4.26.2022
Last Week
Masters of Doom
By David Kushner
Modern video games compete in one of the most profitable, technically challenging, and labor-intensive industries in the world. The best games elevate themselves to an art form, but unlike paintings or music, their constraints are primarily technical. In the decades when PCs were still in their infancy and Windows had yet to dominate, the future of gaming lived in the imagination of a select few. In Masters of Doom, Kushner recounts how a handful of extraordinary individuals created the standards that have gone on to define the way games are made and sold.
John and John
Every large movement is the work of many, but Kushner's narrative focuses on two: John Carmack and John Romero. Carmack is described as a sort of programming genius with barely any social skills; Romero as an imaginative designer lacking emotional intelligence. At one point, Carmack essentially puts his cat down for peeing on the couch; numerous other sections of the book feature Romero screaming obscenities and smashing computers in tantrums. Carmack and Romero's childhoods are atypical. Romero grew up with an abusive stepfather who beat him for visiting the arcade; Carmack tried to steal Apple IIs when he was just 14.
Late one night Carmack and his friends snuck up to a nearby school where they knew there were Apple II machines. Carmack had read about how a thermite paste could be used to melt through glass, but he needed some kind of adhesive material, like Vaseline. He mixed the concoction and applied it to the window, dissolving the glass so they could pop out holes to crawl through. A fat friend, however, had more than a little trouble squeezing inside; he reached through the hole instead and opened the window to let himself in. Doing so, he triggered the silent alarm. The cops came in no time.
Despite their flaws, Kushner argues that the two were the perfect match for each other when it came to building a company. Carmack's programming achievements are legendary; he was responsible for porting smooth scrolling from consoles to PCs, developing the prototypical 3D game engine, and pioneering networked multiplayer mode. The impression given is that Carmack's development of successive game engines was the crucial edge that allowed games like Wolfenstein, Keen, Doom, and Quake to dominate and redefine the field. Romero, on the other hand, had the initiative and gaming experience required for building the game itself. On a higher level, Kushner summarizes the difference between the founders as a fundamentally different approach to perception.
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. 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 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.
Romero, by contrast, was immersed in all moments: past, future, and present. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast, as passionate about the present as about the time gone and the time yet to come. He didn’t just dream, he pursued: hoarding everything from the past, immersing himself in the dynamism of the moment, and chatting out the plans for what was to come. He remembered every date, every name, every game. To preserve the past, he kept letters, magazines, disks, Burger King pay stubs, pictures, games, receipts.
Unfortunately, the differences that made the pair so effective also ended up driving them apart. After leaving their original company, id Software, Romero goes off to start his own company, Ion Storm. Without Carmack holding him accountable, Romero believed that he could build a company where "Design is Law." The problem was that the technology was simply not ready yet—and given that Romero had licensed the underlying game engine from Carmack, he was always at the latter's mercy. Moreover, poor management failed to create a culture of trust, leading to low morale and high attrition. In the end, Romero's passion project, Daikatana, ended up being a multi-million dollar flop. Though their follow-up, Anachronox, would garner positive reviews, it would also prove unprofitable.
Pushing Pixels
Though id Software is famous for their innovations in gaming technology, their advances in publishing and marketing are not to be ignored. Wolfenstein and Doom demonstrated the viability of the shareware model, where an initial portion of the game would be released for free, encouraging its spread. In Doom, Carmack deliberately made portions of the software accessible and open-source to encourage players to mod the game and even make their own levels. (Today, the game's entire codebase, along with its successors and other id games, is available on GitHub). Combined, these viral factors enabled Doom to become one of the most widespread pieces of software in the 90s, at one point beating Windows 95 in installs. With Microsoft eager to establish Windows as a gaming platform, Bill Gates even filmed a promo video set inside the game to help promote Windows 95.
The narrative closely follows the archetype of the American success story, with a handful of exceptionally talented and hardworking individuals building a business from scratch. Several tech industry themes of today are present, such as the belief that extraordinarily productive individuals can turn industries, that effective engineers don't always make good managers, and that company culture can't be ignored. Whereas the book makes it sound as if id had the perfect team at the perfect time, reading between the lines gives the sense that chance had an important role to play as well. The founding team may not have anticipated the steps that would make them successful, but what set them apart was their ability to recognize and take advantage of the trends in game design and development that came with the advent of personal computing.
Kushner's writing is pretty entertaining to follow. At times, he appears to be embellishing the details, but the story is cohesive and engaging. For those born into an age where video games have already become part of the cultural establishment, Masters of Doom is pretty effective at painting a picture of the crazy development of the nascent games industry. It's clear that the absurdity of such games is the product of people with wildly unconventional childhoods and deep flaws, but their legacies are undeniable.
Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would allow at least one thought on his own. “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.”
This Week
The Culture Code
By Daniel Coyle
The success of large organizations is often the work of a cohesive whole rather than a productive few. But whereas some groups are more than the sum of their parts, others are less. In The Culture Code, Coyle investigates the ingredients behind effective systems of people.
