Masters of doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture [Book Review]

I n a bleak period for technology industries, one sector still shines brightly: computer and video games. In 2002, annual U.S. sales grew 8 percent to $6.9 billion. This kind of revenue is similar to Hollywood’s, but unlike Hollywood, the elite of the game world—a cadre of brilliant designers and programmers— are largely unknown. David Kushner tries to partially remedy this in Masters of Doom, his biography of two of gaming’s brightest stars, John Carmack and John Romero. Carmack and Romero were the driving force behind the creation of Id Software (Mesquite, Texas), a small company that revolutionized video gaming in the 1990s and in the process affected how nearly everyone works at their computers. [Kushner wrote about the technological import of Id’s games in “The Wizardry of Id,” IEEE Spectrum, August 2002, pp. 42–47.] In Masters of Doom, Kushner’s focus is on the compelling narrative of the forces that drew these two men together and ultimately pushed them apart. From the moment of their meeting in 1990 at a small Shreveport, La., software company called Softdisk, Carmack and Romero complemented each other perfectly. Both were driven, dyed-in-the-wool game builders and intellectual equals, with Romero adopting the role of the big-picture strategist while Carmack became the graphics technology specialist. Kushner gives us a front row seat to their intense and sometimes turbulent relationships— with the games, with each other, and with nearly everybody else in their orbit. As Kushner points out, after taking jobs at Softdisk, the two men never worked in a vacuum. He fills in the supporting cast of designers, artists, businessmen, and fans, beginning with the game development group within Softdisk that would become the nucleus of Id Software. Indeed, many of the deft signature touches that lent their games such appeal were the brainchildren of others, from the secret doors in Wolfenstein to the mythic monsters of Quake. However, this leads to my one nit: keeping track of this changing cast is tricky, especially when someone abruptly exits the story (having ended up on the wrong side of Carmack or Romero). Sometimes the circumstances surrounding a departure are explained, but often the event is just dealt with in passing. One departure that is discussed in detail is Romero’s 1996 ouster from Id. Kushner demonstrates how, as each John was freed up by the other to play to his individual strengths, those strengths served to open up a gulf between them. Carmack felt that Romero had ceased to be a programmer, and Romero felt that Carmack had ceased to be a gamer. As Quake’s development bogged down, tensions reached breaking point and Carmack—as creator of the 3-D graphics technologies that had become Id Software’s trademark—had the upper hand. Once Quake was released, Romero was out. Romero set up a rival company, Ion Storm, which was going to be a gamer’s game company, where design ruled over technology. Buzz soon began spreading about plans for Ion Storm’s first game, Daikatana. But the buzz turned to ridicule when the game finally came out, two years late. Romero had made a deal that would allow him to use, under license, Id’s graphics engine technology—once Id had released its own game based on the engine. That meant that for all its emphasis on design, Ion Storm’s games would always look second-rate compared with the latest and greatest from Id. Without his programmer partner, Romero was left high and dry. As for Carmack, he had begun mulling the idea of using his graphics technology to create not just a game, but