- Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
+ $3.99 shipping
+ $3.99 shipping


Follow the Author
OK
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture Paperback – May 11, 2004
David Kushner
(Author)
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author?
Learn about Author Central
|
Price
|
New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry"
|
$0.00
|
Free with your Audible trial |

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Ask Alexa to read your book with Audible integration or text-to-speech.
-
Print length368 pages
-
LanguageEnglish
-
PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
-
Publication dateMay 11, 2004
-
Dimensions5.25 x 0.8 x 8 inches
-
ISBN-109780812972153
-
ISBN-13978-0812972153
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Download to your computer
|
Kindle Cloud Reader
|
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are MadePaperback
- Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a GenerationPaperback
- Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft AutoHardcover
- Game Engine Black Book: DOOM: v1.1fabien sanglardPaperback
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer RevolutionPaperback
- The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993--Illustrated EditionHardcover
Customers who bought this item also bought
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are MadePaperback
- Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a GenerationPaperback
- Game Engine Black Book: DOOM: v1.1fabien sanglardPaperback
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer RevolutionPaperback
- The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993--Illustrated EditionHardcover
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The InternetPaperback
Special offers and product promotions
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams
"Masters of Doom is an excellent archetypal tale of hard work and genius being corrupted by fame too young and fortune too fast. I rooted for these guys, was inspired by them, then was disturbed by them, and was fascinated from beginning to end."
—Po Bronson, author of The Nudist on the Late Shift
"Like Hackers, David Kushner's Masters of Doom paints a fascinating portrait of visionary coders transforming a previously marginal hobby into a kind of 21st-century art form -- and enraging an entire generation of parents along the way. Kushner tells the story with intelligence and a great sense of pacing. Masters of Doom is as riveting as the games themselves."
—Steven Johnson, author of Emergence
"Masters of Doom tells the compelling story of the decade-long showdown between gaming's own real-life dynamic duo, played high above the corridors of Doom in the meta-game of industry and innovation. With the narrative passion of a true aficionado, Kushner reminds us that the Internet was not created to manage stock portfolios but to serve as the ultimate networked entertainment platform. It's all just a game."
—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion, Ecstasy Club, and Nothing Sacred
"Are you brainy? Gifted? Deeply alienated? Ever wanted to be a multimillionaire who transformed a major industry? Then Masters of Doom is the book for you!"
—Bruce Sterling, author of Tomorrow Now
“Kushner’s mesmerizing tale of the Two Johns moves at a rapid clip . . . describing the twists and turns of fate that led them to team up in creating the most powerful video games of their generation. . . . An exciting combination of biography and technology.”
—USA Today
“Meticulously researched . . . as a ticktock of the creative process and as insight into a powerful medium too often dismissed as kids’ stuff, Masters of Doom blasts its way to a high score.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[An] extraordinary journey . . . an exhilarating time capsule of a moment in time where anything could happen—and often did. Kushner’s take on this geek uprising is like a breakneck-paced comic book that you can’t put down.”
—Newsday
“Kushner’s portrait of Carmack is lustrous and gripping. . . . An impressive and adroit social history.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Terrifically told . . . The storytelling is so fluid, so addictive, that your twitching thumbs keep working the pages.”
—The Washington Post Book World
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Rock Star
Eleven-year-old John Romero jumped onto his dirt bike, heading for trouble again. A scrawny kid with thick glasses, he pedaled past the modest homes of Rocklin, California, to the Roundtable Pizza Parlor. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be going there this summer afternoon in 1979, but he couldn’t help himself. That was where the games were.
Specifically, what was there was Asteroids, or, as Romero put it, “the coolest game planet Earth has ever seen!” There was nothing else like the feeling he got tapping the control buttons as the rocks hurled toward his triangular ship and the Jaws-style theme music blipped in suspense, dum dum dum dum dum dum; Romero mimicked these video game sounds the way other kids did celebrities. Fun like this was worth risking everything: the crush of the meteors, the theft of the paper route money, the wrath of his stepfather. Because no matter what Romero suffered, he could always escape back into the games.
