“The material plane is overrun with demons. Everyone is dead. That’s it. We’re done.”
Wolfenstein 3D. Doom. Quake. These are games that helped transform video games from a children’s pastime into a cultural movement. All three are the brainchildren of two radically different personalities who happened to fortuitously mesh for a few brief years, transforming into a two-headed beast of innovative game design and distribution. They were dubbed The Two Johns—John Carmack, the monkish misfit who wanted nothing more than to gorge on pizza and Diet Coke while hunkering down to create revolutionary game engines; and John Romero, “Ace Programmer, Contest Winner, Future Rich Person,” the brash outcast, consummate player of games, resident jokester, and the biggest fan of his ascetic partner. The story of their technology-based friendship, the rise and fall of their empire, and the effect of their work on culture and society, are documented in David Kushner’s Masters of Doom. It’s a fascinating book that not only tells the tale of id Software and its co-founders, but also provides a great overview of video game history from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s.
Kushner does a great job of separating the personalities of his two main players. Carmack was the wizard, the pusher of boundaries, with interests geared toward programming virtual worlds, erasing the seams, then starting over with something bigger and better. His idea of a company was a few friends with the inspiration and drive to make engaging games based on his powerful engines. Romero was a rockstar, a gamer’s gamer with ambitions of building an empire and an intimate understanding of the gaming scene and the potential impact of Carmack’s innovations upon it. They were called the Lennon and McCartney of video games, and their rise to fame was as astronomical as it was unconventional. They created new genres, blew open new markets, ushered in multiplayer deathmatch and online gaming almost as an afterthought, and found ways to reap huge profits while giving away their games for free. But their differences in perspective, lifestyle, and ambition eventually caused the dynamic duo to split, each finding that the missing ingredient in their subsequent efforts was something they had only ever found in the other.
The Two Johns both came from broken homes and rough childhoods, and found in one another kindred spirits that sought escape through technology. They had each been creating games as teenagers, and when they met while working at Softdisk, they soon found themselves “borrowing” the company computers every night to crunch through the development of their own game, one they planned to release independently. The most thrilling of the early accomplishments is detailed in a chapter called “Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement” which tells of the innovation that led to the Commander Keen series. One night, Carmack shared a new technique, dubbed “adaptive tile refresh,” that allowed a PC to efficiently scroll as a player moved without overloading the system. Carmack and fellow id Software co-founder Tom Hall stayed up all night, programming and iterating. The next morning when Romero got to his desk and popped in the floppy disk they had left for him, Super Mario 3 appeared on the screen; but instead of Mario, his own character, Dangerous Dave, a Mario ripoff, was jumping around the screen at his command.
Romero could hardly breathe. He just sat in his chair with his fingers on the keys, scrolling Dave back and forth along the landscape, trying to see if anything was wrong, if somehow this wasn’t really happening, if Carmack had not just figured out how to do exactly what the fucking Nintendo could do, if he had not done what every other gamer in the universe had wanted to do, to break through, to do for PCs what Mario was doing for consoles. […] Romero saw it all come pouring down in front of him: his future, their future, scrolling across the room in brightly colored dreams.
Romero’s freakout moment would be repeated many times as Carmack rapidly and repeatedly innovated. Soon the guys were living in a rented lakehouse and making Doom, the first fast-paced arcade-style first person shooter, inspired by Aliens, Army of Darkness, and Metallica. They followed the “death schedule”—little sleep, lots of caffeine and junk food, with only occasional breaks to play video games or D&D. In fact, running throughout a large portion of the book is a side narrative of an ongoing game of D&D, led by Carmack, which inspired many of the game ideas for Doom, Quake, and later, after the split, Romero’s critical failure Daikatana. The game mirrors the relationships and morale of the company as a whole—fun and exciting during the good times, tense and high-stakes during the bad.
Of course, Doom became an all-time classic, and their distribution model for it followed a technique they had worked out with their Commander Keen games—using shareware, they gave away the first part of the game for free, then charged for the remainder of it. Soon, university and office networks were overwhelmed by the number of people playing Doom, sucked in by its addictive multiplayer which Carmack had thrown together in his spare time, once again flooring the fanatic Romero. Celebrities began playing the game and government officials started calling for it to be banned for its graphic violence.
One of the funniest scenes presented in Masters of Doom is a Halloween party at Microsoft. A host of game developers were invited, but the biggest news was that Doom was being ported to Windows. It took a lot of arm-twisting, but eventually the Microsoft strategist in charge of the event was told that Bill Gates was willing to record a video to be played at the event, though he would not be present. With Jay Leno as master of ceremonies and a Doom deathmatch tournament cranking in the basement, the party was going swimmingly well. Microsoft execs even laughed at the 8-foot tall sculpture of various genitalia that marked the id Software installation. But then things were cranked up a notch.
