Book Review of "Masters of Doom"

Masters of Doom is indeed a fascinating read and even though I am not an avid gamer, the intricacies and complexities of the Gaming Tech industry are fun to dive into! This is a book about “2 Johns” - John Carmack and John Romero, who built super-popular games like Wolf-3D, Doom & Quake in the late 80s and early 90s, firmly establishing a new class of Rockstars - the programmers who build awesome games! These 2 introverted, self-taught, nerdy kids from broken homes created a highly successful Gaming company (90s kids will surely remember the name ID Software) with their intense passion and insane work ethic. Plus, as an Engineer, I have to give mad respect for shipping sophisticated graphics-driven games in a DOS-based, pre-Windows 95, pre-DirectX, and a command-line-majority World!

In the second half, the book succinctly captures how overdoing, over-emphasizing, and frankly thinking with swollen egos can destroy the most robust of things. It is actually quite painful to read how the presence of a business-minded, emotionally rational “suit” could have helped save this company. The dealings with Microsoft, the advantages, disadvantages of the Shareware model are some of the other non-gaming interesting things discussed here. All in all, highly recommend it if you work in Tech.