Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words
client when it decided to roll out the iPod in 2001. David Kushner is a writer specializing in the history of gaming culture. His books Masters of Doom, Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, and, most recently, Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D define
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear · 14 Jun 2017 · 708pp · 223,211 words
. Koster, R. “The Online World Timeline—Ralph’s Website.” Retrieved 2016-06-23 from http://www.raphkoster.com/games/the-online-world-timeline/. Kushner, D. Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. New York: Random House, 2003. Kypta, L. S., and H. Bobotek. “Automatic Air Traffic Control
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
of Video Games (Three Rivers Press, 2001). King, Stephen. Danse Macabre (Everest House, 1981). Kohler, Chris. Retro Gaming Hacks (O’Reilly Media, 2005). Kushner, David. Masters of Doom (Random House, 2003). Levy, Steve. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading (Viking, 1996). Poole, Steve. Trigger Happy
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words
American Humor; The Big Book of Jewish Humor (William Novak and Moshe Waldoks) Ohanian, Alexis: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Jessica Livingston), Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner) Palmer, Amanda: Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner · 2 Jan 2003 · 240pp · 109,474 words
1 Contents INTRODUCTION: The Two Johns ONE: The Rock Star TWO: The Rocket Scientist THREE: Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement FOUR: Pizza Money FIVE: More Fun Than Real Life SIX: Green And Pissed SEVEN: Spear Of Destiny EIGHT: Summon The Demons NINE: The Coolest Game TEN: The Doom Generation ELEVEN: Quakes TWELVE: Judgement Day THIRTEEN: Deathmatch FOURTEEN: Silicon Alamo FIFTEEN: Straight out of Doom SIXTEEN: Persistent World EPILOGUE AUTHOR’S NOTE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 3 6 17 26 45 62 73 87 102 114 125 143 158 177 194 209 224 233 237 239 INTRODUCTION The Two Johns T here were two games. One was played in life. The other was lived in play. Naturally these worlds collided, and so did the Two Johns, It happened one afternoon in April 2000 in the bowels of downtown Dallas. The occasion was a $100,000 prize tournament of the computer game Quake III Arena. Hosted by the Cyberathlete Professional League, an organization that hoped to become the NFL at the medium, the gathering was BYOC– bring your own computer. Hundreds of machines were networked together in the basement of the Hyatt hotel for seventy-two hours of nonstop action. On a large video screen that displayed the games being played, rockets soared across digital arenas. Cigar-chomping space marines, busty dominatrix warriors, maniacal bloodstained clowns, hunted each other with rocket launchers and plasma guns. The object was simple: The player with the most kills wins. The gamers at the event were as hard-core as they came. More than one thousand had road-tripped from as far as Florida and even Finland with their monitors, keyboards, and mice. They competed until they passed out at their computers or crawled under their tables to sleep on pizza box pillows. A proud couple carried a newborn baby in homemade Quake pajamas. Two jocks paraded with their hair freshly shaved into the shape of Quake’s clawlike logo; their girlfriends made their way around the convention hall brandishing razors for anyone else who wanted the ultimate in devotional trims. Such passion was hardly uncommon in Dallas, the capital of ultra-violent games like Quake and Doom. Paintball-like contests played from a first-person point of view, the games have pioneered a genre known as first-person 3 shooters. They are among the bestselling franchises in this $10.8 billion industry and a sizable reason why Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. They have driven the evolution of computing, pushing the edge of 3-D graphics and forging a standard for online play and community. They have created enough sociopolitical heat to get banned in some countries and, in the United States, blamed for inciting a killing spree by two fans at Columbine High School in 1999. As a result, they have spawned their own unique outlaw community, a high-stakes, high-tech mecca for skilled and driven young gamers. In this world, no gamers were more skilled and driven than the co-creators of Doom and Quake, John Carmack and John Romero, or, as they were known, the Two Johns. For a new generation, Carmack and Romero personified an American dream: they were self-made individuals who had transformed their personal passions into a big business, a new art form, and a cultural phenomenon. Their story made them the unlikeliest of antiheroes, esteemed by both Fortune 500 executives and computer hackers alike, and heralded as the Lennon and McCartney of video games (though they probably preferred being compared to Metallica). The Two Johns had escaped the broken homes of their youth to make some of the most influential games in history, until the very games they made tore them apart. Now in minutes, years after they had split, they were coming back together