At the moment, what he expected to suffer was a legendary whipping. His stepfather, John Schuneman—a former drill sergeant—had commanded Romero to steer clear of arcades. Arcades bred games. Games bred delinquents. Delinquency bred failure in school and in life. As his stepfather was fond of reminding him, his mother had enough problems trying to provide for Romero and his younger brother, Ralph, since her first husband left the family five years earlier. His stepfather was under stress of his own with a top-secret government job retrieving black boxes of classified information from downed U.S. spy planes across the world. “Hey, little man,” he had said just a few days before, “consider yourself warned.”
Romero did heed the warning—sort of. He usually played games at Timothy’s, a little pizza joint in town; this time he and his friends headed into a less traveled spot, the Roundtable. He still had his initials, AJR for his full name, Alfonso John Romero, next to the high score here, just like he did on all the Asteroids machines in town. He didn’t have only the number-one score, he owned the entire top ten. “Watch this,” Romero told his friends, as he slipped in the quarter and started to play.
The action didn’t last long. As he was about to complete a round, he felt a heavy palm grip his shoulder. “What the fuck, dude?” he said, assuming one of his friends was trying to spoil his game. Then his face smashed into the machines.
Romero’s stepfather dragged him past his friends to his pickup truck, throwing the dirt bike in the back. Romero had done a poor job of hiding his bike, and his stepfather had seen it while driving home from work. “You really screwed up this time, little man,” his stepfather said. He led Romero into the house, where Romero’s mother and his visiting grandmother stood in the kitchen. “Johnny was at the arcade again,” his stepfather said. “You know what that’s like? That’s like telling your mother ‘Fuck you.’ ”
He beat Romero until the boy had a fat lip and a black eye. Romero was grounded for two weeks. The next day he snuck back to the arcade.
Romero was born resilient, his mother, Ginny, said, a four-and-one-half-pound baby delivered on October 28, 1967, six weeks premature. His parents, married only a few months before, had been living long in hard times. Ginny, good-humored and easygoing, met Alfonso Antonio Romero when they were teenagers in Tucson, Arizona. Alfonso, a first-generation Mexican American, was a maintenance man at an air force base, spending his days fixing air conditioners and heating systems. After Alfonso and Ginny got married, they headed in a 1948 Chrysler with three hundred dollars to Colorado, hoping their interracial relationship would thrive in more tolerant surroundings.
Though the situation improved there, the couple returned to Tucson after Romero was born so his dad could take a job in the copper mines. The work was hard, the effect sour. Alfonso would frequently come home drunk if he came home at all. There was soon a second child, Ralph. John Romero savored the good times: the barbecues, the horsing around. Once his dad stumbled in at 10:00 p.m. and woke him. “Come on,” he slurred, “we’re going camping.” They drove into the hills of saguaro cacti to sleep under the stars. One afternoon his father left to pick up groceries. Romero wouldn’t see him again for two years.
Within that time his mother remarried. John Schuneman, fourteen years her senior, tried to befriend him. One afternoon he found the six-year-old boy sketching a Lamborghini sports car at the kitchen table. The drawing was so good that his stepfather assumed it had been traced. As a test, he put a Hot Wheels toy car on the table and watched as Romero drew. This sketch too was perfect. Schuneman asked Johnny what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy said, “A rich bachelor.”
For a while, this relationship flourished. Recognizing Romero’s love of arcade games, his stepfather would drive him to local competitions—all of which Romero won. Romero was so good at Pac-Man that he could maneuver the round yellow character through a maze of fruit and dots with his eyes shut. But soon his stepfather noticed that Romero’s hobby was taking a more obsessive turn.
It started one summer day in 1979, when Romero’s brother, Ralph, and a friend came rushing through the front door. They had just biked up to Sierra College, they told him, and made a discovery. “There are games up there!” they said. “Games that you don’t have to pay for!” Games that some sympathetic students let them play. Games on these strange big computers.
Romero grabbed his bike and raced with them to the college’s computer lab. There was no problem for them to hang out at the lab. This was not uncommon at the time. The computer underground did not discriminate by age; a geek was a geek was a geek. And since the students often held the keys to the labs, there weren’t professors to tell the kids to scram. Romero had never seen anything like what he found inside. Cold air gushed from the air-conditioning vents as students milled around computer terminals. Everyone was playing a game that consisted only of words on the terminal screen: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building towards a gully. In the distance there is a gleaming white tower.”
This was Colossal Cave Adventure, the hottest thing going. Romero knew why: it was like a computer-game version of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D, as it was commonly known, was a pen-and-paper role-playing game that cast players in a Lord of the Rings–like adventure of imagination. Many adults lazily dismissed it as geekish escapism. But to understand a boy like Romero, an avid D&D player, was to understand the game.
Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event. D&D would grow into an international cottage industry, accounting for $25 million in annual sales from novels, games, T-shirts, and rule books.
The appeal was primal. “In Dungeons and Dragons,” Gygax said, “the average person gets a call to glory and becomes a hero and undergoes change. In the real world, children, especially, have no power; they must answer to everyone, they don’t direct their own lives, but in this game, they become super powerful and affect everything.” In D&D, there was no winning in the traditional sense. It was more akin to interactive fiction. The participants consisted of at least two or three players and a Dungeon Master, the person who would invent and direct the adventures. All they needed was the D&D rule book, some special polyhedral dice, and a pencil and paper. To begin, players chose and developed characters they would become in the game, from dwarves to elves, gnomes to humans.
Gathered around a table, they would listen as the Dungeon Master cracked open the D&D rule book—which contained descriptions of monsters, magic, and characters—and fabricated a scene: down by a river, perhaps, a castle shrouded in mist, the distant growl of a beast. Which way shall you go? If the players chose to pursue the screams, the Dungeon Master would select just what ogre or chimera they would face. His roll of the die determined how they fared; no matter how wild the imaginings, a random burst of data ruled one’s fate. It was not surprising that computer programmers liked the game or that one of the first games they created, Colossal Cave Adventure, was inspired by D&D.
The object of Colossal Cave was to fight battles while trying to retrieve treasures within a magical cave. By typing in a direction, say “north” or “south,” or a command, “hit” or “attack,” Romero could explore what felt like a novel in which he was the protagonist. As he chose his actions, he’d go deeper into the woods until the walls of the lab seemed to become trees, the air-conditioning flow a river. It was another world. Imbued with his imagination, it was real.
Even more impressively, it was an alternate reality that he could create. Since the seventies, the electronic gaming industry had been dominated by arcade machines like Asteroids and home consoles like the Atari 2600. Writing software for these platforms required expensive development systems and corporate backing. But computer games were different. They were accessible. They came with their own tools, their own portals—a way inside. And the people who had the keys were not authoritarian monsters, they were dudes. Romero was young, but he was a dude in the making, he figured. The Wizard of this Oz could be him.
Every Saturday at 7:30 a.m., Romero would bike to the college, where the students—charmed by his gumption—showed him how to program on refrigerator-size Hewlett-Packard mainframe computers. Developed in the fifties, these were the early giants of the computer industry, monolithic machines that were programmed by inserting series of hole-punched cards that fed the code. IBM, which produced both the computers and the punch card machines, dominated the market, with sales reaching over $7 billion in the 1960s. By the seventies, mainframes and their smaller cousins, the minicomputers, had infiltrated corporations, government offices, and universities. But they were not yet in homes.
For this reason, budding computer enthusiasts like Romero trolled university computer labs, where they could have hands-on access to the machines. Late at night, after the professors went home, students gathered to explore, play, and hack. The computer felt like a revolutionary tool: a means of self-empowerment and fantasy fulfillment. Programmers skipped classes, dates, baths. And as soon as they had the knowledge, they made games.
The first one came in 1958 from the most unlikely of places: a U.S. government nuclear research lab. The head of the Brookhaven Nation Laboratory’s instrumentation division, Willy Higinbotham, was planning a public relations tour of the facility for some concerned local farmers, and needed something to win them over. So, with the help of his colleagues, he programmed a rudimentary tennis simulation using a computer and a small, round oscilloscope screen. The game, which he called “Tennis for 2,” consisted merely of a white dot ball hopping back and forth over a small white line. It thrilled the crowds. Then it was dismantled and put away.
Three years later, in 1961, Steve “Slug” Russell and a group of other students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar, on the first minicomputer, the PDP-1. In this game, two players shot up each other’s rocket ships while drifting around a black hole. Ten years later, a programmer and amateur cave explorer in Boston, Will Crowther, created text-based spelunking simulation. When a hacker at Stanford named Don Woods saw the game, he contacted Crowther to see if it was okay for him to modify the game to include more fantasy elements. The result was Colossal Cave Adventure. This gave rise to the text-adventure craze, as students and hackers in computer labs across the country began playing and modifying games of their own—often based on Dungeons and Dragons or Star Trek.
