Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture [Hardcover]

David Kushner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2003

“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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first person and messily lay waste to everything that crosses your path, represented a milestone in many areas. It was a technical landmark, in that its graphics engine delivered brilliant performance on ordinary PC hardware. It was a social phenomenon, with individuals and companies hooking up networks specifically for Doom tournaments and staying up for days to blast away on them (well before the Internet went big-time). The game's publisher, id Software, used an unusual shareware marketing strategy (give away the first levels, charge for the more advanced ones) that worked very well. On top of it all, the gore-filled game raised serious questions about decency in products meant for use by school-age kids. Masters of Doom explores the Doom phenomenon, as well as the lives and personalities of the two men behind it: John Carmack and John Romero.

This book manages, for the most part, to keep clear of the breathless techno-hagiography style that characterizes many books with similar subjects. He tells the story of Carmack, Romero, and id--which includes far more than Doom and its successors--in novel style, and he's done a good job of keeping the action flowing and the characters' motivations clear. Some of the quoted passages of dialog sound like idealized reconstructions that probably never came from the lips of real people, but this is an entertaining and informative book, of interest to anyone who's let rip with a nail gun. --David Wall

Topics covered: The biographies of John Carmack and John Romero, and of their company, id Software. The development and marketing of all major id games (including Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom II, and Quake) get lavish attention.

From Publishers Weekly

Long before Grand Theft Auto swept the video gaming world, whiz kids John Romero and John Carmack were shaking things up with their influential-and sometimes controversial-video game creations. The two post-adolescents meet at a small Louisiana tech company in the mid-1980s and begin honing their gaming skills. Carmack is the obsessive and antisocial genius with the programming chops; Romero the goofy and idea-inspired gamer. They and their company, id, innovate both technologically and financially, finding ways to give a PC game "side-scrolling," which allows players to feel like action is happening beyond the screen, and deciding to release games as shareware, giving some levels away gratis and enticing gamers to pay for the rest. All-nighters filled with pizza, slavish work and scatological humor eventually add up to a cultural sea change, where the games obsess the players almost as much as they obsess their creators. Fortunately, journalist Kushner glosses over Carmack and Romero's fame, preferring to describe the particulars of video game creation. There are the high-tech improvements-e.g., "diminished lighting" and "texture-mapping"-and pop cultural challenges, as when the two create an update of the Nazi-themed shooter Castle Wolfenstein. The author gives his subjects much leeway on the violence question, and his thoroughness results in some superfluous details. But if the narration is sometimes dry, the story rarely is; readers can almost feel Carmack and Romero's thrill as they create, particularly when they're working on their magnum opus, Doom. After finishing the book, readers may come away feeling like they've just played a round of Doom themselves, as, squinting and light-headed, they attempt to re-enter the world.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (May 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375505245
• ISBN-13: 978-0375505249
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (89 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #86 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Biographies

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic Business Parable, June 3, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Hardcover)

Americans spend more money on electronic games than they do on movie tickets. Much of the enthusiasm for the games comes from "Doom" which was released ten years ago. Every gamer knows about Doom, and every parent who had not already worried about it was able to worry about it after it was blamed for inspiring the Columbine murderers. Doom was the brainchild of two gamers and computer geeks who are among the army of dweebs changing the way the world does things electronically. Its huge success merits study and understanding, and in _Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture_ (Random House) by David Kushner, it gets just the sort of exciting and weird history that ought to bring enchantment to gamers, envy to investors, and enjoyment to anyone interested in our modern ways of amusing ourselves.

Their many fans call them "The Two Johns," John Carmack and John Romero. They were both products of broken homes, and of the years when video games were enjoyed in arcades only. Both of them were better at playing video games and writing programs than they were at making grades or making friends. They came up with real innovations, now taken for granted, like side scrolling for the PC or rooms with skewed walls. All were steps to make the games look better, of course, but the overall effect was to make them more involving, increasing the illusion that "You are not just playing the game, you're inhabiting it." They also increased the blood; monsters or bad guys that were killed did not simply vanish when brought into the sights and fired upon. These were not the only innovations; Doom, released in 1993, featured the "Deathmatch" in which players could play together or against each other. There might be mutants afoot, generated by the game, but players could also plot with or against each other, and blow each other away. Doom (and their follow-up, Quake) proved to be so addictive and involving that players would be glued to their computers, even if they were suffering motion sickness induced by the realistic visions on the screen.

