Masters of Doom and a short history of family geekery

I have just finished reading a book by David Kushner, a journalist and author known for his work covering the music and videogaming industries. The book, Masters of Doom, is a biography of the gaming company id Software and its two founding fathers, John Romero and John Carmack. You'll have to forgive the book's melodramatic and repetitious delivery; you'll be wondering why three full descriptions of the origin of the "Burger Bill" moniker were needed, and you'll never again want to hear the phrase "bit flip". Some sections of the text feel like they were stitched together from a number of disparate articles. What lies beneath the gluttonous delivery, though, is a well-researched and entertaining exploration of the decade that saw PC games explode into the mainstream, and what many alive during that time might refer to fondly as the golden age of PC gaming.

Part of what makes this book so exciting for me is that I was alive during this era! For once, I can read the recounting of historic occasions in which I participated, in this case occurring within the computer geek subculture of the 90's. Granted, my older siblings were more steeped in it than I was -- coming of age around the beginning of '98 meant that I experienced most of these developments via the trickle down effect. They were no less thrilling because of it.

First, though, a short history of my first six years. Like any kid raised during the 80's, I grew up against the alluring backdrop of computer games. They became the object of lustful desire for any red-blooded child who got a taste. Nintendo and Sega were in a full-scale console war and the consumers were the beneficiaries. Some of my earliest memories of my older brother extend back to his frothing excitement over the release of Sega's next big system, the Megadrive. Television ads at the time exclaimed, "I dreamt I was in a Sega! It was wicked!" One of Sega's biggest appeals was its apparent lack of censorship -- while Nintendo was content with psychedelic jumping plumbers, some of Sega's more gruesome titles played out onscreen in a manner that many parents decried, including my own. As a hyperactive and violent child since birth, I was forbade to play video games at precisely the age I became aware of their hypnotic pleasure. I vividly remember hiding behind the couch or on the top bunk in my brother's bedroom, contenting myself with watching what I could not touch.

Consoles weren't the only appealing virtual escape in our house. My mother, a graduate student at the turn of the 90's, brought home a computer on which she did her schoolwork. My brother, not content to let a gaming opportunity pass, was soon blasting away on games like Bruce Lee and Elite. The latter, now considered a cult classic and the target of many ports, remakes and copies, had an unsurpassed depth and freedom to its game world that may have provided many with their first glimpse of the freedom PC games could provide. Admittedly, I never could get into Elite. I was only six, and had no patience for the slow pace of space exploration.

Around the time that Nirvana released Nevermind, our family packed up and relocated to the U.S. It was a shock for all of us, emerging from the concrete oppression of London to discover the rolling hills and forests of upstate New York. This wildness would set the tone for the next couple of years, for we had brought with us no TV and no computer! Though shocking at first, I believe we all found the verdant setting refreshing. I preoccupied myself with that most virtual of realities, pure imagination, exploring and fighting with invisible things.

In late 1993 there were two major developments in our household. One was the birth of my little sister. The other was an IBM PC packing an Intel 8088 processor clocked at 4.77mhz! It had an industrial-sized red power switch and sounded like a helicopter launch when powered on. Even at the time it was clear this was a dated computer, considering it had been released in 1981 about three years before I was born (!), but the effect its presence had on our family was immediate. It had two 5.25" floppy drives and no graphics card, meaning we had to content ourselves with ASCII text graphics and our imaginations. Interfacing with white-on-black text only computers was a wonder akin to staring up at the stars, piecing them together into the constellations we knew should be there. All of a sudden we had channels streaming in again: BBSes and the web! Email and chat rooms! Though the quality of communication was primitive when compared with the standards of the day, it all felt new and brave and exciting. My older sister became entranced with online text-based role playing games. They had a narrative intrigue and a crumb-trail of incremental rewards that pulled one beyond the binary litany of the blinking cursor.

The aspect of the primordial internet that interested me most was the Bulletin Board System (BBS), an early example of an online forum. A programmer would host a service on their computer or network that would allow others to dial in and interact in any number of ways. The beeps and static shrieks of the modem were a telltale sound in our house, and woe betide the person who picked up the phone during a session, disconnecting the logged-on user. The local BBS scene culminated in biweekly Geekfests, where geeks and anyone who identified with them would hang out and celebrate their culture. These events were marked by gaming on any platform available, quirky and far-out interactions, and probably a lot of weed smoking (I was too young at the time to know about such things). The characters who attended these events were as vivid as any dreamed into virtual existence: the wispy-haired and ethereal Dren Eht Sral (larS thE nerD backwards) and Noid, whose daily attire consisted of welding goggles, gloves with Freddy-Kreuger finger-knives and a black trenchcoat. It was par for the course in a community that declared the definition of a geek to be "one who bites the heads off of live chickens!"

