It was 1 am on a typical night at Microsoft when Jason Robar ran down the hall to Alex St. John’s office, burst in the door and said, “I’ve got it!”
“What have you got?”
“I’ve got the idea. I know what we need to do to launch DirectX.”
“Well?”
“A haunted house,” Robar announced. “It’s perfect.”
Robar’s inspiration harkened back to his high school days, when he had assisted his step-brother in creating community haunted house events for charity. He reasoned that the timing, coming just before the release of Christmas games—the first crop to use DirectX—was perfect. Moreover, he said, “Halloween is completely not politically correct. It’s full of ghouls and demons and blood and skeletons and scary things. And I thought, what better excuse could that be for us to be nonpolitically correct and embrace all the things about the game industry that our marketing teams really hated?”
Robar had no trouble convincing St. John, who also had a memorable haunted house experience when he attended one of Richard Garriott’s very special haunted house events in Austin, Texas.
Richard Garriott’s Famous Halloween
Richard Garriott is the son of an astronaut and one of the pioneers of PC gaming. In the late 1970s, while still in high school, he wrote a game called Akalabeth and distributed it in plastic baggies. After it was officially published by California Pacific, to his great surprise, he received a check for $150,000. Not bad for a high school student. What followed was the founding of Garriott’s game company, Origin Systems, and the long-running and tremendously popular Ultima series, as well as the Wing Commander series, and many other great games.
Garriott is brilliant, affable and eccentric. His home, built literally around a full observatory, features hidden passages and knick-knacks such as a history of the world written in the 16th century, a full old-time diving suit as well as a medieval suit of armor. He also owns a space capsule that is inconveniently stored on the Moon, where it was left behind after the famous mission. Garriott even spent a year training to be a cosmonaut with the Russian space program and spent some time in a space station.
For eight years during the ‘90s, Garriott threw a semi-annual Halloween party at his Austin, Texas home and opened it to the public. Over time, his parties became more lavish, more colorful and creative, and more popular in Austin. Garriott gives credit to an early trick-or-treat experience where a woman had set up an entire witch’s chamber. “It had all the dry ice and sound effects, had this thing called a Violet Wand, if you know what those are, that when you would come in contact with it would give you an electrical shock before we could get the candy. It was such an immersive and truly scary event, that that same year, even before the next Halloween, I began to build interactive, narrative adventures, and they were generally Halloween style in the sense of theme.”
Garriott’s haunted house experiences were unique and memorable, such as the maze that ended in a “squish/boom” experience where at the end the hallway itself would collapse on the participants, squishing them into foam-covered walls, and then the whole thing would fall over, “and you literally fall on your face—kabam!—but you’re being held inside a padded wall, so it’s actually not painful. But you don’t know how far it’s going to go. You don’t know when the bam of the thing crashing down, whether it’s going to hurt because we assume that it will.” There were many other experiences, such as Faraday cages and fires, and any number of violent and scary activities—even swinging over chasms on ropes or walking across a river on floating bridges with monsters trying to pull you into the water. And St. John had attended at least one of Garriott’s over-the-top events.
When St. John heard Robar’s idea he knew it was a winner. He had already seen the concept taken to extremes at Garriott’s events, and he instantly recognized a Halloween party as the perfect opportunity to continue the anti-marketing stance that he and the other evangelists had taken from the start. Like Robar, he immediately saw the opportunity to put on a party like none Microsoft had ever hosted—or even considered.
COMDEX
Initially, the marketing team wanted St. John to have the official launch of DirectX at COMDEX (Computer Dealer’s Exhibition), which at the time was a pretty big event that took place every year in Las Vegas. The timing was about right because Comdex would take place toward the end of October or early November, but, while timing may be everything in comedy, it wasn’t the only criterion St. John and Robar were considering. For one thing, as big as Microsoft was, games were not the big thing at COMDEX, which covered all consumer electronics and media, from car stereos to computers, and, for several years, also featured a section on porn films with porn stars signing autographs in the convention hall, until they were kicked out of the show in 1995 (responding by creating their own concurrent event at a nearby hotel). Launching DirectX at COMDEX simply wouldn’t allow them to have the impact they wanted.
