Author: David Kushner
Date read: 2022-05-05
Masters of Doom is the story of two guys who created a series of revolutionary games which led to a unique pop culture among gamers.
John Carmack and John Romero are the main characters of the book. Carmack is the genius who brings tremendous amount of innovation and brilliance into the PC gaming industry by his gaming "engines". Romero, on the other hand, is the ultimate gamer and designer who has a good taste of injecting ideas for the game play. Once Romero notices Carmack's extraordinary intelligences, he gets convinced that with the "whiz kid" they can make the best games, thus the two Johns establish "id" company. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake are the most important games of id. Of course Doom is one of the most memorable games of all the time which gave the company its reputation.
With every new game, Carmack's engine advances and so does his dominance in the company. He starts controlling working hours of id's employees and some other provocative behavior. At the end he even fires Romero in order to lead the company completely by his own visions.
The interesting aspect about the story was the fact that with Doom the idea of real players fighting against each other was invented, which they called it deathmatch. This sounds very trivial nowadays, but deathmatch was the biggest advantage of id that gave the company most of its fame and fortune.
Although I myself don't remember playing Doom (because at my time there were better games, around 2001), id's games have had an undeniable effect on the gaming industry.
Rating: 4/5