before their fans. Carmack and Romero had each agreed to speak to their minions about their latest projects: Carmack’s Quake III Arena, which he’d programmed at the company they cofounded, id Software, and Romero’s Daikatana, the longawaited epic he had been developing at his new and competing start-up, Ion Storm. The games embodied the polar differences that had once made the Two Johns such a dynamic duo and now made them seemingly inseparable rivals. Their relationship was a study of human alchemy. The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanthropic programmer who built high-powered rockets in his spare time (and made Bill Gates’s short list of geniuses); his game and life aspired to the elegant discipline of computer code. The thirty-two-year-old Romero was a brash designer whose bad-boy image made him the industry’s rock star; he would risk everything, including his reputation, to realize his wildest visions. As Carmack put it shortly after their breakup: “Romero wants an empire, I just want to create good programs.” When the hour of the Two Johns’ arrival at the hotel Finally approached, the gamers turned their attention from the skirmish on screen to the real-life one between the ex-partners. Out in the parking lot, Carmack and Romero pulled up one shortly after the other in the Ferraris they had bought together at the height of their collaboration. Carmack walked quickly past the crowd; he had short, sandy blond hair, square glasses, and a T-shirt of a walking 4 hairball with two big eyes and legs. Romero sauntered in with his girlfriend, the sharpshooting gamer and Playboy model Stevie Case; he wore tight black jeans and matching shirt, and his infamous dark mane hung down near his waist. As they passed each other in the hall, the Two Johns nodded obligatorily, then continued to their posts. It was time for this game to begin. 5 ONE The Rock Star E leven-year-old John Romero jumped onto his dirt bike, heading for trouble again. A scrawny kid with thick glasses, he pedaled past the modest homes of Rocklin, California, to the Roundtable Pizza Parlor. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be going there this summer afternoon in 1979, but he couldn’t help himself. That was where the games were. Specifically, what was there was Asteroids, or, as Romero put it, “the coolest game planet Earth has ever seen!” There was nothing like the feeling he got tapping the control buttons as the rocks hurled toward his triangular ship and the Jaws-style theme music blipped in suspense, dum dum dum dum dum dum; Romero mimicked these video game sounds the way other kids did celebrities. Fun like this was worth risking everything: the crush of the meteors, the theft of the paper route money, the wrath of his stepfather. Because no matter what Romero suffered, he could always escape back into the games. At the moment, what he expected to suffer was a legendary whipping. His stepfather, John Schuneman–a former drill sergeant–had commanded Romero to steer clear of arcades. Arcades bred games. Games bred delinquents. Delinquency bred failure in school and in life. As his stepfather was fond of reminding him, his mother had enough problems trying to provide for Romero and his, younger brother, Ralph, since her first husband left the family five years earlier. His stepfather was under stress of his own with a top-secret government job retrieving black boxes of classified information from downed U.S. spy planes across the world. “Hey, little man,” he had said just a few days before, “consider yourself warned.” 6 Romero did heed the warning–sort of. He usually played games at Timothy’s, a little pizza joint in town; this time he and his friends headed into a less traveled spot, the Roundtable. He still had his initials, AJR for his full name, Alfonso John Romero, next to the high score here, just like he did on all the Asteroids machines in town. He didn’t have only the number-one score, he owned the entire top ten. “Watch this,” Romero told his friends, as he slipped in the quarter and started to play. The action didn’t last long. As he was about to complete a round, he felt a heavy palm grip his shoulder. “What the fuck, dude?” he said, assuming one of his friends was trying to spoil his game. Then his face smashed into the machine. Romero’s stepfather dragged him past his friends to his pickup truck, throwing the dirt bike in the back. Romero had done a poor job of hiding his bike, and his stepfather had seen it while driving home from work. “You really screwed up this time, little man,” his stepfather said. He led Romero into the house, where Romero’s mother and his visiting grandmother stood in the kitchen. “Johnny was at the arcade again,” his stepfather said. “You know what that’s like? That’s like telling your mother ‘Fuck you.’” He beat Romero until the boy had a fat lip and a black eye. Romero was grounded for two weeks. The next day he snuck back to the arcade. Romero was born resilient, his mother Ginny said, a four-and-one-halfpound baby delivered on October 28, 1967, six weeks premature. His parents, married only a few months before, had been living long in hard times. Ginny, good-humored and easygoing, met Alfonso Antonio Romero when they were teenagers in