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Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop CultureMasters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
Random House Product Details - Ratings and reviews for masters of doom: how two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture.
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by: David Kushner
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Sales Rank: 538385
Random House
Released: 2003-05-06
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Media: Hardcover (1)
Also Available in: Paperback.
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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.
Product Description
“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.
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.
Product Details
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
- Hardcover: 352 pages (2003-05-06)
- Publisher: Random House; 2003-05-06
- Label: Random House
- Studio: Random House
- ISBN: 0375505245
- Average Customer Review: based on 76 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #538385
Customer Reviews
Avg. Customer Review:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Masters of Doom 2010-07-19
Customer Rating: 
Summary: so so 2010-07-09
Comment: I don't know why but I get bored reading the book, maybe is not the content, that is good, but maybe is how the story was told ...
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Surprising Story About Getting a Game Out the Door 2010-07-07
Comment: I was reading other material about hacking and programming and I was consistently seeing this book title referenced. I knew about Doom from the Marine Corps and Columbine but I didn't know the people involved and the soap opera atmosphere that surrounded id Software. I found a copy and started reading and the more I read the more fascinated I became. I even used Google maps and Yout**e to see where they were and what it was like at the time. Yes, there's some issues with characters and whether they are important or not and how their background is delivered. Ex: Jay Wilbur was a bartender of TGI Fridays and was self taught programmer. Not until 20 pages later that the rest of his background comes out. He was so good at bar tending that he advised Tom Cruise during filming of "Cocktail". This should have all been given when Jay was introduced. There are many spelling errors but nothing serious. The first chapter starts out with John Romero at age 11 riding a dirt bike. About a page later when his mother remarries, his step father, John Schuneman, finds the "six-year-old" drawing Lamborghini sports car at the kitchen table. I know this is minor but I wouldn't want to read a story that has been embellished to make it more interesting than it is. Fortunately, the two Johns and the company was rising in the wake of the dot com bubble and a great deal of their activities were placed on line. I highly recommend the book even with the discrepancies. Go to yout**e and look with keywords "visit id software". It shows how the office looked at the time of Doom development. Finally, the company wasn't run like Apple or Microsoft. Anybody can be fired including the founders. It's like the mafia or "Survivor". You get your alliances and vote the person out. They leave with nothing. No stock shares or profits. It matters not what you did yesterday. Harsh. In the end, id Software shouldn't have existed. They used Softdisk time and resources to build their company and gave them only a discount in return. Softdisk had rights to all they did. That's what would have happened if they had done what they have done today.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Interesting reading 2010-02-22
Comment: I really enjoyed reading about the two Johns and how they changed the whole world of gaming. It tells a story of genius boys who really work hard to accomplish wonders in the gaming world. For the first time (for me at least) the real story about their differences have been told. The book is well written and enjoyable all the way.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you ever dreamed of creating your own video games. . . 2009-10-17
Comment: . . .then this book is for you. Heading in to college as a computer science major, this is what I pictured life would be like for my friends and me after graduation: renting apartments together and spending countless hours and late nights creating video games while eating pizza and drinking Pepsi and Mountain Dew (Coke is not allowed). Since then our lives have taken much different directions with me becoming a high school math teacher and my best friend moving from Chicago to LA to pursue a career in television production, but nevertheless it is an enjoyable and enthralling reminder of what we once dreamed. Not only that, but the story of what the Two Johns and an ever-changing cast of collaborators were able to accomplish and create makes it very difficult to put down.
A must-read for anyone who ever dreamed of creating video games and/or is interested in the history of video games.
A must-read for anyone who ever dreamed of creating video games and/or is interested in the history of video games.
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Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
This is the story of John Carmack and John Romero, and the computer game company, id Software, which they founded. Carmack is the graphics programmer behind Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, Quake, and others. Even though I have minimal experience with video games I found the story fascinating.