CHAPTER 9

Lightning Strikes

I was speechless.

I know that may be hard to believe. I talk passionately about games to anyone who listens whether it is about programming techniques, upcoming games and consoles, or the latest game I am into. Softdisk even had a conversational atmosphere.

Still, on September 20, 1990, I was at a total loss for words. But my silence wasn’t the real story. The reason for my silence—that was the real story.

In the space of about one second, at the age of almost twenty-three, I had glimpsed my future, my colleagues’ future, and the future of PC gaming, and that future was phenomenal.

Moments before losing my capacity to utter a single word, I had arrived early to an empty Gamer’s Edge office to find a 3.5" floppy disk on my keyboard with a note from Tom instructing me to run the program on the disk. I inserted the floppy.

I was greeted with a brown title screen announcing, Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement.” One side of the screen had a circular portrait of Dangerous Dave, a character I had created a couple years earlier, in his signature red baseball cap. The other side had a portrait of a judge bedecked in a powdered wig holding up a gavel. I took in the image and wondered how Dave was going to interact with the halls of justice. I had no clue where this was going.

I hit the spacebar and got the shock of my life.

A familiar video game lit up my PC screen. I was looking at a replica of Super Mario Bros. 3: the billowing white cloud characters, the green shrubs, the construction blocks, and rotating gold coins. But Super Mario didn’t exist on the PC, because the technology that powered it didn’t exist on the PC. It existed only on the Nintendo Entertainment System and a couple of the ’80s’ best computers, the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. These systems had the custom chips to handle two-dimensional side-scrolling. PC games, due to a dearth of graphics support and processing power, had been restricted to static screen games and chunky scrolling—until Carmack created smooth vertical scrolling just a few days earlier with Slordax.

Now I looked at Super Mario Bros.’s Mushroom Kingdom and wondered what it was doing on my PC screen. I also noticed Dangerous Dave standing at the bottom of the screen. The character I created two years earlier who was inspired by Super Mario Bros. was now inhabiting the Mushroom Kingdom. I laughed. That was the copyright violation of the title, but how far did this parody go?

I hit the arrow key to move Dangerous Dave and find out.

What I saw destroyed me.

The scenery on screen was changing, moving. As Dave walked and bounced his way into the game, moving right, new scenery and new challenges emerged. Everything scrolled smoothly, seamlessly, continually to the left. I hit the direction keys, moving him back and forth and up and down. As much as it looked like I was playing, I wasn’t. I was processing the enormity of what I saw.

You know how in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon goes into warp speed and the stars start whizzing by?

That’s how I felt.

Teleported into the future.

I had to stop and process what I had just witnessed, what Carmack had done. I was sure Tom had done the nuts-and-bolts re-creation of Super Mario Bros. 3’s gamescape, which was funny and cool, but the horizontal scrolling that knocked me out? That was clearly all Carmack. The two of them had created this little program as a joke. As a fun way to tell me that Carmack had figured out a cool programming trick, that he took on my challenge and delivered.

Only this wasn’t just a cool trick. This was a revolution.

For me, the implications of horizontal scrolling were so vast it was hard to fathom. I saw the entire universe of PC gaming expand in that split second. Horizons were no longer finite, no longer limited to the fixed dimensions of a computer screen. I had been immersed in the PC game market for a good two years now. My goal had been to understand every game, all the technology, all the programming tools. I had immersed myself in the PC because I needed to know where the leading edge was. When I saw Dangerous Dave moving effortlessly to the right, I knew the leading edge was right before my eyes. I mean this quite literally. I knew what I witnessed, and I knew this was our future. Ironically, Carmack and Tom didn’t.

I knew what part of the video hardware Carmack had to use to create the side-scrolling effect, but he had figured out another optimization that reused background graphics so that the PC could read, render, and react with maximum efficiency. Remember that processing power and available memory were a fraction of what’s standard today. Carmack had created a rendering engine that rewrote the rules of the game, of all games, and yet he didn’t realize it. In fairness, nobody else did either.

After about thirty minutes of sitting there in silence, I finally got my act together and decided to show a few people this revolutionary breakthrough.

I took the floppy disk down the hall to my friends at Big Blue Disk, booted it up, and waited for people to freak out.

“That’s really neat.”

“Nice! How funny!”

“That’s cool.”

