Lords of DOOM: how two guys created a cult shooter and rocked the video game industry

Hello habrosociety! Today I want to tell you about a book that you could easily skip and deprive yourself of the opportunity to immerse yourself in an interesting story.

In fact, the book is a kind of chronology of the development of Id Software and the “two John” - Carmack and Romero. If you are interested in the topic of the development of PC games, then the story of the appearance of Commander Keen, Daungerous Dave or Doom will not be new for you, but what difficulties the guys faced in this is extremely interesting. I specifically will not even try to engage in retelling here, only a quick overview - read more yourself if you have any interest.

History, as befits any biography, starts from the childhood of Carmack and Romero. Both of them were in love with programming and arcade games on automatic machines, both of them sought wealth in one form or another. Romero wanted to prove that he could become “a famous rich man and a great programmer,” Carmack, as it becomes clear in the course of the book, was attracted by the opportunity to create technologies, engines and do with them what he himself wanted. Fate brought them together - 2 programmers and gamers - and made it possible to start working together. In each other, they saw kindred spirits, albeit with different characters.

But by no means immediately they ran to open a startup, as it would have happened now. There was no smoothie and MacBook back then (but there was Apple II, about which the heroes of the book speak quite gently), the guys had to work “for uncle”, which was Softdisk. They worked on the production of entire collections of games that came out on a regular basis once a month. Yes, yes, once the games were made quickly, they took up little space and at the same time were different and interesting (but this is not accurate). But Carmack was interested not only in the production of clones of already popular games or any prequels of prequels: he wanted to advance PC gaming to a new level. It is worth considering that 1990 was in the yard, there is no Windows on the market, the only things you can work with are IBM PC and DOS.Computers, even by those standards, were inferior to consoles in graphics processing speed and no one really believed in the gaming future of this platform. It was not for this that they invented computers to play toys with them.

But once Carmack came up with a new concept of side scrolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh), which allowed, firstly, to reduce the load on the PC graphics system, and secondly, to achieve a smoother picture change. The idea of ​​redrawing only those elements that change during the player’s movement seems logical to us, but in those years no one came up with this except Carmack. Applying technology for the first time in the Commander Keen series of games, developers have been a resounding success.



Doubts disappeared: the guys have an almost unlimited talent for the production of games. And also to the consumption of diet Coca-Cola, pizza (not diet), the rout of the office, loud listening to "metal". Soon, they decided to go on their own voyage, establish id software and turn over the media entertainment market with both a part of software sales (shareware distribution) and a part of the graphics engine - we still owe many tricks to John Carmack. In addition, the Doom phenomenon included a "deadly battle" mode, which for the first time allowed playing shooters with live people on the "LAN". Quake later transferred this phenomenon to the Internet and turned esports. Tournaments began at that moment, the future came just then. History is truly non-trivial, and among other things abounds with details of interpersonal relationships in a team.Do not think that the guys were hippies - they fired people from the company quickly and simply, without any troubles, labor code and bitter regrets. They worked at the same time for days, at night, day and morning. They lost families, relationships with friends.



The epilogue was the separation of the company from Romero. It was he who, in the guise of a rock star of the company, was better known than the others, and it was precisely because of this that he had to leave the company. How and why - in the book, and between success and disappointment there will be a story of geeks and nerds, thoroughly brightened by Ferrari, intrigues and real nihilism. An excellent translation, a good publication and an occasion to think about whether you spend too much time on your own duties.