Also, they wanted it to be at Microsoft. They wanted the press and the developers to come to them. According to Robar, putting the show on somewhere else would be “an acknowledgment that Microsoft isn’t the center of the universe.” Their strategy was to have game people come to Microsoft en masse for the first time… to make Microsoft a destination and, according to Robar, “cement our place on the stage in the same way that Nintendo or Sony or Sega had.”
The marketing team didn’t see it the same way, and what resulted was a series of contentious meetings. Marketing argued that it was much easier and less expensive just to go to COMDEX, while Robar remembers arguing that they would get very little real publicity out of COMDEX. He recalled going to E3 and seeing the giant presence of Nintendo, Sega and Electronic Arts, and how Microsoft had a tiny booth showing off Microsoft Dogs or something equally unimpressive. “How is the press going to cover a Microsoft message when you’ve got Nintendo’s latest news about Link or Mario?” he asked. And at COMDEX, “How is the press going to find your message when there’s ten thousand messages to find? Of course we’re Microsoft, and maybe we’d get some paragraph here and there, but if we create our own event, in our own time, when there’s nothing else to talk about, well then the press would love to talk about it, because the whole point of media is to have something to say as often as you can to keep your audience.” Not only would they be the center of attention if the event were to take place at Microsoft, but they’d be able to share the stage with their partner companies and promote DirectX and all the games that were in the pipeline. In addition to the DirectX SDK, they would be able to distribute the game sampler disk to all the press, as well as to the assembled development community.
Theirs wasn’t the easy way, the cheaper way, or the traditional strategy, but it was the better way for the DirectX team. In the end, the Marketing gave in, and “Judgment Day” moved another step forward.
Stone Soup
So I bypassed PR organization, their events organization, all the structures the company had in place, the people, teams, large organizations, I just ignored them.
-Alex St. John
Of course the marketing people were right on one issue. Putting on the event that St. John and Robar had in mind was going to be much more expensive than putting on a typical developer event at COMDEX. The Halloween party was going to be an official DRG event, which in itself was nothing unusual. The DRG always had a budget for such events, but when St. John approached Brad Struss for the money, he was told that his budget would be $200k. Of course, he asked for more. He had something bigger in mind. Struss didn’t budge. He told St. John to get sponsors if he wanted more money for the event, which is what he did—his way. “Ordinarily the way it was done when Microsoft did a big event, there was big budget like COMDEX, there were lots of PR people, whole organizations in the company were involved that planned these things. It was all a very formal process. Lots of legal accounts. And I pretended that was going on, and then played all the parts myself, and then, of course, pissing off and humiliating all of them, too.”
St. John bypassed all the conventional red tape and personally approached Intel and the video chip manufacturers and said, “Hey. We’re throwing a huge party. We’re having a haunted house… all kinds of shit. And everybody’s on board but you. Just two hundred thousand bucks.” Telling each potential sponsor that their competitors and other industry leading companies had already contributed worked just as he expected it to. Nobody wanted to be left out. “It was totally stone soup,” he says. Stone soup to the tune of $1.2 million.
The DOOM Strategy
St. John was counting on getting a lot of coverage from the hundreds of press people that were expected to attend the DirectX party. He also wanted to push boundaries way past any reasonable Microsoft limit. Knowing that id Software was planning an international DOOM tournament, Robar and St. John approached John Carmack and id’s president, Jay Wilbur, and made a deal to host the tournament at Microsoft’s expense. This gave him the cover he needed. When he took things too far, he could just say that it was id’s party. “id, who I’m sure had no great love for Microsoft despite our great relationship with them, was only too willing to ‘assist me’ in going off the deep end in their name,” he says.
St. John also wanted to involve Bill Gates in the event somehow, and he found a perfect way to do so. At the time, Microsoft had been making promotional videos featuring Gates and Steve Ballmer, so St. John came up with his own video concept for Gates, which would be used to introduce the DOOM tournament. The basic concept was to green-screen Gates into DOOM, and he sent the proposal to public relations for approval. Not surprisingly, it was rejected. As usual, St. John just ignored their rejection and went directly to Gates, who agreed to do it, “despite howls of disapproval from the PR organization. Their heads nearly exploded.” The PR people did require that the video be shown only once, and then buried in archives forever. (Fortunately, a Microsoft employee smuggled a poor-quality version of the video out of Microsoft, so we can still view it in all its funkiness. Just search on “Bill Gates Doom” and it will pop right up.)
