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Carmack's perfectionism, Romero felt, was costly. Why were they waiting around month after month to make just one game using Carmack's Doom engine, when in the same time they could have released three variations on the Doom theme? "id was just too limiting," he says dismissively. "Too small. Small thinking."
John Carmack doesn't disagree with Romero's description of their clashing priorities. "I'm doing what I want to do now, and it happens to be making us millions of dollars," he told TIME last week, in one of his first public comments on the split with his former partner. Carmack doesn't want to grow id into a big company. "There's only so many Ferraris I want to own," he says. But he takes issue with Romero's version of their breakup. "John's a good designer, and he's got artistic talent. But the fact is that after he got rich and famous, the push to work just wasn't there anymore." Romero didn't quit last fall, says Carmack. "He was handed his resignation."
Now the two young moguls will put their competing visions to the test. ION's big idea is that the age of game technology is over and the age of game design has begun. "Three-D is like Technicolor," says Wilson, pooh-poohing the value of Carmack's perpetual tinkering with his game engines (the latest, code-named Trinity, is due next year). "Once you're there, you're there. It's time to focus on content."
To that end, ION has three autonomous design teams working in parallel, each producing a title in one of the classic computer-game genres. Hall's team is creating a role-playing game called Anachronox, while designer Todd Porter and his team develop Doppelganger, a strategy game. Both are due out next year. For now, ION's bread and butter is the 3-D action game Romero's team is building.
Daikatana, ironically, uses the Quake game engine (id happily licenses Carmack's old engines to any developer willing to pay royalties). It's an expanded version of the standard id action game, with a list of new tricks: where Quake had seven weapons, Daikatana promises 35; to Quake's 10 monsters, Daikatana will offer 64. (Carmack scoffs at these numbers, saying there's "no chance" ION will finish a game of this size in time for the Christmas shopping season.) Daikatana also departs from Quake's Gothic aesthetic with a time-travel story line that allows four levels with four distinct looks: ancient Greece, medieval Europe, San Francisco circa 2030, and the far future.
Daikatana also features a pair of talking characters who act as allies to the human player--a bold departure from standard-issue 3-D carnage that Romero hopes will boost emotional involvement and, eventually, help turn mere games into immersive dramas. "The Internet is sucking people away from TV like crazy," he says, anticipating the day when computer users will tune in to the ION Website as they used to tune in to prime-time TV shows. "Every week the latest Daikatana episode would be up on our site at, say, Friday at 9 p.m.," he says. "It could have new music, new levels, new characters--whatever we can throw over the Internet."