Fri 27 Feb 2004
A little behind on my reading list, I only just finished “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture” while flying back from San Francisco. It was publishes spring 2003 and was authored by David Kushner, a pop culture critic and frequent contributor to Wired magazine.
I very much enjoyed the book and its in-depth/behind-the-scenes look at the guys behind Doom and Quake. It is quite an unbelievable story of hard work, dumb luck, perseverance, arrogance and ingenuity - a modern day digital soap opera. I highly recommend it to those “outside” the industry (ie, students, academics, vendors, media, etc) as a means to understanding the sweat, blood and tears that are often shed in the pursuit of creating great games.
On a personal level, it was fun to read since I was “there” for portions of the story (although too insignificant to actually mention in the book). Like when he discusses Carmack’s various visits to GDC and E3 (eg, I had the honor of bestowing on him a Community Contribution award one year), or the work to optimize Quake for various graphics cards (I remember being on a conference call with Carmack discussing next-gen graphics chip technology and being blown away by what he was envisioning (FYI, I used to work at Matrox Graphics)).
Like when I read the “Opening the Xbox” book, most of the “characters” in play are actually friends and acquaintances. And, despite all the Ion Storm craziness, I can persnonally say that Romero and Case are nice people :)
February 27th, 2004 at 3:47 pm
I read the book when it came out and enjoyed it quite a bit. Last year at E3, I cornered Romero to find out if he thought the book was true to life. He assured me that it was. I guess he and Carmack vetting the whole thing.
So, the book might err a little on “gee whiz” side of things, at times. But it’s a good record of an important period and about some key people in the evolution of the medium. On that account, I agree that anyone interested in games should give it a read!
March 6th, 2004 at 7:14 am
I’m reading it now after seeing your blog entry (the book just came out when I was in LA for E3 last year but was a bit expensive for someone in the US on the Australian dollar). I experienced that period and those games as a gamer before I got into the industry. I only caught the tail end of the Quake community (I discovered the internet a bit late), but devoured id .plan updates and played all the mods, wasted months of nights at LANs, had a spiritual experience the first time I got OpenGL working etc. I never did quite get the whole Romero thing. I remember reading a log of an IRC chat a few years after Quake which Romero unexpectedly turned up for half way through. The moderator announced excitedly “this is John Romero folks”… silence… “no really, this is THE John Romero”… silence. “Big deal” someone typed.
And that sums up part of how this book makes me feel. There’s an underlying sadness and hopeless hyperbole to the history. A sort of brutal soulessness, not just to the people, but the games as well. A .plan entry by Mike Wilson (http://www.webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger.plm?id=235&time=20010402004330) from years ago sheds light on the surreal (and irresponsible )decadence of those days.
It’s a good read, though, and I would love to meet and chat with the people involved. In today’s bean counting corporate climate I sure miss the maverick possibilities of the industry back then.