While Carmack was exceptionally talented in programming, Romero was multitalented in art, sound, and design.

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.

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.

He approached the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think outside the box.

I wind up catagorizing [sic] periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time.

All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents were jeopardizi

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.

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.