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

by David Kushner

After graduating college, Tom found his dreams dashed. When his résumés to game companies went unanswered, he did what most college graduates did with their dreams—gave up and applied for “real jobs.”

The author William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his influential 1984 novel, Neuromancer, to describe an interactive online world that existed between computer networks. In the late 1980s, Scott Fisher, an engineer at the NASA–Ames Research Center, combined a head-mounted display and data-transmitting hand gloves

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

the car wasn’t quite fast enough. His instinct was to get under the hood and start futzing around, just like he had with his MGB. But this was no ordinary car, this was a Ferrari. No one futzed with a Ferrari. The elite manufacturer had very low regard for anyone who dared mess with its pristine design.

If Myst was like Shakespeare, Doom was going to be Stephen King.

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.” Researchers since the 1980s had been finding positive effects of video games; a report in the Journal of American Academic Child Psychiatry argued that games not only didn’t inspire aggression, they released it.

Similar to any competitive sport.