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

by David Kushner

Carmack, in particular, seemed almost inhumanly immune to distraction. One time, Jay tested Carmack’s resolve by popping a porno video into the VCR and cranking it to full volume. Romero and the others immediately heard the “oohs” and “aahs,” and turned around cracking up. Carmack, though, stayed glued to his monitor. Only after a minute or so did he acknowledge the increasingly active groans. His sole response was “Mmm.” Then he returned to the work at hand.

All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to his life: writing code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he couldn’t solve a problem without infringing on someone’s patents, he would be very unhappy living there.