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

by David Kushner

Eleven-year-old John Romero jumped onto his dirt bike, heading for trouble again. A scrawny kid with thick glasses, he pedaled past the modest homes of Rocklin, California, to the Roundtable Pizza Parlor.

Specifically, what was there was Asteroids, or, as Romero put it, “the coolest game planet Earth has ever seen!” There was nothing else like the feeling he got tapping the control buttons as the rocks hurled toward his triangular ship

His stepfather, John Schuneman—a former drill sergeant—had commanded Romero to steer clear of arcades. Arcades bred games. Games bred delinquents. Delinquency bred failure in school and in life.

These books became his lifeblood when his stepfather took the family on a job reassignment to the Royal Air Force base in Alconbury, a small town in central England.

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.

He approached the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think outside the box.

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.

FormGen’s latest concern, however, was even bigger. “Look, Scott,” an executive said, “we don’t think they should be showing blood and stirring up the World War II stuff. We’re really worried about this. It’s too realistic. We’re going to make a lot of people upset. There’s never been a game like this.”

The spirit was in the air. In May 1992, when Wolfenstein was released, an author named Neal Stephenson published a book called Snow Crash, which described an inhabitable cyberspace world called the Metaverse. Science fiction, however, wasn’t inspiring Carmack’s progress; it was just his science. Technology was improving. So were his skills.

Though Romero was somewhat supportive at first, Carmack had other ideas. “Story in a game,” he said, “is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

people would know the game was coming not from GTI but from id. Ron agreed and committed to a marketing budget of $2 million for Doom II. Two million dollars was more than id had spent to develop all its games combined.

Gamers would not have access to Carmack’s graphical engine, but the stuff he was making available was more than just subtly giving them the keys. It was not only a gracious move but an ideological one—a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations.

Though few if any of the gamers had seen pictures of Romero, they figured he was the guy wearing the black T-shirt with the militaristic Doom logo on the front and the bold white words “Wrote It” on the back.

With some research online, he realized he was hardly alone. Doom deathmatch was taking over lives: fans hijacked their office networks to play all weekend, threw their kids out of their basements to wire together their own arenas, and put off so many trips to the bathroom that at least one player (who had been consuming Ding Dong cupcakes during a marathon match) explosively defecated in his pants midgame.

Doom imitations were flooding the shelves and topping the sales charts: Dark Forces, a Star Wars–themed shooter from LucasArts; Descent, a free-flying shooter from Interplay; Marathon, a Macintosh game from a small company called Bungie.

Apogee started doing business under the name 3D Realms, making games that would one-up id Software. Their first release, Duke Nukem 3D, was in fact doing just that. The game was like a comic book version of Doom set in a realistic modern-day world. Players would shoot through abandoned porno theaters and strip clubs. There were even strippers. Though Carmack hated it, feeling that its engine was “held together with bubble gum,” the gamers bought it in droves. People were dubbing it the “Quake killer.”

Brother Jake stood behind the bar of the Horny Toad Cantina in Mesquite mixing up another Big Fucking Gun. One part Rumplemintz, one part Midori, with a splash of blue curaçao, the BFG was a drink he’d concocted in honor of his favorite weapon from Doom.