Masters of Doom (3 page)

Buzzed on his
Uptime
meeting, Romero headed right for the Origin booth, where a banner read, “Ultima V:
Coming October 31!” Oh my God, Romero thought, the next Ultima! He sat down in front
of a machine and popped in his disk. “What do you think you’re doing?” a woman in
marketing from Origin asked him. “You’re taking our game out of our machine! You’re
not supposed to do that!”

Romero tapped a few keys. “Look at this!” he said. On the screen appeared a maze chase.
He had written it using a complicated program that doubled the resolution of the graphics,
making it look, essentially, twice as colorful and pristine. So-called double-res
graphics were considered the high art of programming, and here was this skinny kid
showing off some game that looked even better than the Ultima version on screen. The
woman had only one question: “Are you looking for a job?”

Two months later,
in November 1987, Romero was driving across the country, heading for his first day
of work at Origin’s office in New Hampshire. Eager but broke, he wrote hot checks
to pay for tollbooth fees. He was driving with Kelly, his pregnant wife—their first
baby was due in February. Kelly was less than thrilled about heading off into the
snow, but Romero had convinced her in his charming and enthusiastic way. His life
as an Ace Programmer and Rich Person was on its way, he promised.

The promise fell through. Despite his immediate success at Origin, Romero took the
gamble of joining his boss, who was leaving to start a new company. It was a bad bet.
The start-up couldn’t drum up the requisite business. Before long Romero—now twenty-one
years old with a wife, a baby boy, Michael, and another child on the way—was out of
a job. The strain was beginning to wear on Kelly. Romero’s hyperbole seemed to have
no payoff, and she had returned to California to have her second baby near her parents.
Romero had to call and tell her that there was nothing: no job, no apartment. He was
sleeping on a friend’s couch.

But Romero wasn’t going to lie down and die. He had a dream to pursue, a family he
loved. He could be the dad he’d never had himself, the kind of dad who would not just
support his kids’ games but
play
them. Romero phoned Jay Wilbur to see about a job at
Uptime.
Jay told him he was leaving
Uptime
to join his competitor Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana. Maybe, Jay suggested, Romero
could get a job there too. Romero didn’t hesitate. Sure, he’d go to Shreveport. The
weather was there. The games were there. And so, he hoped, were the most hard-core
of gamers.

TWO

The Rocket Scientist

John Carmack was a late talker.
His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled
into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete
sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.” It was as if he didn’t want to mince words
until he had something sensible to say. “Inga,” the boy’s father, Stan, told his wife,
“perhaps we might have something a bit extraordinary on our hands.”

The Carmacks were already a self-taught family. John Carmack’s paternal grandfather
and namesake was an electrician with a second-grade education, taught to read and
write by his wife, a homemaker who had reached only the eighth grade. They raised
their boy Stan in the poorest part of eastern Kentucky; Stan studied hard enough to
earn a scholarship to a university, where he excelled at engineering, math, and eventually
broadcast journalism and became the family’s first college graduate. His wife was
the daughter of a chemist and a physiotherapist. She inherited the interest in science,
pursuing both nuclear medicine and a doctorate in microbiology. Inga and Stan, attractive
college sweethearts, would pass their love of learning on to their first son.

Born on August 20, 1970, John D. Carmack II—or Jondi as he was nicknamed—grew amid
the fruits of his parents’ hard work. After his father became the nightly news anchor
for one of the big three television stations in Kansas City, Missouri, the family
moved to an upper-class suburb, where his younger brother, Peter, was born. There,
Carmack went for the best education in town at a Catholic elementary school called
Notre Dame. Skinny, short, with unruly blond hair and large glasses he had worn since
before he was one year old, Carmack quickly distinguished himself.
In second grade, only seven years old
, he scored nearly perfect on every standardized test, placing himself at a ninth-grade
comprehension level. He developed a unique speech impediment, adding a short, robotic
humming sound to the end of his sentences, like a computer processing data: “12 times
12 equals 144 . . . mmm.”

At home, he grew into a voracious reader like his parents, favoring fantasy novels
such as Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.
He read comic books by the dozen, watched science fiction movies, and, most enjoyably,
played Dungeons and Dragons. Carmack, more interested in creating D&D than playing,
immediately gravitated to the role of Dungeon Master. He proved himself to be a unique
and formidable inventor. While most Dungeon Masters relied on the rule book’s explicitly
charted styles of game play, Carmack abandoned the structure to devise elaborate campaigns
of his own. After school, he would disappear into his room with a stack of graph paper
and chart out his game world. He was in the third grade.

