Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web of problems and solutions, imagination and code.

He kept nothing from the past—no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time.

But Romero wasn’t going to lie down and die. He had a dream to pursue, a family he loved. He could be the dad he’d never had himself, the kind of dad who would not just support his kids’ games but play them.

The computer game, he believed, was a unique medium into which he could incorporate those disciplines. He could invent a language for aliens in a game. He could program realistic physics. He could write stories, invent characters.

bit can be either on or off. Tom called Romero’s mood swings the bit flip.

Until this point Carmack had been entranced by arcade games. He wasn’t the best player around, but he loved the fast action and quick payback of Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Battlezone.

create an arbitrary 3-D world with Internet play. Carmack began the project as he often did, by reading as much research material as he could gather. He paid thousands of dollars for textbooks and papers, but everything was purely academic.

When assigned to write about his top five problems in life, he listed his parents’ high expectations—twice.

Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.