Masters of Doom by David Kushner Page B

subscribe.”
    “One month!” they cried. Two months, the original deadline, was tight enough. There
     was no way they could come up with two games from scratch. They would have to port
     a couple of their existing Apple II games to PC—a specialty that both Carmack and
     Romero could handle. And they had just the titles: Dangerous Dave, an Apple II game
     of Romero’s, and The Catacomb, a title of Carmack’s. Romero had made his first Dangerous
     Dave back in 1988 for Uptime. It was a fairly straightforward adventure game, featuring
     a tiny little splotch of a guy with a purple bodysuit and green cap. The object was
     to run and jump through mazes and collect treasure without getting killed first. Donkey
     Kong, the arcade game from Nintendo, had a similar paradigm, one Romero admired.
    Catacomb was Carmack’s latest spin on the role-playing worlds he’d first explored
     with Shadowforge and Wraith. This one would show an even stronger influence from Gauntlet,
     the popular arcade game in which characters could run through mazes, shooting monsters
     along the way, casting spells. It was like Dungeons and Dragons with action. This
     was also a key point of communion for the Two Johns: their admiration for fast-action
     arcade games, their desire to emulate them, and, most important, their unbridled confidence
     in their abilities. They turned up the stereo. There was work to be done.
    Romero gleefully referred to the ensuing experience as “crunch mode” or “the death
     schedule”—a masochistically pleasurable stretch of programming work involving sleep
     deprivation, caffeine gorging, and loud music. For pure sportsmanship, Carmack and
     Romero had a little contest to see who could port a game the fastest. It didn’t take
     long for the Ace Programmer to see just how fast the Whiz Kid was, as Carmack fairly
     easily pulled ahead. It was all in good fun. And Romero was full of admiration for
     his new friend and colleague. They coded late into the nights.
    There was a bitter reason for Romero’s increased freedom. He was getting a divorce.
     Being a twenty-two-year-old Future Rich Person was challenging enough, without the
     demands of husbandry and parenthood. His wife didn’t share his love for games and,
     in Romero’s mind, was becoming even more depressed. She wanted family dinners, church,
     Saturday barbecues—things that Romero was feeling increasingly ill-equipped to provide.
    For a while he had tried to make both worlds work, even leaving the office early while
     the others stayed behind. But it was never enough. The truth was, Romero didn’t know
     if he had enough to give. Though part of him wanted to have the family he never had
     as a child, he sometimes felt that he wasn’t programmed to be that kind of husband
     and dad. It would be best for everyone, they agreed, if they split up. But Kelly didn’t
     just want this; she wanted to split to California to be closer to her family. Romero
     felt crushed. At the same time, he knew that he couldn’t handle having the boys live
     with him. Instead, he convinced himself he could make long-distance fatherhood work.
     Even with several states between them, they would be closer than he ever was with
     his dad.
    Rather than dwell on his family life, Romero immersed himself in Gamer’s Edge. Working on the ports had helped Carmack and
     Romero realize how they could best work together given their strengths and weaknesses.
     Carmack was most interested in programming the guts of the game—what was called the
     engine. This integral code told the computer how to display graphics on the screen.
     Romero enjoyed making the software tools—essentially the palette they would use to
     create characters and environments or “maps” of the game—as well as the game design—how
     the game play would unfold, what action would take place, what would make it fun.
     It was like yin and yang. While Carmack was exceptionally talented in programming,
     Romero