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

by David Kushner

He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.

Though Carmack was not aware of it, he was joining a pursuit that had begun thousands of years before. The dream of a realistic, immersive, interactive experience had consumed humankind for millennia. Some believed it to be a primal desire. Dating from 15,000 b.c.e., cave paintings in Lascaux, in the south of France, were considered to be among the first “immersive environments,” with images that would give the inhabitant the feeling of entering another world.

Released in April 1991, Hovertank was the first fast-action, first-person shooter for the computer. Id had invented a genre.

Buoyed by the blockbuster success of the first trilogy months before, he had long imagined doing three trilogies, similar to the plan his hero George Lucas had mapped out for the Star Wars films.

That same year three fans of Silas Warner’s original Castle Wolfenstein programmed a parody called Castle Smurfenstein—with Smurfs substituted for the Nazis.

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.”

Soon a Belgian student named Raphael Quinet collaborated with Wyber to release a more readable version of the DEU, which hit the Net on February 16, 1994.

So in early 1995, Alex and his team developed a technology that made sure a game would run on Windows no matter how a computer’s hardware might change. The technology was called DirectX.

“Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden . . . is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.”