Romero was growing up in the eighties as a fourth-generation game hacker: the first having been the students who worked on the minicomputers in the fifties and sixties at MIT; the second, the ones who picked up the ball in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University in the seventies; the third being the dawning game companies of the early eighties. To belong, Romero just had to learn the language of the priests, the game developers: a programming language called HP-BASIC. He was a swift and persistent student, cornering anyone who could answer his increasingly complex questions.
His parents were less than impressed by his new passion. At issue were Romero’s grades, which had plummeted from A’s and B’s to C’s and D’s. He was bright but too easily distracted, they thought, too consumed by games and computers. Despite this being the golden age of video games—with arcade games bringing in $5 billion a year and even home systems earning $1 billion—his stepfather did not believe game development to be a proper vocation. “You’ll never make any money making games,” he often said. “You need to make something people really need, like business applications.”
As the fights with his stepfather escalated, so did Romero’s imagination. He began exorcising the backwash of emotional and physical violence through his illustrations. For years he had been raised on comics—the B-movie horror of E.C. Comics, the scatological satire of MAD, the heroic adventures of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. By age eleven, he churned out his own. In one, a dog named Chewy was invited to play ball with his owner. With a strong throw, the owner hurled the ball into Chewy’s eye, causing the dog’s head to split open and spill out green brains. “The End,” Romero scrawled at the bottom, adding the epitaph “Poor Ol’ Chewy.”
Product details
- ASIN : 0812972155
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (May 11, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780812972153
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812972153
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.8 x 8 inches
-
Best Sellers Rank:
#123,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Industrial Relations Business
- #71 in Entertainment Industry
- #399 in Video & Computer Games
- Customer Reviews:
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Long and well-researched account of an important part of the history of the subculture of violent and high tech video games and their creators, their lives, failures and technological adventures. I really enjoyed this reading and I recommend it not only for those who lived part of this recent history but for everyone who want to learn about this important subculture.
Overall highly recommended, excellent book, stayed up all night reading it.
I'm really impressed on how things turn out for the guys that created DOOM. They were successful in tech and gaming but they weren't able to handle so much in so little time. None of the Johns were able to see that they needed each other.
I think the book is summarized by a great analogy presented by the author: Carmack was the guitar maker and Romero was the musician that could get the best songs out of them.
I really recommend buying this book, it gets interesting from the beginning and it grips you until the end. I even read the index hoping there would be more stories post 2003.
Masters of DOOM tells the story of the "Two Johns," John Carmack and John Romero, creators of DOOM and founders of ID software. It's a story of amazing success and spectacular failure, personality conflicts and political witch-hunts. I found the early history of PCs and the sub-culture of game players and hackers enlightening.
I recently took a trip down memory lane and played through DOOM 1 and DOOM 2. This book was the perfect companion piece.
Final Verdict: This is a MUST read!!!!
If I have to pick one thing I didn’t like is that it seemed to wrap up very quickly after a very detailed story. Of course all the relationships fell apart over time but I didn’t get a great sense of closure. But then again, maybe that’s the point.
Top reviews from other countries

In reminiscing like this, it's only fair to emphasize, that this book is written primarily for those with either an interest in gaming history or Doom itself. The stories of hardship and turbulence both these guys faced, towards carving their own stamp in gaming history, I'm sure would make an interesting read for many. But again this is more for those with an ongoing interest in gaming in general I think.
The book flows really well when reading. The writing is tidy. I found that the last quarter of the book especially becomes hard to put down as tensions mount and egos bristle. As a hardcore gamer and a budding game historian, I can't recommend this book enough.

Describing the rise and fall of the two creators of id software, John Carmack and John Romero, it is a classic silicon valley business/bio - with some particularly extreme characters. I knew nothing of these people at the time, but reading the book brought on waves of nostalgia as they were responsible for three of the key milestones in gaming history. I was still programming PCs when Wolfenstein 3D came out and I remember being amazed by the effects and responsiveness they coaxed out of the early PC's terrible graphics. By the time Doom and Quake came along, I was reviewing games for a living. Though my personal tastes ran more to the X-Wing series and Seventh Guest, I was stunned by the capabilities of the id games. They were the only first person shooters I ever found interesting - and each moved on the field immensely. All the first person shooters that are popular today from Call of Duty and Halo to Destiny owe them so much.
