Masters of Doom

Doom

Have you played or heard of games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Quake? I did. These games belong to the all time classics, written by Id Software. What is even more interesting about these games is that there is a whole story behind each of them. And that story has been put together in the book called Masters of Doom, written by David Kushner. If you were/are a fan – or have nostalgic feelings about these games – you should read this book. Let me first say this is not a “gaming” book, whatever that may be. It’s mainly about John Carmack and John Romero – the Masters of Doom – and how everything began for them. Both Johns had two hobbies in common: gaming and programming. At a certain moment those guys met eachother at Softdisk, a software company. In the evenings they were trying to develop an imitation of Mario Brothers for the PC, which was never done before, because the PC hardware was to slow. However, John Carmack was the only person at that time on the planet who managed to develop it for the PC, using a technique called “adaptive tile refresh”. He called Nintendo, but they were not interested in this port. Later on it was used as the “engine” for Commander Keen.

Quite soon both John’s decided to leave Softdisk and work for the game company Apogee where they worked on several games like Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. Shortly after that they started up their own company called “Id Software” – Ideas from the Deep, they both have very dark humour and enjoyed zombies, blood and horror and the like. The book tells about the background of the people behind this company and how step by step things were implemented in games like Wolfenstein 3D. How they recorded their sounds and images for the games, how enthousiastic they where when their engine reached a new development stage and how their Shareware-concept became widely used. How they both apply the rules of the hackers ethic and how they dislike software patents. Their idea was that in the end everyone should actually have fun with their games and is stimulated to contribute to their games by making modifications and editors. The book is of course not only about the positive moments they both have gone through. There was also consternation, personal and business problems which eventually lead to the split of the two Johns.

Actually this books makes a lot of things clear which I didn’t know about those two guys. But there is through the whole book a certain spirit which inspires me as a programmer myself. If you really want to do something and you have the enthousiasm for it, you really don’t need a million dollar investment but – not that I was thinking that – just go for it. The same applies to this book, if you want to get some insight in one of the players in gaminghistory, definitely read it.