressing and checks continuing to
pour in, Carmack was able to go back to his pet project: 3-D first-person shooters. The latest step was inspired by something he had heard from Romero.
Carmack and Romero had developed another aspect of their collaboration.
Though Carmack was gifted at creating game graphics, he had little interest in
keeping up with the gaming world. He was never a player, really, he only
made the games, just as he was the Dungeon Master but not a player of
D&D. Romero, by contrast, kept up with everything, all the new games and
developers. It was through one of these developers that he first learned about
an important new development called "texture mapping."
Texture mapping meant applying a detailed pattern or texture to a tile of
graphics on the computer screen. Instead of drawing a solid color on the back
wall of a game, the computer would draw a pattern of bricks. Romero heard
about texture mapping from Paul Neurath, whose company, Blue Sky Productions, was working on a game called Ultima Underworld, which would be
published by Richard Garriott's Origin company. Neurath told Romero that
they were applying texture mapping to shapes or polygons in a three-dimensional world. Cool, Romero thought. When he hung up the phone, he spun
his chair to Carmack and said, "Paul said he's doing a game using texture
mapping."
"Texture mapping?" Carmack replied, then took a few seconds to spin
the concept around in his head. "I can do that."
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The result was Catacomb 3-D, which incorporated texture-mapped walls
of gray bricks covered in green slime. To play, the gamer ran through the
maze, shooting fireballs out of a hand that was drawn in the lower center of
the screen, as if one was looking down on one's own arm, reaching into the
computer. By including the hand, id Software was making a subtle but strong
point to its audience: You are not just playing the game, you're inhabiting it.
The game ended up being published six months before Neurath's Ultima
Underworld. Though Ultima Underworld, a role-playing adventure, received
more attention because of the Garriott connection, together the games took
the 3-D gaming experience to a new, more immersive place. When Scott Miller
saw Catacomb 3-D, he had one thing to say: "We need to do something like
this as shareware."
As Thanksgiving 1991 neared,life in Madison was turning increasingly
ugly. The drug-dealing neighbors had been arrested after the cops pounded
down their door. Someone siphoned gasoline from their cars. Adrian was
particularly miserable because he lost the cap to his water bed and couldn't
find a replacement. He spent months in a sleeping bag on the floor. Carmack
had been sleeping on the floor for months too, though by choice. He simply
didn't feel he needed a mattress. Finally Romero got fed up with the situation
and bought his partner a mattress, leaving it for him on his floor. "Dude." he
said, "it's time you got a good night's sleep."
Madison was growing cold–really, really cold. Snow dumped from the
sky. The entire parking lot of the complex was glazed over in ice. Every afternoon when he'd wake up, Adrian would have to sit in his car tor twenty
minutes warming the engine so he could drive to the other side of the development. One time they all went out to buy a pizza but ran back to their cars
without the pie. They were so cold they decided to leave the pizza and drive
home. No one was willing to run back inside.
The result was that they barely left their apartment. Though they were
used to spending endless hours together in a small room, in Shreveport at
least they had the opportunityto go outside and kneeboard around the lake.
Here they killed even more time playing Dungeons and Dragons. In an effort
to expand the game, they even drew up flyers that they posted around town.
At the top of the page, Adrian had drawn each of the id guys as his
character in the game–Tom with a beard and a large ax, Romero with a huge
sword, Adrian standing high with a belt that had the word die on a cloth, and
Carmack, dressed as a wizard, holding the rule book. Next to them was a
blank stick figure with a question mark for a head. The flyer read: "WANTED:
CLERIC and/or THIEF! Party playing in an awesome, character and eventdriven campaign... Just moved our business here, need one or two new players... Things you will enjoy in this campaign: character interaction, good bal-
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ance, cool stuff happening, pizza. Things you won't be doing in this campaign: Dominating the world."
Tensions began to rise, however, about who was trying to dominate the
apartment. Adrian was fed up with Tom and Romero bopping around making alien noises and imitating the characters from Keen. Even Carmack was
growing tired of their antics. Worse was the trouble with Jason, who was
becoming something of a fifth wheel. Carmack was still defending him, though;
so instead of firing him they assigned him to bang out a fast, easy game by
himself that could fulfill an obligation on the Softdisk contract.