As the lights fell, a video screen lowered above the stage. It was time for the main event. The crowd cheered as footage of Doom’s familiar corridors began to roll. But it was not the Doom soldier chasing the demons, it was … Bill Gates. Microsoft’s fearless leader was superimposed running inside the game in a long black trench coat and brandishing a shotgun. Gates stopped running and addressed the crowd about the wonders of Windows 95 as a gaming platform, a platform that could deliver cutting-edge multimedia experiences like Doom. But no sooner had he begun than an imp monster from the game jumped out and through a voice-over, asked Gates for an autograph. Gates responded by raising his shotgun and blowing the beast into gory chunks. “Don’t interrupt me while I’m speaking,” he said, then finished his speech. At the end, the screen went black with blood, only to be replaced by the familiar Microsoft logo and the phrase “Who Do You Want to Execute Today?”
In the wake of the cultural phenomenon sparked by Doom, Romero becomes consumed by success and revels in his newfound celebrity status. He spends more time doing interviews, challenging his officemates to rounds of deathmatch, and building his mansion than he does putting in hours coming up with the next big thing. This grates on the pragmatic Carmack, who eventually calls a meeting with the other owners of id Software. They force Romero out. It seems unthinkable because Romero was the face of the company, and a large portion of its heart and soul as well. But Carmack was its brain, the only one of the core group of young dreamers that they considered purchasing key man insurance for. It’s a sad episode that marks the beginning of the end—not for id Software, which is still a thriving company today, sans all of its founding members—but for the streak of genius innovations led by the headstrong gamers from Louisiana.
Carmack would continue to innovate as hardware capabilities increased. He blew Romero’s mind again with the debut of Quake II, while Romero crashed and burned with the release of Daikatana. Romero eventually rebounded by launching a mobile game development company while Carmack gradually shifted his interest away from games—a frontier that he has explored thoroughly—to fast cars, rocket ships, and virtual reality.
Some of my favorite parts of the book are when Carmack’s unique worldview is elucidated. He frequently insists that his innovations be made public knowledge rather than patented. He intentionally makes Doom easy to mod and licenses the engine to other studios to make their own games. He does the same with his Quake engine, leading to several of Valve’s early successes, such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike. Both he and Romero bristle with glee when they find someone has used their engine to create an overhaul of Doom that is populated with characters from Star Wars. He is also a very blunt conversationalist, seemingly incapable of lying; when confronted, he confesses to the team’s boss at Softdisk that yes, they had been using company resources to work on their own game that they intended to release themselves, and no, he had not thought about how unfair that was to other Softdisk employees. He drew much of his inspiration and philosophy from the ‘Hacker Ethic’—laid out in Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Thankfully, Kushner doesn’t attempt to defend the medium of video games, opting instead to describe them as an obvious forerunner of virtual reality. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are referenced multiple times as the author portrays these hackers as engineers of the future, pioneers of cyberspace and the Metaverse, rather than producers of a benign form of entertainment.
Another fascinating aspect of Carmack’s story is that the only thing that ever kept him from plugging away at his virtual worlds was a lack of access to computers and learning materials. As a teen, he was arrested for breaking into a school to snag an Apple II. The psychiatric evaluation read: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs … no empathy for other human beings.” But in the current era, everything that young boy craved is available to virtually everyone. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” Carmack said in an interview with Kushner. “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.”
Of course, the book takes a firmly “pro John” stance and attempts to cast both Carmack and Romero in a positive light despite their obvious negative traits. Many times, questionable choices are glossed over or glorified. At one point, Carmack euthanizes his cat for peeing on his new couch. Romero destroys thousands of dollars of computer equipment throughout the book in bursts of frustration. Employees are fired regularly when Romero grows to dislike them or Carmack finds they have lost utility for him. Romero neglects his family and goes through two wives. But the Johns are the main characters, and so we root for them, only occasionally hearing about steadfast id employees, business partners, mentors, friends, family, etc. that were not always positively affected by the actions of the rockstar and the recluse.
I wasn’t old enough to experience any of this drama as it unfolded. While Doom, Quake, and Daikatana were in the news, I was playing Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. As I grew up and started playing violent games—the successors of id’s output—I was aware of the early id titles, especially Doom, but thought they were curious relics of the past that were only useful as the giants upon whose shoulders stood the developers of the games I was enjoying in the present. Masters of Doom does a great job of shattering that misconception, capturing a transitional decade in gaming and cultural history when people became glued to computer screens and video games outgrossed the box office (debates on the merits of this phenomenon are for another time). It’s probably historically inaccurate, with the main players reconfiguring their memories several times throughout the years to fit into a very Hollywoodesque narrative (although it doesn’t have a Hollywoodesque ending, yet), but this twisted tale of a junk food-fueled pursuit of the American Dream, hampered by hubris and idealism, is nothing short of fascinating.