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Epilogue: Splash Damage
Chapter 25
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Epilogue: Splash Damage
David Craddock
61

"You gotta remember: we're musicians... we're just crazy people who can't get along sometimes. I've definitely come to the table with my knife in my pocket a couple of times; you know how it is. It's part of being human. Now add fame and money and all that rock and roll craziness to it - we're lucky we don't eat each other in this industry." –Corey Taylor, lead singer, Slipknot

"What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?" –Matthew 16:26

"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers." –John Carmack, co-founder of id Software (as quoted in David Kushner's Masters of Doom)

Rocket jumps demand sacrifice.

A rocket jump is executed by pointing your rocket launcher at the ground, then jumping and firing a rocket. The resultant blast will send you soaring to great heights, even to places you cannot reach without performing the maneuver, but at the cost of self-inflicted damage.

Id Software has rocket-jumped time and again over more than 20 years. Almost every time, its developers soared higher and farther than before, turning out games that became instant classics and went on to form the bedrock of the games industry. Every single time, they paid a price.

The original Quake served as a window into the company's culture, one of contradictions and compromises. Levels were at once creative and conventional, grouped in episodes that were thematic and incongruent, powered by technology equal parts cutting-edge and derivative, developed in a work environment where a teammate could smile to your face one minute and stick a knife between your shoulder blades the next.

Quake 2 was less a window and more a phantasmagoria. The game presented a cohesive single-player campaign, arguably id's best before Doom 2016 and criminally underappreciated: simple, yet unified in terms of character design, objectives, arsenal, and sense of place. Beyond the smoke and mirrors of the game's content, the company was in turmoil. Social pressure and affluence pervaded the workplace, leading to rampant burnout and politicking.

id Software.

In their way, the third numbered entries for Quake and Doom were just as focused: one exhibiting a single-player campaign that, however divisive, stuck to its themes and premise; the other rooted in competition during a time when an increasing number of players were able to write Professional Gamer on their CVs. According to various accounts, id's culture was just as bleak. Projects were figuratively held at gunpoint. Cliques formed. Bits flipped.

John Carmack flipped many of those bits. A brilliant mind, Carmack never failed to produce results. Even those incensed by his unilateral decision-making found it difficult if not impossible to argue with his results, yet even he would be hard-pressed to deny that his actions fell far short of what his team needed in a leader. Since his departure, other developers such as Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin, co-directors on Doom 2016, had room to set their own styles of leadership and creativity, and to prove that the fate of id Software did not rest in the hands of one developer.

Quake Champions' fate remains uncertain. Id's decision to concentrate on pros may have been made at the expense of new players who feel unwelcome in Quake's arenas. Without AI-controlled bots, newcomers have no way of learning map layouts or practicing with their weapons. The only way to learn is to join a match with other players, most of whom have been playing Quake for 10 years or more. The outcome of those matches is easy to predict and will likely be off-putting to beginners.

Perhaps id will declare Quake Champions, still in early access as of this writing, a success as long as the eSports crowd remains satisfied. Their satisfaction may be the only possible qualifier: LawBreakers, an arena shooter developed by Boss Key Productions and helmed by Unreal and Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski, launched in August 2017 and sank like a stone immediately. In 2017, character-focused games—which Quake Champions is not despite its characters' special abilities given id's determination to lean into the franchise's tradition of skill—such as Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch, and mainstays Call of Duty and Battlefield, reign supreme.

Of the original Quake developers, only Kevin Cloud and Tim Willits remain at id. A quote misattributed to Winston Churchill—but no less relevant and true—states that "History is always written by the winners." Willits, now id Software's studio director, has shared anecdotes of how certain shooter staples came to be. He claimed to invent the concept of multiplayer-only modes and deathmatch in FPS games when, sometime in 1996, he suggested to John Carmack and John Romero that he take fragments of Quake maps and glue them together to create levels especially for multiplayer.

Doom and Doom 2 did not ship with maps made specifically for deathmatch. Instead players fragged each other on the game's campaign maps, or made or traded custom maps online. Even then, Willits' account is erroneous. Rise of the Triad and Bungie's Marathon both released on December 1994, and featured multiplayer-only game modes and maps.

Moreover, the notion of building maps for deathmatch instead of solo play was more than likely invented by Doom players as far back as December '93 when the game was released. In December 1994, quite a popular month for FPS titles, DWANGO (Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation), written by Bob Huntley and Kee Kimbrell, became one of the first online gaming services and was created explicitly for playing multiplayer in and finding levels for Doom before it opened up to other shooters. Huntley and Kimbrell pitched DWANGO to developers at id; some, such as Carmack, were uninterested, but Romero loved the idea and pitched in on the project.