With the Softdisk game being handled by Jason and the second Keen
trilogy wrapping up, id could focus on its next project for Apogee. At this
point, a hierarchy had been established. Carmack was the technology leader,
coming up with the latest engines with which they could construct a game.
Tom, as creative director, was in charge of spearheading the game stuff that
would go around Carmack's technology. Romero fit nicely between the two,
able to help Carmack with tools and at the same time goof around with Tom
on creative ideas. Adrian would fulfill their orders for artwork, injecting, when
he could, his own menacing visions.
When the four sat down late one night to discuss a new game, those roles
unexpectedly began to shift. The trouble started with Tom. Buoyed by the
blockbuster success of the first trilogy months before, he had long imagined
doing three trilogies, similar to the plan his hero George Lucas had mapped
out for the Star Warsfilms. But Carmack's technology was clearly headed
toward another idea; a fast-action, first-person game. Keen was neither fastaction nor first-person; it was a side-scrolling adventure like Mario. It was
implicit that the next game, at least, would call for something else.
Tom was disappointed, but he shifted into high gear, brain-storming for a
new first-person game. He had an immediate idea. "Hey," he said, "remember in the movie The Thingwhen the guy comes out of the cage where the
dogs are going insane from that alien, and everyone asks him what's in there?
And he says, 'I don't know, but it's weird and pissed off'? Well, that's just like
a video game, because in video games you have no idea why you're shooting
the monsters other than that they're green and pissed off. Why not do a game
like that? Something about these mutant lab experiments you have to hunt
down?" He started jotting down potential titles at his PC as he read them
aloud to the group: "Mutants From Hell!" "Die, Mutants, Die!" "3-Demons!"
"Texture-Mapped Terence and the Green Shits!" Or, he concluded, they could
just cut to the chase and call the game "It's Green and Pissed."
Everyone laughed. "Yeah," Romero said, "imagine some game dude wandering into a computer store and saying to the clerk, 'Um, excuse me, but do
you have Its Green and Pissed?'" Despite their approval, Tom quickly retreated from his idea. He didn't want to be controversial tor controversy's
sake.
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"Yeah, I don't know," Romero said. "That's so hackneyed. That's something you always hear of. Its like 'yet again the mutated lab full of bullshit,
blah blah blah.' We need to do something cool. You know, it'd be really fucking
cool if we made a remake of Castle Wolfenstein and did it in 3-D."
Wolfenstein! It was a word that struck an immediate chord with both
Carmack and Tom, who, like Romero and every other hard-core Apple II
gamer, had grown up playing the classic action title created by the legendary
Silas Warner in the early 1980s. They immediately gotRomero's vision.
Wolfenstein was perfect for Carmack's technology because it was, at its core, a
maze-based shooter. The player had to run through all these labyrinths fighting Nazis and collecting treasure, then doing away with Hitler. Despite the
games blocky, low-resolution graphics, it was unique in its implication of a
larger virtual world. When Castle Wolfenstein was released, most games for
computers or arcades, like Pong, existed on one static screen. But in Wolfenstein
the conceit was that each screen the player saw represented one room of a
large castle. Each room was a maze of walls. When the player ran through the
maze, the screen would change, showing a new room. Though there was no
scrolling, the feelingwas one of true exploration. Part of the appeal was that
the player never knew what awaited in the next room: often it was a Nazi
screaming in German.
Encouraged by everyone's sympathetic reaction, Romero exploded with
ideas. In the original Wolfenstein, the characters could search the bodies of
dead soldiers. "How cool would that be to have in first-person 3-D?" he said.
"You could go through and, like, drag the bodies around a corner and rifle
through their pockets! Prsshh prsshh prsshh!" he said, imitating the sounds.
"We have this opportunity to do something totally new here, something fast
and texture-mapped. If we can make the graphics look great and fast, and
make the sound cool and loud, and make the game explosively fun, then
we're going to have a winner, especially with the theme."
