DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST

Front matter

Dan Pinchbeck

LANDMARK VIDEO GAMES

DOOM

Contents

Introduction: There Are a Lot of People Totally Opposed to Violence. They're All Dead.

. Eva! Auf Wiedersehen! The Birth of a Genre

The Speed of Light Sucks: The Rise of id Beefy Chunklets from Bible to Beta The Fastest Texture Mapping in Town: id Tech 1

Introduction

There Are a Lot of People Totally Opposed to Violence. They’re All Dead.

It was early 1994, and the core, as I remember it, was me and my friends Tom and Andy. Tom was the one with the PC. We used to get together in his room in the halls of residence, with the lights off, and play this new game hed just got. Usually, he was a freak for role-playing games—most recently, a top-down steampunk set on Mars—and a group of us would occasionally pull an all-nighter on Civilization (MicroProse 1991), but that winter, there was really only one game: id’s seminal shooter DOOM. It’s difficult to overstate the impact DOOM had on us all. Wed all thoroughly enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D (id Software 1992), of course, but for a bunch of nineteenyear-olds in the pre-PlayStation era, DOOM just blew everything else into bloody gibs.

This is a book about the most important first-person game ever made, about the blueprint that has defined one of the most successful genres of digital gaming. It is about a controversial, hyperviolent, scary, funny, exciting game that manages to be both profoundly, self-congratulatory dumb and exceptionally clever at the same time. All this and a chaingun—what more could you ask for?

I love first-person games: I think they are the most engaging, furious, immersive digital game form, even when they deviate from the basic run-and-gun model carved out by DOOM and typified by recent shooters like Bulletstorm (People Can Fly 2011) and Killzone 3 (Guerilla Games 2011). There is something absolutely unique about the direct mapping of your per-

2 = DOOM ception onto an avatar’s, something really wonderful about how, in many ways, these games extend the rewarding simplicity of early arcade gaming into the most high-end edges of technological implementation. The contemporary first-person shooter Crysis 2 (Crytek 2011) may look like an oil painting (if not actually better), but at heart, it’s just first-person Defender (Williams Electronics 1981). Lurking just below the dystopian musings on free will and capitalism that give Bioshock (2K Boston + 2K Australia 2007) its unique flavor is Wolfenstein 3D with water and a wrench.

DOOM '’s legacy includes some of the finest moments in gaming yet produced. Without it, Half-Life (Valve Software 1998) wouldn't have pushed how story is delivered in games seismically forward or set the crowbar at a new high for level design. There would be no Portal (Valve Software 2007), no Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009), no EE.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon (Monolith 2005), no Mirror’s Edge (DICE 2008). The technological advances of DOOM cast an equally long, dynamically rendered shadow. Then there’s the creation of the online multiplayer gaming scene, via id embracing the idea of players playing against one another over LANs and online networks. You could argue that maybe the entirety of the massively multiplayer economy owes something to DOOM. Finally, id’s championing of the open-source ethos—not just through the adoption of the Apogee model but through opening up of build tools to fan communities—effectively created the modding scene, which has had a huge impact on gaming as a movement.

Enough hyperbole. Pve made some pretty big claims here, and though I suspect that you don't really need convincing if you know anything about games, duty calls me to offer some evidence to back them up. So this is what were going to do: examine the context that DOOM crawled into, bloody and triumphant; talk a little about id, the dark heart of the enterprise; and try to paint a picture of the game’s impact on release. Were going to take a tour under the hood to look at what made DOOM so important as a piece of software engineering. Then it will be time to get down and dirty on Phobos, Deimos, and Hell itself and discuss level and experience design. In case all that isnt enough, theres some other work to do. We have to look into multiplayer in a little more detail, and we need to discuss mods. We need to talk about the ports, sequels, and reboots: DOOM II and particularly DOOM 3. So that’s enough introduction: strap on your ammo bandolier, power up the plasma gun, grab some blue armor, and, in the immortal words of DOOM’s

Introduction = 3 hilariously succinct intro, put a “couple of pellets in the forehead” of whatever killed your buddies.