I couldn’t believe it. I was waving a paradigm-shifting demo before their eyes, and they couldn’t see it. In the world of programming, Dangerous Dave in “Copyright Infringement” was like a coding version of the Rosetta Stone. It was like E=mc2. It was like nuclear fusion. Instead, they told me it was “neat.” This surprised me even more.

“Are you serious? Neat? This is incredible!” I said. It was all I could do not to go on a rant. These were people who lived and breathed computer programming, who understood and were invested in the PC revolution. They should have been saying: That is fucking amazing.

The ability to program games that move so smoothly on the horizontal axis within the game world was earth-shattering technology. It meant we could write games for the PC that rivaled the games created for gaming systems like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari without the need for their specialized hardware. Players didn’t need to invest in a new console! All they needed was a PC and the game files. Nowadays, this is what venture capitalists mean when they talk about “disruption.”

When Dangerous Dave moved, he wasn’t just moving right in pursuit of the gold coins of Mario’s kingdom—he was stepping into a completely new future for PC computer gaming, and we were going to step with him. Not just into a new technological and gameplay standard, but into entirely new lives. I knew right then that we were going to make groundbreaking games. We were going to be the team to follow. Like Wozniak. Like Nasir. Like Budge. Like my game dev heroes. We were going to build our own game company!

I walked around with that disk—the actual leading edge—thinking about all the new dimensions this programming capability would open up. I saw untapped possibilities on the horizon. There was the obvious universe of porting the offerings of Nintendo, Atari, and Sega to the PC. We also wanted to make new games. That was always the goal—to create games that we loved playing, that challenged us. Carmack knew he had broken the fourth wall of gaming on PCs. He had defied programming gravity. But he didn’t care about the business implications of his triumph. The programming achievement was all that mattered.

Giving Carmack the runway and opportunity to laser focus on code and nothing but code, specifically the EGA adaptor, paid off, and we were just beginning to discover how our individual sets of unique traits worked with, challenged and celebrated each other. If I stated an achievable design or technical goal as a challenge—like smooth horizontal scrolling—he enjoyed and happily took on the challenge of solving it. I was the design/code yin to his engineering yang, and I had the programming knowledge to know what I was suggesting was certainly possible. As a team, we didn’t just work well together, we propelled each other. I was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of design. He was called to push the boundaries of code. We had the vision and the goals to see beyond the current industry horizons. Achieving those goals meant solving tricky game design, computing and graphics problems.

Despite his gaming genius, Carmack wasn’t that interested in advancing game design—the mechanics, the player progression, the narratives, the environment design, the sound, the surprises and Easter eggs—and quite often he didn’t think about the limitations that needed to be conquered until we presented them to him. That’s not to say that he didn’t care about design at all. He cared deeply about the design and the architecture of code, and games were at the frontier. Because of the kind of programming that goes into games, they were (and still are) the most taxing form of programming. You can use a computer to crunch a bunch of numbers, sure, but spreadsheets don’t generally need sound cards and GPUs (graphics processing units). Games require the whole of a computer to immerse a player in an experience, and game developers push computers to do interesting, fun, and innovative tasks, and it drives hardware innovation.

I thought Tom Hall would see it. Unlike Carmack, Tom loved games and game design. He loved the narrative, the journey. He didn’t really give a damn about computer languages or rendering issues, although he had good programming skills. He was about flights of fancy and having fun. If I had to bet, I would have wagered that he understood the importance of side-scrolling beyond the amusing “copyright infringement” demo he had meticulously created, but I would have lost that bet.

They had stayed up late into the night to create the demo, and when Tom finally showed up for work that afternoon, he was eager to see my reaction. I was equally eager to see if he knew what they had done. “Cool, right?” Tom said with a laugh.

As for Carmack, I found out he called part of his innovation “adaptive tile refresh.” He didn’t see it as anything to shout “Eureka” about. I suspect he viewed the inability to side-scroll on PCs as a functional, programming and graphics conundrum.

It seemed to me that they had missed the forest for the trees, both of them. I was still in awe.

“This is massive,” I told them. “Revolutionary. This is it. We are gone!”

I was elated and nervous at the same time. I never doubted my analysis, or my vision, of what side-scrolling meant, not for one second, but the implications, the opportunities that loomed as a result of that conclusion, were non-trivial. A tremendous, unique opportunity can also a daunting opportunity. I wanted to make no missteps. Everything had to be exactly right.

