Virtual reality was around long before I began making games. The first machine of its type was patented in 1962. The field has made great strides over the past decade thanks to breakthrough technologies such as those from Oculus and Valve Index, more affordable hardware like Sony’s PlayStation VR, and popular games like Half-Life: Alyx and Beat Saber. But despite VR’s growing presence, many players wondered when the tech would become the present rather than continue to be hyped as the future.
Around the time I returned to DOOM maps, I asked myself a different but related question: What would it be like to work on the far future of VR, years or even decades after the technology had become as ubiquitous as PCs and smartphones?
It’s a question I attempted to explore in Blackroom, an FPS concept I’d been fleshing out while working on E1M8b. I coupled what I thought might be the far future of VR with the possibilities of advanced artificial intelligence.
Blackroom was envisioned with design and story at its core. In the game’s world, VR doesn’t require the player to wear a headset. They stand in a massive space called a Blackroom, and a simulation comes to life around them. It’s room-scale VR, but in a coliseum-size room. In the game, the player takes the role of technologist Dr. Santiago Sonora, the chief engineer employed by Hoxar, Inc., creators of the Blackroom tech. These simulations differed vastly from today’s real-world VR, however. In Blackroom, it’s more than just fancy visuals. The Blackroom tech dropped users inside a solid simulation. They climbed over walls and crawled under things. Most importantly, the simulation allowed for “effect persistence”: any wounds inflicted on the player in the simulation could be carried over into real life. If they were shot in the Blackroom, they would be wounded in real life.
Like any good (bad) corporate entity in the world of video games, Hoxar flew too close to the sun when it experimented with advanced AI. It started as a simple and even moving request—to have simulated conversations with deceased loved ones in an environment modeled after a childhood home, a favorite hangout, or somewhere completely fictional. The AI’s responses weren’t just the canned, impersonal dialogue spoken by virtual AI assistants. Hoxar’s advanced AI deployed machine learning in real time, based on the user’s memories, to create characters that acted and responded in ways that felt real. The value of Hoxar’s technology was obvious for entertainment, educational, and military purposes. The company could simulate anything and adjust that simulation in real time based on the user’s actions and thoughts.
As one of Hoxar’s engineers, the player’s job was to enter the simulation, analyze its performance, and address any issues as they arose. Santiago was, in that role, not unlike Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman, a well-trained research associate at Black Mesa. Santiago had a variety of tools at his disposal such as a Boxel, a device worn on his left arm that let him analyze and change the simulation in real time, as well as a drone that allowed him to see parts of the simulation he couldn’t access in person.
During a routine mission, Santiago noticed subtle anomalies in the simulation—things he could neither identify nor correct. Over time, these anomalies in the AI and its algorithms transformed the simulation into something extremely dangerous, even lethal. Instead of generating realistic simulated environments for the the sim user’s entertainment, the algorithms began to simulate fears as well. Even worse, when he entered the Blackroom with his Boxel, he discovered that the AI had begun to protect itself against his ability to fix whatever was going on. Meanwhile the AI, driven by its rogue algorithms, continued to go further astray.
Writing about Blackroom now, nearly seven years later, I see issues at the core of the concept. With games in early concepting, there are rough spots, things that seem interesting to the game’s designer, but which will certainly change throughout development. I think the core concept of an advanced virtual simulation with a rogue AI is interesting, but at least in its initial and unrefined state, it was not the game people wanted from me.
The levels in Blackroom were, in essence, an analog of game development. When I made DOOM maps at id and again years later as a solo designer, I play-tested them constantly before they were finished to see how objects were looking and to decide if I liked the placement of this imp or that shotgun. Blackroom’s simulation (the one in the game’s story) worked similarly. Some simulations the player explored were complete. Others were simulations in development by Hoxar or broken because of bugs created by the rogue AI. As the player made their way through the simulation, they saw things like messed-up textures and regions that were impassable. In those scenarios, they controlled a drone to fly through walls, the ceiling, or the floor, to scout out what was going on elsewhere. The player’s camera allowed them to see these unfinished and mangled levels from any vantage point. The AI corruption manifested in many ways, such as weird creatures that weren’t programmed into the simulation. I wanted to create an atmosphere of tension and dread, amplified by the solidity and the real consequences of the virtual world. Some corruption couldn’t be disabled with your Boxel, further raising the stakes for your character.