Assuming, for just a minute, that you may have been living in a bunker for the last nineteen years, I need to make a formal introduction. DOOM is a first-person shooter. Its minimal heads-up display contains an ammo counter, a health and armor bar, a picture of your avatar’s head (visually showing what kind of physical state you are in), and a keycard indicator. Above this, you can see a hand holding a variety of weapons. You can move about horizontally (including strafing),' look freely around,’ use a generic action key to open doors and press buttons, collect objects such as health kits and ammo and armor lying around the place, and shoot—there’s lots of shooting. In academic terms, DOOM is based around the core activity of lining up objects with the center of the screen and removing them by pressing the shoot button. You start in a complex environment, and you simplify it by removing agents and pressing all the buttons there are to press and collecting all the objects there are to collect. You can cut part of the simplification process out by just running for the exit (normally impossible without first finding a keycard or two), but although this is possible—and we'll return to speedruns in subsequent chapters—the game is all about simplifying the environment, with extreme prejudice.

DOOM takes place in an industrial base on a Martian moon that has been invaded by demons from Hell. You are the last survivor, and gameplay takes the form of you battling onward through a variety of locations, exterminating anything that moves. The demons are intent on reducing you to a bloody smear on the corporate carpet, and attempt to do so by clawing, biting, and rending you at close range and by blasting you with shotguns and fireballs from a distance. If you haven't played DOOM but have played any first-person shooter, you already know this is fast, simple gameplay, alternating between tense exploration and adrenaline-fueled gunfights. If you haven't played either DOOM or any other FPS, your life is poorer as a result, and you should stop reading this and get in on the action immediately. That’s the basic overview; we'll go into more detail later on, but from here on in, Pm going to assume you have, at the least, an awareness of a product called DOOM out there in the world and some inkling of what playing it entails.

The first release of DOOM occurred on December 10, 1993, in the form

4 = DOOM of a free shareware episode available for download, plus two further episodes requiring payment. The fact that id used the embryonic Internet as a distribution channel, co-opting the emerging online communities, speaks volumes about just how cleverly they understood the context into which their game was going to launch. Netscape was founded in October 1994, the Mosaic web browser (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in January 1993. These were the glory days of the Gopher protocol, computerized bulletin board systems, and Usenet. Networked games were not necessarily new. MUSE had launched MUD1 via CompuServe and Compu- Net in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1985, and the ancient equivalent of LAN battles had actually been hardwired into the genre from its very conception, with networked games being established through the 1970s. The idea of using modem-to-modem networks to support multiplay globally was a hugely ambitious goal. Bear in mind, this is all before Steam and other online game stores, way before any general idea of mass digital distribution of games was in the offing. Users were used to file sharing, of course, but the idea of inviting mass, user-driven distribution of a full third of a game as a marketing exercise was quite brilliant, and as we shall see, id co-opted Scott Miller's brilliance to propel DOOM sales sky-high.

Its next to impossible to accurately capture sales data for DOOM (for reasons we will explore later on), let alone figures for the shareware distribution. Kushner estimates that orders amounting to $100,000 a day hit id in the days just after release (Kushner 2003). In the 2000 edition of The Complete Wargames Handbook, combined sales for DOOM and Ultimate DOOM (version 1.9, released in 1995 and the first traditional retail release) from 1993 to 2000 come in at over 1.8 million units (Dunnigan 2000, 8). VGChartz gives a total figure of 2.85 million as of 2011.’ Regardless of the impossibility of verification, the fact that community sites claim over ten million installations by 1995 gives some sense, at least, of what a phenomenon it was.*

DOOM was an instant, if controversial, critical smash. While players lapped it up, some form of media backlash was pretty inevitable, and the game was attacked for its graphic violence and content. This may look faintly ridiculous now, in the era of Manhunt (Rockstar North 2007), [PRO- TOTYPE] (Radical 2009), and Saw: The Videogame (Zombie Studios 2009) (let alone the Saw movie franchise), but anti-DOOM hysteria bubbled into the press with all the vigor of ichor bubbling up from a shotgunned Imp’s neck stump. David Grossman famously described it as a “mass murder simulator” (60 Minutes, CBS, 1997), and the game was at the center of attempts

Introduction = 5 to push through compulsory licensing of virtual realities. This was driven up to fever pitch with the disclosure that Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, was a keen DOOM player and had created his own mods—both of which were linked directly to the shooting by the Rocky Mountain News (August 22, 1999), among others. Rumors even circulated that Harris had modded Columbine levels. Regardless of the truth or fiction of media stories, one thing is certain: controversy sells. The hype and the horror stories catapulted DOOM even further into the public sphere. Perhaps as much because of this reception as because of how efficiently the content works in a ludic setting, hell, industrial sci-fi, conspiracies involving military-industrial complexes, and shooters were fused together, and this combination still represents the spine of the overwhelming majority of FPS content.