Gates’ time was a highly controlled commodity, and so he was only able to offer 20 minutes for the video shoot. It was enough. St. John says, “As soon as he walked into the studio he got swarmed by PR people who were determined to micro-produce the soul out of the thing. Bill just turned to me and said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I handed him a trench coat and shotgun and told him what I wanted him to say. He did it in one take with no prompter no notes and no rehearsal then left.” Robar says, “It’s funny because he doesn’t even hold the trigger properly. But he did it in one take. It was pretty awesome. That’s Bill’s magic, right? That he could get the message right away. Within a second and a half he knew exactly what he should be conveying.”
Sticking it to Multimedia
Naturally, the event coordinators at Microsoft expected the Halloween party to be a pretty tame affair, with some spook masks and some rooms set aside for the DOOM tournament. They had no idea what was to come. With several months lead time, St. John set in motion arguably the grandest—and weirdest—party in video game history.
The event, which would be called “Judgment Day,” would be themed around Dante’s Inferno. And St. John decided to bring back a slogan that had nearly gotten Brad Chase to fire him when he had demoed WinDOOM at the Windows 95 launch and closed the show with a slide depicting the DOOM shotgun blowing a “bloody hole” through the Microsoft logo and then fading into “Who do you want to execute today?” According to Robar, “Nothing was too far for Alex at that point, where he was like, ‘Ok. I’m really going to go as far I can go, and I’m not going to stop until it just totally breaks.’”
Now that the idea was taking shape, St. John needed to find a suitable venue, and nothing ordinary would do. As it happened there was a perfect location that was not only vacant—and therefore fair game—but an opportunity to make more trouble at Microsoft by sticking it to the Multimedia Group. To St. John, Microsoft’s forays into multimedia were pathetic. “The vision for multimedia was Microsoft Bob. Julia Child’s Wine Guide. Microsoft Dogs and Cats. Encarta. You click on the text and see a video of a Panda bear.” And he adds, “That’s so fucking cool,” in a voice dripping with sarcasm.
Sarcasm aside, his criticism had merit. The Multimedia Group was struggling. As St. John points out, Rick Segal had eight evangelists working to get other publishers to create multimedia titles for Windows, and they were striking out. He says, “Eighty percent of multimedia titles available for Windows were porn. Porn CDs. That’s all we could get. I loved pointing that out to Bill. ‘You know, Apple’s got 90% market share from porn on Windows, Bill. That’s your real problem.”
St. John’s disdain for Microsoft’s consumer home group extended to its leader, Patty Stoneseifer, who had complained about the “creatively oppressive” Microsoft main campus, and managed to get Microsoft to build a new wing—Red West—just for her group. When Jason Robar showed him the new building, it was too much for St. John. “You had these spectacular, huge vaulted empty parking garages, empty offices, this giant new central cafeteria that was three stories tall. A three-stories tall glass atrium, empty. An entire campus built for that shitty group for their shitty multimedia titles, and it was under construction, and so everybody was really annoyed because you had all these gourmet cafeterias put in for all these just crap multimedia applications.”
But Robar and St. John also saw an opportunity. In describing the scene, St. John said, “The Red West underground parking garages were concrete labyrinths abutting unfinished dirt walls, tunnels and pits where various bits of plumbing and wiring were still to be completed. Better still, the cathedral-like central cafeteria, which had not opened yet, connected directly to the parking garages. This would be the perfect setting for Judgment Day!”
As usual, bypassing the people at the top, St. John went to the Facilities department and arranged to use the new campus with its gourmet cafeterias and the garage still under construction, for his next event. Doing so had, from St. John’s perspective, the added bonus of shutting down construction on Red West for a week.
