Masters of Doom is the history of id Software, the creators of classic games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. More specifically, the book focuses on the two main driving forces behind the company and the most famous and influential persons in the gaming industry: John Carmack and John Romero.

The book starts with the childhood of Carmack and Romero. From a young age, they were both heavily into video games and soon started making games themselves on the Apple II. They first met when they worked at Softdisk, a software subscription service, where they made games for Softdisk’s gaming department. Being bored and feeling underappreciated, they decided to leave Softdisk eventually and start their own game development company: id Software. They teamed up with publisher Apogee (today 3D Realms) and started working on some truly revolutionary games. Commander Keen was the first smooth scrolling game on the PC, something that only existed on game consoles before. Wolfenstein 3D was the first succesfull 3D game. But the game that made them superstars was, of course, Doom. The gameplay, the graphics, the gore, but most of all, the deathmatch, all of these were unseen so far.
After Doom, they started working on Quake, but tension was building up in the team. Carmack and Romero were disagreeing often on how games should be made, and Romero was spending more time playing Doom and behaving like a rock star instead of working on Quake. The game was delayed quite a few times, and when it was finished, Romero was fired. Romero getting kicked out of id Software, that’s like James Hetfield getting kicked out of Metallica.
Romero immediately got started on his own, though. He was planning to make a game of his own for a long time, and now was his chance. He started his own company, Ion Storm, and started working on the now-infamous Daikatana. The game was announced with lots of media exposure (including the “John Romero is about to make you his bitch” ad), got delayed a few times and when it was finally released in 2000, it turned out to be not only technically backwards, but it also had lousy gameplay. It couldn’t compete with other first person shooters like Unreal and Half-Life, and became the most legendary failure in the history of video games.
I have personally read this book five times already and I never grow tired of it. It provides a great behind-the-scenes look of a game development company. This is a must-have for all game developers!