Masters of Doom

Hewlett and Packard. Jobs and Wozniak. Gates and Ballmer. High-tech success stories often revolve around a notable duo, and in the computer game industry, there is no more better-known story than that of id Software, creator of the Doom and Quake series of first-person shooters, and id’s original two principals, John Carmack and John Romero.

In Masters of Doom: The True Story of How Two Guys Created a Video Game Empire, Transformed Pop Culture, and Unleashed Doom, David Kushner chronicles the rise and pitfalls of the Two John’s, starting from their disturbingly dysfunctional childhoods to the pinnacle of their Ferrari-buying and Playboy-centerfold dating days. Carmack is considered by many to be the best game programmer around and perhaps the best programmer, period. Romero, perhaps best remembered for his hubris-filled pronouncements to gamers, was considered a game design god by rabid game fans, before he was ousted from id and foundered at his next game venture, Ion Storm.

Kushner’s history of id mirrors the development of the PC game industry. id brought console-quality game performance to the PC, pioneered 3D graphics in games, popularized the first-person shooting genre, encouraged “modding” (customization of the game, to the extent of creating new levels and characters) and was at the center of the still-ongoing controversy over violence in games.

After reading Kushner’s description of Carmack’s childhood isolation and run-ins with the law, and Romero’s abusive treatment at the hands of his stepfather, it seems that violence in video games is the result of youth violence rather than the cause. The success of the two in transcending their unhappy upbringing is gratifying, but the feeling is tempered by their immature and sometimes amoral behavior on their way up. Kushner’s depiction of id’s rowdy atmosphere, extended crunch times and political infighting brings to mind a combination of Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House and Lord of the Flies.

Irony abounds in this story. Romero, the visionary who first understood the implications of Carmack’s innovations and persuaded Carmack and their team members at SoftDisk to jump ship and start id, had ambitious plans for turning id into a vast gaming empire, but it was Carmack the introverted and ascetic programmer who ended up controlling the direction of the company. Just as the id group had abrubtly abandoned SoftDisk, so did Romero’s team at Ion Storm walk out on him. And while the split between Carmack and Romero was partly fueled by their technology-centric versus design-centric debate, eventually Romero turned to developing games on technologically constrained cell phones and PDA’s, while Carmack’s ultimate goal of approximating a Star Trek holodeck experience was stymied by his game designers.

As with many successful game titles, Kushner’s work is thoroughly entertaining, but not without some minor distracting glitches. Some of the technical history is not quite right, e.g. Carmack did not convert Quake 2 to run on the OpenGL graphics library so that it would run on graphics cards from 3dfx, as the book states. On the contrary, 3dfx had inadequate OpenGL support at the time, so Carmack implemented a subset of OpenGL called “QuakeGL” for 3dfx in order to get the game running on that hardware. This effort and his strongly-state preference for OpenGL over other graphics libraries at the time attests to Carmack’s programming prowess and also his sense of hacker purity, which the author does convey clearly.

The reader might not obtain a correct sense of proportion from this book. The “video game” business really encompasses arcades, PC games and console games. id is primarily in the PC game business with incidental ports to the console business, and the PC game business, while influential, is currently dwarfed by the console business. Other first-person shooters come off as imitations of Doom and Quake, but many of them were innovative in their own right. For example, Descent featured a floating ship with lateral and vertical 360 degree movement, and I would argue that Marathon, which was released just a year after Doom, was a more interesting game than Doom but limited by it’s Macintosh-only status.

There is a printing error resulting in at least one missing line, and some of the grammar is a bit loose, which detracts from the flow of this otherwise absorbing read. But as game reviewers often note, the game play is what counts, and this book plays well from beginning to end.

I enjoyed reading this. I was about 6 when Doom came out, but in the subsequent years I played the shareware versions of it as well as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D regularly. The first half of this book was a bit of a nostalgia trip but it filled in a lot of the backstory of Carmack (who is a personal hero of mine as a C programmer) and Romero (who was more of a famous name).