When Stoneseifer became aware of what St. John was doing, she “screamed bloody murder to Bill Gates,” but by that time it was too late to stop. Gates forwarded her angry message to St. John. “I replied, in my usual diplomatic fashion, that at the rate that the Microsoft Home group was losing money, every day I shut them down should save the company half a million dollars, which would easily pay for the party. Neither Patty nor Bill replied to that response, and the party went on as planned.”
Two Downtown
St. John describes the event coordinators at Microsoft as “little event gnomes… These ladies are very sweet. They’re all like 4 feet tall. Just the nicest people, and their idea of organizing an event or conference is you make sure that there’s tables and nametags out and somebody at the counter to register everybody for the boring presentations. So when I put them to work planning a three-story volcano and haunted house, I nearly broke their souls.” St. John realized that his vision was far beyond anything Microsoft’s event people could fathom, so he turned to a hip, two-person group in Seattle called Two Downtown. What Two Downtown produced exceeded even St. John’s expectations. They turned the three-story atrium into a three-story volcano with an elevator in the back where devils and other actors would emerge at the volcano’s cone. “It was magical. It was like a Broadway kind of thing,” says St. John. The parking garage was turned into a haunted house/labyrinth.
Original blueprints for Judgment Day
Crazy, Obscene, Sacrilegious… Epic
As St. John describes the scene, two huge projection screens flanked the volcano and two forklift-mounted chairs were designed to lift the final competitors in the DOOM competition—the first of its kind—high over the crowd late in the evening, where they would battle to determine the winner.
In addition to the giant volcano, the cafeteria featured sponsor booths along the walls and a small stage where company reps could get up and talk about their products while the rest of the participants grazed at tables full of food and drink—and according to some, emphasis on drink.
Meanwhile, the high-dollar sponsors were trying to outdo each other in the haunted house/labyrinth, and heavy metal music was blasting everywhere from live bands.
On his blog, St. John describes the scene, which opened with what he called a “cheesy skit” that featured him, Engstrom and Eisler dressed as demons and standing on eight foot stilts, arising from the volcano’s cone. The skit involved the demons judging a hapless Robar, who had been condemned for continuing to play DOS games. “We sentenced him to an eternity of futilely adjusting his media card jumpers to make his DOS games work properly. We then had our devil assistants march him off to the haunted house for tormenting.” Next came the video of Bill Gates, which officially opened the festivities.
According to St. John, the haunted house and labyrinth created in the unfinished garage was truly hellish. The attendees were ushered through the “Gates of Hell” in groups of 12, where they would meet Virgil, Dante’s spirit guide, who would lead them to the catacombs.
Bill Gates opens the show in DOOM with a shotgun.
Robar’s Tour
Jason Robar had been involved in the setting up of the haunted house labyrinth, so he knew what it looked like from the outside. After his role in the skit, it was his turn to experience it from the inside, coincidentally, along with Windows top executive Brad Silverberg and Microsoft VP Paul Maritz as part of his group of 12.
Participants entered the haunted house on a stairway from the cafeteria down to the garage. At the entrance to the labyrinth, the participants would meet Virgil, who would tell them it was Judgment Day, and they were going to be judged. Then they were escorted to Hell. Here’s Robar’s account of his journey to Hell and back:
“You went down the stairs into this neoclassical entrance to Hell and, as you were guided into there, you had to crawl up… One of the first experiences was climbing up a couple of feet into a tunnel entrance, and then you kind of slid down back to the ground floor level, so it was only like a three-foot slide, but it felt weird because you were in total darkness. And you would crawl through a tunnel that turned and twisted and felt like it went on and on. And in that tunnel were bungee cords at various angles that you would have to crawl through, and in the dark many people thought they were spider webs, which is what we wanted them to think. And you’re crawling on your hands and knees. And eventually, you exited the tunnel into the first of the sponsors’ installations—Zombie Studios.
“One of the things Zombie did was fantastic. They created this giant Tesla coil, and being that Zombie was their name, they had a mad scientist using it to bring a zombie to life. Then there was another tunnel that twisted and turned around, and eventually you’d get into the Activision room, which had the giant pit of snakes you had to get across… rubber snakes, but there were some real ones in an area nearby. Even rubber snakes were quite enough for some people who had a phobia.
