Free Masters of Doom by David Kushner

was living
     and breathing in a more expansive virtual space. It became a phenomenal hit—filling
     almost as many arcades as Space Invaders and beating out Pac-Man as the industry’s
     Game of the Year. Countless scrolling games would follow. By 1989 scrolling was the
     “it” technology, fueling in part the success of the bestselling home video game in
     history at the time: Super Mario Brothers 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
    But at this moment, in September 1990, no one had yet figured out how to scroll games
     for the PC; instead, they would use lame trickery to make the player feel like the
     action was larger than the screen. A player might get to the right edge of the screen
     and then, in one clunky movement, see the panel from the right shift over into place.
     The reason, in part, was the PCs’ slow speed, which paled compared with those of arcade
     machines, the Apple II, or home consoles like the Nintendo. Carmack was determined
     to find a way to create a smooth scrolling effect, like the one in Defender or Super
     Mario.
    The next Gamer’s Edge game would be a step in that direction. When the crew discussed
     ideas for the game, Carmack demonstrated a technology he was working on that could
     scroll the action down the screen. Unlike the more sophisticated scrolling games,
     this one was set up like a treadmill—the graphics would descend the screen on a steady,
     set path. There was no sense that the player was willfully moving up through the action.
     It was more like standing on a stage and having a rolling landscape painting move
     behind the actor.
    Romero, the erudite gamer who had played nearly every available title for the PC,
     had never seen anything like it; here was a chance at being the first. They called
     the game Slordax; it would be a straightforward shoot-the-spaceships descendant of
     arcade hits like Space Invaders and Galaga. They had four weeks.
    From the start of the work on Slordax, the team gelled. Carmack would bang away at
     his code for the graphics engine while Romero developed the programming tools to create
     the actual characters and sections of the game. As Carmack engineered breakthrough
     code, Romero designed gripping game play. Tom Hall even managed to sneak into the
     Gamer’s Edge office to create the creatures and backgrounds. Adrian, meanwhile, would
     sketch out the spaceships and asteroids on his screen. It was clear right away to
     Romero that the quiet intern was talented.
    Though still new to computers, Adrian quickly assimilated with a palette on screen.
     Computer art at the time was almost like pointillism because game graphics were so
     limited. Most had only four colors, in what was known as Computer Graphics Adapter,
     or CGA; recently, games had evolved to allow sixteen colors in Enhanced Graphics Adapter,
     EGA. But that was still pretty tight for an artist. Adrian had only a few colors at
     his disposal. He couldn’t even push them together; he just had to bring the worlds
     to life with what he had. People in the business called this craft “pushing pixels.”
     And it was clear that Adrian could push pixels with ease.
    It was also clear that Adrian liked to keep a profile so low it was almost subterranean.
     One reason he kept to himself was that he didn’t know what to make of these gamers.
     Carmack was like a robot, the way he spoke in little clipped sentences with the strange
     “mmm” punctuation at the end. He could sit there all day and code, not saying anything
     but turning out amazing work. Romero was just plain
bizarre,
making all these sick jokes about disembowelment and dismemberment, and all those
     twisted Melvin cartoons he still drew. Adrian thought he was pretty funny too.
    Tom Hall was another story. The first time Adrian met him was when Tom came leaping
     into the room in blue tights, a white undershirt, a cape, and a big plastic sword.
     He stood there, raised his eyebrow, and made a strange alien beep, to which