The biggest entertainment software convention of the year was nine days away, and John Romero still didn't have his monsters finished or his dialogue written. The computer gaming masses who descend upon Atlanta this Thursday for the third annual Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) will be lining up to test-drive the latest offering from the man who designed some of the seminal CD-ROM games of the 1990s--including Doom, Doom II and Quake--but as of last week, Romero and his team were still scrambling to get the demo done.
Being under the gun is nothing new to Romero. For five years, he and the other co-founders of id Software rolled out one ultraviolent shoot-'em-up game after another, in the process becoming legends in the gaming world: designer Romero for the orgiastic mayhem of his monster-filled scenarios; artist Adrian Carmack for his dystopian, mazelike backdrops; and programmer John Carmack (no relation) for game engines that create an uncanny sense of careering movement through a real three-dimensional space.
This time, however, Romero is competing not with id but against it. Last November he and id marketing whiz Mike Wilson abruptly left the company, hooked up with Tom Hall (an id designer who had left earlier), moved into a Dallas skyscraper and announced the birth of a new company, ION Storm. Their first product is called Daikatana, and the E3 show this week is their best chance to spark some buzz for a Christmas '97 software season in which they will almost certainly go head-to-head with id's Quake II. How to finish the demo in time? "Get in at 2 p.m.," says Romero, "and stay until 4 in the morning." And repeat daily until the job is done.
The ability to work around the clock, along with his childhood obsession with games like Pac-Man and his Bill Gatesian decision to drop out of college to write software, are traits Romero shares with many top-notch programmers. He met Hall and the two Carmacks at a company called Soft Disk in Shreveport, La., in 1989, and within two years the four had launched id, settling by 1992 in a Dallas suburb called Mesquite.
Six years later, id's 3-D bloodfests have spawned a worldwide gaming revolution and made its founders cult heroes and multimillionaires before age 30. Sports cars and magazine covers swiftly followed. Romero in particular wore the mantle of pop-culture godhood with aplomb. If the four founders were, as Wired magazine dubbed them last August, "The Egos at id," then Romero, with his lion's mane of black hair, his Tudor mansion, his Testarossa, BMW and Humvee, was the superego.
Why did the hottest game-development team in PC history break up faster than the Beatles? According to Romero, it was because his vision of gaming perfection clashed with John Carmack's vision of coding perfection and lost. Carmack saw id as a boutique company, cranking out one title a year based on his latest it'll-be-ready-when-it's-ready game engine--which left lead designer Romero feeling like a second-class citizen. "We were spending all this time making data for this engine that wasn't even done yet," Romero says, frustration still edging his voice, "and then we'd have to throw it all away because John decided to change something."