The first sign of trouble comes when Kushner attempts to nail down the beginning of what we now call the first-person shooter. By his lights, it starts somewhere in late 1991, when id gets word of a game being made by a New Hampshire-based studio called Blue Sky Productions:

"When [Romero] hung up the phone, he spun his chair to Carmack and said, 'Paul said he's doing a game using texture mapping.'"

Paul Neurath, president of Blue Sky Productions -- which was later re-dubbed Looking Glass Studios -- was here referring to a technique in which the computer depicts a three-dimensional world with patterned textures (brick walls, mossy tunnels, and so on). Up until then, 3D computer graphics were usually rendered with abstract, geometric lines. Real-time texture mapping would be the next, giant leap forward towards the creation of a virtual world that felt like a real physical place you could interact in -- a quality that came to be known as "immersiveness."

Back to Kushner:

"'Texture mapping?' Carmack replied, then took a few seconds to spin the concept around in his head. 'I can do that.'"

And just like that, as "Masters of Doom" would have it, Carmack sits there and grasps the technology on the spot, and is able to whip up Catacomb 3-D, a simple action game, and get it out six months before the release of "Ultima Underworld," the game Blue Sky was working on at the time, set in the fantasy world created by Richard "Lord British" Garriott. Paul Neurath and his team were trudging toward the goal of real-time 3D, Kushner clearly means us to think, but the more nimble Carmack just leaped ahead and planted his flag there first.

Neurath recalls that phone conversation, but when presented with that excerpt from "Masters," recounts the chronology quite differently. In the summer of '90, he says -- at least a full year before that call -- Blue Sky was showing off a working demo of what would become Ultima Underworld at a software convention. They had two visitors:

"Romero and Carmack swung by to take a look," Neurath e-mails me. "I recall Carmack's great interest at seeing the demo, and then turning to me to say that he knew a way to do faster texture mapping. He was just 19 at the time, and seemed like a cocky kid to me."

Over 12 months later, Carmack finally did succeed at speedier texture mapping, but only at a huge hit to realism. In "Catacomb 3-D," as in "Wolfenstein 3-D" -- the Nazi-killing follow-up they put out in May 1992, which really made their reputation -- you could move forward, backward, or laterally, but you couldn't go or look up or down. These shortcuts enabled id to create fast-paced action games with the limited PC power of the time. But it also meant these games were, at best, 2.5D.

By contrast, in "Ultima Underworld," you had a fully three-dimensional world, with textures on all sides. Not only could you go and look up and down, you could swim in streams, and fly through caverns. There were rudimentary lighting effects which furthered the illusion of distance and mystery within a living world. There were bursts of first-person combat, too, but just as compelling, there were foreboding spaces to explore, personal traits to improve, tools to use, characters to talk with. The immersiveness extended into its unfolding story, with mysteries to piece out and complex quests to accomplish. It is all this, in addition to its technical innovations, which makes the game so beloved, even now.

Nothing like these features were extant in either of id's debut first-person games, but Kushner just splits the difference between Blue Sky's game and "Catacomb 3-D":

"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, immersive place."

On a purely technological metric, this is flimflam. It's like comparing the graphic-user interface of Macintosh and Windows, circa 1992, and saying, "Together, both operating systems took the home computing experience to a new, user-friendly place."

To anyone who played "Ultima Underworld," the comparison reeks of travesty. For everyone else, no doubt, the distinction must seem academic. Even many Blue Sky veterans don't seem all that exercised about claiming their rightful credit, as the first and best. "I'm sure that if we or id had not started to play around with the technology," Neurath tells me, "some other developer would have figured it out soon enough."

So why should we care?

Well, it's like this: if Kushner just wanted to write about the history of first-person shooters, and how id helped invent them, that would be one thing. No one is apt to dis id's contribution to the genre, or even the relative quality of what they put out -- for what they were, well-made, if unaccountably morbid shoot-fests, they weren't horrible. And John Carmack's graphic engines -- that is, the software he created to render their 3-D worlds in ever more granulated detail -- are still fairly important software tools. Even more laudable is Carmack's willingness to publicly release the code to id's games, which enabled anyone to customize and radically change them, launching the mod subculture that keeps the industry vital to this day.

But Kushner also wants to situate id in a much bigger cultural context, and to do so, he cites writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, and before them, Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley. All of them imagined a near future where virtual worlds would become so realistic and varied, they'd evolve into our play space for freeform imagination and social experiment. By Kushner's lights, this is the ideal that id supposedly brought us much closer to, to what he calls an "utopian vision of a game."