Now, I regretted sharing it with a few people in the office. Even giving them a glimpse of the golden ticket was stupid. I didn’t want the enormity of this discovery to get out. I realized I needed to be clear with Carmack, Tom, Adrian, Lane, and Jay. We now had the opportunity to do something that was too big for Softdisk. It wasn’t even a part of Softdisk’s business model.

I put the disk back into the drive and let it fly, lifting my voice over the beeps and blurts of the soundscape Tom had assembled. “This is the coolest fucking thing ever. We need to get out of here. This is our ticket.”

Jay Wilbur, the guy who had known me longer than anyone at the company, walked by our office door as I was talking.

“Hey, what’s up guys?” he said.

“Jay, you saw the demo, right?” I said.

“Yeah. It’s really cool.”

“Dude, it’s beyond cool. It’s ‘we’re out of here cool’ is what it is.”

Jay snorted at this as if he thought I was just spouting off, hyping something up, which he’d seen me do dozens of times in the four years we’d known each other.

“I’m dead serious, Jay.”

He must have heard the commitment in my voice and concluded I was not blowing smoke, because he closed the door.

I laid out my vision: “We have to get out of here. That’s the plan. We’re going to keep working together, and we can totally make some unbelievable games, but we need to get out of here. Side-scrolling means we can create PC games that rival the games of the biggest-selling videogame companies in the world. We have the perfect team right here in this room. We need to refine this and develop our own games for PC. If we do, they will be superior to every single PC game out there. Think about it. There is not a single game on PC that lets you move like this, and the market for PCs is exploding! We can do this. We have to do this.”

Everyone heard me loud and clear. It made sense. Jay believed something big was happening, too.

“This is what I think,” he said. “We need to take this to Nintendo right now. Straight to the guys at the top and get a deal to port it to PC. Then we are talking serious money that can fund other development.”

It was the obvious play, the one I’d thought of instantly when my head was exploding with ideas. Now Jay had expressed it and confirmed my thoughts. Everyone was on board. We just had to figure out how and when to do what needed to be done. Continuing to work for Softdisk, we went into heavy stealth mode with our new tech. We were all work all the time, with only sporadic breaks to play Super Mario Bros. 3, Lifeforce, or The Legend of Zelda.

Carmack, Jay, and Lane found a perfect house on the shores of Cross Lake, Shreveport’s massive man-made lake that serves as a water-sports hub for the area. This meant we had a workspace away from Softdisk where we could jam 24/7 if need be and focus on our work. We had only one problem: We didn’t own PCs. At the time, we were still living on modest salaries, and since I had to send money to Kelly and the kids, I really had to live on the cheap. Our solution? We “borrowed” PCs from Softdisk. When our workday ended at 6 p.m., we stayed in the office, changed directories, and started on our other project. We spent an entire week of after-hours work churning out a two-level PC demo of Super Mario Bros. 3. We even videotaped the original game so we could be sure our demo captured every single pixel. On Friday evenings, we pulled our cars up to the Softdisk office and quickly and quietly removed our PCs, packing them into our cars. With Jay grilling food and feeding us, Carmack and I programmed in the living room while Tom and Lane handled graphics and enemy AI (how enemies made decisions and acted upon those decisions) on other PCs we’d eventually bought. Adrian, who worked with us on Gamer’s Edge, wasn’t a part of this initial stealth mode* team; we had yet to get to know Adrian well, he was relatively new, and Tom planned to handle the art for the demo.

The sense of urgency and excitement among the team was palpable. We had the ability to execute the right idea at the right time. For years to come, this was our strength. There is nothing more fun than making games when you have a solid direction, an experienced team, and the knowledge that you are ahead of the competition.

With our mission complete, Jay sent our demo to Nintendo with a request to let us develop the game for PC. Three weeks later, Nintendo turned us down. They wanted to keep their intellectual property exclusive to their proprietary system. This, of course, made perfect sense, even if it didn’t initially work in our favor. Fortunately, I stumbled onto a terrific plan B while making the Super Mario Bros. 3 demo. I had gotten plenty of mail from gamers over the years, especially when I was publishing games in inCider and Nibble. Some of them were people having difficulty typing in the source code of my games from magazines, and some were complimentary. Since I’d arrived at Softdisk, though, my work wasn’t exactly front and center. The disks we mailed out every month didn’t have my address on them. So I was surprised when I started getting fan letters sent to me via Softdisk.

