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

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

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I just bought the Audible audio book version (read by Wil Wheaton!). Looking forward to this. I've heard a lot of good things about it.
Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart.
https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Cre ... B000FBFNL0

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

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I bought a used book from Amazon. Soon as I finish watching House series (on season 8 - last), I'll start reading the book. For some reason, I thought it would be a paperback.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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I'm half way through it which has covered everyone's childhood, meeting up at a software company, and then going off to do their own games under the Id name, and finally the work of producing and releasing Doom.

Even though I lived through those times and I was doing some programming back then, I never really appreciated the breakthroughs that Carmack was responsible for. He INVENTED all the basic techniques used in 3D gaming today WITHOUT and had to optimize it for regular EGA and VGA without the benefit of any graphic processors.

People (mostly universities and production companies like LucasArts) were doing 3D but it was rendered 3D that took hours to render a few minutes of video. Carmack's incredible brilliance was figuring out was of making the PC (not a machine optimized for graphics) to render 3D in real-time.

I had no idea how much money these guys made in such a short time - and keep in mind this was SHAREWARE. They gave away the first episode FOR FREE and only expected 1% of the people who played it to buy the whole game for $40.

Castle Wolfenstein 3D was their first major money maker, and was making them an impressive $100K a month.

Doom, when first released, was bringing in an incredible $100K A DAY! And there was practically no overhead, and since they didn't use a publisher, they profited 90 cents on every dollar.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Wow. Now they're getting into DWANGO. God I almost forgot about DWANGO.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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LOL yes DWANGO. I just finished the book this afternoon.I forgot about that also. Man the book brings back old memories. I wish I had kept my original DOOM disk. I only have the manual and receipt. I lost it during several moves, or someone took it and never gave it back.
Interesting reading on how JR got removed from ID. I did not know it happened during the initial game of Quake. Then the failure of ION Storm which JR created with a few of his friends that left ID. I wish the book would have said what they are up to with a specific date. I think that JC is working for ID, which was purchased? Not sure what JR is up to. All I can say is these 2 guys, as the book refers to them, the 2 Johns, they really turned around not only gaming, but the PC.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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Just ordered it for my Nook. Looking forward to reading it.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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As for DWANGO, I forgot also that when DOOM came out, you could only deathmatch with a serial cable (fvcking slow), or IPX protocol. DWANGO added the ability to play over the net, but at a cost. You had to have a modem and dial into one of their servers to play on line. At work, we created a special boot floppy that we used which would load the correct network drivers used at our company. It avoided the IT detection of someone playing a game. In this case, it was DOOM. We did get caught, but we stated it was during lunch hour, and we had a valid license for the game. After that, they pretty much left us alone.
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Re: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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I used Dwango for Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. It was painful to use. You had to find someone else with a very similar ping to yours for it to work. On rare occasions I could play Duke Nukem with 2 other people but a session would rarely last more than a few minutes before the pings started varying too much over unreliable dialup. When it worked, it was a blast.

It filled a void until the Internet version of Quake came out, which finally made easy Internet multiplayer possible.
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