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Masters of Doom
Summary
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture is a 2003 book by David Kushner about video game company id Software and its influence on popular culture, focusing on co-founders John Carmack and John Romero. The book goes into detail about the company's early years, the success of their franchises such as Doom, and the dynamics between Carmack and Romero and their different personalities. The book also focuses on Romero's firing and the founding and the eventual collapse of his game studio Ion Storm.
Upon release, Masters of Doom received positive reviews from critics and has been placed on numerous "best of" lists for video game books. The book would later influence Palmer Luckey to establish the technology company Oculus VR, and Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman to found reddit. There have been two attempts to adapt the book: a television movie on Showtime, and a pilot episode greenlit by USA Network in 2019 for a potential series.
David Kushner was a contributor for news outlets such as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Wired. A self-described "gamer", Kushner saw an opportunity to write a book about the video games industry, choosing to focus on John Carmack and John Romero as he considered their careers as "a great story waiting to be told". Due to it being his first book, he spent five years on research. He moved to Dallas, Texas to conduct the interviews with the subjects, interviewing them late into the night. Basing his writing technique on Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff, Kushner wrote every line of dialogue and internal monologue based on interviews the author had with the subjects.
The book describes the respective childhoods of the "two Johns", their first meeting at Softdisk in 1989 and the eventual founding of their own company, id Software. It discusses in detail the company's first successes, the popular and groundbreaking Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D games, and the new heights the company reached with Doom, which granted the company unprecedented success, fame, and notoriety.
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