When the first one came, from somebody named Scott Mulliere, I pretended to make a big deal of it, showing it off like I was somebody’s idol, but, obviously, I was honored. Scott “loved” my game and pronounced me “very talented” and himself “a big fan.” As a game developer, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was rare to have any kind of fan interaction, and so I was grateful that people played my games and liked them enough to write me. Behind the barricades at Softdisk, mail was exceedingly rare. In fact, some companies, wary of talent being poached, made it hard to reach programmers. A few more “fan mails” followed Scott’s letter. Some of them asked me to write back or even call collect. I taped them on the wall near my PC, but I didn’t give them too much thought. Since I was so busy, I didn’t feel the urge to write back.

Right around this time, I read a story in PC Games magazine about a new game distribution model that was paying off for a guy in Texas named Scott Miller. The article mentioned his address on Mayflower Drive in Garland, Texas. That rang some bells. Who did I know in Garland, Texas? I racked my brain and then glanced at the letters on my wall. Every one of them was from Garland. Every one of them had the exact same address. Every one of them was from an allegedly different guy.

What the hell was going on? Who was sending me these letters? How the hell had I not noticed this before?

I didn’t understand what his problem was. Was he a freak? A stalker? A practical joker? Was he trolling me? I immediately wrote him a long, nasty response, but I cooled off and reread the letters on the wall, noting the invite to call collect and make contact. Bizarre, for sure, but he must have had a motive behind his madness. So, I enclosed another letter along with my more reactionary first letter, telling him that I was mildly intrigued by his strange method of making an approach. I included a phone number at Softdisk where he could reach me.

Soon after that, he got in touch.

“Oh my god. FINALLY! John Romero!” he said when I picked up the phone.

“Who is this?

“Scott Miller. We so need to work together.”

I thought of saying some of the nastier things I wrote in my first letter, but settled on something less confrontational. “Dude, what was with those letters you wrote me? All those different names? It’s unbelievable. Can you—”

“Never mind the letters. I had to write that way to make sure they got to you. It’s hard to make contact with programmers, but forget all that. What I really want to do is talk about you making games for me.”

After that, he backed up, and we got on track.

He told me his story, focusing primarily on the new company he’d created, Apogee, and how he had solved the computer gaming distribution puzzle—a challenge for any independent game start-up—with a disk- and BBS-based* grassroots solution.

He didn’t exactly put it in those terms, but that is what it amounted to. In the fall of 1990, there was no Steam, Epic Games Store, or online App Store. If you wanted the latest games, you ordered them via mail order, or you went to smaller retailers like Electronics Boutique, ComputerLand, Egghead, or Software Etc., if you were lucky enough to have any one of those in your town. In bigger cities, everyone who wanted games went to large computer stores like CompUSA or Babbage’s, found the game section, and bought what are now called big box games off the shelf. The managers of these outlets organized the games by genre, and in doing so, organized the industry by genre, too. The world of downloading games online was in its infancy on BBSs but was gaining popularity.

Scott had adapted the shareware model—where developers made applications or games available for free download and hoped users would appreciate their work and send them money in return. Scott had been writing games since he was a teenager, mostly text-based quiz and adventure games. Instead of giving the whole game away, Scott decided to post a sample version of a game on bulletin boards and Usenet groups. The idea was to hook users and then make them pay for the complete version. When they finished the free sample, a screen popped up with Scott’s address and instructions to buy the rest of the game from him.

He said he was making a fortune—thousands of dollars a week on a roguelike game called Kroz, a game mentioned in the PC Games article. He gave away the first episode of the game, “Kingdom of Kroz,” and the thousands were coming from people who wanted to complete the trilogy with “Caverns of Kroz” and “Dungeons of Kroz.” He’d even given the first episode away on Big Blue Disk #20, but that was before I got to Softdisk.

The reason he wrote me those letters, he told me, was that he wanted me to make a clone of Pyramids of Egypt for Apogee. “It’s a perfect shareware game and will sell like crazy.”

“We can’t do that. Softdisk owns Pyramids, Scott.”

But I saw an opening for our stealth plans and went for it.

“You wouldn’t want Pyramids anyway. We’ve got something way better. You have no idea how cool our current game is,” I told him. “It is light years cooler than Pyramids. I’ll send you a sample. You’ve never seen anything like it on the PC.”

“Then I want to sell it.”

