Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

“All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks. Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world. “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”

“He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.”

“Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.”

“The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.”

“In another assignment, he wrote about how one day, when he refused to do extracredit homework, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door.”

“In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute. A lot of people didn’t seem to enjoy their work. Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that.”

“At 4:00 A.M. on May 5, 1992, the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D was complete.”

“a poem called “The Night Before Doom”: “ ’Twas the night before Doom, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that Doom, / soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision he printed in an editorial called “A Parent’s Nightmare Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums, they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.”

“Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After”

“John Carmack was a late talker. His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.” It was as if he didn’t want to mince words until he had something sensible to say.”

“If we can get this done, [Doom] is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”

“He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills.”

“Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them."This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.”

“The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

“This is my daily work . . . When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day. Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed. Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.”

“The only digital images around were big banners of Hitler from Wolfenstein, so he put those down back to back, making a highway of Hitlers surrounded by a sprawling web. Carmack could lose himself in the abstract mathematical imagery of this world, working on the acceleration of movement, the sense of speed, velocity, decline.”

“There are people who argue that you can just simulate reality,” he said, “but I think there’s value in coming out here and dealing with the wind.”

“320 pounds of gamer meat”

“What happens to this kind of business when the data superhighway arrives? . . . No sales force, no inventory costs, no royalties to Nintendo or Sega, no marketing costs, no advertising costs, no executive parking spaces. This is a new and exciting business model, not just for games, and not even just for software, but for a host of products and services that can be sold or delivered via an electronic underground.”

“Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden . . . is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.”

“Carmack shrugged it off and returned to work. The same rule applied to a cat, a computer program or, for that matter, a person. When something becomes a problem, let it go or, if necessary, have it surgically removed.”

“When he was on, he was on—loving everything, everybody. But when he was off, he was off—cold, distant, short. Tom Hall came up with a nickname for the behavior. In computers, information is represented in bits. A bit can be either on or off. Tom called Romero’s mood swings the bit flip.”

“For any given project,” he posted in his .plan file online, “there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for id is very small.”

“Story in a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

“A few thousand miles away, Nine Inch Nails’ rock star Trent Reznor sauntered off a concert stage as the crowd roared. Security guards rushed to his side. Screaming groupies pushed backstage. Trent nodded and waved, heading back through the crowd. He didn’t have time for this. There were more important things waiting. He stepped onto his tour bus, forsaking the drugs, the beer, the women, for the computer awaiting him. It was time again for Doom.”

“the design didn’t take into account technology and it didn’t take into account that the designer doesn’t necessarily know how to manage.”

“He and Romero joked about making a life-size porcelain doll that would stand in the office holding a baseball bat. The punch line was that it held its own demise.”

“writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.”

“Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web of problems and solutions, imagination and code.”