“Then there was another tunnel. The idea was that these connector pieces were supposed to be interesting in and of themselves, almost like a carnival ride. And so, we went through the Activision room (which I think was the one my step-brother did) and came to an elevator. The cool thing about the elevator was that it spun around, and so the crewmembers would disconnect it from the tunnel that you came from and spin it around and around and around until you were dizzy and couldn’t tell what was going on, and they’d reconnect it to a tunnel that was exactly the same as the tunnel you came from, but was, of course, in a different spot. So it seemed like you were coming out the same place you went in, but in fact, you’d moved about 15 feet over to the left and were headed in a different direction. This tunnel led to the GWAR room, sponsored by id… and the dildo monster.”
GWAR was a notorious group, known for over-the-top performances of extremely questionable taste. (If you’ve never heard of GWAR, look them up. Words can’t adequately describe their act.) The guys from id first encountered the group, who were fans of DOOM, when they went to one of their shows together. As former id producer Mike Wilson remembers it, “We all went out to a GWAR show together once… the only time I remember John Carmack going out for anything remotely social in those days… to a bar in Deep Ellum <the area with the highest crime rate in Dallas County and perhaps some of the most interesting acts>. I remember my wife Melissa and Adrian Carmack’s wife Ami being fed to a giant maggot onstage and emerging from it a few minutes later in just their jeans and bras. Fun times. I think John Carmack kept his GWAR-spew colored DOOM T-shirt unwashed for a good while.”
The idea of bringing GWAR to the Microsoft party came in part because nobody at id had time to design or develop an installation, and if they wanted to make an impression—especially a not-Microsoft impression—what better than the spectacularly irreverent GWAR?
People experienced the GWAR event differently, some remembering specific details, and others remembering very little beyond the chaos. Alex St. John offers one priceless description of the scene: “So the id room in the haunted house was occupied by the GWAR band. OJ Simpson. An eight-foot tall giant vagina with fangs covered with penises with OJ’s severed head for a clitoris was one of the monsters. They had a dominatrix there with a three-foot spiked dick that sprayed blood and semen on people going through the haunted house. You wouldn’t fucking believe it. Oh my god. Of course, the Microsoft people were freaking. The irony is… think about this. They’re going, ‘Paul Maritz and Brad Silverberg just went into the haunted house.’ By all accounts… Paul Maritz, Senior Vice President of Windows platforms reporting to Bill Gates, got whipped, forced to lick the demon dominatrix boots, sprayed with bodily fluids and finally eaten by the giant vagina monster… along with the journalists accompanying him from PC Week and the Wall Street Journal… He comes out of the haunted house laughing his ass off. So does Silverberg. They had the best fucking time ever.”
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Robar’s first-person account depicts a slightly tamer, but still hopelessly chaotic scene where it was almost impossible to make sense of what was going on. “We got battered right up in the face. The giant dildo monster went up really close to everybody… almost hugging people, but I don’t quite remember it actually spitting anything in people’s faces at that point. That might be anecdotal. Some sort of crazy thing was waving appendages at you, and that’s about all you could really tell in the dark and fog, and strobe lights flashing at you.”
Jay Wilbur, who was there as part of the id contingent, recalls that the concept behind the installation was that you were coming through a giant birth canal to be born into this hellish world. “The idea was, you went in and the GWAR penis monster came on you, and you fertilized an egg somehow and you were born into this other world or something.” There was apparently something resembling a script, but Wilbur remembers that the GWAR members kept going off it. “They would start yelling at each other, and they’d say, ‘You fucked this up.” “No, you fucked this up.” And they’d start beating on each other. It was mania. It was like KISS on acid, or something like that.”
In the midst of this chaotic event, Audrey Mann Cronin, id’s public relations representative, was doing her best to conduct an interview with MTV. “We had to do 10 takes because the guys in the flesh column just couldn’t get their words together. It was cringe-worthy.” (The “flesh column” was what she called the giant penis.) Cronin also recounted an embarrassing moment in the haunted house tunnels. “I am a bit claustrophobic and it was dark as night and long. The CEO of GT Interactive, Ron Chaimowitz, was crawling in front of me. In my panic, I pulled off his shoe and ultimately needed to be rescued. One of my most mortifying experiences :-)” Clearly, the tunnels were not meant for claustrophobics, but there were safety hatches installed at various points and people on hand to bail out those unfortunates who panicked in the tight, dark passages.
