If you count the hundreds of millions of dollars spent developing these mediocre games, and the tens of millions more spent making them compatible with all the 3D cards on the market, all for the relatively small, fickle audience that id created, the industry's opportunity cost is staggering. The most ironic casualty on this ledger is surely Looking Glass Studios, the original creator of "Ultima Underworld" and the first-person game; many blame the company's death on John Romero himself, and the lucre-soaked failure of "Daikatana," his first, post-id project. But that's another story.

Just as id's games helped veer the industry into questionable developmental territory, it was their manic goriness, free from consequence, or story, or empathy, or even much humor, that nudged the whole enterprise on a collision course with the aftermath of the Columbine massacre in June 1999, when many blamed "Doom" for pushing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into their homicidal fit.

At the time, Carmack dismissed the criticisms outright -- since, after all, they had just made an innocuous computer version of "cowboys and Indians with better special effects." But judging from Kushner's early biographies of the id team, they were already well-inclined to aim for something quite different. Beginning as a preteen, Romero entertained himself with gory cartoons where a dog or a boy (himself, actually) is slaughtered in creatively sadistic ways. After Carmack is caught trying to use an explosive paste to break into his high school, to swipe its Apple IIs, his court-appointed psychiatric evaluation reads: "Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs ... no empathy for other human beings." In college, id artist Adrian Carmack (no relation to John) earns money by photocopying pictures of emergency room patients for a local hospital. Many are lurid images of real suffering: gunshot wounds, rotting flesh, severed limbs. Carmack keeps copies of those, so he can trade them with his friends. Details like these leave the sense that "Doom" was actually some kind of twisted purging that had been struggling to get out for some time.

It was their laser beam focus on darkness that also sealed the fate of Tom Hall, a college-educated programmer with a childlike sense of humor, who joined the boys in Shreveport. As Kushner tells it, Hall seems like the only id member interested in making their early games something more than elaborate adrenaline dispensers. (He sometimes references Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" as an inspiration for game characters.) Hall balks at their games' endless viscera, rebels when his detailed story line for "Doom" is trashed, and at Carmack's behest, eventually gets booted from id. He was an impediment that stopped them from mowing shit down, in other words, so they got rid of him.

No one could reasonably suggest a causal link between "Doom" and Columbine. But there was undisputedly a connection between id's games and the massacre. As Kushner mentions, the connection was made by Eric Harris himself, who shot a video where he promised into the camera that his upcoming slaughter was "going to be like fucking 'Doom.'" (Without pausing to really consider the implications of this statement, Kushner sidles quickly onward.) Harris' words give the lie to the evasions of the gaming press, as it does Carmack's own robotic sophistry on the matter: "It was just the odds," he wrote online then. "This life event, like every other, could be broken down to mathematics." If so, Harris factored "Doom" into his own bloody calculus. In any case, the practical outcome was the worst controversy ever to shudder through the game industry, as anti-media violence crusader Sen. Joe Lieberman and other politicians descended.

Despite all this, Kushner makes it hard for you not to feel some affection for them. As the book brings us up to date, we find Romero selling his Ferrari on eBay and donating his rock god hair to a children's chemotherapy charity. He's gone back to building the kind of modest, non-aggressive games he started with, once again collaborating with his friend Tom Hall, the designer who was too cerebral for id's tastes. For Carmack's part, he can now freely admit to being "an amoral little jerk" as a kid, and sometimes makes noises about quitting the game industry altogether, to devote more time to his new passion of amateur space travel. (But first, he's devoting his considerable talents to finishing a remake of "Doom," a project Kushner portrays Carmack pursuing with highly limited enthusiasm.)

And maybe it's a bit unfair to fix too much blame for the kinds of games they made, so young, or the unintended consequences they wreaked, on the industry. At any rate, even the first-person shooter has finally moved out of id's shadow, in recent years. The shooters that usually sell well now are best defined by how much they aren't like id games -- story-free kill fests set in an undefined world, where you frag anything that moves with implausibly gargantuan firepower. Instead, there are first-person tactical shooters, which depend just as much on teamwork and strategy as they do on twitch reflexes, and realistic shooters like "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" and "Battlefield: 1942," both of which succeed due to their World War II historical verisimilitude. To that group, add story-driven shooters like "Half Life" and "Deus Ex," a "first-person simulation" created by several lead alumni from Looking Glass Studios, who now carry on as Ion Storm Austin. (Before his financing publisher ejected him from his own company, John Romero set them up as a satellite studio -- another of his redeeming acts.)

Still, it doesn't hurt to yearn for the games that might have been. It's easy to imagine an alternate timeline, had John Romero not hauled his first wife to Shreveport, where he met John Carmack. "Ultima Underworld" would have been alone to set the standard for first-person games, and to define their potential. With the bar raised so high, other studios would not only try to surpass "Underworld's" graphics, but also the possibilities it opened, for building a truly interactive world. At some point, sure, someone would figure out how to put a handheld pistol in the center of the screen -- there'd still be first-person shooters. But because the genre would have already come so far, no one would be cheesy enough to turn big dick gunplay into the be-all end-all. (For this same reason, there'd be more incentive to make them appeal to a more mainstream, casual-gamer audience, which would in turn curtail the escalating arms race of competing graphics cards.) With more interactivity would come more demand for intelligent AI -- creatures, people, supporting characters -- to populate these games. They'd get smarter, become more eerily human-like, and allow ever-widening breadth of player expression. And right about now, we'd be a lot closer to the medium-as-utopian vision Kushner speaks too loosely of.

But it's not David Kushner's place to piece out how many missed opportunities were blown away by the crossfire of hype and free downloads. His key fault, in an otherwise excellent book, is giving far too much credit to games which consistently fell way short of the medium's full potential -- while failing to recognize the one game which did show, so early on, the kind of world-changing promise he professes to want. Before its example was lost, that is, in all the gathering gun clouds.

Recent Stories