Blackroom was supposed to be the ultimate meta expression of technology, with an atmosphere and world that posed a threat to the player’s character. One of the joys I had concepting it, which I wanted to pass on to players, was this idea that they were seeing things in the simulation that they weren’t supposed to see. In Blackroom, you lived in a world of tech gone bad, and you had to fix it while it was trying to kill you.
It was an ambitious setting and concept that I hoped would push design forward. For Blackroom to really land, I needed an artist who was as passionate about visual direction as I was about game mechanics and storytelling. Adrian Carmack was the perfect choice. He was more than a friend and fellow cofounder of id Software. Wolfenstein 3-D, DOOM, and Quake were all seminal games, and his artistic choices on each game were inspired, but they were arguably most important in Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM. Those games were pioneering efforts made by pioneers, and Adrian was the visionary who defined their look—and by definition, the look of the FPS.
By the time Brenda and I moved to Ireland in 2015, the concept of Blackroom was taking shape, and I was excited to talk to Adrian about making video games together again. He accepted my offer to become the art director, and together we formed Night Work Games Ltd. Adrian started working right away. He created a brilliant logo with huge, bold letters. The animated version seen in our Kickstarter video was an extension of Blackroom’s themes and setting. It’s quick and looks like a graphical glitch, the letters fuzzy before they coalesce into the Blackroom title. From there, he moved on to the glitch creatures stalking through Blackroom’s corrupted worlds. Some of his concept art, also seen in our video, showed a wide range of settings that manifested in the simulation, such as gothic ruins.
The pitch video is a crucial component of any successful crowdfunding campaign. You can write all the marketing copy to describe your idea and the rewards tied to it, but videos are more accessible. Some ideas, especially for audiovisual mediums like games, are better communicated in a video (if the game itself is not yet playable). To craft our pitch video, we hired 2 Player Productions, a video production company based in San Francisco dedicated to generating content rooted in games and game development. 2 Player had been involved in projects made by both AAA and indie companies, and had even made a documentary that chronicled the making of Double Fine Adventure, a Kickstarter game made by Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine Productions, the first game development studio to fund a title on Kickstarter.
Our first collaboration with 2 Player Productions was a teaser video inspired by Star Wars: The Force Awakens that we spun off from our full pitch video. The Force Awakens ends with Rey scaling a mountain and extending a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker, who had been conspicuously absent from the film until that point. It was a fantastic cliffhanger that teased the return of a beloved character fans had been waiting decades to see again. Our idea was to film part of the pitch video in Connemara, a rugged, beautiful coastal region in the west of Ireland, that revealed our return to the genre we had helped to create. The teaser, titled “The Return,” opened with Adrian looking nervous as he began his climb at the foot of the mountain. He hikes to the top and finds a hooded figure, but wearing jeans, sturdy footwear, and a thick jacket in place of Luke’s brown robe. Dramatic music swells to a crescendo as the figure turns slowly and lifts his hood, revealing yours truly. Wordlessly, Adrian hands me a keyboard and mouse. I take a breath. The camera pans out to show us standing across from each other, and then the finale theme—a nod to John Williams’s epic score—kicks in, promising an announcement on April 25, 2016.
“The Return” was a hit with fans, and with Adrian and me. We had a blast making it and felt it was the perfect way to get fans even more excited than they were when I released E1M8b. We filmed a second promotional video, working with prolific filmmaker Tomek Ciezki, who had founded production company Heavy Man Films in Galway, Ireland. “The Return” was imitation as flattery, but our video with Tomek was more lighthearted. We got Tim Schafer to do a mockumentary-style interview where he thanked me for killing adventure games—referencing how “DOOM clones” had nearly made every other genre extinct in the ’90s—because it freed up time he could spend doing other things. Most of the video summarized my history in the industry, based on sit-down interviews I recorded. Other industry luminaries such as Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford, who got his start as a level designer on Duke Nukem 3D, and Richard Garriott were kind enough to make appearances and talk about my history in the industry. But the best guest appearance may have been my mom, who reminisced about my creativity as a child and praised me for being “such a good boy” growing up. “He never shot at his mom,” she said.