Somehow Robar and his group managed to survive GWAR’s treatment of them and continue through the labyrinth. “Then there was this giant room full of packing peanuts, but it was up to your waist, and what they had that was really clever is they had a couple with masks on so they could breathe swimming around underneath all those packing peanuts. So you didn’t know it until you had waded out halfway into the room and suddenly there were things grabbing your legs, and you’re trying to swim through this giant space—almost like a giant ball pit. I think it was packing peanuts—an enormous amount of packing peanuts in this giant, long hallway of a room. And then from there we came to the Mortal Kombat room, which ATI was sponsoring. If I remember right, ATI had paid to be able to show a port of Mortal Kombat using DirectDraw on their hardware, and so they had the guys from Mortal Kombat there.
“Finally, we came to the guillotine room. We saw them clearly, then were led up to them blindfolded, placed in the guillotine… and then we felt the guillotine go off, and there was that moment… the anticipation that the blade was coming down and you couldn’t move. And when it landed, you definitely felt it because there was a bar right on the top of your neck, so you definitely could feel the WHACK! This part was for Eric. His whole thing is that he wanted people’s heads to be cut off. He wanted it to be rendered in full glory so you’d be looking down into some monitors, and you’d see your body fall away from you. We didn’t quite achieve his vision of it, though, and to this day he’ll bring that up when I see him.”
Some representative images from Judgment Day from a video by Computer Chronicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9qAOblaRrA
From the guillotines, each participant was led into a closet-sized room and left alone in utter darkness. “The final thing was just this demonic voice saying, ‘Get out.’” Then another door would open, leading into the brightly lit show floor, where dozens of cameras would flash as people came screaming out. St. John recalls that, for many people, just standing and watching people come screaming out of the haunted house was the best part of the show.
Alex St. John, Mike Wilson, and friends.
The Battle of the Band
In addition to GWAR, id had brought along a thrash metal band, aptly named Society of the Damned, who were friends of id’s Mike Wilson. Wilson and two of his friends, Rob Atkins and Harry Miller from Ritual Entertainment (also an appropriate name) dressed up as Mickey from Natural Born Killers, Jesus, and the Pope, respectively. They formed what Wilson describes as an “all-white mosh pit,” saying that the band was used to having a mosh pit, “but were rather performing in front of a captive and very confused audience of MS suits. So we went and moshed.” Comment of the night, according to Wilson, was when one of the party goers commented to Atkins (as Jesus), “Hey man! Loved your book.”
Wilson remembers that the band took a break at one point and were told not to come back “by some suit, and that’s what caused Alex to go code red, which was quite funny as he was dressed as Satan and painted red at the time.”
Code red is putting it mildly. St. John went nuclear. He says, remembering the moment, “The Microsoft’s people were going, ‘There’s 300 press here. Oh my god.’ And so they were losing their shit over this. ‘We’re all going to get fired. Oh my god. It’s the end of our careers.’ And they cancelled the band and told them to go home without talking to me about it. The id people came running over and said, ‘We just got told that Microsoft cancelled our band and sent them home.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I went to the event coordinators… ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ They go, ‘Oh my god. They’ve got Jesus and the Pope and there’s blood and they’re holding crosses upside down in front of the volcano. And the press is… ahhhhh ahhhh…’ I go, ‘You can’t fucking fire the band. That’s id’s band. They paid for it. You can’t throw their asses out. It’s too late now.’ And they just screamed and fought over that.
“The situation was out of control. Microsoft’s event people, they are shitting themselves. They are coming unglued. And I was just like, fuck it. I don’t care. I kept telling them, ‘Let them fire me. I made you do all of it. Just don’t… fuck… it… up.’ And I lost my shit with them. And Doug Henrick, my boss, finally came over to me. I made them put the band back on. ‘Put them back on. Don’t you fucking change a thing.’ And Doug said, ‘Yeah, Alex. You need to take a break. You’re gonna kill somebody.’ And I go, ‘I’m sorry.’ So he said, ‘Go home. I’m not going to let them stop anything, but you’re clearly overwrought.’ And so I just went home and passed out. I’d had it. I couldn’t deal with it.”
