I have hyperthymesia. Neuroscientists and researchers call this condition “highly superior autobiographical memory,” and pop-culture fans and journalists frequently apply the phrase “total recall”—taken from the movie adaptation of “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a classic Philip K. Dick story about implanted memories—to describe it.
Based on what I’ve read about hyperthymesia, many people with the condition regard it as a curse. It’s easy to imagine painful scenarios, as if straight out of a Stephen King novel or Groundhog Day, that involve reliving the past’s disasters and humiliations in a vivid, never-ending loop.
I actually can see scenes from the past—images, often fully realized—in my mind’s eye. I can home in on distinctive details. Sometimes, the setting activates other specifics tied to the scene—the song that was playing, the weather that day—that are not part of the visual. I can relive encounters with people, recalling actual conversations, reactions, laughter, anger, sorrow, and I can tap into how I was feeling at this time—my own internal life.
You can see how this condition could be a real challenge for some people, but I am fortunate. While I experience the past events in my life—both the good and the bad—I am an analyzer, not a ruminator. Escaping into my memory and imagination is something I enjoy, as I think this book will attest, and it’s an incredibly useful skill when creating and playing immersive games. Even as a small boy, I could get lost in playing make-believe, inventing simple games, like throwing rocks at a target or drawing pictures. Consciously or not, my personality traits have conspired to turn my condition into an asset, a gift.
I am primarily self-taught. From the age of twelve, I worked at odd jobs whenever I could because money was tight in my family. Being short on cash also meant being short on time. Having the ability to absorb massive amounts of detail and retain that information was a great advantage. I didn’t realize it was even a “condition” when I was a kid. It was just the way I was. My teachers called me gifted, but neither my parents nor I knew what that meant, and even if we did, I’m not sure there was anything we could do about it. This “gift” only extended to things I really cared about. The rest, which included some subjects at school, was forgotten.
I get the impression some experts view the origins of hyperthymesia as sort of a chicken-or-egg condition. Does it lie dormant and then present itself, or do those who have it create it? There is an argument to be made that I sharpened my memory, that I created my condition due to my obsession with programming and games. As a teenage boy in the 1980s, I realized information on programming was hard to come by, so I forced myself to retain technical information and memorize the internal details of computers—memory maps, ROM locations, hardware switches, and tons more stuff. I did it quickly, which, in turn, expanded my ability to retain and access precise memories of almost everything else.
Of course, there’s irony here. I can remember precise details of games I played forty years ago, conversations with high school friends, or long code-crunching nights with my partners at id Software, but I can’t remember when, exactly, I first noticed my ability to approximate something like total recall.
At any rate, I thought I’d mention my condition up-front. A lot of ink has been spilled about my life and my projects. A great deal of the reporting on me and the work I’ve done has been filtered through other people. Some of it has been accurate. Some of it has been way off base. I can’t speak to other people’s ability to accurately recall events, but I can speak to mine. Several people, including my id Software co-founders John Carmack and Tom Hall, have said they leave their memories with me because I’ll remember them and refer journalists to me when they can’t remember something. More than once, I’ve provided gentle corrections to people online because I believe history—accurate history—is important. So when I say that my version of events is “true,” it’s based on a condition that is rare, strange, and real.
As many before me have noted, we are our memories. They provide us with our background, with our context, our perspective. They cement our most important relationships, and they inform our future. We are also shaped by family, which in turn shapes those memories. Where you come from and who you come from will always be a part of the equation of you.
I’m a true American hybrid—part Mexican, part Yaqui and Cherokee, part European. My father, Al Romero, was a mestizo with Yaqui blood, from Tucson. He was a talented musician, a ladies’ man, a high school dropout, and a lover of fast cars. To my mom, Ginny, he was a real catch, and vice versa.
He was also a second-generation miner and fourth-generation badass; his grandmother, my great-grandmother, Elvira Duarte de Morales, was a full-blooded Yaqui and a powerful, successful madam in Nogales, Mexico, a fact I only discovered in the last decade. I met her once, when I was five years old, on a visit to Nogales, which is a town that sprawls across the Mexico-Arizona border. I remember bouncing along a rut-filled dirt road, Calle Galleña, to a house on a hilltop with a small chapel across the street. Inside the sizable house, I was shown a picture of her as a beautiful bride. Decades later, as my wife and I were doing research for her Chicago-gangland strategy game, Empire of Sin, we learned about the family brothel.
