In the last year of making Anachronox, Tom Hall worked, in his own later words, 'fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for 1.3 years.' The game was a science-fiction role-playing game, and it was being built in Dallas, Texas, at Ion Storm, a company that had already lost most of its reputation. His team sat on a different floor from the rest of the company. It never had more than thirteen people.
Hall had started somewhere much smaller. In 1987 he took a job at Softdisk in Louisiana, a company that mailed software to subscribers on floppy disks every month. He worked there as a programmer and as the editor of the Softdisk bundle. There he met John Carmack, John Romero and Adrian Carmack.
In 1990 Carmack and Hall stayed up through a night and built a PC replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3, using stock art from Romero's game Dangerous Dave. They hoped Nintendo would license it. Nintendo declined. The scrolling technique was real, though, and it became the first Commander Keen game, released through Apogee in December 1990. In February 1991 the four founded id Software. Hall led the design of the Keen series and invented the Dopefish, a green fish with a dull stare who appears in Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy.
In 1992 Hall was creative director of Wolfenstein 3D. Then, as work on Doom began, he wrote a design document that fans now call the Doom Bible. It was a plan for a game with a plot, a backstory and named places, including a setting called Tei Tenga. Hall wanted players to have a reason to care about what they were shooting.
Carmack did not. As sources describe it, he wanted a fast, continuous world, and he held that a game's story is expected to be there but is not that important. Romero sided with him. Hall reworked the document to fit their ideas, and most of the story was dropped. Some of it survived: the Tei Tenga setting, a marine held prisoner, and the title Knee-Deep in the Dead. Hall left id Software in August 1993. Doom shipped that December without his name in the credits as creative director.
He joined Apogee in August 1993 and worked on Rise of the Triad, Terminal Velocity and Duke Nukem 3D. He left Apogee on August 12, 1996. In November of that year he and Romero co-founded Ion Storm. Eidos put in thirteen million dollars. The company then went through Daikatana, eight developers quitting in protest in 1998, and a leak of internal emails to a newspaper.
Hall's own project, Anachronox, was a role-playing game with the feel of Japanese RPGs and animated comedies. By the account of the people who worked on it, Hall had little management experience and chose kindness over pressure. 'I was always focused on being the kindest to employees I could be,' he said. Writer Richard Gaubert said Hall wanted to give the team 'a safe place to play, explore, and feel free to fail.' Lead programmer Squirrel Eiserloh was less sentimental: the team, he said, 'didn't feel enough of the whip, maybe.' The design was eventually cut in half, because it was too large to finish.
After Daikatana, Eidos decided to complete Anachronox and then close the Dallas studio. Part of the reason it paid for the finish was Hall's reputation inside the company. Anachronox came out in North America on June 27, 2001, with little marketing. Reviews were good. It lost money. The Dallas office closed within days of its release. Hall planned a sequel to use the content that had been cut, but it was never made. He kept working in games, and in 2020 and 2021 he was a designer on the virtual-reality tabletop game Demeo.
The Doom Bible lost its argument, and Doom became one of the most influential games ever made without Hall's plot. Anachronox lost its studio and is remembered now by the people who played it and the people who made it. What he kept was the way he treated the thirteen people on that floor. If the place you have been given is the one nobody is watching, what would you make safe inside it?