Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
• Published by: Random House Trade Paperbacks May 11, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0812972155
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0812972153
• Book Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 9.6 ounces

Product Review
Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first human being 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
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.