It’s important to note the amount of stress that St. John was under at the time. Doing an event of this magnitude and insanity was difficult enough. “I hated planning events like this. I just had to do it.” Making things worse, his wife had taken the kids to the East Coast to visit family—and hadn’t returned after two months. He didn’t know it yet, but the signs were there. He was in the early stages of a very painful divorce.
The Competition
The DOOM competition and finale came off without any problems, although the final confrontation between Thresh and Paradox didn’t begin until well after midnight—hours after it had been planned. According to Wilbur, the atmosphere was intense, with people cheering. “It was like you were watching the last game of the NBA finals, or the World Series, or the Super Bowl. It was bananas, and that was the point where I thought, ‘Wow! This is really a sport.’”
People’s memories differ in describing the scene, although everyone reported that it was an exciting event. St. John thinks the two finalists were hoisted up high on the volcano (although he was passed out at home by this time), but none of the witnesses remembered it quite that way. All they remember up on the side of the volcano were the two giant screens. The winner was Thresh, who easily defeated his adversary, Paradox. Paradox later complained about not being able to use his own equipment, but regardless of the outcome, it was an epic event and the first of its kind. Even MTV was there to give it some coverage, prompting Robar to comment, “I can’t think that there was any possibility that MTV had ever said the word ‘Microsoft’ up until that point—October 1995”
One of the events that has probably been largely forgotten by almost everyone was Mike Wilson, wearing a long white beard and brandishing a gigantic hand-crafted bible, reciting his original poem, “An Ode to id: with apologies to Edgar Allan Poe.” However, Audrey Mann Cronin not only remembers it well, but she still has the original poem. (I kindly refrained from publishing it in this book. You’re welcome. Oh, and did I mention that there was a lot of freely flowing alcohol at the event?)
The Ultimate Irony
Although St. John missed some critical parts of the party, including the DOOM competition, he had done his part. He had put on a show that nobody would soon forget, even though many of the participants had a hard time knowing exactly what they had experienced.
The greatest irony of all was that, even though everybody told St. John later that it was the greatest party ever, people seemed not to have noticed some of the starkest and most disturbing details. He asked Silverberg and Maritz if they had noticed the giant vagina monster with teeth, and they said, “What?” He also asked some of the attendees from the press. They said stuff like, “All I remember was the haunted house. I was being chased by monsters, and the screaming and the lights and I was scared shitless and I got the fuck out of there, and there was shit going on. It was amazing. I don’t remember seeing anything.”
To St. John, this was a fascinating experiment in human psychology. “They didn’t remember. They couldn’t see that stuff. It was too weird and too traumatic and happened so fast that all they knew was that there were monsters and fluids and lights and scary things, and they’re fucking freaked out, and they didn’t know what happened. People did not see any vagina monster with teeth and OJ Simpson’s head. They just… something grabbed them. There was biting and gnashing and monsters, and they got the hell out of there. And my theory is that it was so bizarre and so unthinkable for Microsoft to do something like that, whatever their brains saw was something that was not that bizarre.”
Silverberg, however, remembers Judgment Day very well. “Microsoft hadn’t done events like that before. It broke the mold. It was maybe a little bit over the line in terms of tastefulness… tastelessness. Definitely not politically correct, but it created a buzz. It was edgy, and it was fun. It was at a time of tremendous change in history, and we were leading that change… It was showing that this was not your father’s Microsoft. It was a breakthrough. It was a breakthrough for Microsoft in transforming the way people viewed the company.”
After the event, St. John took a couple of days off from work—something he rarely did—and laid there with an ice pack on his head, once again waiting to get fired. Jason Robar came by and let him know what a huge hit the party had been. They had succeeded in generating hundreds of positive articles in the press, and everybody, including Silverberg and Maritz, had a great time. With some trepidation, he asked Robar, “What about the GWAR room? Nobody mentioned the vagina monster?” “Not a word,” was the answer. Somehow the toothed penis/vagina elephant-in-the-room had managed to go unreported.
