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

by David Kushner

Shareware. Romero was familiar with the concept. It dated back to a guy named Andrew Fluegelman, founding editor of PC World magazine. In 1980, Fluegelman wrote a program called PC-Talk and released it online with a note saying that anyone who liked the wares should feel free to send him some “appreciation” money. Soon enough he had to hire a staff to count all the checks. Fluegelman called the practice “shareware,” “an experiment in economics.”

Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that. Beginning with Doom, he had decided to adjust his biological clock to accommodate a more monkish and solitary work schedule, free from Romero’s screams, the reporters’ calls, and the mounting distractions of everyday life. He began by pushing himself to stay up one hour later every evening and then coming in one hour later the next day. By early 1995, he had arrived at his ideal schedule: coming in to work at around 4:00 p.m. and leaving at 4:00 a.m.

“For any given project,” he posted in his .plan file online, “there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people.