“Mama Elvira was a businesswoman and did not put up with any weakness from anyone,” Aunt Yoly, one of Elvira’s grandchildren, told me. “She raised her family during very hard times and did whatever she had to do to make ends meet. She was a very proud woman, hard and strong. I was sort of afraid of her because she was so rigid and tough.”
Mama Elvira opened three brothels. Each of these clubs—which included the Wakiki and the B-21—was fronted by a legitimate restaurant and bar. Her sons worked as bartenders. The Wakiki issued bordello tokens stamped with “Your Place in Nogales” and “Open Day and Night.” I’ve seen a number of them for sale on coin-collector websites. These tokens were likely purchased by patrons and redeemed for sex or booze to circumvent money-for-sex laws, and there’s little doubt they also functioned as promotional items.
Mama Elvira was a tough, powerful woman, but she was also a madame with—if not a heart of gold—a serious sliver of kindness. Her business had a frequent side effect: Women got pregnant. According to Aunt Yoly, Mama Elvira would support them and even raise their kids if they couldn’t afford it. This meant she built additions onto her house with rooms and beds for all the kids. Family lore has it that she raised about forty children this way.
She finally exited the business after winning a quarter of a million pesos in a lottery. She had a little chapel built across the street from her family home, sold the three brothels, and lived out the last third of her life as a law-abiding woman. When her first husband, Duarte, got sick in his old age, Mama Elvira took him in, caring for him until he died.
I don’t think she softened up entirely. My favorite story of my gritty great-grandmother might be this: In her old age, when she complained of crippling pain in the back of her neck, one of her friends told her about a local folk remedy—that eating rattlesnake meat would relieve her symptoms. Mama Elvira decided to give it a try. She hired a man to hunt rattlers and bring them to her. Then she would grind up the meat in a blender, cook it, and eat it. She claimed it helped.
My father’s mother—my beloved Grandma Suki—exuded a similar unstoppable, deal-with-it, housemother vibe. She was the only one of Mama Elvira’s children born in the US. Elvira specifically traveled to Tucson at the end of her pregnancy with Suki to make sure she had an American daughter. Given her own sons’ behavior, Grandma Suki also didn’t recoil from living on the other side of the law.
Suki remained in Tucson until eighth grade and then rejoined her mom in Nogales. I count her as one of the most instrumental figures in my life: a loving, caring woman who steeped Mexican culture into my bones—the music, the food, the style, the love of family. More importantly, she provided a dose of stability, comfort, and ballast for everyone who crossed her path, including my parents.
My parents needed that ballast. They were high school sweethearts who got married as soon as my mom turned eighteen. They were young, poor, unworldly, and pregnant, with a limited network of support—not the ideal circumstances to start a family—but they were in love, so they really didn’t care. My mom wanted away from her family, and who could blame her? Her parents, John and Ann Marshall, were the opposite of my grandma Suki. They weren’t badasses, they were hard-asses—a judgmental, unsupportive, Depression-era couple, and as I mentioned, my grandfather was also incredibly racist.
More than he hated non-whites on TV, Grandpa John really hated my father, the Mexican who married his daughter. When my mom walked down the aisle in her self-made wedding gown, he wasn’t there.
Tired of the racism they experienced as a mixed couple in Tucson, my newlywed parents relocated to Colorado. My mom was four months pregnant when they pulled into town, and my dad soon got a job selling jewelry at Zales—but the gig ended when he got caught stealing. I was born six weeks early in Colorado Springs on October 28, 1967. My arrival didn’t do too much to warm up the Colorado winter for two lifetime desert-dwellers, and a few months later, they packed us up, and we returned to my grandma Suki’s house, and my father went to join his dad, Alfredo, in the mines.