The bulk of our Kickstarter pitch video made with 2 Player Productions focused on discussion of Blackroom as a concept. They shot footage of me walking around Ireland as castles and other scenery flickered into view, giving the impression that I was walking through an advanced simulation where I had the tools and ability to manifest anything, even entire structures. It took around a month to put the full Kickstarter together. During that time, heading up to the campaign’s launch, Adrian and I asked our consultants whether or not we should have a demo. The answer nowadays is an obvious “Of course!” but surprisingly, it wasn’t the de facto approach in 2015.
Kickstarter-funded games were going through a transition at the time. In 2012, Tim Schafer and Double Fine created a campaign seeking $400,000 in funding for Double Fine Adventure and wound up taking in more than $3 million—all without a demo. Game developers took notice, and Kickstarters sprang up left, right, and center. With this glut of Kickstarters came some success stories, but others failed to live up to their promises and some were even outright no-shows. Gradually, those who pledged the games became more discerning with their investments.
Surveying the current crop of Kickstarters, Adrian and I felt that a demo was the way to go, and we certainly had the means to fund it. Our thinking was that we should be able to back up the concepts shared in the pitch video so players could see that the game was more than just an idea and a lot of striking concept artwork. However, our consultants felt differently. They pointed out that the recently launched and successful Bloodstained, a 2D “Metroidvania” made by Koji Igarashi, most famous for working on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as an assistant director, writer, and programmer, didn’t have a demo. Igarashi described Bloodstained as a return to the look and game design of Symphony of the Night, and his Kickstarter reached and exceeded its funding goal without a game demo. More than anything, our consultants pointed out, we didn’t need one. Everyone knew we could make FPS games, and I had released E1M8b, which players loved, by then. I was also working on E1M4b and planned to release it during the Kickstarter campaign to generate even more excitement.
Together with our various consultants, we decided to launch without a demo.
The date was set. On April 25, 2016, Blackroom’s Kickstarter went live. We set a launch goal of $700,000 and gave ourselves thirty-two days to reach it. In four days, we raised just north of $131,000. Fans in the comments section thought the game had potential but questioned why we didn’t have any gameplay to show. The concept itself was too far from what Adrian and I were known for, and prospective players were confused. Funding started strong then slowed dramatically. On April 29, we canceled the project, and all money raised went back to the backers. There is a lot of data behind whether or not Kickstarters will succeed. The first forty-eight hours are critical, and all the data strongly suggested we didn’t have a hope in hell. The way we phrased it externally was that we wanted to “press pause” on the campaign and develop a demo that would show the game’s groundbreaking direction. It was not a decision any of us took lightly, least of all me. There were many reasons for pausing, and each came with an invaluable lesson.
The most important takeaway was, of course, to have a demo. It seems obvious. People need to see or test what they’re buying. Back in the 1990s, demos were called shareware. You could play a nice chunk of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D, DOOM, or Quake, and know exactly what the full game promised: the demo, but more of that. At a minimum, prospective Kickstarters needed a video of the demo so players could understand how the promises of the marketing video and the pitch translated to actual gameplay. The initial concept of a VR simulation and AI gone rogue sounds fun, but it’s also conceptual and difficult to grasp. If we’d had footage of a demo, or even a video people could get their hands on, players would have understood the game’s goals better.
Shortly after ending Blackroom’s Kickstarter, I collaborated with expert graphics programmer Keith O’Conor and virtuoso game artist Warren Marshall to build a gameplay demo that communicated the coolness of the game’s setting and play mechanics. Our goal was to build a slice of the game that showed off a cool environment, its tech-gone-rogue aesthetic, and its enemy encounters. Our goal was to combine the demo with Adrian’s concept art and voiceovers to set the scene for aspects of the game we hadn’t developed yet. Everything would come together in a pitch video we could shop to publishers, starting with the annual Gamescom event in Germany set for mid-August 2016.
I’ve never talked publicly about the pitch or the gameplay video until now. At every event, I’m asked, “Where’s Blackroom?” Here, finally, is the answer. The demo and video have not been released publicly.
