This is probably one of my favorite books, but I'm not much of a reader. It's just really cool to see two really enthusiastic guys doing what they loved back in the wild west era of game development and becoming extremely successful at it. It's amazing that one guy (Carmack) single-handedly created the technology needed to have such a revolutionary experience on PCs. It's doubly cool that he's about to do the same thing twice in one lifetime (with Oculus).
May I suggest Hackers by Steven Levy [0]. It was a phenomenal and inspirational read for me. Having born during the turn of the century, I'd missed the evolution of computers and programming. This book helped me fill that gap.
Incidentally, Hackers was what I read after I read Masters of Doom. Here's a quote from Masters of Doom:
"
Overnight, it seemed, Carmack was in a strange house, with a strange family and going to a strange school, a junior high with no gifted program or computer’s. He’d never felt so alone. Then one day he realized he wasn’t. The book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was a revelation.
"
I thought Hackers was great - you might also like two other of Levy's books: In the Plex (which follows Google's history) and Crypto (which is especially relevant today).
Some people find his style dry, but I've found it direct and really interesting (probably because I'm already interested in the material anyway).
Crypto is even better than Hackers, I think. I think Google was expecting In the Plex to valorise its subject as much as Hackers or his Macintosh book Insanely Great (Levy is an old-fashioned Mac loyalist) did theirs, but Levy seems to have come away with a visceral distrust of Google.
Seconded. Every developer should read this book. It's short, a pretty easy read, and oh-so captivating. Makes you a grow a fond appreciation for games and software in general.
Ah yes...adolescent "bombs" and BBS's...what nerds back in the day didn't enjoy these both?
My favorite bomb cocktail was brake fluid, pool chlorine, and PVC. We lived in Florida on a river and we used to see how many fish we could "catch" with one of our homebrew contraptions.
I guess that would make me a "terrorist" by today's standards? I'm not sure anymore...
I remember when I learned about water electrolysis. I built an electrolysis cell with a high voltage rectifier diode and a two liter coke bottle and proceeded to fill giant punching bag balloons with a perfect stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas. (Was smart enough to use a long cord and stay away while the power was on.) Then I tied them up with firework fuse. WOW were those ever loud!
Also got in trouble for hacking (black hat sense) when I was fifteen. I wasn't stealing or wrecking things though, just doing "catch and release" stuff because I was bored and had a modem.
I was banned from computers at school for the last two years of high school, as I kept defeating every single defence they had in place. My impetus to do so? I wanted to run compilers and interpreters so I could keep learning programming.
I installed Doom on my high school computers and carefully hid it so the technology department (who were clueless) couldn't find it (by putting it in a renamed subdir in the Windows dir and renaming the .exe and .wad file and handling running via a .bat). Tech class became "Let's go play Doom" class.
Nice! Goodness...you certainly played with a much more dangerous and combustible "recipe" then I, and it's good to hear you didn't hurt yourself in the process.
Isn't it amazing how our inquisitive youth shields us from realizing how dangerous what we are doing really is?
I also got in trouble for wardialing large lists on my parents secondary phone line. Sad to think a lot of that stuff could be prosecuted under very serious laws these days.
What always impresses me about carmack, is that there's only his sheer talent, and you only see nothing else.
I'm going to sound a little judgmental, but you don't often hear him talk about work politics or non-technical stuff, it can be a little curious. I really wonder if he ever talks about his personality or his younger years at all, or if he learned something when thinking back about it. Has he ever given his opinion or talked about this type of stuff?
I wonder if he has ever planned to write a programming or non-programming book, or anything else other than code.
Being able to focus and work hard for long periods of time can itself be described as a talent. Not many people possess the ability to do so to the levels of people like John Carmack and Bill Gates.
The post title is misleading. 'Masters of Doom' is not a book on John Carmack's adolescent years alone, but a book focusing on the lives of both Carmack and John Romero, with a few other 'minor' characters, who were the main people behind idSoftware. It is a fascinating read.
I wish there were more books about the PC game industry at that time. I grew up with Apogee games and I'd love to read more about the company's history and the creation of Duke Nukem 3D! It's too bad that interest in early console gaming overshadows early PC gaming, especially since there were a lot more "hacker"-types working in PC games in the 90s.
There's a nice collection of interviews[1] that Apogee did with many of the original developers a few years ago, but it's hardly enough!
The poster that Interceptor Entertainment made for the 3D Realms Anthology[2] is like a nostalgia bomb for me. :)
I enjoyed "The Making of Prince of Persia" [1]. It is a journal and thus misses out on some of the dramatic storytelling the strong, contrasting personalities of Romero and Carmack provided Masters of Doom. However, I found it very interesting from a design and programming point of view.
Yeah, I wish there had been a similar book about the Warcraft side of the company, since Warcraft was one of the first non-shareware games I played on my first PC. Patrick Wyatt's blog[1] has some pieces on it, but more would be lovely.
There's a bunch of other id and Carmack related docs up there too if you look including the "Book of id" from the id Anthology and a few GameDevMag articles.
Masters of Doom actually mentions Apogee a few times, and discusses a bit of detail about the Build engine and Ken Silverman (particularly pointed at its influence on the guys at iD, and how it influenced the development of Quake). The author does a good job of describing the landscape for developers and publishers at the time in general as well.
Yeah, it's why I brought this up. I loved the Apogee/3DRealms talk in Masters of Doom! Brought me back to being a budding gamer in the 90's. Just wish there was more; a "Masters of Doom" for Epic, Apogee, Blizzard, and all the other big names at the time.