I loved what I was hearing. Even if Nintendo rejected our PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3, this was a potential solution for taking our breakthrough to the next level. If Scott was making money hand over fist, so could we. At Softdisk, we were all salaried employees. No matter how well our games did, we got paid our set amount, and there’s one thing for sure, it wasn’t thousands of dollars a week. I’d told Carmack about Scott Miller the previous week after piecing together his multiple letters, and he knew I had given Scott our number. After the call, I came back into our Gamer’s Edge office and shared the details with Carmack, who seemed slightly interested but skeptical. I was stoked, though, and sent Scott the demo straight away. He was impressed when he saw our work. He got it, understood its potential, and called me immediately.

“I need you guys to make a new game with this tech.”

Making an additional game for Scott was exactly the opportunity we had been looking for. I felt like Carmack’s breakthrough—which had come long after business hours in the Softdisk office—and the plans to capitalize on it were ours, collectively, to use. Carmack and Tom worked on their own time—nearly to dawn—to make their extraordinary Dangerous Dave demo, and I knew side scrolling was a game changer before I started Gamer’s Edge. Though all the ingredients had come together here, they had come together on our own time. Yet, excited as we were to charge ahead, we had our day jobs and were currently developing Slordax for Gamer’s Edge. In my opinion, using groundbreaking horizontal scrolling for a Gamer’s Edge release was a waste of an opportunity. The entire company’s business model was not suited to capitalize and promote the kind of hot-selling and groundbreaking games we could now build.

At this point, we had to make a big decision: Do we stay, or do we go? In the end, we decided to do both. We worked at Softdisk by day and created our future at night. Eager to get going, we needed a name for our new company. We had named our little D&D team “In Demand” as a joke—we were level-3 peons and no one ever needed us, but IDF (Ideas from the Deep) and the moniker “ID” for In Demand seemed destined to stick to us, so Tom suggested we go with “id.” It was a Freudian term and described the primitive, instinctual part of the mind—a way that we hoped our games would connect with players. We decided to add “Software” to it. Looking back, we could have used “Entertainment,” “Studios,” “Games,” or something else more interesting than “Software,” but that’s what most companies did back then. I often hear people pronounce “id” as “eye dee,” but that’s not correct. It’s “id” and rhymes with “did.”

After the Super Mario Bros. 3 demo, we decided to part ways with Lane. It seemed to us that the PC was not for him, which doesn’t work in a PC game company. We decided to leave him out. Also, Lane didn’t play in our D&D group.

Eventually, Scott laid out the terms of a deal: Our team would make a 45 percent royalty on every copy sold. To cement the deal, I asked Scott for a $2,000 advance.

When the check came in the mail, it proved to me and the team that this was a real deal. The $2,000 worked out to $666 per person. We would have started making the game for Scott without it, but getting this advance showed us Scott was serious and believed in us. We did some rough math to determine what kind of money we might bring in if our game did well. As long as we made enough to pay rent two times per person, we knew it was enough to do this full-time on our own. For the time being, though, we continued our day jobs working on Slordax for Softdisk.

The three-game component of the Apogee model (first game goes out for free and if players like it, they buy the other two) was critical, and we held a quick meeting to figure out a plan. “Okay. Does anyone have an idea for a trilogy?” I asked.

Carmack said, “How about a genius kid who saves the world, and his parents are oblivious to it?”

Tom Hall loved it and said he’d be back in ten minutes. He ran to his Apple IIgs, fired up AppleWorks, and banged out a three-paragraph overview about Billy Blaze, an eight-year-old genius who builds a rocket, dons a football helmet, and jets off to Mars. Fifteen minutes later, he returned to read the initial “defender of justice” paragraph aloud to us in a Walter Winchell voice. Carmack applauded. I loved it, too. It was an amalgam of Tom’s passions: punny, subtle, often kitcshy humor; a love of science fiction; an awareness of being a kid; and his vast game knowledge. As he got deeper into developing the idea, he came up with a design for a secret level and other Easter egg-type treats, like having signs written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, Tom’s futuristic cipher for the English alphabet, all over the place. Curious gamers could even decipher the alphabet and translate the signs.*

The game was called Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons. The name and the idea itself had just come out of thin air, on demand. Tom was like that, and he still is. I have never known anyone as intensely creative as Tom Hall. Give him an idea, go get a coffee, and when you come back, he has your universe created. Tom later told me that the name was inspired by old movie serial names, like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Flash Gordon and the Planet of Death.