But DOOM is not just about the game itself. Pumping away within the shattered rib cage of the Phobos Anomaly was an engine that broke new ground technologically and sat at the top of one of the first true engine dynasties. It’s not just the case of id finding a gameplay model that worked for them with Wolfenstein 3D, via Catacomb 3D (id Software 1991), and then refining this for DOOM; it’s about coding solutions. From texture mapping to lighting, id took the current boundaries of game technology and drove them forward. It wasn’t so much that DOOM did things that no one had done before. Ultima Underworld (Blue Sky Productions 1992) let the user freely look around using the mouse and pushed the envelope on texture mapping, for example, but DOOM pushed these capabilities further and married them to fast, seamless, responsive gameplay. It had everything that was developing in the first-person RPG scene, but it stripped back the complexity of the gameplay and shoved everything into performance. The result was a Formula One car of a game, next to Ultima’s camper van. It may not have been complicated or diverse and may not have offered such a range of customization, characterization, story, affordances, and dramatic range, but it was fast. It stands as a brilliant exercise in engine optimization—or gameplay optimization, depending on your stance—with everything serving an experience that shoved the player through an affective pipe at a breakneck pace, only letting up on them to replace action with tension and a pause to admire the scenery. DOOM was built for speed.

One last thing: If you haven't played DOOM in a while, hunt down and dust off your copy. You know it’s lurking around somewhere, hissing like a Cacodemon. Play it all over again. Because it’s just, quite simply, a really bloody good game.

Chapter 1

Eva! Auf Wiedersehen!

The Birth of a Genre

We need to consider the context into which DOOM arrived. The very first FPS game was Maze War, created by Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and Greg Thompson (and other contributors) at the NASA Ames Research Center. Colley estimates that the first version was built during 1973,' as an extension of the earlier game Maze, which offered a first-person exploration of a basic wireframe environment. At some point during ’73 or ’74, networked capability was added, enabling multiplayer FPS play. The genre was born out of networked deathmatching. After Thompson moved to MIT, he continued to develop Maze War, adding a server offering personalized games, increasing the number of players to eight, and adding simple bots to the mix. Twenty years before DOOM, all of the prototypical features of the FPS were in place: a 3D real-time environment, simple ludic activity (look, move, shoot, take damage), and a basic set of goals and win/lose conditions—all this and multiplayer networked combat.

Around the same time, Jim Bowery developed Spasim (1974), which he has claimed to be the very first 3D networked multiplayer game.’ Spasim pitted up to thirty-two players (eight players in four planetary systems) against one another over a network, with each taking control of a space ship, viewed to other players as a wireframe. A second version expanded the gameplay from simple combat to include resource management and more strategic elements. Whether or not Bowery’s argument that Spasim precurses Maze War and represents the first FPS holds water, its importance as a game is undiminished—even if for no other reason than because Spa-

Eva! Auf Wiedersehen! = 7 sim is a clear spiritual ancestor of Elite (Braben and Bell 1984) and its many derivatives. It perhaps even prototypes a game concept that would later spin out into combat-oriented real-time strategy (RTS) or even massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming.

What certainly differentiates Spasim from Maze War is the perspective. Like other early first-person games, such as BattleZone (Atari 1980) and id’s Hovertank 3D (1991), the game is essentially vehicular, with no representation of the avatar onscreen other than a crosshair. It is interesting that, aside from occasional titles such as Descent (Parallax 1995) and Forsaken (Probe Entertainment 1998), the genre very swiftly settled down into the avatarbased perspective, abandoning vehicular combat more or less completely. It’s also interesting that contemporary shooters often opt for a shift to third-person when including vehicles, such as with Halo: Combat Evolved (Bungie 2002) or Rage (id Software 2011). Half-Life 2’s (Valve Software 2004) first-person car sequences are actually quite unusual.