The computer game industry was still meek, after all. SimCity, a hit game,
challenged players to build and micromanage a virtual town. Civilization,
another success, was a heady Risk-like strategy game based on famous historical battles–blood not included. Wolfenstein could be like nothing the industry had ever seen. "It will be just shocking," Romero concluded, "a totally
shocking game."
Carmack gave his blessing. Once behind an idea, Romero was always
charismatically convincing. And Carmack was growing to appreciate Romero's
talent for taking his technology into a new world, a place he himself would
never have conceived. Adrian, who wasn't familiar with the original
Wolfenstein, was eager to do anything other than Keen, and the idea of 3-D
art intrigued him. Tom, though stung by the rejection of Keen, assumed that
they would return to his games after this one. He was still the company's
game designer, after all. So, true to his conciliatory nature, he was willing to
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go along for the ride. It was a ride all the more immersive because of Carmack's
technology and all the more wild because, for the first time in id's brief history, it was being steered by Romero.
On a cold winter day,Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and
headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars
caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had
no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out
the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.
Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for
$11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve
Jobs, cocreator ol Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and
games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic
titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present tor the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack.
The NeXT computer wasn't the only new spirit ushering in the new year.
Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else
was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new
spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio
called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with
their album Nevermind. Soon, grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world
with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those
artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point
had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and PacMan. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as
rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D.
The title came after much brainstorming. At first they assumed they had
to use something other than the Wolfenstein name, which had been created
by Silas Warner at Muse Software. Tom banged out a list of options from the
strained–The Fourth Reich or Deep in Germany–to the absurd–Castle
Hasselhoff or Luger Me Now. He even played around with some German
titles–Dolchteufel (Devil Dagger), Geruchschlecht (Bad Smell). To their surprise and relief, they discovered that Muse had gone bankrupt in the mid-1980s, and let the trademark on the Wolfenstein name lapse. It would be
Wolfenstein 3-D.
When they ran the idea by Scott, he loved it. He had been pleading with
them to do a 3-D shareware game for months. He too knew Castle Wolfenstein
and cracked up at Romero's plans for their version: loud guns, fast action,
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mowing down Nazis. Money was still rolling in from the Keen games. The
second trilogy was out in the shareware market too. Its numbers were disappointing, about a third of the original, but Scott knew this was not so much a
sign of the game's appeal as verification of his original concern: that the retail
release of a Keen game for FormGen would cut into his sales because it left
him with only two episodes, not three, Nevertheless, the guys at id were his
stars, and he believed wholeheartedly in their technology and vision. He
guaranteed them $ 100,000 for Wolfenstein.
Id had no intentions to stop there. Mark Rein, still id's probationary president, had scored with FormGen to release two more retail id products. Id was
excited but concerned; FormGen's first game with them, Commander Keen:
Aliens Ate My Babysitter, didn't sell well. Id blamed in part what they
thought was a terrible box cover, designed by a company that had done packages for Lipton tea. But the prospect for another shot was enticing. Again, it
would allow them to earn revenues from two lucrative markets: shareware
and retail. No one, not even Origin and Sierra, was doing this. Though Mark
and FormGen were reluctant to, as they said, "stir up the World War II stuff,"
they agreed to take Wolfenstein retail. The id guys were growing accustomed
to getting their way.
Mitzi enjoyed her new perchatop Carmacks spacious black NeXT computer. She stretched out lazily on the monitor, letting her legs dangle over the
screen. Surrounded by empty pizza boxes and Diet Coke cans, Romero,
Carmack, Tom, and Adrian sat at their computers, working on Wolfenstein 3-D. The calmness of the outer world was in stark contrast to the world unfolding on the screens. Wolfenstein had taken on two imperatives: it would be
brutal, as originally imagined by Romero, and it would be fast, as engineered
by Carmack.
Carmack knew he could up the speed and thus, the immersion–thanks to
the leaps he had made by combining raycasting with texture mapping on
Catacomb 3-D. For Wolfenstein, he didn't so much take another leap as improve his existing code: cleaning up the bugs, optimizing the speed, making
it more elegant. A key decision was to let the graphics engine focus on drawing only what the player needed to see. That meant, once again, drawing the
walls but not the ceilings and floors. Also to speed things up, characters and
objects in the game would not be in true 3-D, they would be sprites, flat
images that, if encountered in real lite, would look like cardboard cutouts.