I was most interested in the early, hacker days of basically turning pizza and Diet Coke into seminal videogames. The book did a good job chronicling the creation of Commander Keen and Wolf3D as a prelude to Doom and setting the scene of BBS era shareware gaming. It also colored in some of the other notables whose roles were never as clear to me. The contributions of fellow Softdisk guys/id founders Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and to a lesser extent designers like American McGee and Sandy Petersen are all made clear. There's a lot of fun in reading about just what a huge splash Doom made and getting some light shed on other players like Scott Miller's Apogee, or Bill Gates trying hard to sell Windows 95 as an upgrade over DOS, Burger Bill, Nintendo trying to keep the SNES a family system, or even Joe Lieberman calling for the creation of the ESRB.

As a programmer I was generally pleased with how technical the book got in some places. Nothing too insane for the non-technical reader, but it did go into details about how each iteration of Carmack's engine was different and better than the last. The rise of the GPU is also a minor tangent here. It didn't get everything right (at one point it referred to OpenGL as a programming language which... is a simplification at best) but it grounds the software work well and even gives some details about the rigs they were using to do their work.

I was less interested in the second half, mostly because I was actually old enough to remember some of the broad strokes but there are still plenty of bits of trivia and readings from .plan files that were new to me. The book does a pretty great job overall of painting Carmack and Romero as the yin and yang of early id, and the later history of Ion Storm (Romero's game developer utopia that failed to do much - classic status of Deus Ex aside) versus id's more diminished role of being an engine publisher (which is harsh but mostly true up until Doom 2016 well after this book) underscores that they both really needed each other to bring balance to their early work. Even with 16 more years of retrospect that analysis holds up.

Anyway, very interesting book and I'd highly recommend it to anyone that enjoyed the 90s PC gaming scene, even if you were just a kid.

In general I have to agree on the review Philipp gave, probably because our biographies seem to match up pretty well. I similarly was brought up by a 386 and on the Keen games et al. So. I also felt lots of good nostalgia during the read (editing DOS config files, first network gaming experiences on Duke3D - complete with the search for the damn terminator plugs - and hell, even my first Linux experiences came because I wanted to run a Quake or Half-Life dedicated server on an old machine).

But nostalgia only gets you so far. Some more technical background would have been nice (though I also get that neither Philipp nor I will probably be the typical reader in that aspect) but what really bugged me was that for large parts the book boils down to 'id: The Soap Opera' or maybe 'Bad Business Decisions 101: How Your Larger-Than-Life Ego Will Ruin You'.

Yes, I get that this stuff happened (apparently all the time) but every other page turns out to be a lesson in how one of the two John's did something stupid because they thought of themselves as so important. It's a nice lesson in humility, but after the first couple of instances a brief summary would have worked as well I think.

1) ''Romero's eyes widened. The Daikatana was a mighty sword, one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Despite the pleas of the others, he told Carmack he wanted to give the demon the book. It didn't take long to find out the consequences. As the rules of the game dictated, Carmack rolled the die to randomly determine the strength of the demon's response. The demon was using the book to conjure more demons, he told the group. A battle of epic proportions ensued until Carmack declared the outcome. 'The material plane is overrun with demons,' he said, flatly. 'Everyone is dead. That's it. We're done. Mmm.'
No one spoke. The guys couldn't believe it. After all those games, all the late nights around the table in Shreveport, the adventures here that cured all the cold nights of Madison, it was over. A sadness filled the room. Romero finally said to Carmack, 'Shit, that's fun playing that game. Now it's ruined? Is there any way to get that back?' But he knew the answer. Carmack was always true to himself and to his game. 'No,' he said, 'it's over.' There was a lesson to be learned: Romero had gone too far.''

2) ''Romero wandered back through the maze of cubicles and sat down at his desk, where he would remain long after the sun came down on the glass tower. Everything is bullshit! he thought. Why did I hire these people? It shouldn't have been this big. This was too many people, too much money. It should have been just me and Tom and a small team of people with a common goal. It should have been like the way it was when we weren't biz guys. We were just gamers.''

3) '''In the information age, the barriers just aren't there,' [Carmack] said. 'The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.'''