The pitch video opens with Santiago, our engineer-turned-hero, receiving his assignment. One of Hoxar’s holosims, their term for simulations, is experiencing anomalies. Santiago needs to enter the holosim, diagnose the issue, and repair it. He steps into the Blackroom, an open space with blue grid lines mapped over black walls, ceiling, and floor. A voice announces that the Blackroom holo sequence will initiate in three … two …
As the viewer watches from Santiago’s point of view, the simulation loads in like a wave. A realistic environment spreads like water being poured: blue grid lines fade and are replaced by rocks, trees, and uneven terrain. The player is now outside Ravenscroft Manor in one of Hoxar’s most popular holosim games, “The Curse of the Ebon Raven.” Its title appears in the sky ahead as, in the distance, the sprawling estate flickers and then solidifies as it finishes loading into the simulation. As Santiago makes his way along a dirt path bordered by large rocks and foliage, he keeps up a dialogue with his partner using the Boxel. He’s not the classic space marine character we popularized in DOOM and Quake, known for inarticulate grunts when hunting for secret rooms hidden behind walls. He’s an inquisitive, intelligent technologist, and he chats with his partner as she informs him that she has marked instances of bizarre activity for him to investigate.* The Ravenscroft Manor holosim starts at night, and although Santiago doesn’t realize it yet, he’s going to have to fight for his life in that manor. The eerie ambience of the game’s soundtrack sets the mood perfectly—for players, and for the publishers we wanted to pitch our game to in just a few months.
Ravenscroft Manor is a sight to behold, with wrought-iron fences, towering columns that appeared carved from white marble, and torches set in iron sconces. Santiago makes his way up a curving marble staircase to the front entrance, which is locked. This presented the perfect opportunity to showcase Santiago’s skills in these virtual worlds. The view reverts to the blue grid lines over a black background—kind of like Detective Mode in the Batman: Arkham games—only the simulation maintains its three-dimensionality. Santiago is still looking at stairs, trees, and marble pillars; they are just black and covered in a grid. The exception is the door, which the Boxel has registered as a dynamic object. Information about objects appears in the player’s view, similar to scanning the environment with your visor in Metroid Prime. A text box for the door lists it as a dynamic object locked by the Key of Despair. Players can use the key, but it’s hidden in the catacombs beneath the nearby town of Rankleton. (These names were placeholders.)
Santiago doesn’t have the key, and since he’s under some time pressure, he uses his Boxel to remove the door (remember, he’s an engineer who works for the company that makes these simulations, not just a Hoxar client going through them). This process takes a few seconds. Although the demo didn’t come right out and say so, it invited the audience to imagine scenarios where time was the critical resource: Maybe something huge and terrifying is chasing them and they come to a dead end—a locked door. The player doesn’t have a key. They can use a tool to modify the environment, but it takes precious seconds, while they’re sweating up a storm, hoping against hope that the door will vanish before the monster catches up to them. They could also run away or turn around and fight.
In the case of the demo, the door was programmed to always disappear. Santiago switches back to the simulation view and steps into a foyer with oak-paneled walls lined with bookcases and stairs that take the player up to walkways bordered by a wooden railing. Off to one side is a pair of sofas placed near a stone fireplace set in the center of one wall. A painting is hung above the mantel, and light fixtures on the walls and chandeliers overhead give the manor a stately if spookily quiet feel. It’s a setting that would look right at home in a Resident Evil game, but there are worse things than zombies waiting for this player. The first sign of the abnormal activity Santiago was sent to diagnose is the statue in the center of the room. It’s a carving of Arthur Ravenscroft, a singer whose descent into madness spurred him to build Ravenscroft Manor. The statue flickers and fades, giving off a fuzziness like a bad TV signal. Switching to the grid view gives the player information about Arthur, along with a troubling message—STATUS: GLITCH DETECTED, written in blood-red text. Santiago reports this to his partner, who asks him to record what he’s seeing. Ominously, she isn’t seeing the same thing from the control room.
In the demo, Santiago wanders over to the fireplace. One of the sofas flickers in and out of place. Scanning it displays the same STATUS: GLITCH DETECTED message. Before either character can say anything else, the computerized voice reports that an anomaly has been detected. “What the hell?” Santiago says as a monster charges at him from the side. This is the player’s first look at a glitch, a four-legged beast that bull-rushes you like pinkies and has glowing eyes set deep in its skull-shaped head and spikes jutting from its body. Blackroom is a first-person shooter, so naturally Santiago equips a double-barreled shotgun. However, the player doesn’t juggle weapons the way players do in other FPS games. “Military ordinance enabled,” the voice says as the gun materializes in the player’s hands. Remember, this is a simulation. With a mere thought, Santiago has summoned his weapon from the simulation’s database. He lets fly with both barrels, and blood sprays with every hit. He circles the monster as he fires. Little effects cement the audience in Blackroom’s setting, such as the statue blinking in and out of existence as Santiago and the beast do battle. When the shotgun doesn’t seem enough to get a job done, it fades away in a flash and is replaced by a futuristic rocket launcher. Santiago maneuvers to the stairs and rocket-jumps up to the second floor, where he fires one more rocket. It’s not a direct hit, but the splash damage it inflicts on the floor is enough. The beast growls as it collapses. Its body pulses with digital runes. Santiago switches to the grid view, but his Boxel lists the entity as unknown, explaining that it’s not registered in Hoxar’s database. “Analysis reveals procedural merging of multiple Predictive Memory personas. Highly dangerous.”
