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

by David Kushner

Romero was also chastised for playing his music too loud. Grudgingly, he wore headphones.

While big guns like Nintendo were spending millions on marketing and advertising, id would take out only one small ad in a gaming magazine for Doom. The goal, then, was to get the Doom shareware into as many hands as possible.

With Doom’s help, computer games had skyrocketed GTI’s sales from $10 million to a projected $340 million in just two years. When the company went public in December 1995, it was the largest venture-capital-backed IPO of the year, even ahead of the Internet browser company Netscape.

It would be, by all definitions, something of a hack—a piece of creative engineering that he’d invented to solve a problem.