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

“In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks.
Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world.
“In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“At 4:00 A.M. on May 5, 1992, the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D was complete.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“a poem called “The Night Before Doom”: “ ’Twas the night before Doom, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that Doom, / soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision he printed in an editorial called “A Parent’s Nightmare Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums, they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero’s stepfather knew something was up when an officer working on a classified Russian dogfight simulation asked him if his stepson was interested in a part-time job.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“If we can get this done, [Doom] is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D. The”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero could hardly breathe. He just sat in his chair with his fingers on the keys, scrolling Dave back and forth along the landscape, trying to see if anything was wrong, if somehow this wasn’t really happening, if Carmack had not just figured out how to do exactly what the fucking Nintendo could do, if he had not done what every other gamer in the universe had wanted to do, to break through, to do for PCs what Mario was doing for consoles. On the strength of Mario, Nintendo was on the way to knocking down Toyota as Japan’s most successful company, generating over $1 billion per year. Shigeru Miyamoto, the series’s creator, had gone from being a poor country boy in Japan to being the gaming industry’s equivalent of Walt Disney. Super Mario Brothers 3 sold 17 million copies, the equivalent of seventeen platinum records—something only artists like Michael Jackson had pulled off. Romero saw it all come pouring down in front of him: his future, their future, scrolling across the room in brightly colored dreams. The PC was hot. It was heading into more homes each day. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t be just a luxury item, it would be a home appliance. And what better to make it a friendly part of life than a killer game. With such a hit, people wouldn’t even have to buy Nintendos; they could just invest in PCs. And here Romero was sitting in his crappy little office building in Shreveport looking at the technology that could make the first big league games for the PC. He saw their destiny, their Future Rich Personages. It was so devastating that he found he couldn’t move, couldn’t get up out of his seat. He was destroyed. And it wasn’t until Carmack rolled back into the office a few hours later that Romero was able to muster the energy to speak. He had only one thing to tell his friend, his genius partner, his match made in gamer heaven. “This is it,” he said. “We’re gone!”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“This is my daily work . . . When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day. Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed. Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would allow at least one thought on his own. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Carmack wrote some code that duped the computer into thinking that, for example, the seventh tile from the left was in fact the first tile on the screen. This way the computer would begin drawing right where Carmack wanted it to. Instead of spitting out dozens of little blue pixels on the way over to the cloud, the computer could start with the cloud itself. To make sure the player felt the effect of smooth movement, Carmack added one other touch, instructing the computer to draw an extra strip of blue tile outside the right edge of the screen and store it in its memory for when the player moved in that direction. Because the tiles were in memory, they could be quickly thrown up on the screen without having to be redrawn. Carmack called the process “adaptive tile refresh.” In lay terms, as Tom immediately understood, this meant one thing: They could do Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC! Nobody, no one, nowhere had made the PC do this. And now they could do it, right here, right now, take their all-time favorite video game and hack it together so it could work on the computer. It was almost a revolutionary act of subversion, he thought, especially considering Nintendo’s stronghold on its own platform. There was no way to, say, copy a Nintendo game onto a PC as one would tape an album. But now they could replicate it tile for tile, blip for blip. It was the ultimate hack. “Let’s do it!” Tom said. “Let’s make the first level of Super Mario tonight!” He”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“John Carmack was a late talker. His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.” It was as if he didn’t want to mince words until he had something sensible to say.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero ran back to the Apple II department to tell Lane and Jay the good news: “Dudes, we’re fucking making games!” Lane would now be editor of Gamer’s Edge, Softdisk’s new bimonthly games disk for the PC. All that remained was to get another programmer, someone who knew the PC and, just as important, could fit in with Lane and Romero. Jay said there was someone he knew who was definitely hard-core. This kid was turning in great games. And he even knew how to port from the Apple II to the PC. Romero was impressed by the apparent similarities to himself. But there was a problem, Jay said. The Whiz Kid had already turned down a job offer three times because he liked working freelance. Romero pleaded with Jay to try him again. Jay wasn’t optimistic but said okay. He picked up the phone and gave John Carmack one last pitch. When Carmack pulled up to Softdisk in his brown MGB, he had no intention of taking the job. But, then again, times were getting rough. Though he enjoyed the idea of the freelance lifestyle, he was having trouble making rent and would frequently find himself pestering editors like Jay to express him his checks so he could buy groceries. A little stability wouldn’t be bad, but he wasn’t eager to compromise his hard work and ideals to get there. It would take something significant to sway him.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“game. A Kentucky entrepreneur hooked up a version of Wolfenstein to virtual reality goggles and brought in five hundred dollars a day at the Kentucky State Fair. But players didn’t need virtual reality goggles to feel immersed. In fact, the sense of immersion was so real that many began complaining of motion sickness. Calls were coming in even at the Apogee office saying that people were throwing up while playing the game. Wolfenstein vomit stories became items of fascination online. Theories abounded. Some players thought the game’s animation was so smooth that it tricked the brain into thinking it was moving in a real space. Other gamers thought it had something to do with the “jerkiness” of the graphics, which induced the feeling of seasickness. Some felt it was simply disorienting because there was no acceleration involved; it was like going from zero to sixty at light speed. Gamers even exchanged tips for how to play without losing one’s Doritos.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“We fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“One night in 1987, Carmack saw the ultimate game. It occurred in the opening episode of a new television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the captain visited the ship’s Holodeck,”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The gaming community, already reeling from the split of Carmack and Romero, became ablaze with speculation until Carmack finally addressed them in an unusually personal and lengthy e-mail interview. “Lots of people will read what they like into the departures from id,” he wrote, “but our development team is at least as strong now as it has ever been. Romero was pushed out of id because he wasn’t working hard enough. . . . I believe that three programmers, three artists, and three level designers can still create the best games in the world. . . . We are scaling back our publishing biz so that we are mostly just a developer. This was allways [sic] a major point of conflict with Romero—he wants an empire, I just want to create good programs. Everyone is happy now.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone’s relief, they burst out laughing.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Neither technology nor Carmack would be his ruler. In fact, he would simply license the Quake engine—which id had agreed to do—and make a game around it. He would have three designers, working on three games at a time in different genres. And he would give each designer a large enough staff to get the jobs done quickly. It wouldn’t be just a game company, it would be an entertainment company. And the mantra of anything they produced would be loud and clear: “Design is law,” Romero said. “What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate solution. “You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“If we can get this done,” Romero said, “this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero hurled a few shotgun blasts into an opponent and yelled, “Eat that, fucker!” The sheepish guy on the other computer looked up in fear. Shawn knew that look—the look of gamer who had never heard true, unbridled smack-talk, just like he’d been the first time he had heard Romero insult him during a game. But now Shawn was a pro and joined right in. “Suck it down, monkey fuck!” he called, after firing a few blasts from his BFG. The gamers cowered. They would learn.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

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