Despite his industriousness, there were some things Carmack couldn’t escape. When
assigned to write about
his top five problems
in life, he listed his parents’ high expectations—twice. He found himself at particular
odds with his mother, the disciplinarian of the family. In another assignment, he
wrote about how one day,
when he refused to do extracredit homework
, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock,
he removed the hinges and took off the door.

Carmack began lashing out more at school—he hated the structure and dogma. Religion,
he thought, was irrational. He began challenging his classmates’ beliefs after mass
on Wednesdays. On at least one occasion, the other kid left the interrogation in tears.
Carmack found a more productive way to exercise his analytical skills when a teacher
wheeled in an Apple II. He had never worked on a computer before but took to the device
as if it were an extension of his own body. It spoke the language of mathematics;
it responded to his commands; and, he realized after seeing some games on the monitor,
it contained worlds.

Until this point Carmack had been entranced by arcade games. He wasn’t the best player
around, but he loved the fast action and quick payback of Space Invaders, Asteroids,
and Battlezone. Battlezone was unique in its point of view: it was first-person. Instead
of looking down on the action from the side or from overhead, Carmack was in the action,
looking out from inside a tank. Though the graphics were crude, made up of green geometric
lines, they had the illusion of being three-dimensional.
The game was so compelling
that the U.S. government took notice, requesting a customized version for military
training. It didn’t take long for Carmack to want to customize games of his own. With
a computer, it was possible.

When Carmack was in the fifth grade, his mother drove him to a local Radio Shack,
where he took a course on the TRS-80 computer. He returned to school with the programming
book in hand and set about teaching himself everything he needed to know. He read
the passage about computers in the encyclopedia a dozen times. With his grades on
the rise, he wrote
a letter to his teacher
explaining that “the logical thing to do would be to send me to the sixth grade,”
where he could learn more. The next year Carmack was transferred to the “gifted and
talented” program of the Shawnee Mission East public school, among the first in the
area to have a computer lab.

During and after school, Carmack found other gifted kids who shared his enthusiasm
for the Apple II. They taught themselves BASIC programming. They played games. Soon
enough they hacked the games. Once Carmack figured out where his character in Ultima
resided in the code, he reprogrammed it to give himself extra capabilities. He relished
this ability to create things out of thin air. As a programmer, he didn’t have to
rely on anyone else. If his code followed the logical progression of the rules established,
it would work. Everything made sense.

Everything, he thought, except for his parents. When Carmack was twelve, they suddenly
got divorced. Tensions between Stan and Inga over how to rear their children had become
too great. The aftermath for Carmack was traumatic, Inga felt. Just as he was finding
himself in school, he was pulled out and separated from his brother. They alternated
years between parents, switching schools in turn. Carmack hated being separated from
his father. Worse, when he was living with his mother, he had to fend for himself
alone.

Despite his growing interest in computers, Inga didn’t see the point of all his
games.
In her mind, if a boy was interested in computers, he didn’t sit around playing Ultima;
instead he worked hard in school, got good grades, then went to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology—just the recipe for a job at IBM. She loved him and only wanted
what she thought was best. But Carmack didn’t want any of it. All he wanted was his
own computer with which to pursue his worlds. He became increasingly obstinate. Inga
took him to psychologists to see why her once compliant boy was becoming so uncontrollable
and dark.

Carmack found reprieve when his mother decided to move to Seattle soon after to pursue
a new relationship. His father took the teenage boys to live with him, his new wife,
and her two kids. Though Stan was still making a decent living as a news anchor, the
sudden doubling of family size was too great to maintain his former lifestyle. So
he ventured into the nearby blue-collar neighborhood of Raytown, where he found an
old farmhouse on two acres of land within city limits. Overnight, it seemed, Carmack
was in a strange house, with a strange family, and going to a strange school, a junior
high with no gifted program or computers. He’d never felt so alone. Then one day he
realized he wasn’t.

The book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
was a revelation. Carmack had heard about hackers: In 1982 a Disney movie called
Tron
told the story of a video game designer, played by Jeff Bridges, who hacked
himself
into a video game world; in a 1983 movie called
WarGames
,
Matthew Broderick played a young gamer who hacked into a government computer system
and nearly triggered Armageddon. But this book’s story was different—it was real.
Written by Steven Levy in 1984, it explored the uncharted history and culture of the
“Whiz Kids Who Changed Our World.” The book traced the rise of renegade computer enthusiasts
over twenty-five rollicking years, from the mainframe experimentalists at MIT in the
fifties and sixties to the Homebrew epoch of Silicon Valley in the seventies and up
through the computer game start-ups of the eighties.