But this is precisely what they did not do. Their games were allowed to be 3D worlds only insofar as you were moving fast and killing stuff in them -- and you were allowed to be interactive in them only insofar as you were moving fast and killing stuff.

This was a conscious choice from very early on, Kushner suggests. (And here, as elsewhere, his first-rate journalism doesn't jibe with the larger thematic framework he keeps trying to jam over it.) During development of "Wolfenstein," he says, id considered adding a feature which would let the player hide the Nazis you killed, to prevent their discovery by other guards. That element would have added a level of strategic thinking, and more meaningful (if simple) world interaction beyond mere gunplay.

But Romero, Kushner reports, would have none of that: "[I]t's slowing the game down," he moans. "Anything that's going to stop us from mowing shit down -- get rid of it!"

And that became the model for what most of us came to assume, incorrectly, wrong-headedly, shortsightedly, a first-person game was supposed to be. So it's important to see the near-simultaneous release of "Wolfenstein 3-D" and "Ultima Underworld" as a crucial turning point in how later technology would come to shape our lives -- much the same way, in the same time frame, Apple's Macintosh still had a chance to become the dominant personal computer system, competing as it was against the far inferior (but far less expensive) DOS/Windows PC clones.

Similarly, "Wolf 3-D's" dominance was more a matter of market timing and revenue model, over quality: When id's game came out, most PC owners didn't have computers that were powerful enough to run "Underworld." (Which also was, it must be said, difficult to learn, and indifferently marketed.) Meanwhile, "Wolfenstein" was easy to play, fun for what it was, and best of all, free. While many paid for the full registered version of the game, far more were happy just to enjoy the shareware version that was downloadable everywhere. "Ultima Underworld" and its 1993 sequel together sold almost half a million copies -- more, as it turns out, than "Wolfenstein 3-D" (150,000) and "Spear of Destiny" (135,000), the expanded retail version sold in stores. Despite this, the ubiquity of the shareware version helped foster the illusion that id's game was the real blockbuster.

This misperception was also true for "Doom": id sold just under 1.5 million copies of the registered version, but it's estimated that over 15 million copies of the shareware version were downloaded. In other words, id's games didn't seem so phenomenally popular because they were great -- rather, they seemed popular because they were pretty good games that were basically free.

But the game industry went ahead and gleaned the wrong lesson from it, dumping the market with derivative first-person shooters. From "Wolfenstein 3-D" in 1992 to now, an online game database counts over 500 FPS titles -- on average, a joyless churn rate of one per week, almost all of them irredeemably wack. Despite this deluge, total market share for the genre never exceeded 10 percent or so. (Wondering if they'd enjoyed an aggregate post-Doom surge in popularity, in the '90s, I double-checked with Douglas Lowenstein, president of the IDSA, the game industry's lead advocacy group. "Through the mid and late 1990s," he e-mails me, "first-person shooters were a small portion of the total PC game market and they remain a niche market today.") And even id's games were significantly outsold in the mid-90's by crossover titles "Myst" and "Microsoft Flight Simulator." All of which groin-kicks Kushner's fanciful notion that id somehow transformed popular culture in the '90s: Not only were their games interactive knock-offs of 80's movies like "The Terminator" and "Aliens," and not only did their games' influence not cross over into other mediums, what influence they did have was mostly confined to a very nichey genre of computer game.

But when id hit, publishers seemed to largely ignore their mainstream market, for a vain pursuit of the hardcore dude demo which comprised the Mesquite company's main audience. Meanwhile, as Kushner reports, id's games helped create the market for 3D graphics cards. While an expensive, superfluous expansion for most computer owners, the peripheral improved the performance of 3D games. (And after Carmack implemented the code to make "Quake" compatible with a new line of cards, Kushner writes, the industry's path was set: developers of action games would follow Carmack's lead, and make their titles 3D card-optimal.)

For the most part, though, only committed gamers are willing to keep pace with the latest graphics cards, by upgrading their PCs every year or two. Even now, 3D graphics are no guarantor of a blockbuster: last December, for example, well over half of the top 20 bestselling PC games do not require a powerful 3D card, to run -- and none of those, unsurprisingly, would be considered a hardcore gamer title. And among them all, only one is an FPS. The ultimate end result: in a market of over 100 million U.S. home PC owners, few crossover hits that have sold to even 5 percent of that massive audience. While other factors were involved, games catering to 3D card owners must surely be blamed for driving this demographic wedge between hardcore gamers and casual players, and the balkanized market we're left with now.

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