Product Description

'Masters of Doom' is the true inside story of John Carmack and John Romero, co-creators of the most innovative and notoriously successful video games in history - Doom and Quake. They created an empire, ruled a multi-billion-dollar industry, and provoked a national controversy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44515 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 335 pages

Review
'Masters of Doom is an impressive and adroit social history.' New York Times Book Review

About the Author
David Kushner has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone (where he writes a digital music column) and Spin (where he is a contributing editor). He has also worked as a senior producer for the music website SonicNet.

Customer Reviews

This book reads like a thriller!
An excellent book about the people behind many killer games like Commander Keen, Castle of Wolfenstein and Doom. The book starts from the very beginning, from the time before the first shareware hit games. In addition to being excellent history book about id software, it also shows the potential problems and pitfals facing each game developer, especially the problem of too big egos and different visions among to developers.

And what's best.. It's the author's style. He certainly knows how to write a good book.

Simply marvellous!
I bought this book as a way of learning the story behind the development of a range of my most favourite games. When the likes of Doom and Quake were released, I wasn't too bothered about the people behind them. 10 years on, I had a great curiosity to find out what drove Carmack, Romero et al to produce their programmatic excellence.

Written in a very appealing and non-technical way, the book is as much a thriller as it is a record of events. My only slight gripe with the book is the fact that it glosses over the technical side of things to favour the "people" side of the story. This is by no means a fatal flaw, since the book is fantastic, it just would have been nice to have had a little more technical details to go on.

According to the writers notes, the book took 6 years to write, which included endless interviews and contact with all involved.

Simply marvellous!

Yep, great read
I spent sooooo many hours, like soooo many other people, playing these games. The story of the Two Johns has been touched upon in the computer press but the story more than bears telling in a full length book. I picked it up just to read about what the background was to these incredible games that dominated weeks / months of my adult, slacker life, and sure enough the account given of how Wolfenstein and onwards were written was at turns exhilerating and bittersweet. I then started moving back through the book to the earliest days of the two johns and it held my attention throughout. Great story, great characters, and the author has a great eye for his subjects and the allure of the story of how geeks became rockstars. Gaming isnt going to disappear, and Carmack and Romero are like two Neil Armstrongs in terms of their acheivements. THis is a good history book in the making if nothing else, and it is surprising how much you end up feeling for both Carmack and Romero, two lost boys in a gold mine. Carmack in particular is an odd and mysterious character. My rating? Five stars. mmmm.