Romero, in pure Melvin mode, imagined all the crazy stuff they could do
in a game where the object was, as he said, "to mow down Nazis." He wanted
to have the suspense of an Apple II game pumped up with the shock and
horror of storming a Nazi bunker. There would be SS soldiers and Hitler.
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Adrian hit the history books, scanning images of the German leader to include throughout the game.
But that wasn't enough. "How about," Romero suggested, "we throw in
guard dogs? Dogs that you can shoot! Fucking German shepherds!" Adrian
cracked up, sketching out a dog that, in a death animation, could yelp back.
"And there should be blood," Romero said, "lots of blood, blood like you
never see in games. And the weapons should be lethal but simple: a knife, a
pistol, maybe a Gatling gun too." Adrian sketched as Romero spoke.
Tom came up with ideas tor objects the player could collect through the
game. In a paradigm dating back to the early text-based adventures, the gamer
had two essential missions: to collect and to kill. Tom came up with treasures
and crosses for players to find. There was also the issue of health items. A
player would begin with his health at 100 percent. With every shot, the health
would decrease until, when it hit 0 percent, the player would die. To survive,
a player could pick up so-called health items. Tom wanted these items to be
funny; he said, "Why not turkey dinners?"
"Yeah," Romero agreed, "or even better, how about dog food?" They
were having German shepherds in the game, so what the hell? Tom began
cackling at the thought of a player slurping up dog food. "Or how about
this?" Tom added. "When the player gets really low on health, at like 10
percent, he could run over the bloody guts of a dead Nazi soldier and suck
those up for extra energy." "Flllipppslrrrrrp," Romero said, making the sounds
and wiping his chin while cracking up. "It's like human giblets, you can eat
up their gibs!"
The work would go late into the night. Carmack and Romero perfectly
embodied the two extremes. While Carmack tweaked his code, Romero experimented with the graphics and new ways to exploit the tools. Carmack
was building the guitar that Romero would bring to life. But their friendship
was not traditional. They didn't discuss their lives, their hopes, their dreams.
Sometimes, late at night, they would sit side by side, playing a hovercraft
racing game called F-Zero. For the most part, though, their friendship was in
their work, their unbridled pursuit of the game.
Carmack and Romero shared a vision the others didn't possess. Tom,
deep down, was still closer to Keen, concerned about violence, about being
too controversial, too bloody. Adrian liked the gore; he sketched out dead
Nazis lying in pools of blood. But he still harbored a desire to get back to
something more gothic and horrific, like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted
Mansion.
Carmack and Romero, however, were in sync. Carmack didn't so much
care about the accoutrements of the game as he enjoyed Romero's passion for
showing off what his engine could do. Romero got what he was doing–trying
to make a sleek, simple, fast game engine. And he was the one who dreamed
up the sleek, simple, fast game to go around it. Romero even began excising
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parts of the game just to adhere to that dictum. At first they had programmed
the game so that players could drag and search dead Nazis, as in the original
Castle Wolfenstein. But they didn't like the outcome.
"Ugh," Romero groaned as he watched Tom drag a body across the screen.
"That's not going to help the game be bad ass, it's slowing the game down. Its
a neat idea, but when you're running down hallways and blowing down everything you see, who cares it you drag shit? We gotta rip that code right out of
there. Anything that's going to stop us from mowing shit down–get rid of it!"
The brutality was not just a graphic and game play concern, it had to be a
matter of sound too. Id had developed a relationship with an out of town
computer game musician named Bobby Prince. Bobby had worked with
Apogee and come highly recommended by Scott Miller. He had done some
work on the Keen games. For Wolfenstein, they needed him even more badly.
The weapons had to sound suitably killer. To accomplish this, they would,
for the first time, use digital sound. Bobby came up with a few suggestions,
including a staccato rip for the machine gun.