The drive to build it before Christmas was epic. Carmack and I spent sixteen hours a day together, pushing each other, inspiring each other. The first eight hours were on Slordax, the second eight were on Commander Keen. Tom wasn’t far behind. Adrian still wasn’t part of id Software at this time, so his focus was solely on Slordax. Tom did all the graphics for the first Keen trilogy, and we brought Adrian in at the end to create some graphic tiles and the Vortininja enemy that players would encounter in episodes 2 and 3.

When Adrian left the office for the day, Tom came in, and we began to work on Keen. I continued coding tools and other parts of the game such as the world map, menu system, secret Loch Ness Monster transport, and other touches like that. John spent his time coding enemy AI, and Tom and I made the game’s levels. Tom created an entire universe, and these first three games were just a glimpse into it. There were alien races and tons of creatures with their own backstories.

Each of the Keen games had sixteen levels, so we made forty-eight levels in total. These levels were exciting to make—they were the first levels we made that felt like we were crafting an adventure that was meant to excite, to surprise, and to provoke curiosity in the player. We hid secrets everywhere, and we made sure the game was challenging but not too difficult.

As we worked, Scott Miller would send us $100 checks just before the weekends with “Pizza Money” noted on them. Once again, we were on a 10-to-2 death schedule. In hindsight, I know this schedule sounds nuts, and the fact that we did this to ourselves may seem even nuttier, but at the time this didn’t at all feel like work. We were chasing greatness, and we ran as fast as we could. We knew someone would get to the finish line, and we wanted to get there first.

We finished Slordax for Gamer’s Edge on October 31 and started on our next game for them the day after. We decided to make a ninja action game and called it Shadow Knights. We used the Keen scrolling tech for this game, making it the first Gamer’s Edge game to horizontally scroll. Working with this code during the day made our evening work on Keen that much easier.

Though we were challenging ourselves and working around the clock, I still stopped now and again to talk with Beth McCall, a woman who worked on the production line putting disks in mailers to send out to Softdisk’s many subscribers. She had a calm and easygoing demeanor, a thick southern accent, and a pleasant laugh. When we’d bump into one another, she’d ask about what we were working on. Like a person who had spent a good portion of their life behind a monitor, I launched into answers with technical details, and seeing I was speaking only to myself, followed up with gameplay details.

“I don’t play games,” she told me. She rolled her eyes in mock anticipation of my response.

“Everyone plays games,” I said. “There just might not be a game for them yet.”

I believed what I said. I had been in the industry long enough to see the incredible breadth of games that developers had created, and I knew that there was still so much ground to cover.

“Maybe so,” she told me, but I knew that she was speaking more from politeness than hope of finding that perfect game for her.

I enjoyed our conversations and decided to ask her if she’d like to go on a date with me. Since she knew how committed I was to my job and to my growth as a game creator—she saw firsthand how hard our group worked—I wasn’t worried that it would become an issue and kept on with our development schedule.

On December 12, we finished the Commander Keen Trilogy. While the rest of the team got some sleep, I brought the disk to the post office and sent it off in the mail. Scott got it two days later, and Apogee released the free first episode of the game “Marooned on Mars,” that day. Scott uploaded episode one to Dan Linton’s popular gaming BBS, Software Creations in Clinton, Massachusetts. Dan created a big text banner with the name Commander Keen crafted from a block of ASCII art symbols, which everyone saw as soon as they logged in. Players could buy the remaining two episodes, “The Earth Explodes” and “Keen Must Die!” for $30.

The response was immediate and remarkable. The first month, Apogee generated about $25,000 in sales; the vast majority of it from Keen purchases—all with zero advertising. Just as gratifying was the feedback from gamers. When journalists pen obituaries about id Software team members, DOOM and Quake will be name-checked in the first paragraph, along with first-person shooter games. Commander Keen may be just a footnote, a passing paragraph in the inventory of our work, but if you look back at the reviews of Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons, the critical acclaim was every bit as breathless and loving as the response was to DOOM. Accolades abounded: PC Magazine said it “has a Nintendo feel” and was a “tremendous success,” while PC Computing wrote, “Commander Keen’s standard-setting quality has made addiction all too easy!” Commander Keen was a revolutionary game and design that took advantage of never-before-seen PC programming techniques. We’d set out to astonish everyone, and we did.