So from a techie viewpoint, this was fascinating, though the author does tend to rather brush over the technical side to keep the story flowing. And from the personal side, there were plenty of fireworks too. While the book slightly overplays the traditional US business biography style of presenting disasters and triumphs to regularly fit chapter boundaries, there is no doubt there was a real roller-coaster of an existence in a way that all those reality TV stars who overuse that term wouldn't possibly understand.
Although there are plenty of other characters, the two Johns are at the book's heart - Carmack the technology wizard behind the engines that powered these worlds, and Romero the designer and flamboyant gamer. The pair inevitably clash on direction and when they split it's interesting that it's the John who doesn't go for the classic US software developer heaven of turning the offices into a playground who succeeds.
All in all, truly wonderful for anyone who was into games in that period (and should be of interest to those who have followed them since). It's a shame it stops in 2003, as things have moved on a lot since its 'how the main characters are now' epilogue - but a quick visit to Wikipedia can bring you up to speed.


This book is the account of how Doom came into existence, created by a group of pioneering computer programmers in the 90’s. The book’s main protagonists are the “two Johns”; John Romero and John Carmack. Romero is the crazy, wild designer of the pair, mirrored by Carmacks calm, collected hardcore programmer. There are other ‘characters’ that appear in the book, such as Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall etc. But the two Johns are the focal points of the novel.
The book starts with the childhoods of the Johns and describes how they finally meet and how, from humble beginnings, they jump from strength to strength and end up creating a multi million dollar business. Very much the American dream. From reading this book I can only define Carmack and Romero as Geniuses. Programming is hard. I’ve tried it. It’s full of hard maths, syntax problems and logic arguments. Its like trying to measure the moon, with your eyes closed. With your hands tied behind your back. And yet the Johns (and many other bit players of the industry who make an appearance in this book) seem to just “get it”. The book doesn’t show the hard graft that I’m sure went into learning the programming languages, but by the age of 14 they were already coding. You have to be extremely intelligent to be able to pick it up that easy and with this intelligence and hard work they made themselves millionaires.
The two Johns’ careers started with creating small simple games in high school on early Apple computers. They then got small jobs with developers such as Origin and Softdisk. Ultimately, with their eagerness and entrepreneurial spirit, they finally branched out on their own. Their beginnings were questionably legal, with them borrowing work equipment and moonlighting. However the whole era just oozed rebellion and breaking loose the shackles of big business so this ambiguity of law just increases the spirit of self actualisation. Where young, passionate, hardworking and not forgetting extremely clever individuals made their fortune in their own way. This book makes it look so easy to make millions from computers. If only it was that easy.
Games created by the team include Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake 1, 2 and 3, all synonymous with the video game revolution of the 90’s and both the birth of first person shoot ‘em ups and the prevalence of PC gaming. Its touched on briefly in the novel that the Johns were not the only people capitalising on the rise of the video games industry, but the majority of the book does read like they were.
In the end the duo run into the humanity side of all business’. Arguing, jealousy and contempt all led to their eventual split. Following the split, they each run their own companies in their own different styles. With successes and failures, the book tapers out and brings us up to the books publication date.
The positives of the book are many if you are fan of the games and the gaming industry. The book goes into some what detail of the creation of the games and gives insights into how the minds of the creators processed. Even if your not a gamer, the book is still a good tale of the underdogs making it big. The tension during the crunch days, when deadlines were looming, is brought to life by Kushner and each characters personality is shown to the reader. For a book written some 10 years after the majority of the facts, it goes into quite intricate details. This is proof of the amount of research carried out by the author. The epilogue at the back tells us he interviewed all parties in depth, as well as spent months sifting through mountains of old computer magazines to gather dates and locations.
Theres not much to be negative about the book, its hard to criticise real life. Some of the dialogue felt pushed, but then it would have been transcribed from interviews which would have been dragged out of half-forgotten memories. In my opinion, there wasn’t enough detail on the actual design of the main games, Doom and Quake. It seemed like the design and code was glanced over for tension and drama. More prose than fact but drama sells and too much code detail in the book would have slowed it down and turned it into more of a text book.
In all a good book however its audience is automatically narrowed by its genre and topic. Not everyone will find it interesting however I found it enjoyable, intense and fascinating. I could almost see myself writing the next best selling video game and making my millions! Or maybe not…

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?
There's a problem loading this menu right now.