Kushner Masters Tough Subject in Even-Handed Masters of Doom

Note: This article was originally published on Joystick101.org



"Well you're in your little room

and you're working on something good

but if it's really good

you're gonna need a bigger room

and when you're in the bigger room

you might not know what to do

you might have to think of

how you got started

sitting in your little room."

-The White Stripes, Little Room



It's hard to come up with a more succinct summary to the saga of David Kushner's Masters of Doom (Random House, 335 pages). The book is a cautionary tale about what can happen when egos and staff sizes get bigger than the ideas and work ethic of those implementing them.



Master of Doom is the epic tale of "the two Johns" (Romero and Carmack) that "created an empire and transformed pop culture," according to the book's subtitle. The book starts with chapter-long summaries of each John's childhood which segue nicely into their first meeting at SoftDisk. The book goes on to chronicle in detail the creation of Ideas from the Deep, which later became id software, and the marathon coding and gaming sessions that went into creating classics like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and, of course, Doom.



After Doom, the split between Romero and Carmack is echoed by a split in the narrative of the story, which jumps back and forth between the development of Carmack's Quake 2 and 3 and Romero's Daikatana. The interoffice politics are broken up by the real-life politics of the Columbine massacre and its effect on the creators of the game many media outlets blamed for the tragedy. In the end, the book takes on a redemptive tone as Romero starts up a new small-time game development house and Carmack looks to break new boundaries in rocket science.



Kushner's even-handed, balanced writing style frees the book from the bitter bias that infects the countless message board posts and .plan files about the two Johns. Kushner lays out the facts as he sees them and lets the reader draw their own conclusions about the people involved. Kushner wisely stays away from the fanboy-esque ranting that often creeps into such discussions, and the narrative is much better for it.



The main draw of Masters of Doom is Kushner's uncanny talent for getting into the heads of his subjects with an amazing self-assuredness. Much like a good Tom Wolfe book, "Masters of Doom" carefully treads the line between detached reporting and personal experience with flair. Kushner's writing style brings out the divergent and symbiotic personalities of the two Johns to great effect, and the highly narrative structure makes the book read more like a good work of fiction than a bland, purely factual history.



Each success and pitfall on the two Johns' road is chronicled with excruciating detail. Kushner has done so much research that it often seems he was an observer to events that he actually just heard about, a fact that he acknowledges in the notes. The reader gets the impression that Kushner is an expert on the subject he's writing about, too, not simply a non-gamer who felt like writing a video game book. Asides about things like the "hacker ethic" and LAN parties show a more than passing interest in the video game subculture.



Masters of Doom succeeds because it is about more than the games that are its obvious subject. It is a story about the circuitous paths of two visionary game designers and the millions of lives that they affected with their most popular work. Kudos to David Kushner for making a book that humanizes a group of people that are too often considered mindless code-monkeys.