One fact eased my mother’s transition into the house—the fact that Tucson was a very Mexican place, even if you were white. Unlike 99 percent of America, the Mexican influence was everywhere there. Spanglish was a part of the local language. My dad’s best friend at Sunnyside High School, Pat Snyder, and his wife, Judy, my mom’s best friend, were both white, but they used tons of Spanish phrases. When I met them decades later, after they relocated to Idaho, I was shocked by how much Spanglish filled the conversation. So my mom, who grew up in a more middle-class neighborhood, wasn’t totally behind the curve at her in-laws’ house in the Tucson barrio. Grandma Suki welcomed her—and me—with open arms.
“Barrio” means neighborhood (like “borough”) in Spanish, but in the US, it has come to mean a lower-income urban area populated by Latinos. My grandparents lived on South Sixth Avenue near East Nebraska, raising a family of eight in a three-bedroom house. There were paved streets, but the alleyways and side streets were dirt. My grandfather had purchased the lot behind the house, which served as a junkyard.
Sometimes I think about my mother, eighteen and from the nicer side of the tracks, coming back to Tucson with her baby to live with her in-laws in a house next to a junkyard filled with rusting cars, discarded kitchen appliances, and tires. Despite her Tucson roots, that still must have been strange for her: Who lives next to a junkyard?
My grandfather, Alfredo, never ran the junkyard as a business. There wasn’t even a sign outside the lot. He and his sons amassed car, truck, and camper parts and sold stuff when the opportunity arose. My uncle Tito eventually went into business renovating used RVs, but that was the closest the lot ever came to being an operating business. I assumed it must have done well since Uncle Tito was always flashing lots of cash, walking around with $4,000 in his pocket. (I later learned that another family business was responsible for that.)
Inside Grandma Suki’s house, activity was constant, a welcoming refuge filled with food, music, and life. My father was the youngest of six kids. He had two brothers and three sisters, and they were frequently in the house, too. My uncles Ralph (Rafael) and Tito (Alfredo) also worked in the mines at various shifts, and often dropped by with their kids and wives and girlfriends. So there were cousins to look after me and to play with. Grandma Suki cooked continuously, all day, every day, churning out fabulous, spicy food—paper-thin flour tortillas with deliciously shredded machaca, carne asada, carnitas, and pollo, and frijoles, frijoles, and more frijoles. There was plenty of music—traditional mariachi favorites, norteño, and rock.
There was also plenty of drama, even in the early days of my parents’ marriage.
They had problems. Or perhaps I should say my father had many problems and my mother had one big one: my father.
My dad was a drinker, a gambler, and prone to explosive violence. His problems turned my mother’s life into a daily nightmare. Her violent husband was also her primary provider, and she was almost entirely dependent on him for money, but even when he was working, she couldn’t rely on even part of his salary making it home because he sometimes gambled it all away. She was an excellent seamstress and took in whatever sewing and mending work she could find to earn cash. For years, Suki was her main support network. When our cupboards were bare, when my father went AWOL, when my mother was barely hanging by a thread, my grandma was there to take care of us, feed us, love us.
Adding to the drama and domestic chaos, no doubt, were my uncles’ extracurricular gigs, too—although I was completely unaware of them when I was little. Uncle Tito sold heroin and wound up serving time. Uncle Ralph ran drugs north and south for a cartel and sold weed until the day he died. I remember him trying to gift me a bale of weed when I was visiting my father in Idaho. I turned him down. Sometimes I tell people this, and I think for a moment that my dad was a comparatively law-abiding citizen, as far as I knew. Of course, I then remember the drinking while driving, gambling, and committing armed robbery for diapers, not to mention the many moments of domestic abuse.
Eventually, after a few months of living at Suki’s, my parents scraped together money to buy a small two-bedroom house on South Oregon Drive. It cost $10,000 in 1968, about $77,000 in today’s dollars. It was a humble abode in a humble part of town, not far from Twelfth Avenue and Nebraska, the big cross streets.
The little house on South Oregon was liberating for my mom—she had her own space. She didn’t have to ask Suki or any of her in-laws for permission to do anything. It was also confining, exhausting, and dangerous. I was a toddler when they moved in, and toddlers are a lot of work. They didn’t have the money to ship me off to daycare, so my mom and I were together in the little house a lot. Soon, she was pregnant again, and Ralph was born the November shortly after I turned two. It must have been hard, lonely work caring for two boys. At Suki’s, there were always other people around. On South Oregon Drive, there weren’t any distractions—no uncles and aunts and cousins laughing, and teasing, and Grandma Suki and her daughters weren’t around to shield my mom from my dad’s ugly drunkenness or pick up the slack from his absences. My dad was a hard worker—he went to the mines every day—but coming home was another matter. He liked going out, shooting pool, and drinking at the bar. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all.