These were not people who fit neatly into the stereotypes of outlaws or geeks. They
came from and evolved into all walks of life: Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who would
write the first BASIC programming code for the pioneering Altair personal computer
and form the most powerful software company in the world; game makers like Slug Russell,
Ken and Roberta Williams, Richard “Ultima” Garriott; the Two Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—who
turned their passion for gaming into the Apple II. They were all hackers.

“Though some in the field
used the term
hacker
as a form of a derision,” Levy wrote in the preface, “implying that hackers were
either nerdy social outcasts or ‘unprofessional’ programmers who wrote dirty, ‘nonstandard’
computer code, I found them quite different. Beneath their often unimposing exteriors,
they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists . . . and the ones who most
clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool.”

This Hacker Ethic read like a manifesto. When Carmack finished the book one night
in bed, he had one thought:
I’m supposed to be in there!
He was a Whiz Kid. But he was in a nowhere house, in a nowhere school, with no good
computers, no hacker culture at all. He soon found others who sympathized with his
anger.

The kids from Raytown he liked were different from the ones he had left behind in
Kansas City—edgier and more rebellious. Carmack fell into a group who shared his enthusiasm
for games and computers. Together they discovered an underworld: an uncharted world
on the emerging online communities of bulletin board systems, or BBSs. While an international
network of computers known as the Internet had been around since the seventies, it
was still largely the domain of government defense scientists and university researchers.
By contrast, BBSs were computer clubhouses for the people—people just like Carmack.

Bulletin board systems came about
in 1978, when two hackers named Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss wrote the first
software to transmit data between microcomputers over telephone lines. The result
was that people could “call” up each other’s computers and swap information. In the
eighties the systems quickly spawned what were essentially the first online communities,
places where people with the will and skills could trade software and “talk” by posting
text messages in forums. Anyone with a powerful enough computer system and a setup
of phone lines and modems could start a BBS. They spread across the world, starting
in dorm rooms, apartment buildings, computer labs. Systems such as the Whole Earth
’Lectronic Link, a.k.a.
the WELL
, in San Francisco and Software Creations in Massachusetts became hotbeds for hackers,
Deadheads, and gamers.

Carmack didn’t go on BBSs only for games. Here, he could research the most thrilling
and illicit strains of hacker culture. He learned about phone phreaking: a means of
hijacking free long-distance telephone service. He learned about MUDs: multiuser dungeons,
text-based role-playing games that allowed players to act out D&D-type characters
in a kind of real-time masquerade adventure. And he learned about bombs.

For Carmack, bombs were less about cheap thrills than about chemical engineering—a
neat way to play scientist and, for good measure, make things go boom. Before long
he and his friends were mixing the recipes they found online. They cut off match heads
and mixed them with ammonium nitrate, made smoke bombs from potassium nitrate and
sugar. Using ingredients from their high school science class, they brewed thermite,
a malleable and powerful explosive. After school, they’d blow up concrete blocks under
a bridge. One day they decided to use explosives for a more practical purpose: getting
themselves computers.

Late one night Carmack and his friends snuck up to a nearby school where they knew
there were Apple II machines. Carmack had read about how a thermite paste could be
used to melt through glass, but he needed some kind of adhesive material, like Vaseline.
He mixed the concoction and applied it to the window, dissolving the glass so they
could pop out holes to crawl through. A fat friend, however, had more than a little
trouble squeezing inside; he reached through the hole instead and opened the window
to let himself in. Doing so, he triggered the silent alarm. The cops came in no time.

The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine
his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview
didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves
like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.” At one point
the man twiddled his pencil and asked Carmack, “If you hadn’t been caught, do you
think you would have done something like this again?”

“If I hadn’t been caught,” Carmack replied honestly, “yes, I probably would have done
that again.”

Later he ran into the psychiatrist, who told him, “You know, it’s not very smart to
tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.”

“I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!” Carmack replied. He was sentenced
to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for
drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.

If life felt structured and unyielding
when Carmack lived with his mother, it was nothing compared with the life he found
in the juvenile home. Everything took place during its allotted time: meals, showers,
recreation, sleep. For every chore completed, he would receive a point toward good
behavior. Each morning he was herded into a van with the other kids and carted off
to his old school for classes. The van would pick him up at the end of the day and
return him to the home.