David Kushner

Presents a dual biography of John Carmack and John Romero, the creators of the video games Doom and Quake, assessing the impact of their creation on American pop culture and revealing how their success eventually destroyed their relationship.

How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

Masters of Doom

“To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.” —Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. From the Hardcover edition.

Sven Schmidt

Patrick Book

Sooooo interesting! I had either forgotten or never knew how many of the games I liked in my youth were the result of one group of prolific young men. But this is a great "rise and fall" story from an industry that probably has more than their fair share of them.

Lovro Oreskovic

A great book about an untold history of human history. It is really well researched and well written book. I would recommend it as a great read even for non gamers.

Tobias V. Langhoff

Recently, a new Doom game was released to much fanfare. And not long ago, Wolfenstein: The New Order came out, a refreshing and, most of all, fun take on the classic Wolfenstein 3D. These are both reboots of two ground-breaking franchises from id Software, and this book is a great documentation of the circumstances surrounding their development and release.

The story has a cool structure. We follow the two main personas of id Software, the two Johns Romero and Carmack; from their formative years as game developers, to their first meeting, when they work together, when they form their own company where their different personalities and approaches first complement each other but then alienate them from each other.

This structure, focusing on John & John, means that auxiliary characters are introduced on a need-to-know basis, which sometimes becomes jarring: Some persons are introduced when they become relevant, when it’s suddenly revealed that they have actually been working in the small indie game company for years alongside the main men.

As the name of the book suggests, and unsurprisingly, the story is told around the development and release of Doom, the revolutions it brought forth on the PC gaming scene, and the birth of esports as a result. My favorite platformer from my youth, Commander Keen, is also featured heavily, which was nice. Also, Quake – I played a lot of Quake as a youth, and I must admit that, because of my young age, Quake and Doom to a certain extent are conflated into one game in my mind. It’s also hard for me to appreciate exactly how ground-breaking these games were when they came out, although as a developer myself the focus on Carmack’s new graphics algorithms is very interesting. I felt Carmack was the main character of the story (his speech mannerisms, idiosyncrasies and rocketry enthusiasm also gets some page time), although Romero is also central as a visionary.

Speaking of Carmack, the description of him as a creator of virtual worlds with a vision of a future virtual reality akin to the Holodeck (“It’s a moral imperative that we must create this.”) makes it much easier to understand how he eventually ended up as the CTO of Oculus Rift (although that happened long after this book was released).

His view on politics is also briefly touched upon: Carmack releasing the source code of his games “was not only a gracious move but an ideological one—a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations.” Leftist, indeed, although Carmack is really a staunch libertarian.

The book seems well researched, although I happened upon the odd error. For example, the creators of the highly successful computer game Myst are named as Rand and Robyn Scott, even though they’re actually named Rand and Robyn Miller. I can only assume the “culprit” is another person featured in the book, the id employee Scott Miller.

The best story I've read in years. I wanted it to last forever. 

Daniel Toke Hansen

Gavin

Kinda amateurish prose, everything "classic" and "legendary" in the same sentence.
 
 It's saved by the singular, remarkable character Carmack. Neuroatypical, ascetic, principled, focussed to the point of dissociation. He slept on the floor for months, despite being rich, because he didn't see the need for comfort. An excellent example of what someone profoundly creative can do, if they also love work. (: All the glories of the species.)

 Romero is less interesting, because he is a fairly ordinary tech startup founder (with a sicker sense of humour and less self-suppression), mendacious and loud. "To the outside world, Romero was id." He may have invented gaming smack talk, by screaming at people in LAN tournaments. If you've never been on Xbox Live, you probably haven't had a 9 year-old child scream that you're a faggot and a noob. The child is channeling Romero.

I concede that there would have been no Doom Moment without Romero's hyping it - that together these two men form one functioning human being.

 Kushner occasionally adds value, e.g. when he notes that id were to gaming what technical metal was to music: the marriage of virtuosity with extreme content, "high technology and gruesome gameplay". To see how important skill is in selling a dark aesthetic, compare the Learjet-level success of fancy metal with the parochial subsistence of hardcore punk. 

He also sees an entire type very clearly: the alpha nerd, with all his lofty contempt, Ferraris, workaholism, disloyalty, pranks, energy. This is much more common in life than in media.

Repetitive though; skim.

Bouke van der Bijl

I flew through this book in just a weekend. Most of this story happened before I was born—yet through this book I lived it all. A total ode to the individual hackers that revolutionized computer games forever, with OG ‘rockstar programmer’ John Carmack and game development visionary John Romero as the protagonists. Just like the book ‘Skunkworks’ this one highlights the innovations small teams under great constraints can achieve. It makes me want to start my own company developing for the current cutting-edge mobile devices, and pushing the status-quo much further than it currently is

I am not worthy!

Incredible history of the start of the modern gaming industry 

Kesar Varma

Todd Luallen

An excellent book. I'm not a huge Will Wheaton fan, as many others clearly seem to be, but there is no doubt that he brings tremendous enthusiasm to the Audible book narration. Kushner details all the information in a compelling and well paced manner, and he touches on the challenging issues, both moral and political. The book does have a fair bit of foul language as the author is detailing dialogue, so keep that in mind - although having worked in games for 20 years now, it certainly rings true.

Kait Long

Highly enjoyable read. Reminded me of the origin story for Ready Player One.

Radimir Bitsov

It was a great experience to read this book. It describes one of the golden periods of the video games development and more specifically the contribution of the Two Johns to push the limits of the technologies back then. I really like the inside look of the Id's way of creating video games and the relationships between the main personas. The last describe the ups and downs of the creative persons on their way to achieve certain goals and create something unseen. Totally recommend this book especially to everyone that grew up with the video games and have all these precious memories like me.

Barry Hess

For someone who grew up gaming around the time of the Doom arrival, this book was greatly interesting. The development of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake was a roller coaster ride of can-do, pizza and Ferraris. The insights into business and technology innovation were nice, though not extremely frequent.

Adam

One of the first computer games I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D on my moms Packard Bell 386 computer. Eventually I also played Doom on it as well. At the time I didn't realize what was behind those games. Masters is more a biography of John Carmack and John Romero - the technical and design talent behind these games and id software.

It's crazy to me how this company got started -- "borrowing" computers from their day job to program on them at night and eventually release Wolfenstein. The small group of guys working in their house part time ended up impacting the world of video games as much as anyone else has, and this is the rise and fall of that empire.

James Bedford

I read this about 15 years ago, but to this day it is one of my favourite books. This is what gave me the first proper introduction to computer programming.

Masters of Doom How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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