Late one afternoon Romero got ready to play the sound effects for the
first time. The game had really taken shape. On the suggestion of Scott Miller,
Carmack had gone from the 16-color palette of EGA graphics to the new
Video Graphics Adapter or VGA, which allowed 256 colors. Adrian took full
advantage of the expanded color range. He had drawn out soldiers with little
helmets and boots. He created a special animation sequence that would show
the soldiers twitching back in pain, blood spurting from their chests, when
they were shot.
Romero loaded up the test portion of the game. He looked down the
barrel of his chain gun as the Nazi approached him. He hit the fire button,
and the roaring fire of the machine blast Bobby had programmed tore through
the speakers as the Nazi went flying back. Romero flew back himself, hands
off the keyboard, and fell to the floor laughing, holding his stomach. It was
another moment, a variation on when he saw Dangerous Dave in Copyright
Infringement for the first time. "You know," he said, as his laughter finally
subsided, "there's never been another game like this."
On screen, the little Nazi bled.
One afternoonin February 1992, Roberta Williams opened a package. She
and her husband, Ken, were sitting in a gorgeous office in Northern California atop one of the largest empires in the business, Sierra On-Line. They were
among the leaders in the computer game industry, which had grown from
$100 million per year in 1980 to nearly $1 billion. Their early graphical roleplaying games had given way to a slew of titles, all created around Sierra's
inherent philosophy: building brands by making game designers into celebrities.
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Sierra, as a result, received submissions for games all the time. This day
the contents of the package would catch Roberta's eye. There was a cover
letter from a young programmer named John Romero. He had heard that she
was becoming interested in children's games and was including one he and
his friends had made. It was doing rather well in the shareware market, he
wrote. It was called Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy!
Roberta and Ken were impressed and requested a meeting. The id guys
were awestruck. They had grown up playing Sierra games; now they were
being asked to visit the king and queen in their lair. And the timing couldn't
have been more perfect. Wolfenstein was coming into shape. If Sierra made
them an offer they couldn't refuse, they might strike a deal. They decided to
put together a short demo of the game to show the Williamses.
When the id guys showed up at Sierra's offices, it was clear that they
hadn't left their apartments for a month. Romero had been growing out his
hair. Tom had an unkempt beard. Carmack had holes in his shirt. They were
all in ratty, torn jeans. Before they met with Ken and Roberta, they were
given a tour of the offices. For the guys, particularly Romero and Tom, it was
a tour of the gamers' hall of fame. Back in a CD duplication room, they were
introduced to Warren Schwader. Romero and Tom looked at each other and
immediately fell to their knees, bowing. "We're not worthy, we're not worthy," they said.
Schwader, they knew, had designed one of their favorite old Apple II
games, Threshold. "Dude!" Romero beamed. "Threshold!You are the Daddy!"
But the allure soon wore off. Around the corner Carmack fell into a conversation with a programmer. As Romero, Tom, and Adrian watched, Carmack
chipped away at the programmer's work, challenging what to him was an
obvious waste of time. When he was through, the Sierra programmer just sat
there, completely belittled by Carmack's superior skills. Romero patted
Carmack on the back as they walked away. "God," he said, "you just wiped
them down." Carmack shrugged modestly. Romero was proud.
The Williamses were not as impressed. The boys struck them as nothing
more than highly talented and highly naive kids. When Ken Williams showed
up at a fancy restaurant called Edna's Elderberry House with this ragtag group
of guys in shabby clothes, he was pulled aside by the maitre d'. Williams had
to explain that these were important guests before they were led to a private
room with a long oak table and a burning fire.
The food came, and conversation flowed. Williams prided himself on
discovering and nurturing young talent. But the inexperience of this group,
he thought, was palpable. They didn't seem to have a business bone in their
bodies. When they told Williams how much they were making on Commander Keen, he blanched. "You're telling me," he said, "you're making fifty
thousand dollars a month just from shareware?"
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They showed him the numbers. Scott had upped their royalty to 45 percent. There was virtually no overhead, they explained. The shareware model
let Apogee keep ninety-five cents for every dollar that came in. "We make the
best stuff in shareware," Romero proclaimed, "that's why we're making so
much money. If you think that's awesome," he said, "check this out."
