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Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first person and messily lay waste to everything that crosses your path, represented a milestone in many areas. It was a technical landmark, in that its graphics engine delivered brilliant performance on ordinary PC hardware. It was a social phenomenon, with individuals and companies hooking up networks specifically for Doom tournaments and staying up for days to blast away on them (well before the Internet went big-time). 

I just finished reading “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture” by David Kushner and am itching to hook up some old PCs and do some deathmatching. Who’s with me?

“Masters of Doom” tells the story of the Two Johns (John Romero and John Carmack) from their early days at Softdisk, to their founding of id Software, and their eventual parting of ways. Along the way we get some behind-the-scenes looks at their personal lives, the personality clashes, the rockstar lifestyles, the controversies, and, of course, how their most influential games were developed and released.

This book was a lot of fun to read because I remember playing all of these games: from Dangerous Dave, Commander Keen Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake (and their related sequels and re-releases) to the other first-person shooters of the era like Descent, Unreal, and Half-Life.

In the early days I would download the shareware releases from local BBSes. I remember designing our apartment as a level for Wolfenstein 3D. When Doom was first released, we hammered the FTP sites on the internet trying to download it as soon as possible. We figured out how to run the networked multi-player (which back then was a cryptic set of command-line parameters) in the university’s computer lab for late-night deathmatch sessions. One summer some friends and I bought network cards and a copy of Personal NetWare and taught ourselves how to set up a network in a friend’s basement. We’d lug our computers (no flat screen LCDs back then!) over to the houses for more deathmatch sessions using mods like Aliens TC, or our personal favorite WAD, Peace 2.0. I even made an ASCII DOOM logo for the mini-FAQ. I remember “finger“-ing id’s developers, reading their .plan file updates and waiting for their upcoming releases. I still have my original shareware Quake CD.

All of that history made reading “Masters of Doom” a nostalgic trip down memory lane. It’s a good read for anyone who grew up an FPS gamer like me, or the next generation of gamers who should know the legacy that has brought them current shooters like the BioShock, Portal, and Call of Duty series. The Two Johns started it all.

And hey, look at this: Romero might be working on a new shooter game. The legacy continues …