Although St. John had left the party early, he was able to witness, if not enjoy, the incredible realization of his vision—expanded to the max. He credits the Two Downtown guys with taking it beyond anything he had imagined. “The Two Downtown guys went, ‘You want to do Dante’s Inferno? Well, we’ll show you Dante’s Inferno,’ and they took that idea and really blew it up beyond what I thought was possible to execute under the circumstances.”
What St. John and his team pulled off was not just a great party. It was an unforgettable event that people still talk about to this day. Even more importantly, DirectX was a huge hit, even though it was far from perfect and would go through years of refinements. But, where St. John’s goal had been to have 25 Windows games on the shelves for Christmas ‘95, there were 90. Getting the word out, getting positive press, and getting games on the shelves were the real work, and for that, he received an excellent evaluation:
“You and Jason did a truly excellent job of closing out on Windows 95 titles for Christmas 95. You far exceeded the expectations for successfully evangelizing this community. Hosting porting labs and sending contractors on site helped secure a number of these wins. These efforts should hopefully also yield the remaining top tier titles in Q1 ‘96. You, Eric and Craig have overseen an amazing industry movement over the past 18 months the time since you first went and visited game companies to collect feedback on OS features needed to when actual products shipped using the technology.”
Another 4.5 evaluation dealt specifically with St. John’s publicity efforts, and specifically the Judgment Day event and ended with an admonition:
“You helped Microsoft pull off an Impressive launch of Windows as a games platform. The event gained solid press in the targeted publications. The commitment to games it demonstrated and the strong vendor support were the highlights of the event. Unfortunately the event was more difficult to pull off than it needed to be due to several of your actions that we’ve discussed. It’s key to your success moving forward that you avoid repeating these actions.”
That final admonition is probably what prevented St. John from getting the ever-so rare perfect 5.0, although he did receive that coveted score in his next review.
DirectX Success
There’s no question that DirectX was a huge success, and there’s also no question that it was imperfect. Chris Taylor, founder of Gas Powered Games, was one of the developers who experienced some its early failures. “When I got the very, very, very first DirectX disk, the shit didn’t work on the disk. I mean it was so buggy that I remember… For instance, you had DirectPlay. DirectPlay was the communication protocol, and it was beautiful, right? The API said, ‘call this function and you’ll get a list of all the other computers that are on the network that also have a DirectPlay API’ so we can just query and say ‘Here’s the game and what’s your ping time, and do you want to play with me?’ ‘Yes I do.’ And now we’re playing, so we’re handshaking, and now I can populate a structure with some data. That data would automatically and transparently in the background get propagated to the other clients. So everything was going to be magic. Well, none of that shit worked. And I was kind of blown away because it was the first time that I’d actually seen something that was advertising itself as a solution that didn’t work. And I thought, is this normal?”
Over several software generations, the DirectX APIs were steadily improved, ultimately even incorporating ideas from other technologies, like OpenGL and Talisman, that it had originally rejected. Mike Abrash claims that the team creating Direct3D from scratch was reinventing the learning curve—starting from an inexperienced position and therefor having to make lots of mistakes in order to perfect the product, but he concedes that DirectX, and specifically Direct3D, were probably the way to go in the end. “The bottom line is that it enabled Windows gaming in a way that maybe wouldn’t have happened with OpenGL, because it was possible for D3D to evolve faster than OpenGL could, and Microsoft put huge resources behind, not only evangelizing, but do doing devrel (developer relations) stuff and tools, and so I’m not saying it’s the wrong way to do it.”
Where Abrash offers qualified retroactive approval of DirectX, Brad Silverberg is unequivocal. “Of all the thousands and thousands of APIs that Microsoft launched in the latter half of the ‘90s, the only one that really had any major impact was DirectX. I even had that conversation with Steve (Ballmer) in
‘99 or 2000.
Like, ‘Steve, I hope you realize that of all these APIs the company has launched, the only ones that really matter are DirectX.’
‘Yeah. I know.’”