The geekfests I was allowed to attend were held at a labyrinthine house off of some back country road in Tompkins County, NY. The place looked like a pile of wood cabins dropped from the sky that had since healed together - it was a mess of rooms, corridors and staircases. It was at these geekfests that I first caught wind of the sensation surrounding id's Doom. All gaming and hands-on geekery took place in the basement of the house, which was outfitted with a number of PCs and the Super Nintendo responsible for holding most of my attention each visit. I was enthralled by a recent release, the hovercraft racing game F-Zero that I was surprised to read in Masters of Doom was enjoyed by the staff of id software during the development of their early games. My brother and some others shrugged off its gameplay as boring and sterile, but for me it was the pinnacle of technical achievement in gaming to date. Also popular (but never appealing to me) was the controversial Mortal Kombat, whose gorily animated disembowlments were performed on animated sprites created from photographs of real people! I spent hours in front of that Super Nintendo and am sure my religiosity was a major annoyance to more than one geekfest gamer.

Meters away, a network of several PCs cranked away on Doom, perhaps the most visceral game yet developed at the time. I'd heard about the immersion, the tension, the gory graphics and thrilling sound effects. But, to be honest, the first time I saw Doom load up on a PC screen I felt a niggling sense of disappointment. This was it? While Super Nintendo games of the day were smooth, polished and colorful, Doom looked pixellated and dull-palletted. I watched as a player ran around some shapeless laybrinth, chopping up demons with a chainsaw. They groaned in lo-fi. I didn't get it. There were no puzzles, no colorful backdrops, no real sense of a consistent visual style, and the point-shoot-move-repeat game dynamic lost its appeal for me within minutes. This is no revolution, I thought. Someone made a game where you shoot stuff, and it's not as much fun as those overstimulating, epileptically staged simulations at the arcade. I exclaimed aloud, "Doom sucks!"

There was a moment of shocked silence. Then a veritable geek chorus retorted, "Doom rules!"

Hardly the most exciting achievement...

I was not, in the moment, able to see what made Doom so important. The fact that the PC finally had arcade-level action titles made for it was a huge breakthrough for the platform, but that was just the beginning - Doom supported network multiplay! You could assemble tens of your buddies and duke it out together in an arena. Doom invented deathmatch. It was also arguably the first real catalyst for the game modding community, a bunch of self-taught hackers who modified the game's code to implement their own changes. The Barney mod became one the most infamous examples. The subsequent release of level editors and dedicated modification tools meant that even unskilled players could try their hand at personalization. This game took full advantage of the PC as a platform, allowing people to play in ways they'd never played in the past. And the "first person shooter" genre (popularized by Doom but contested as to its game of origin) was almost singularly influenced by Doom for the next decade.

Doom earned its many successes, but what made it so timely was its coincidence with other cultural trends. Its hellish theme and unapologetic gore harmonized well with the attitudes of angsty grunge and goth kids who were listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Satanic and occult images were flooding the collective teen consciousness through films, literature, Magic: The Gathering and, now, computer games. All of a sudden, everybody knew somebody who practiced Wicca. Vampires, werewolves, zombies and demons were more popular than ever in this generation's mythology. If you don't remember smoking weed while listening to Downward Spiral and playing Doom, you probably weren't teenaged in the early nineties.

Though id's John Romero (Doom's ideological father) cratered his game coding career through an ill-fated and over-inflated flight of ego, John Carmack (the other parent) remains one of videogaming's most revered geniuses. His work on 3d engines and virtual environments continues to be at the forefront of game development. If you've played Games in the last 15 years, chances are you've used some of his code. Though I didn't personally discover the joys of Doom until 1997 (when the family got its first Intel computer with a 66mhz Pentium processor!), I have reaped countless benefits from id's contributions to gaming.

... And those benefits will have to be explored in a later post, because this is getting ridiculous. Hats off to one of gaming's finest developers! And many thanks to David Kushner for taking me down this whole silly path of nostalgia in the first place. For another good gaming-related read, check out Tom Bissell's Extra Lives.