On January 15, 1991, our first check arrived in the amount of $10,500. We had more than hit our team budget requirement of two times our rent per person. None of us had ever held a check for an amount that large. We passed it around in wonder. We had made it, partially anyway. I went to see Al Vekovius to tell him Carmack, Tom and I were leaving, and Adrian was coming with us.

“I know this is not an ideal situation,” I said. “And I’m totally grateful for everything you’ve done, but the Softdisk model isn’t going to work for us.”

Once again, Al surprised me, insisting “we can work something out.” I have to say, part of me was relieved. Tom was worried about getting sued by Softdisk. I had downplayed that concern with logic: “What can they sue us for? We don’t have any money! What’s he going to take from you, Tom? Your couch with a spring popping out of it?!”

Instead, Al had collaboration, not legal action, on his mind.

“How about I work with you guys to make your own company? I’ll own a piece of it, but you’ll own the rest. We’ll be partners, and I can manage all the business aspects of it. You can be wherever you want to be.”

On the surface, this sounded good. No potential legal hassles, we wouldn’t have to deal with business issues, and we could make games that used the shareware model—which seemed far more profitable and liberating than Softdisk’s subscription model.

As we hashed this out, Al was thinking on his feet. His plan was to move some of the programmers who handled his cash cow, Big Blue Disk, to take over Gamer’s Edge, as they were the only other PC programmers in the company. We would help train them and then spend all our time making games for this new Al-and-Us company. This sounded like a great plan, and we were seriously considering it, but Al had concerns, saying, “I have to have a meeting with the other editors about this. Everyone’s going to find out about it.”

The next day the deal was off. His staff had threatened to quit. From their perspective, Al was rewarding us for screwing over the company, for using Softdisk to build our careers. Meanwhile, they were going to get shafted with more work.

“I can’t do it. They said they will all quit, and then I’m really screwed.”

Eventually, after some civil negotiation, we agreed that in return for Softdisk not suing us or making claims to our intellectual property, we would spend the next year making a game every two months for Softdisk, while their new Gamer’s Edge team trained themselves to use our code and tools. He offered to pay us $5,000 for each game.

We took that deal quickly. Living in Shreveport, our living expenses were about $400 a month each. So with the money coming in from Keen, we’d have no cash flow issues at all. We would still have to code like maniacs, but in the end, we would be beholden to nobody. Apogee was ready and waiting for our next project.

Before I leave the Softdisk era behind, I want to address a few things. A great deal has been written about this period—our time at Softdisk, John Carmack’s horizontal scrolling breakthrough, and the creation of Commander Keen. Most of it jibes with my version of events. I have, however, seen some reporting that overstates the group’s creative tensions and personality clashes. I realize this was a dramatic device that obviously added tension to our story, but at the outset, we were unified and in sync. Suggestions that John Carmack was reclusive and antisocial were not at all evident in the first few years. Yes, he had a superhuman work ethic and was brilliant, but he was a regular guy like me, and nobody spent more time with him than I did. As for tensions that existed among the rest of the team, I can’t speak for the inner feelings of everyone, but we were as high-functioning and collaborative and positive as it gets. It was a dream team of motivated, talented game developers. Once, I read a report that Adrian Carmack truly loathed Tom Hall. He absolutely didn’t.

As I’ve said, none of us smoked, drank regularly, or did drugs, and I think this speaks to just how in sync and focused we were, but there was one night, New Year’s Eve 1990, where some of us got drunk and Carmack famously stated, “I am losing control of my faculties.” He normally did not talk like a computer, but apparently the drinking caused him to. I think we would have been turned off if someone lit up a joint or started doing shots. We got high on games and programming. That was it.

I’ve also read similar reports that I didn’t like Al Vekovius. On the contrary, I thought Al was a great guy and so did the others. We were happy to have jobs at Softdisk. The statement itself was attributed to John Carmack, a statement Carmack disputes as untrue and out of character. Why would I dislike the guy who gave me a chance to learn the PC? Everything he did for us was always positive. There was zero negativity from me, or any of us, toward Al, as far as I knew. I consider Al Vekovius a major and helpful figure in my life and the history of video games.

 

* Our stealth mode was not due to any noncompete or other contractual agreements. We just knew we had something innovative and wanted to be as silent about it as possible.

* A BBS, short for bulletin board system, was a common means for people to exchange or download files.

* SGA is now part of the Unicode, the generally accepted standard for digitally rendered writing systems and it is also used in Minecraft.