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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
David Kushner's new book about id Software calls the company the "Nirvana" of computer gaming. But did John Romero and John Carmack revolutionize the genre, or ruin it?
May 5, 2003 | On May 5, 1992, at 4 a.m., two misfits uploaded an 836k file online, and proceeded to bung up the game industry so badly, we're only now beginning to recover.
That is not, of course, the story David Kushner is trying to tell us in "Masters of Doom," his biography of John Carmack and John Romero, founders of the game studio id Software, and co-creators of its renowned shoot-em-up games, "Doom" and "Quake." His through-line is pretty much the archetypal, digital age morality tale: one more history of two dropouts who turned their obsession with computers into software that netted them millions, only to let their outsized personality conflicts tear up their partnership and crater their dreams -- until the smoke finally cleared, and they were able to gain something like wisdom.
When it sticks to that arc, "Masters" is excellent, ripe with vivid, you-are-there details tracking the rise of id Software, and the games that fueled its ascent. It begins in a flood-prone lake house in Shreveport, La., where Carmack and Romero start their company with PCs "borrowed" from their day job employer. From there, Kushner takes us with them to a shitty, crime-ridden neighborhood in Madison, Wis., where they create Wolfenstein 3-D, their first substantial hit, and then over to Mesquite, Texas, where id relocates after the runaway success of their early shareware games.
We follow them onto the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., where in order to promote the Windows 95 version of "Doom," id commissions a display booth featuring an 8-foot vagina encrusted with dildos; we go with them into the boisterous multiplayer death matches held in cavernous auditoriums, where they're hailed as royalty by thousands of gamers. There are midnight highway rides in tricked-out Ferraris, the toys they acquire with their mountainous game earnings -- or what they liked to call "pizza money." On the way, they keep careening over human factor speed bumps, with partnerships dissolving and staff mutinying. (Inevitable, really: Romero, the overheated hype piston, and Carmack, the cold-as-Freon engineer, never had much in common, besides games.) So near the end, we're in Dallas' highest office tower, where Romero, having severed his relationship with id and his friendship with Carmack, struggles to hold onto Ion Storm, his new dream game studio where design would be "law."
Throughout, Kushner captures the recklessness of young men convulsing on adrenaline and creative energy, at a time when the personal computer suddenly became a popular entertainment medium, ably explaining not only what made their games addictive, but the complex programming mechanics that made them work. Taken together, all this makes for a book to enthrall hardcore players and technically minded non-gamers alike.
But there's a meta tale Kushner also wants to put across, about how id's games took us into a new era of virtual world innovation, and in the process, altered all popular culture.
And the trouble is, that story just isn't true.
In the book's wankiest overreach, Kushner goes so far as to compare id to Nirvana. Like the legendary alt-rock band, he suggests, the company was integral to the anarchic spirit of the 1990's unleashed by the end of the Reagan-Bush era, doing in their video games what Cobain/Grohl/Novaselic did with their music: "overthrow the status quo," infusing pop culture with "more brutal and honest views."
But this is hyperbole on crack. If anything, id Software was more like the Dokken of computer games: in content and attitude an '80s holdover, spitting out unoriginal product for its teen boy fan base, who were the largest market for its bogus, fist-pumping badass.
No: while gamers were scraping the floor with "Wayne's World" bleats of "We're not worthy!" whenever Romero swaggered by them at game conventions, the industry's real Nirvana, Blue Sky Studios (which later became Looking Glass) was holed up in a New England studio, quietly putting out its genuinely innovative games in relative obscurity. Blue Sky could have overthrown the status quo. But for many reasons, most of which have little to do with talent, id would always overshadow its betters. Instead of advancing the medium, id's Texas smack talking rude boys obscured and impeded gaming's potential by spawning needless controversy and inspiring an oncoming slew of mediocre imitators.
And now, with "Masters of Doom", it looks like they'll get to help rewrite history, too.
