Video Games: The Age of Doom
In 1993 six geeks had a digital nightmare that changed the culture. It's about to get far creepier

By Lev Grossman/Mesquite 	 Monday, Aug. 09, 2004

It was the janitor who showed John Carmack that the world had changed. In 1993 Carmack was working on a new kind of video game for a tiny company called id Software. He had written games before, but nobody except computer geeks had cared much about them. "I remember showing some people games that I liked on the Apple II," Carmack remembers, "and just having them sit there, completely not comprehending what could be enjoyable about moving these little guys around. People just did not get it." But this game was different. "We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty the trash had just been sitting there staring at the game--for a long time," he says. "The game had this power: it could affect normal people."

The game was called Doom, and the janitor was among the first of us normal people to get a look at the electronic frontier of the coming century. With Doom, Carmack and his colleagues had created a three-dimensional virtual world so powerful, compelling and disturbing that it would change the real world around it. This week id will launch Doom 3, four years in the making. It is, if anything, a little too real.

In 1993 id consisted of six rootless dorks in an office in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Carmack, their programming ringer, was a 23-year-old who had spent a year in juvie and completed exactly two semesters at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Carmack is an odd duck: blond, skinny, with a fixed, unblinking gaze and a curious vocal tic--his sentences often end with an involuntary noise that sounds something like Mn! Despite his otherworldly demeanor, he is artlessly charming, although he does not make anything resembling small talk. It's not because he's too busy or aloof; you get the impression he doesn't make small talk because he has never heard of it.

Before Doom most games took place in flatland: they were two-dimensional, like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man. But Carmack figured out a way for the cheapo, underpowered personal computers of the day to create depth, to render three-dimensional spacea miniature theater, a virtual dreamworld in which the player could move around at will. "You could have fun with those old games, but it was more of a detached, abstract sort of fun," Carmack says. "But when you take the exact same game play, put it in the first-person perspective, and you go around a corner, open up a door, and there's a monster, like, full-screen, right there, you saw people just go aggggghhh and jump back. That's something you never, ever could have done before." With Doom the monitor screen became a magic rabbit hole, and you fell down it, screaming all the way. Mn!

Doom was packed with high-tech innovations. It pioneered multiplayer gaming over networks, online distribution and an open architecture that promoted user modifications. Today video games are a $7 billion industry, and most of them rip off Carmack's work in one form or another. The military used multiplayer Doom to train soldiers for combat. Architects use the graphics engine for Quake, Doom's successor, to explore their buildings before they build them. Doom and Quake have pushed computer manufacturers to make (and gamers to buy) faster, more powerful machines.




Doom had a cultural impact as well. Its fluid, hyperkinetic rhythms have become part of the visual language of movies and TV. "Kids can absorb information on the screen more rapidly, and they react to it much faster as well," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Enemy of the State). "They also don't have the patience of older audiences, so we have to make our stories move along at a faster pace." The game was also exceptionally violent ("It's going to be like f___ing Doom!" one of the Columbine killers famously said), to an extent that shocks us and ultimately attracts us. We don't have to be happy about it, but five years after Columbine, it is no longer possible to deny that Americans passionately enjoy pretending to shoot one another with guns, and fears that such a pastime would give rise to a generation of spree killers have not borne fruit. Ignoring the mass appeal of virtual violence seems as pointless as wagging a finger at those darn long-haired rock 'n' rollers.

As radical as it was 11 years ago, Doom looks pathetically crude compared with Carmack's new brainchild. A first glance at a computer screen running Doom 3 is confusing to the eye: the illusion the game creates is so realistic. The secret? Light. Carmack has spent the past four years painstakingly studying optics, and he has figured out how to make photons bounce around in a virtual space in much the same way that they do in the real world. Suddenly, pebbly surfaces cast pebbly shadows. Air ripples from the heat of a broken steam pipe. There is a crispness to details, a weight and solidity to objects and figures, a lifelike sheen to surfaces in Doom 3 that is unlike anything we've seen before.

The original Doom told a rather disposable story about a space Marine posted to some kind of high-powered research facility on Mars. An experiment goes wrong, yada yada yada, and a portal to hell opens, flooding the station with demons, which the player must dispatch with an assortment of high-caliber weapons. Doom 3 tells the same story but this time treats it with surprisingly artistic tenderness. Carmack's light engine allows the game's designers to paint the story the way a film director would, with light and shadow, like a noir mystery. Scenes are lit by broken light fixtures, flickering and swinging, or cut up by the shadow of a spinning overhead fan. id's designers have worked wonders, despite the newness of the technology. "It's like making a movie while you're inventing the camera," says Tim Willits, the game's lead designer.

As virtual worlds go, Doom 3 is big. To play through it just once, never mind multiplayer matches and replay time, takes upwards of 30 hours. (Take that, Peter Jackson!) Despite its size, it is meticulously detailed. The monsters of the original Doom were barely animated blobs of pixels; this time the game is populated by a gallery of fascinating grotesques and gargoyles created by Kenneth Scott, id's soft-spoken lead artist, whose work references Francis Bacon and cheesy fantasy artist Frank Frazetta with equal reverence. The ghouls are excruciatingly detailed. As you're being devoured by a swarm of demonic cherubs, you can admire the iridescent patina on their insect wings. To play Doom 3 is to feel your skin prickle with atavistic fear. It's a bit too lifelike for comfort.

Doom 3 is sure to be big business. It had better be: id Software releases only one product every few years, and developing a game like Doom 3 costs from $15 million to $20 million. Unless it confounds all expectations, Doom 3 should sell well into the millions, at $54.99 a pop. And id will license Carmack's technology to a swarm of game developers. Although conventional wisdom has it that games like id's appeal to just a narrow, nerdy hard-core subculture, they're actually wildly popular. Even before Doom 3 hits stores, 6 of the top 10 computer games in June were hard core. And two other games of that ilk, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, are expected to post big numbers later this year. Universal Pictures has a Doom movie set to film in Prague this winter, with producer John Wells--of such respectable fare as ER and The West Wing--attached. (The Rock reportedly has his sights set on the starring role.) The hard core has become the mainstream. This isn't a subculture, it's a culture.

A generation is defining itself through virtual combat, without the casualties or consequences of World War II and the Vietnam War. And who knows? Maybe one day we'll figure out less destructive ways to have fun in Carmack's dreamworld. After all, it would be a shame if, having invented cinema, we made only war movies. Carmack might even be the one to broker that virtual peace. He has a life outside Doomhobbies, charities, not to mention a wife who's eight months pregnant. He doesn't spend much time gaming anymore. But he isn't giving up on the virtual frontier he opened. "There's something fundamentally interesting about that, about the world in a box," he says. "If somebody can be an emperor in a virtual world, with only a cheap computer, is that really a fundamentally bad thing?" --With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles