Hurt Me Plenty

May 23, 2000 — 16:11

The penthouse was hot. Romero was thirty-two. The GameSpot review had been up for eleven minutes.

The penthouse was hot because the architect had insisted on a fiberglass roof in Dallas, and the architect had been Romero. He had loved the roof when it was a drawing. He had loved it standing on the empty fifty-fourth floor in 1997 with Russ Berger explaining how the Texas light would come through and turn the room into a cathedral, which it had. The cathedral, two years in, was a furnace. The team had draped black fabric over every cubicle in their second month, and the fabric had stayed up since, sagging in places where someone had thumbtacked it wrong, blooming dust in the still air. From the elevators you saw the fabric first and the people second. Romero had a theory that the building had stopped being his idea and become his fault somewhere between the day they moved in and the day the fabric went up. He did not write the theory down. He kept it in the same place he kept the other ones.

The GameSpot review had been up for eleven minutes and the score was 4.6.

The review had finished loading at 16:00 exactly, by his terminal's clock, which was set against a time server in Boulder. The publicist from Eidos had called at 15:54. The publicist's name was Patty Bramson. Patty had been on hold for thirty-one minutes at the moment the page finished resolving, because Romero had pressed the hold button at 15:23 with a fresh Diet Coke in his hand and Patty's voice in his ear saying John, hi, you have a minute, and he had thought, with the part of him that took decisions on his behalf, no I do not. He had walked away from the desk. He had walked to the south window. He had walked back. He had sat down. He had loaded the page. He had picked up the Diet Coke. He had not pressed the hold release. Patty was still on the line. The hold-line indicator on the phone was a small blinking red dot at the lower-right, which he could see from the corner of his eye if he tilted his head slightly to the left.

The Diet Coke had been in his hand when the page loaded. It was still in his hand. It had been warm for an hour. The condensation ring on the desk had dried. The aluminum had the specific quality of warm aluminum — a metal that had wanted to be cold and given up. The critic who reviewed it for GameSpot did not, as a rule, give 4.6 scores. He gave 8.4 scores and 9.1 scores — the kind of score that, when Romero had been twenty-five, had felt like a man on the other side of a window saying I see you. His review had a sentence in its second paragraph: Daikatana is not an unmitigated disaster — but unfortunately, that's not enough to endorse it. The sentence sat there like a thing that had been put there to be read out loud at parties and would be.

Romero read it again. He read it three times. Then he leaned back in his chair, which was a Herman Miller Aeron and had cost the company fifteen hundred dollars per chair, four hundred and twelve chairs of them, and he laughed. The laugh was not a real laugh. It was the laugh he had been doing in interviews for two years, the laugh that meant you cannot land a hit on this man, the laugh he had perfected the way other men perfected handshakes. It made him feel briefly better. It made his throat hot.

Somewhere in the building, through three walls and across the development pit, somebody had left a monitor on with the Doom soundtrack playing low. Bobby Prince's E1M1 theme. It came in at the threshold of audibility, the bass not coming through, the snare ghost-light over the air-conditioning, the small repeating pattern of a thing built by a man in 1993 in a studio in Florida who had never met any of them and had been instructed by Romero to make music that sounded like what's at the back of the closet at three a.m., which Bobby had. The track played for nine seconds and looped and played again.

Romero registered it the way he registered everything that had been in the building since 1998, which was at a distance.

He scrolled.

He did not have to. There were three more reviews up by now — IGN had a 5.8, Computer Gaming World had not posted yet but Robert Coffey had emailed his editor the column header and someone had leaked it to a Usenet thread an hour ago, the header was DAIKATANA: WORST GAME OF 2000. PC Zone had run a sentence that was already on its way to becoming the second most-quoted sentence ever written about Romero, the first having been the one Mike Wilson had written for the magazine ad in April 1997. Romero's reputation is based on the fact that he is the daddy of game design. Daikatana must be his illegitimate child. He did not click on PC Zone. He scrolled past it and clicked on a Slashdot thread instead, which was a mistake but was the mistake he had been training himself to make for four years, ever since he had moved into the penthouse and stopped being able to walk past a screen with his name on it.

The Slashdot thread had four hundred comments and the top comment said suck it down.

He closed the browser.

He sat for a moment with his hand still on the mouse and watched the screen go back to the desktop wallpaper, which was a screenshot of E1M1 of Doom from December 1993, the level he had built in three days at the lake house while Tom Hall watched and ate Pringles and made him change the lighting on the back wall four times. The screenshot showed the bend in the corridor where the soldier first sees you, the angled wall he'd added to break sightline. He had been twenty-six. He had built that bend with his hands inside an editor he and Carmack had written together, on the NeXT cube whose fan he could still hear in the apartment in his head if he closed his eyes. He could close his eyes now, in fact, and he did, and the fan was there, with the second-bearing wobble he had not heard since 1994 and would not be able to un-hear for the rest of his life.

The penthouse was hot.

He opened his eyes. He stood up. He went to the window.

The window was the south face, fifty-fourth floor, and it gave you Dallas in the way Dallas gives itself, which is at a small angle, which is freeway and antenna and the white tops of the smaller buildings repeating south to the edge of vision. He had picked the south face for his office because he had wanted to see the storm fronts coming in. The storm fronts came in from the south in April and May and went over the building and went on. Standing at the window he could see the parking garage and the wedge of street where the yellow Hummer was parked. The Hummer was his. The Testarossa was downstairs in the climate-controlled bay. The Hummer was for being seen in. The Testarossa was for the ride home after midnight when no one was looking and he was alone, which he liked, and which he would not have admitted to anyone, including himself, four years ago.

Behind him in his office his terminal made the small green sound it made when a new mail came in.

He did not turn.

He stood at the glass and looked at the Hummer and at the Texas afternoon coming off the asphalt in shimmer, and he thought, with the precision of a man who has done a task and not yet allowed himself to think about whether the task was the right one, the team is gone, and Stevie is in her office working on Anachronox, and the kitchen has eleven pizza boxes in it, and the launch is over, and the launch is over, and the launch is over.

The little blinking red dot of Patty's hold-line was visible in the periphery of his vision in the glass, reflected, a small red star four inches off-center from the reflection of his own face.

He turned around.

He went back to the desk. He hit the hold-line button. The line was empty. Patty had given up at some point. She would call back. He set the receiver in the cradle. He did not feel anything about Patty.

He read the mail.

The mail was from his publicist at Eidos and it said call me at your convenience. The mail had been written, the timestamp said, at 16:09, which was a minute after the GameSpot page had finished resolving, which was three minutes after Patty had given up on the hold line. He had a sense that at your convenience was the kind of phrase publicists used when they did not want to be the ones who said the actual thing. He set the message aside. He opened a terminal window — the real one, the green-on-black one, the one he kept open in a corner of the screen at all times the way you keep a window cracked in a house you do not entirely trust.

He typed: finger [email protected].

Carmack's .plan file came up. It came up the way it always came up, which was as a list. Carmack's .plan had been a list since 1995. The list went: asterisk-item asterisk-item asterisk-item plus-item plus-item, the asterisks being things done and the plusses being things to do, and on certain days it included a paragraph at the top in which Carmack permitted himself to say something that was not on the list, and these paragraphs were what Romero came for. The most recent paragraph was dated May 15, 2000, which was eight days ago, which was three days before the gold master burned, which was the week of the rocket launch in the Mojave.

The paragraph said: Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

Below it was a list of code changes for the GeForce 256 evaluation. Below the list was a comment about GPL-ing the Quake source. Below the comment was nothing about Daikatana. Below the nothing about Daikatana was nothing about Romero. Below the nothing about Romero was nothing.

Romero read the paragraph twice. Then he leaned back in his chair, which made the very small Herman Miller sound he had still not gotten used to, and he laughed again, and this time the laugh was almost a real one.

Carmack did not know.

Carmack did not know that Daikatana had shipped on Tuesday, and that GameSpot had given it 4.6, and that PC Zone had called it an illegitimate child. Carmack was in California or back in Texas with his new wife and he was watching a rocket fail in the desert because he wanted to build a better rocket and that was what he did. He had married Anna Kang on January 1, 2000. Romero had heard about it from Adrian Carmack secondhand five weeks later. He had thought Y2K morning and then he had thought who gets married on Y2K morning, and then he had thought Carmack does, and then he had stopped thinking about it. The Mojave rocket entry was eight days old and the man who had written it had not noticed that there was a thing in the world called Daikatana and that the thing had been let out of its room on Tuesday.

Romero read the paragraph a third time.

The room was hot.

He sat very still.

Outside, fifty-four floors below, a horn went off in traffic. He did not hear it. What he heard, with the part of his hearing that lived behind his eyes and that the office had paid eighteen million dollars to make him forget, was the fan of the NeXT cube in the apartment at La Prada in 1992. He heard the fan, and then he heard the sound the floppy made when it was inserted into the drive, and then he heard, with absolute fidelity, the sound a 320x200 EGA monitor made when a screen was scrolling, which was no sound at all, which was the absence of every previous sound he had associated with the word scrolling.

He closed his eyes.

He let it come.