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

by David Kushner

but I’m going to need a team: an artist, a couple programmers, and a manager, because I don’t want to sit there interfacing with management all day; I want to program.”

He was doing what he had always wanted to do: code games. And he was happy, in the moment as always, not thinking at all about what would come next. If he could be here working on games with enough money for food and shelter, that was good enough for him. As he told the other guys on one of his very first days, put him in a closet with a computer, a pizza, and some Diet Cokes, and he would be fine.

Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.

Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as “Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.”

lol

They hacked all day. They even hacked naked; at the Taylor University computer lab, gamers stripped down for regular “skinny-hacking” parties.

wut

In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute. A lot of people didn’t seem to enjoy their work. Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that.

“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.”