When Santiago asks if his partner is getting all this in control, she replies that she’s registering multiple anomalies, but what she sees looking at the simulation from reality isn’t the same as what he sees from inside it. Exploring the second floor, Santiago comes to a dead end when he notices a glitch in the wall. It manifests as something dark, almost like television static, and it looks like it’s crawling beneath the wallpaper. Scanning it reveals that it’s a sliding wall that can be opened using a switch. A glowing blue line unfurls along the grid: It’s a trail the player, as Santiago, can follow if they want to get to the next area of interest right away. As he follows the line, the robotic voice rattles off another node number, and another four-legged monster appears out of thin air. Santiago puts it down. “Santiago, what’s happening?” his partner asks. He reports that he’s found and killed another monster and is detecting multiple glitches in the area ahead. This is another tool, a way for players who are diligent about scanning their surroundings to be prepared for monsters to attack.
The line stops at a bookshelf. Scanning it shows a book, glowing orange, that’s actually a switch, one of the deranged musician’s secrets that will open a passageway when pulled. Sure enough, it causes the glitchy wall Santiago found earlier to slide open. He has to backtrack to get there, but he can move in gliding bursts—one of many abilities at the player’s fingertips as an engineer with almost total control over simulations—to cover ground faster. Entering the secret passage, Santiago finds a rug containing a glitch, and a mysterious portal at the end of one corridor. As he moves toward the opening, the walls, floor, and portal flash and flicker rapidly, signaling the worst glitch he’s encountered yet. Through the portal, he gets a view of a colorful fantasy world—something he absolutely should not be seeing. He steps through, and the haunting music is swapped out for an intense metal track, signifying a change in tempo and setting. His partner panics and informs him he’s disappeared from the “Curse of the Ebon Raven” simulation. He reports that he’s in a completely different, unknown holosim.
Before she can respond, the computerized voice calls out the presence of another node. In Santiago’s periphery, the wings of the biggest monster yet beat at the air. The screen fades to black, and the Blackroom title appears. The demo was over, and so was Santiago, if the player didn’t handle that situation well. Now the pitching process could begin.
Keith, Warren, and I were thrilled with the demo, and with the video walkthrough of it we put together to show it off. I traveled to Gamescom and gave our Blackroom presentation to multiple publishers. Publishers liked the demo, and few of them were very interested. Talks went back and forth, but none panned out. In the end, it came down to the game having already failed publicly in its Kickstarter.
Behind the scenes at game development studios, ideas are a dime a dozen. Sometimes, those ideas make it to concept and demo phase, like Blackroom did. Sometimes, they make it past that and go on to development and release. There’s a figure I sometimes hear kicked around in the game industry—for every ten games started, one makes it to completion. I suspect its actually more games started than that, like for every one hundred games pitched in demo form, one makes it to completion. Even that estimate might be generous. Kickstarter gave people outside of game dev a chance to see behind the scenes: a game concept coming to life, getting a demo, but ultimately not succeeding. In a sense, it wasn’t much different than the original attempt at Quake in 1991. We had a demo for it, but we decided not to go forward. With Blackroom, the decision to not go forward wasn’t exactly ours, but it was definitely the best decision in the end.
In the weeks and months after halting the Kickstarter, we received inquiries from countless outlets who wanted to know what was happening with the game and where we planned to take it next. We decided its public story would end there. Perhaps there would come a point in time when we would tell it, we reasoned. This is that time. Blackroom was a concept that became a demo, and that’s all it was destined to become. It was time to focus on other games.
* I intended for players to be able to play as either Santiago or as his partner, Maria.