Tom took out a laptop, set it on the table, and urged Williams to hit the
key. Wolfenstein came on the screen. Williams played the game with a poker
face. The guys were dying with anticipation. Finally Williams said, "Ah, that's
neat." He closed the program. A final screen came up, with the face of Commander Keen and a green monster from Aliens Ate My Babysitter. In big
words in the middle it said: "id Software: Part of the Sierra Family?"
"Do you mind removing the question mark?" Williams said. Then he
offered them $2.5 million.
The id guysreturned to their snowed-in apartment to discuss the deal. Two
and a half million dollars was a lot of money for four or five guys to split. But
they didn't jump the gun. They didn't want just to do a stock deal, they
wanted some up-front cash. So they returned to the approach they'd originally taken with Scott Miller. "Why don't we do this?" Romero suggested.
"Lets ask for a hundred thousand down. If they're interested, then we'll sell.
If they don't, then we don't do it."
When presented with the request, Williams balked. Though he was impressed by their work, he wasn't ready to fork over such a large chunk of
cash. The deal was over. Clearly, id thought, he just didn't get what they were
doing. He didn't understand the potential of Wolfenstein 3-D. If he had, he
would have immediately handed over the cash. It was a disappointment, not
so much because they missed out on the money but because their hero and
his company had let them down. This game was going to change things, they
knew; there was nothing on a computer like it. Fuck Sierra and their loser
programmers, Romero told them, id would remain independent. And, independently, they would rule.
Fueled by the tripto Sierra, id's burgeoning egos exploded into their Dungeons and Dragons fantasies. Games, once again, had become expressions of
their own inner worlds. In recent rounds Romero had been toying with the
Demonicron, the darkly powerful book he had encouraged them to seize
from the demons. It was a dangerous move, one that would either help them
rule or destroy the world. Carmack grew increasingly distressed at Romero's
recklessness. He didn't want to see the game he had spent so long creating get
ruined. In a desperate move, he called Jay Wilbur back in Shreveport, asking
him if he could fly up to Madison to reprise his D&D character and help stop
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Romero. But Jay couldn't make the trip. Ultimately, Carmack decided to test
Romero's resolve, to see just how far his partner was willing to go.
Late one night Carmack the Dungeon Master brought the devil in to play.
He told Romero that a demonic creature in the game had a bargain to make;
Give him the Demonicron and he will grant you your greatest wishes.Romero
said, "If I'm going to give you this book, then I want some really kick-ass
shit." Carmack assured him the demon would oblige with the Daikatana.
Romero's eyes widened. The Daikatana was a mighty sword, one of the
most powerful weapons in the game. Despite the pleas of the others, he told
Carmack he wanted to give the demon the book. It didn't take long to find out
the consequences. As the rules of the game dictated, Carmack rolled the die to
randomly determine the strength of the demon's response. The demon was
using the book to conjure more demons, he told the group. A battle of epic
proportions ensued until Carmack declared the outcome. "The material plane
is overrun with demons," he said, flatly. "Everyone is dead. That's it. We're
done. Mmm."
No one spoke. They guys couldn't believe it. After all those games, all the
late nights around the table in Shreveport, the adventures here that cured all
the cold nights of Madison, it was over. A sadness filled the room. Romero
finally said to Carmack, "Shit, that's fun playing that game. Now it's ruined?
Is there any way to get that back?" But he knew the answer. Carmack was
always true to himself and to his game. "No," he said, "it's over." There was a
lesson to be learned: Romero had gone too far

Quote from: TristramEvans;727110Hell as a Dungeon has always been one of those projects I wanted ro tackle. A huge megadungeon inspired by Dante and Barlowe.

Quote from: TristramEvans;727110Hell as a Dungeon has always been one of those projects I wanted ro tackle. A huge megadungeon inspired by Dante and Barlowe.

Quote from: JeremyR;727387And them John Stater did a hexcrawl in his Nod magazine.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;727459I did a high level AD&D module based on Dante's Inferno a couple years back.