In 1992, Blue Sky Productions released DOOM’s calmer, more reasonable sibling, a first-person role-playing game called Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. The Ultima RPG series had been around since 1981 and was already part of a tradition opting for first-person perspective in a much more complex game. Akalabeth (Richard Garriott 1980) used wireframe graphics, in the manner of Maze War, alternated with top-down gameplay. This style became more prevalent as games shifted to tiled graphics, but the inclusion of first-person perspective remained constant (e.g., through the embedded window in Sir-Tech’s Wizardry series or Jagware’s 1986 Alien Fires: 2199 AD). RPGs began to return to first-person in greater numbers as the technology caught up with the aspirations of early titles. Dungeon Master (FTL Games 1987) leapt the genre forward in terms of real-time 3D action, and others soon followed. What marks these games out, however, is the retention of predominantly RPG-flavored gameplay, based on complex controls, resource gathering, and stat management. Ultima Underworld broke new ground in the responsiveness of controls, the degrees of perceptual freedom and movement, and a renewed emphasis for combat in real time. If it wasn’t for the fact that an upstart little company called id had released their own first-person dungeon crawler, featuring radically stripped-back gameplay and a push toward frantic, fast-paced action that made Stygian Abyss feel positively sluggish by comparison, Ultima would be in a strong position to claim rights to igniting the modern FPS powder keg. As is, the debts owed by RPG/FPS crossovers from Deus Ex (Ion

8 =" DOOM

Storm 2000) to Borderlands (Gearbox 2009) and Fallout 3 (Bethesda 2008) are clear, and while less explicit, most FPS games of anything other than the most basic twitch shooters trace their genealogy back to somewhere in the Ultima family. But Catacomb 3D (id Software 1991) was different (fig. 1). It was bloody. It was basic. It was fast. It was fun.

Catacomb started out as a 2D shooter with an RPG-flavored world in 1989 and went through a couple of variations before it went 3D in 1991. The template for DOOM is set here. The representation of the avatar is limited to the form of a hand at the bottom of the screen. There’s a familiar heads-up display (HUD), which really didn't evolve that much between the two titles. There are multiple means of attacking enemies (basic fireball, stream of fireballs, and a short-range area effect centered on the avatar) and an evolving succession of fantasy enemies to fight. This all takes place in a maze that the player progresses through using required colored keys, normally found by identifying and destroying secret passages in weakened wall sections. Catacomb 3D’s story was pure RPG hack and more or less completely superfluous to the action. While id has never really invested that much in its plots, we can see with both Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM that even if you don't really care about story, setting is a powerful tool in game design. In Catacomb 3D, the player explores a series of more or less identikit fantasy settings: a graveyard, a mausoleum, a garden, all of which use a basic set of square wall textures and occasional props in the exploratory space to distinguish between them. Agents are preplaced in the maze and do not respawn once an area is cleared. Critically, although Catacomb 3D’s world is straightforward Dungeons & Dragons guff, the gameplay itself has nothing to do with RPGs, the odd obsessive fan aside. Configuration is completely abandoned. The player starts with access to three combat abilities. New areas are exposed by shooting away walls that are visually (and textually) announced to be different (weak). You can pick up treasure, health, or potions (the equivalent of ammo). There is practically no avatar representation, characterization, or development. This is an arcade game bolted onto an RPG-styled HUD and world. John Romero comments,

When we made Catacomb 3D, the game didn't feel as cool as it should—it was very interesting in its technology and what we were trying to do.... At the same time we released Commander Keen, which was way more fun than Catacomb 3D, but [Catacomb 3D] looked like it had a direction, a promise we could go after. (JR)?

Eva! Auf Wiedersehen! = 9

KA

H e e Item destroyed F AEA - -

Fig 1. Catacomb 3D

The follow-up to Catacomb 3D discarded any notion of the RPG. Whereas Catacomb 3D could potentially be described (if you really wanted to) as an arcade-style RPG-lite game, Wolfenstein 3D, released as shareware on May 5, 1992, is a shooter, pure and simple. Goodbye ghouls, healing potions, and crypts. Hello chainguns, pseudo-supernaturalized sci-fi, and, most important, blasting Nazis. Wolfenstein 3D not only offered a radical break from the normal deployment of first-person perspective in gaming; it stalked the RPG through the corridors of the medium, blasted it at short-range with a shotgun, and planted a flag in the sucking chest wound of the corpse. The FPS had arrived. Romero recalls,

On the home computer, we had a major drought of any fast play. .. because everything on the computer had to go through CPUs, so the PC had all these plodding, turn-based titles. . . . So when we were making Wolfenstein 3D, getting rid of anything that slowed it down made it feel truer to the arcade skill that we were used to. (JR)

