Gabbar! Main Tera Khoon Pee Jaaoonga!
I just finished one of the most comprehensive books on the history of a medium few share my enthusiasm for. Masters Of Doom is a great book, and everyone should read it. It includes details that many of us already know or could obtain from other sources, but it compresses a great amount of gaming history – the first consumer-level 3D accelerators, John Carmack’s .plan files, and early floppy-disk subscription services – into one accessible, single tangible entity.
The biggest strength of the book is the ability of humanizing people like John Romero, who by a combination of personal desire and raucous media focus became a demi-God, or at least the public face of all things id. He certainly wasn’t the first “name” to be created by gaming, Sierra put designers like Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, and Roberta Williams right on the cover for everybody to see, in a Gulshan Kumar presents Anuradha Paudwal sort of way, only slightly healthy and with lesser hints of sexual politics. But John Romero – he actively gripped the mechanism of fame and appeared to enjoy its velocity. The book delves into that, and explains with tenacity the story that has all the trappings of another Veeru-Jai saga.
The dissolution of something like Ion Storm is distressing to any idealist – more so to dreamers like me – proof somehow of dire and practical truths that creative sorts constantly work to suspend or rescind. But it was the logical and predictable end. The book covers – with a level of veracity I can’t verify – an earlier period in gaming history, where the right mix of people under the right conditions and temperature became id Software and then the thing virtually disintegrated. I mean id is still as strong as ever, but the team that started off together has broken apart and decayed beyond recognition. It is a testament to their creative and practical vision that the company still stands, strong and forward bound.
This book makes a good read for people not interested in gaming history too. The relationship that the harbingers of Doom had, and the vision that they shared, at one point became an ugly mess of disagreements and differences. I have no idea how accurate the narrative is from the perspective of Johns – both Carmack Romero – but I found the dissolution of their creative relationship heartbreaking. It’s certainly not without precedent. Is this really how it happens in the end? How many years do you get to work with a friend before you start to hate each other?