I apologize...I should've checked in another browser (works in Chrome, w/o cookies) and/or mobile...not being sarcastic here, I've never been quite sure how stable Google Books's permalinks are outside of Chrome. But yes, the submission is meant to point to a specific chapter about Carmack growing up and acquiring an Apple ][
Every time I think about some stupid, stuffy startup that acts like a big corp when it's just a bunch of MBAs playing with other people's money, I think back to the story of ID, and smile.
A wonderful book, indeed. It "teaches" a useful business management lesson: when two strong egos clash, the company drowns.
I also admire Carmack's way to tackle new (sometimes unknown) problems: read the literature, learn, do. And never failed following this.
I loved the parts when Romero swam across the lake to work all night with the rest of the crew, or when they invited in a stripper with pizza but Carmack wouldn't set the keyboard aside. So determined.
>I loved the parts when Romero swam across the lake to work all night with the rest of the crew,
That was also one of my favorite passages:
"The lake house was filled with the sense of unlimited possibilities. And
the bond between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day.
It was like two tennis players who, alter years of destroying their competition,
finally had a chance to play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better
programmer. Carmack pushed Romero to be a better designer. What they
shared equally was their passion.
This was most clear to Carmack one late weekend night. He was sitting in
the house working at his PC as lightning flashed outside. Mitzi curled lazily
on top of his monitor, her legs draping over the screen. The heat of her body
was causing Carmack’s heat-sensitive display to ooze its colors. He pushed
Mitzi gently from the monitor, and she scurried away with a hiss.
A rainstorm had picked up, and it was mighty. Cross Lake spilled into the
backyard like the prelude to a horror movie. The lake was so high that it
pushed the ski boat to the top of the boathouse. Long black water moccasins
slithered toward the deck. The bridge leading to Lakeshore Drive was completely
washed out. When Jay arrived after having been out for the day, there
was no way to get in. It was, as he described it, “a turd floater” of a storm,
bringing everything from the bottom of the lake to the surface. He turned
away to wait it out.
Romero arrived with a friend later to find the bridge even worse than
when Jay got there. There was simply no way he was going to get his car over
the flooded expanse. And there were probably alligators and moccasins now
making it their home.
Back in the house, Carmack resigned himself to working on his own that
night. After all these hours, he had come to appreciate Romero’s diverse range
of talents, gleaned from years of making his own Apple II games. Romero
had been not only a coder but an artist, a designer, and a businessman. On
top of all that, he was fun. Romero didn’t just love games; in a sense, he was a
game, a walking, talking, beeping, twitching human video game who never
seemed to let anything get him down. Like a game character, he could always
find an extra life.
Just then the door behind Carmack swung open. Mitzi dashed under his
feet. Carmack turned to see Romero standing there with his big thick glasses,
soaking wet up to his chest, lightning flashing behind him, a big smile on his
face. It was a real moment, a moment so impressive that Carmack actually
saved it in his thin file of sentimental memories. This one he wanted for
future access: the night Romero waded through a stormy river to work."
I loved reading "Masters of Doom." It's an easy read, and a fascinating story about a handful of people of had a remarkable influence on an entire industry.
Also, I learned by reading it that Carmack and Romero created Commander Keen (somehow I'd never made that connection with their later games). Commander Keen was my Mario. Perhaps it was more than that. It introduced me to shareware, which led me to BBSs, and then the Internet.
This is one of my favorite book. I really like the raise and fall of IdSoftware. I also like to see how the relationship between Carmack and Romeo changed during the decade where they were so successful.
Wikipedia states that the James Halliday character in Ready Player One is based on Richard Garriott but I have always thought it was closer to Carmack especially now with the whole Occulus business.
Not sure there's enough drama to really make this a good movie. There is some drama and bickering and Romero leaving when he got bored but that's about it.
Are you kidding?? :) The two John' starting out as friends. Chaos Romero vs order Carmar. The rise of a small indie developer to super stardom. The ensuing split with Romero going full hubris with Ion Storm (Heck with the amount of drama and dirt available a movie on ion storm alone would make a great movie). Scenes with an battle axe breaching an office door, a gamer winning a ferrari. An underlying theme of "everyone's expendable".
It would make for one epic movie in the right hands.
Well, Turing can be turned into a martyr for gay rights (as I understand they've done with the movie, which I haven't seen). I guess that's a lot "cooler" than anything about Carmack, at least AFAIK.
I think what makes it so appealing is that it isn't just an action movie with lots of keyboard action. It's actually about hackers and their subculture. The heroes enjoy understanding new things, share books on BSD and compilers, have an annoying wannabe that they nurture, value merit over superficial traits, and have a low tolerance for artifice. It's as if they came out of a jargon file hacker template.
When I said that this movie is more or less a Carmack movie, it's because of how teenage Carmack is described. He's arrogant, but not so much he'd surround himself with idiots. When he meets other smart programmers at Al's company, he's elated.
So yeah, it is cheesy, but it does more justice to the hacker subculture than anything else I've seen. It certainly has more to do with actual hackers than hacker news does.
I love it because it has almost everything that makes a cult movie: bad and punchy dialogs, great soundtrack and an unbalanced cocktail of cool things (including subcultures) the director likes (hackers, rollerblades, cyber). It's as if all these things are more important than the plot itself.
These movies always age well. At that time it was lame. Now it's just a joke about itself.
Couldn't you say the same about Steve Jobs? Doesn't this say more about "most Valley startups today" than it does about people that actually forged these industries?