Wolfenstein 3D was loosely based on the side-scrolling arcade game Wolfenstein, created by Silas Warner in 1981. Taking the basic premise of escape from a Nazi castle, id dispensed largely with the stealth approach

10 = DOOM that formed much of the gameplay of Warner’s game. Rather than encouraging the player to avoid detection, Wolfenstein 3D is a straightforward shooter. Environments are simple and clean, with level-to-level progression based around finding the elevator to the next floor, which usually requires the player to find at least one key to get through locked doors. There are no variations in room heights, and textures are only applied to walls. This is simpler than the environments offered by Ultima Underworld, but the compromise enabled the game to run at a greater speed, effectively sacrificing complexity for performance. Likewise, Wolfenstein 3D offers fewer agents, with very simple behavior. It is possible to sneak up on soldiers, for example, but the core gameplay is fast, furious, bloody. Romero’ vision was clear.

Originally Wolfenstein 3D had all that—dragging bodies, picking locks. But when we started playing it, we figured . . . what use is there in trying to hide stuff or drag it round when all Pm doing is just blowing stuff up anyway? So let’s get rid of all of the things that stop us in our tracks and pretty much force the player to just mow everything down—just make the player destroy stuff constantly. (JR)

Treasure is available for Wolfenstein 3D players to collect, the HUD features a score counter (dispensed with in DOOM), and there are secret areas leading to ammo, health, and treasure. But exploration is really only there for completionist players, rather than being essential or even particularly advantageous.

Wolfenstein 3D is split into six episodes, each comprised of ten levels. The story is an exercise in brutal simplicity. In the first episode, B. J. Blazkowicz, an allied spy, must escape from a Nazi stronghold. The player fights through the prison, eventually reaching the final boss, Hans Grosse. Episode two sees Blazkowicz return to stop a new biological warfare threat, represented by zombie agents with machine guns implanted in their chests and a syringe-hurling boss, Dr. Schabbs. The final episode culminates with a battle with Adolf Hitler, complete with robot exoskeleton, in the bunker beneath the Reichstag. The second batch of three episodes involves further chemical war shenanigans but is largely indistinguishable from the first, and to be fair, a player looking for fulfillment in Wolfenstein 3D’s story is probably going to miss the point and would likely get a more engaging experience reading the back of a cigarette packet. There's little going on apart from a very basic exercise in scene setting and establishing a premise: shoot as many Nazis as possible while running about a series of similar-looking environments, collecting treasure as you go (if that’s your thing).

Eva! Auf Wiedersehen! = 11

The Wolfenstein 3D player has access to only four weapons: a knife, a pistol, a machine gun, and a chaingun. There is a single health counter that can be topped up with health kits, stolen Nazi dinners, and dog food. There is a limited range of objects—tables, torture gibbets, and green barrels (not exploding yet, we had to wait until DOOM for that). The secret areas in the levels are rarely signposted, so for every door lurking behind a portrait of Hitler, there are two triggered by attempting to open otherwise indistinguishable walls. The lack of dynamic lighting and the basic texture set means that progress through the levels is often a result of trial and error and of exhausting the environment using a trail of bodies to work out where you have previously been. While it’s important not to be overly critical of Wolfenstein 3D’s simplicity or lack of signposting, it does demonstrate how the technological advances of DOOM suddenly threw such devices into general usage.

Wolfenstein 3D was a critical and commercial success. It won the People’s Choice and Best Entertainment Software categories at the 1993 Shareware Industry Awards, Best Arcade Game from Compute! (1992), Most Innovative Game and Best Action Game from Videogames and Computer Entertainment (1992), the Reader’s Choice—Action/Arcade Game award from Game Bytes (1992), and Best Action Game from Computer Gaming World (1993). It was ported to Mac, Acorn, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Jaguar, and others, still enjoying life on contemporary platforms such as iPhone and PlayStation 3. A follow-up, Spear of Destiny, released later in 1992 by id, carried on the rich tradition of pure Nazi hokum and tongue-in-cheek graphic violence. The series was reinvented by Gray Matter Interactive in 2001. Less frantic than the original, Return to Castle Wolfenstein placed more emphasis on story and exploration and diversified the gameplay, as might be expected of a development in the post-Quake (id Software 1996), post-Half-Life era. Nerve Software developed the multiplayer aspect of the game, and this was then spun off into Enemy Territory (Splash Damage 2003), a free multiplayer-only game. In 2009, id collaborated with Raven Software and Pi Studios to release Wolfenstein, a reboot that added the equivalent of magic powers and upgrades to the expected mix of supernatural cyborg Nazis. It was generally favorably received, with many critics noting that, it delivered in terms of competent gameplay what it lacked in inspiration or originality. It also proved that blasting undead Nazis had lost none of its charm in the seventeen-year interim.

