Masters of Doom chronicles the history of John Romero and John Carmack, the founders of id Software, who made Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, and Quake. Romero and Carmack are widely credited for creating the first-person shooter genre in video games. It tells the story of their childhoods and upbringings before meeting and forming a partnership, and all the challenges and tribulations that followed. It also tells the story of the birth of Romero’s second company, Ion Storm, and the history of the ill-fated Daikatana, which is regarded as being one of the biggest flops in the history of video games.

To create a new game is one thing, to create a new IP is something greater, but to create a new genre is special. It doesn’t happen a lot in video games, but the whole video game industry puts down their controllers and takes notice when it does. It’s the equivalent of a galaxy being born in outer space because now a whole new paradigm exists to make games that didn’t exist before. From that paradigm, new games, new IPs, and new sub-genres will now be born as well. That’s what id Software did with first-person shooters: they created a new paradigm. Masters of Doom does an excellent job of telling that story.

This is another video game history book I had a hard time putting down. I remember a lot of the hype around Wolfenstein and Doom, but I didn’t know a lot about Carmack, and even less about Romero, other than they both worked together at id. Fans of id’s early work, or anyone interested in video game history, should definitely give Masters of Doom a read. It’s a good time capsule of what PC gaming was like in the 1990s and the culture that surrounded it.