www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990523mag-keegan.html
He's a vaguely Asian crusader with giant muscles bursting through an armored torso, but since you're watching the world through his eyes, all you see is his Ion Blaster gun and dungeon floors and walls hurtling by so fast your stomach somersaults into your throat. It's Superfly Johnson -- Hiro's gargantuan bald and black nemesis -- streaking by, blasting away with his Sidewinder gun. Hiro leaps to avoid the rocket-powered missiles, then pivots and fires. Green laser beams ricochet off the fortress walls, exploding like fireworks. As Hiro, he has just fragged a co-worker playing Superfly Johnson in a "death match," a battle via linked computers. He wears tight designer jeans and a black T-shirt, and has the slightly pudgy frame of someone who has spent a lifetime staring at computer screens while drinking Cokes and eating candy bars. Death match over, he gets up and walks through the spectacular, glass-encased penthouse office of his company, Ion Storm, glancing briefly at the panoramic view of downtown Dallas. Down in the garage, he climbs into his yellow 1991 Ferrari Testarossa, which looks like a rocket-powered capsule from a child's fantasy. Already a legend in the bizarro world of computer game fanatics, he has lately seemed on the cusp of the mainstream stardom he clearly craves, having been celebrated as "the Quentin Tarantino of computer-game megaviolence" by GQ and given rock-star treatment by the technology press. It was Romero, along with a programming genius, John Carmack, who revolutionized the computer-games industry in the mid-90's with the seminal shoot-'em-ups Doom and Quake, two of the biggest sellers of all time. The pair made millions, bought several Ferraris each and turned Dallas into the blood-and-guts capital of their industry. Though they have since broken up in a spat over precisely what makes a computer game cool, to hard-core fans they are still gods -- "the Paul McCartney and John Lennon of our business," says a Dallas game developer who insists on being identified only as Levelord. Then the nation was suddenly confronted with the image of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both avid Doom fans, rampaging through the halls of Columbine High with an arsenal of deadly weapons and laughing at the gibs. For the mass-market audience that developers like Romero have always coveted, the connection was hard to miss. Video and computer games had been criticized for violent content before, but what happened at Columbine High instantly gave the industry term for this relatively small game genre -- "first-person shooter" -- ominous new resonance. The same qualities that made Doom and Quake so adrenaline-pumping, so unlike any other form of violent media, now made them a primary target of outrage. These games plunge you into a three-dimensional world where you must kill to survive, whether your opponents are controlled by the computer or by real-life rivals. If computer games are all about blurring the line between fantasy and reality, so is the business that produces them -- and no one exemplifies this better than John Romero. A controversial figure even in gaming circles, he has so dominated his world that he's inclined to treat his critics with all the respect that Hiro Miyamoto affords the huge, slimy maggots and robotic frogs with venomous tongues that cross his path. Romero refuses to talk now about the events in Littleton, but when he sat fragging Superfly Johnson into bloody chunks, it seemed that nothing could threaten this world he'd created. With a severed head rolling one way and a rib-sprouting torso bouncing another, he was perfectly candid when asked if he was concerned about criticism of game violence. He imagines his reception in Japan, where he's never been but where his games are huge. Romero immediately plunged $2 million into renovating the glass-bubble penthouse floor of the Texas Commerce Tower, one of the most prestigious office addresses in Dallas. Today, oilmen who worked their whole lives to get into the Petroleum Club on the 40th floor find themselves sharing the elevators with the 90's version of Texas wildcatters -- techie 20-somethings wearing nose rings and cutoff shorts. Ion Storm is an astonishing place, like something out of a "Jetsons" cartoon -- with walkways suspended above a maze of stainless-steel cubicles, wall lighting embedded in marble sconces, glass cases filled with models of one-eyed monsters, the whole enterprise wrapped in clouds and sky. It bustles with 88 employees, including screenwriters and producers, developing three games at once and making plans to branch into movies, action figures, comic books and clothes. There are leather couches and giant projection screens, a locker room with showers, Ping-Pong and pool tables, a million-dollar recording studio for making game soundtracks and a special area for death-matching that's linked to 16 television sets in a nearby spectators' lounge. One of Romero's recurring cartoon characters was Melvin, a crew-cut kid who was always getting blown away by his dad. Then Schuneman noticed his stepson's fascination with computers and bought him an Apple II+. Romero became a brilliant programmer, with no interest in anything besides making games, and eventually made his stepfather proud. After high school, he bounced around several game companies before landing a job at Softdisk in Shreveport, La. There he hooked up with Carmack, a teen-age prodigy from Kansas City. In 1991, the two split off to found Id Software and moved to Dallas to form a partnership with Apogee Software, a company pioneering the use of the Internet for distribution, instead of merely relying on floppy disks sold in stores or through the mail. Their first game, Wolfenstein 3-D, is considered the original first-person shooter, letting players shoot Nazis in dungeons adorned with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler. It was an instant smash, bringing in about $120,000 a month in sales. You could download the first stages or "levels" of Doom free. But once addicted, you couldn't get the whole game unless you forked over a credit card number. So many people tried to download Doom that it crashed the computer system at the University of Wisconsin, on which it was posted. Doom spawned an entire generation of computer-gamers, from geeky kids making a beeline to their PC's after school to office workers flipping back to their spreadsheets whenever the boss walked by. Though it's impossible to know for sure how many free copies of the opening levels were downloaded worldwide, some estimates range as high as 20 million. As the first three-dimensional game playable over a computer network, Doom created a subculture of hard-core gamers. By intentionally leaving cracks in his source code, Carmack encouraged Doomers to hack the game and create their own elaborate levels -- new battlegrounds upon which the carnage took place. Was it Carmack's specialty, the programming advances that allowed for increasingly fast and realistic play? Or the cooler stories, weapons and monsters that Romero dreamed up? Doom was a huge hit not because of its "plot" -- something about a marine stationed on a moon base that was so lame that even people at Id can't recall how it goes -- or even the scary creatures and artsy backdrops. The key was Carmack's magnificent software, the "engines" -- the underlying operating systems that take full advantage of increasing computer power and made him a programming cult figure. Id Software's offices are hushed and contain only a bare-bones staff of 15 producing one game -- Quake III, due out this summer. Highway in the suburb of Mesquite, there's no mention of the company in the lobby's directory. While Romero has yet to earn a penny through Ion Storm, Id's revenues in 1997, the year Quake II came out, were $28 million, a staggering $2 million per employee. With only small overhead -- mostly salaries and computers -- fully 80 percent of that is profit. In early March, after much persuasion, Carmack agreed to a rare interview to help promote Quake III. Down a carpeted U-shaped corridor, he sat programming quietly in his office, a windowless room that he shares with...
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