One could give Willits the benefit of the doubt. After all, he and his former id colleagues made Quake over 21 years ago in the midst of an arduous development cycle, a wringer that Willits was put through time and again over the years that followed. Perhaps he simply got his wires crossed. In any event, Romero and other former id developers argued his recollection of events in the summer of 2017 when one of Willits' many interviews in which he shared his erroneous anecdote came to their attention. American McGee was not surprised to see Willits taking credit for the concept, calling Willits a serial thief in a tweet.

Bungie's Marathon.

I covered the online argument between the ex-id developers, and contacted John Carmack for his take. He admitted he could not recall the conversation in which Willits allegedly proposed the concept of multiplayer-only maps to "the two Johns." Shortly after I published the story on Shacknews, Willits tagged Shacknews in an Instagram post in which he posted a video of a prototype Quake map chugging along in a NeXTSTEP emulator—the environment in which id developed both Doom and Quake—and claimed that anyone who played Quake multiplayer should recognize it.

Rather than clear the air, his response dug a deeper hole. Why make vague allusions to the fragment being part of a Quake map that shipped as part of the game's Deathmatch Arena? Why not clearly state the map's name and show the date it was made?

In my interview with Willits, conducted at QuakeCon, he shared the same anecdote with me. I doubted its veracity, but did not pursue it, preferring to research the matter once I was back at home and then contact him for a follow-up. After my news story spread across social media, and following his obtuse Instagram post, Willits declined to speak further about any matter concerning ex-Quake developers. I put in an official interview request with Bethesda, but never heard back.

Another claim Willits has made over the years is that Quake had no design direction. That is, at best, a half truth. Anyone who played Quake would be forgiven for wondering why the game jumped between military bases and castles and pyramids surrounded by lava. In our interviews, American McGee and Sandy Petersen echoed the sentiment that Romero did a poor job of leading Quake's design, especially in its early stages. To Romero's credit, he did not shy away when I asked him if those claims had any merit. He spoke candidly, admitting that he made many mistakes particularly during 1995, but was happy to provide documentation showing that there was a plan for Quake's FPS design, regardless of how or why the game failed to coalesce in the way he had hoped.

Unless all of Quake's original developers agree to hash things out—preferably in a space free of nailguns and rocket launchers—the matter seems closed.

DWANGO interface.

I'm happy to let sleeping dogs lie, especially after months of hearing about the many ways id Software's developers deceived and abused each other. As a supporter of id Software's products since my teenage years, I was left profoundly disappointed by many of the stories I heard, many of which were not fit to print.

That said, innumerable more stories motivated and amazed me. I remained astounded by the grit, imagination, and aspirations of game developers, and awed that I got to talk with so many of my heroes within and without id Software.

I am also oddly reassured. I can't speak for other writers who cover this industry, but several times every day I realize I get to talk with some of the people who crafted my favorite games, and unreality washes over me. Me, the kid who spent nearly every waking hour of his childhood playing video games made by people whose names I could recite as easily as some of my friends could rattle off the names of musicians, artists, movie stars, and professional wrestlers.

Then I hear their stories. I discover their mistakes along with their triumphs, and that's when the odd sense of relief sets in. The men and women who make our favorite games, those creative visionaries and rock star-like personas whom so many of us deified, are just like us.

Only human.

Special Thanks

A work of this scope would not have been possible without the help of many talented, patient, hard-working people.

A huge thank-you to all the creative individuals who gave so generously of their time to answer my questions and coordinate interviews: Liz Roland, John Romero, John Carmack, American McGee, Sandy Petersen, Tim Willits, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, Scott Miller, Mark Dochtermann, Justin Chin, Ian Caughley, John Cook, Robin Walker, Graeme Devine, David Doak, Jennell Jaquays, Rob Smith, Jay Stelly, Chris Vrenna, Kat, Anthony, Niles, Fletcher, Miguel, the Death by Pixels gaming group, and Shacknews' own Bryan "CrustaR" Henderson.

The Shacknews staff and volunteer editors from our community were immeasurably helpful in proofreading my work and preparing the media that accompanied this project: Greg Burke, Ozzie Mejia, Kevin "K-Tuck" Tucker, Charles Singletary, Bill Lavoy, Brittany "BV" Vincent, Sam Chandler, Chris "Crabs" Jarrard, Bryan Henderson, and "The Grolar Bear."

A very special thank-you to Max DeChant, an editor who went above and beyond to help me make Rocket Jump the best it could be.

Thanks also to Greenlit founder and CEO John Benyamine, as well as Shacknews and Greenlit IT gurus Patrick Lucas and Joe Stasio, who helped fine-tune the technical underpinnings of Shacknews to accommodate the ever-evolving size and presentation of my work.

Last but not least, a huge thank-you to Shacknews CEO, editor-in-chief, and janitor Asif Khan for his guidance and support during the writing of this feature.

Bibliography

The following materials were helpful in writing Rocket Jump:

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