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

by David Kushner

John Carmack was a late talker. His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.” It was as if he didn’t want to mince words until he had something sensible to say.

Id hated Myst. It had none of the elements they liked: no real-time interaction, no pace, no fear, no action. If Myst was like Shakespeare, Doom was going to be Stephen King.

Only Jay stayed behind to watch the game finish uploading. After a half hour, the final bit of Doom data made its way to Wisconsin. The moment it did, ten thousand gamers swamped the site. The weight of their requests was too much. The University of Wisconsin’s computer network buckled. David Datta’s computer crashed. “Oh my God,” he stammered to Jay over the phone. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Neither had the world.

This belief has existed since ancient Greece, when Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play . . . is a significant function . . . which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton. . . . Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture.

In video games, no one really got hurt. But when it came to violent play, people had a history of linking fantasy with reality, as the author Gerard Jones explored in his book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence.

children who watched films of a person punching an inflatable clown doll later beat up such a clown toy more aggressively than kids who hadn’t watched the film. The conclusion: exposure to violent media caused real-life violence. In reality, of course, the kids were just punching inflatable clowns; they were not running to the local circus and pummeling Bozo. Rather than blame violent media, Jones argued, adults needed to understand the role make-believe violence plays in human development: “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.”

Romero himself couldn’t believe the way people were harping on Doom, a game that was six years old. It just showed how clueless the politicians had become. It was just the same old crap from the same old people. And Romero was tired of the blame. Those kids were defective, he thought, so don’t blame it on my game. Don’t blame the games. Blame the fucking parents.