The book's concentration on the tale of the two gamers, Carmack the programmer and Romero the designer, will make it a pleasure to read even for those who know nothing about computers. The eventual split between them, fuelled by millions of dollars, is, of course, a classic business parable. Their company changed computer games, and in some ways, the computer industry, forever. _Masters of Doom_ is an impressive documentation of how games got to be the way they are now, as well as a social history of the lives and times of two key game makers. Kushner wisely does not go into deep sociological examination of the effects of the games' violence, but of course the two Johns weren't interested in any moral implications of their wares. "Doom was cowboys and Indians with better special effects," Kushner explains, and though this might be too light an analysis, it is much more fitting than blaming Doom for Columbine. The games may be suitable subjects for moral disdain, but that will make no difference to those who get a rush from spending time in this way, and more importantly, it will make no difference in the millions of dollars spent on games that will probably get more and more like being in a movie, and thus will continue to push computing limits. Carmack and Romero have forever changed people's ability to live out dreams of escape and power, and have changed people's ideas of what computers can do.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely stunning, December 28, 2003

By 

Brian Taylor (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Hardcover)

I cannot give this book any higher praise than I will now attempt to bestow.

This is a fascinating account of perhaps the most intriguing story in the world of computer gaming: the story of id Software's rise to prominence through the development of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, as well as the highly publicized split between the two men most responsible for these blockbusters, the two Johns: John Carmack and John Romero.

The book is not only an entertaining blow-by-blow account of the events that transpired in this story, but is also a cunningly crafted and penetrating look inside the psyche and personality of two fascinating human beings, and the wild initial success of colloboration followed by the bitter conflict bred by the polar forces that drove them. As such, its appeal transcends that of the video gaming community; it is a marvelous case study in sociology as well as a chronicle of the creation of computer games.

Masters of Doom is ultimately a "rise and fall" tale, in a sense. id Software, John Carmack, and John Romero will likely never reach the heights they achieved in the glory days following the release of Doom, but it is arguable that no single company or individual developer will ever do so again either.

The book is uncompromising in its account of the conflicts, and assesses blame only through the eyes of the people involved, without sounding preachy. Kushner assumes a neutral role and presents a remarkably balanced portrayal of the events, siding with neither Romero nor Carmack on the critical issues, leaving the reader with the accurate perception that both were right in their own way.

As a budding game programmer, I found the accounts of Carmack's technological breakthroughs (complete with rudimentary technical explanations as to how they were achieved) fascinating and inspiring. As a game enthusiast who largely cut his teeth on games like Wolfenstein and Doom, I found the story behind the creation of these masterpieces enthralling. And as a human being, I found Kushner's penetrating account of two personalities and the fruits and poisons of their collaboration positively enlightening.

David Kushner, you have done the gaming world an enormous service writing this book, and I strongly urge you to write others of its ilk.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pizza, Diet Coke, Games, and All Night Programming!, May 21, 2003

By 

sporkdude "sporkdude" (San Jose, Ca United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Hardcover)

In this book, David Kushner documents the lives of two influential game programmers, John Romero and John Carmack - the guys who created Doom and id Software. It chronicles the lives, the company, the gaming industry, and the impact of these two young computer geniuses. It's a quick, fluid read that is not only entertaining, but is awe inspiring as well.

This is a fascinating book on many fronts. It describes how two kids got into games from the early childhoods, describes their fascination with computers in general, and their dreams. It goes from a tale of two kids with ideas, to their technological innovations, to business start, to their monumental growth, and finally to their fallout. It sheds light not only independent game programming, but of the type of people who develop and play these first person shooters like Doom.

Not only is this a biography, or a game book, it's also sort of the "startup.com" of the gaming world. With a good mixture of business, gaming, with unique and individual characters, it indirectly describes the world of gaming companies and what it takes to make a good, and bad, company.

While a good book for all, it's a must for anyone who loves games or is into software development.