My dad could keep a party going for hours. He loved hosting his friends, cooking and talking. He and my mother would bundle us into the car and take us to the home of Pat and Judy, their best friends, where they would drink and smoke and play card games all night, while Ralph and I played with their kids, Alan and Samantha, who were the same ages as we were. We played with Maggie, their dog. I liked going to that house. It was in a new development with ’70s interior design and unlike any other house I had seen before. Eventually, all of us kids fell asleep while the partying continued. Hours after midnight, a slumbering Ralph and I were carried to the car by our partied-out parents, and we’d wake up the next morning in our beds.
I don’t remember my dad ever being violent with us at social events. It was always at home. He drank from the moment he got home from work: beer, beer, and more beer. When he got older, he drank from the moment he got up. At one point, I thought beer was the only thing adults drank.
The violence was usually sudden and fierce. My dad used heavy equipment in the mines, drilling against the earth, hauling ore, hour after hour, day after day. He was incredibly strong. I remember him hoisting and tossing car tires like they were nothing. That strength meant his eruptions were terrifying in their force and efficiency.
He abused my mother and made life horrible for her. It could be anything. Sometimes, the dinners she fixed weren’t good enough, and he’d fling full plates of food across the room. My mother cleaned it up and started over. Unfortunately, she was accustomed to this type of behavior. My mom grew up watching her own father pummeling her brothers. It bothers me to think that must have played into her enduring this brutal treatment from my dad, and because her father had opposed the marriage to begin with, he certainly wasn’t going to save her or let her move back in with him. She must have felt stuck between a rock and a hard place. She couldn’t protect herself, and she couldn’t protect her kids. Escape must have seemed unfathomable.
Even as a little boy, I sensed that she felt this way. I didn’t understand that she didn’t have a means to support herself or was tragically in love with and dependent on a violent alcoholic. I didn’t know that her own dad shut her out and refused to help her. However, even at that young age, I did understand that the world was sometimes unfair, and that was that. There weren’t really any easy options, and so you had to play the cards you were dealt. I believed that for both my mother and father, violence was part of the equation of living.
Eventually, we became the target. One day, I was in the backyard throwing darts at the back of the garage. It was a wooden wall, and the darts stuck into it and made a nice sound when they hit. My aim needed work, though. I was a little kid. Eventually, a dart hit the window and broke it. When my mom found out, she went into her standard refrain when I did anything wrong:
“Just wait till your dad gets home.”
I knew I was in big trouble. To me, those words meant only one thing: My dad would remove his belt and use it on me. It wasn’t a daily or even weekly occurrence, but it happened. Sometimes he would whip me pretty bad. Another time he suddenly grabbed my wrist and stubbed out his burning cigarette on it. He was buzzed—he was always buzzed—and I was playing with his lighter and that upset him. I still have a scar on my wrist and others elsewhere. I processed these events the same way computer engineers look at coding: input in, output out; x triggers y. To my kid brain, the events translated this way: You did something wrong, and this is what happens when you do something wrong. You get whipped, or you get left out in the desert and have to walk home. Mostly, for self-preservation, I accepted what happened and moved on.
In spite of all of this, I never hated my dad. He told me he loved me, and I loved him. He picked me up and hugged me. He brought me things he found in the mines—huge centipedes that seemed to belong in horror movies, shiny crystal rocks. He made us all laugh with jokes and sang to us. To this day, when I meet someone who knew him, they always say how wonderful he was, and I agree. One of my favorite memories is him serenading Grandma Suki with “La Malagueña” on her birthday. He was a passionate, troubled man, and I have far more good memories of him than I do bad. I loved him, and I know that he loved me. At age fifty-seven, he passed away in his childhood bedroom at Grandma Suki’s. Among his few possessions was a folder with articles he saved about me.
I was and still am incredibly close to my mother. She kept us alive, kept us sane and safe, and got us through some difficult times, especially when she was having such difficulty herself.