To understand DOOM, you really have to understand Wolfenstein 3D and the seeds that were planted within its development. In essence, Wolfenstein 3D established a set of conceptual design constraints, in its refusal to

12 = DOOM be counted alongside games like Ultima Underworld. DOOM might add complexity in the form of lighting, shifting environments with a vastly bigger range of textures, switches and lifts, and a bevy of demonic enemies to battle, but Wolfenstein 3D set the ground rules. This was 3D arcade gaming without compromise. Everything else was disposable. A conflict around this lack of compromise set the ground for id’s first major split and, arguably, its transition into a grown-up company.

CHAPTER 2 The Speed of Light Sucks

The Rise of id

The meteoric rise of id Software is the stuff of gaming legend, a largerthan-life tale of ambition, ego, and raw talent. In what is likely to remain the definitive book on early id, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, Kushner (2003) argues that what ultimately catapulted id to fame was the collision of two exceptional talents—John Carmack and John Romero—coming together at a hinge point in the development of gaming as a medium. Without underplaying the equally exceptional supporting cast (Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall, Kevin Cloud, Sandy Peterson, Jay Wilbur,' and a host of others), Kushner clearly sees Carmack and Romero as the Lennon and McCartney of gaming. Maybe comparing them to Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious would be more appropriate, only without a Malcolm McLaren operating behind the scenes. If the story of id can be read as the American dream in action and then a cautionary tale of its implosion, it’s also straight out of punk, pure and simple.’

I'm not going to rehash chunks of Kushner’s book here. It’s a really great book and very readable, and you should probably hop across to it straight after this if your interest in id has been sparked. I’m going to keep us focused here on the frothing petri dish that spawned the monster. What follows is a brief, potted history on who made DOOM and why. It’s important to note that not everyone agrees with Kushner’s emphasis on the two figureheads at id. Todd Hollenshead, now CEO at id, thinks reducing the DOOM team to the two most visible members doesn't do justice to the spread of input and

14 =" DOOM talent across the studio. In particular, he singles out Adrian Carmack’s art as being underrepresented when DOOM is talked about.

Adrian is a supremely talented natural artist who never got enough public credit back in the day for the work he put in on DOOM and DOOM II. If I can speak to his contribution, it’s his imagination that created basically all of the demons in DOOM. He was quoted once as saying, “I have nightmares and then draw them,” which is probably not far from what really happened. The story has been told over and over that it was John Carmack and John Romero that created all the old games, with Carmack being the technical genius and Romero being the game designer. That makes a good story, but that’s not how I see it. First of all, those games were developed by the whole team, with everyone making substantial contributions. Crediting just two people on the team with the majority of the work is misleading. John Carmack’s tech was and remains amazing, but it is gated by the quality of the art. It was the imagination of Adrian Carmack that brought it all to life. (THo)?

The id story begins at SoftDisk, a subscription company that first rolled out its monthly disc for Apple II computers back in 1981. Romero joined the company in 1989, after an abortive start-up venture seduced him away from Origin, his first major professional role. After a period making games to be released on the standard SoftDisk monthlies, Romero, along with Jay Wilbur, convinced the company to create a specialist game disc, Gamer's Edge. The Gamer's Edge group recruited a programmer named John Carmack, who was already creating waves in the gaming scene, and Adrian Carmack, who was an intern at SoftDisk at that point. The group also roped in Tom Hall, although he didn’t officially join the team at first. The core team of id Software came together and, in the face of a relatively unenthusiastic SoftDisk, began to hatch their plans for world domination. The major breakthrough, according to Kushner, came when John Carmack managed to re-create Nintendos console side-scrolling on the PC, in a prototype aptly titled Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. Romero was quick to see the huge potential for this and for PC gaming to break out of the rut of slow-moving, strategy- or adventure-based titles, reclaiming a more arcade-styled territory from the burgeoning console market (although the team did send a PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 [1988] to Nintendo, who declined to pick it up). When SoftDisk failed to live up to the ambitions of