Tucson, Arizona. Alfonso, a first-generation Mexican American, was a maintenance man at an air force base, spending his days fixing air conditioners and heating systems. After Alfonso and Ginny got married, they headed in a 1948 Chrysler with three hundred dollars to Colorado, hoping their interracial relationship would thrive in more tolerant surroundings. Though the situation improved there, the couple returned to Tucson after Romero was born so his dad could take a job in the copper mines. The work was hard, the effect sour. Alfonso would frequently come home drunk it he came home at all. There was soon a second child, Ralph. John Romero savored the good times: the barbecues, the horsing around. Once his dad stumbled in at 10:00 P.M. and woke him. “Come on,” he slurred, “we’re going camping.” They drove into the hills of saguaro cacti to sleep under the stars. One afternoon his father left to pick up groceries. Romero wouldn’t see him again for two years. Within that time his mother remarried. John Schuneman, fourteen years her senior, tried to befriend him. One afternoon he found the six-yearold boy sketching a Lamborghini sports car at the kitchen table. The drawing 7 was so good that his stepfather assumed it had been traced. As a test, he put a Hot Wheels toy car on the table and watched as Romero drew. This sketch too was perfect. Schuneman asked Johnny what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy said, “A rich bachelor.” For a while, this relationship flourished. Recognizing Romero’s love of arcade games, his stepfather would drive him to local competitions–all of which Romero won. Romero was so good at Pac-Man that he could maneuver the round yellow character through a maze of fruit and dots with his eyes shut. But soon his stepfather noticed that Romero’s hobby was taking a more obsessive turn. It started one summer day in 1979, when Romero’s brother, Ralph, and a friend came rushing through the front door. They had just biked up to Sierra College, they told him, and made a discovery. “There are games up there!” they said. “Games that you don’t have to pay for!” Games that some sympathetic students let them play. Games on these strange big computers. Romero grabbed his bike and raced with them to the college’s computer lab. There was no problem for them to hang out at the lab. This was not uncommon at the time. The computer underground did not discriminate by age; a geek was a geek was a geek. And since the students often held the keys to the labs, there weren’t professors to tell the kids to scram. Romero had never seen anything like what he found inside. Cold air gushed from the airconditioning vents as students milled around computer terminals. Everyone was playing a game that consisted only of words on the terminal screen: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building towards a gully. In the distance there is a gleaming white tower.” This was Colossal Cave Adventure, the hottest thing going. Romero knew why: it was like a computer-game version of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D, as it was commonly known, was a pen-and-paper role-playing game that cast players in a Lord of the Rings–like adventure of imagination. Many adults lazily dismissed it as geekish escapism. But to understand a boy like Romero, an avid D&D player, was to understand the game. Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event. D&D would grow into an international cottage industry, accounting for $25 million in annual sales from novels, games, T-shirts, and rule books. The appeal was primal. “In Dungeons and Dragons,” Gygax said, “the average person gets a call to glory and becomes a hero and undergoes change. 8 In the real world, children, especially, have no power; they must answer to everyone, they don’t direct their own lives, but in this game, they become super powerful and affect everything.” In D&D, there was no winning in the traditional sense. It was more akin to interactive fiction. The participants consisted of at least two or three players and a Dungeon Master, the person who would invent and direct the adventures. All they needed was the D&D rule book, some special polyhedral dice, and a pencil and paper. To begin, players chose and developed characters they would become in the game, from dwarves to elves, gnomes to humans. Gathered around a table, they would listen as the Dungeon Master cracked open the D&D rule book–which contained descriptions of monsters, magic, and characters–and fabricated a scene: down by a river, perhaps, a castle shrouded in mist, the distant growl of a beast. Which way shall you go? If the players chose to pursue the screams, the Dungeon Master would select just what ogre or chimera they would face. His roll of the die determined how they fared; no matter how wild the imaginings, a random burst of data ruled one’s fate. It was not surprising that computer programmers liked the game or that one of the first games they created, Colossal Cave Adventure, was inspired by D&D. The object of Colossal Cave was to fight battles while trying to retrieve treasures within a magical cave. By typing in a direction, say “north” or “south,” or a command, “hit” or “attack,” Romero could explore what felt like a novel in which he was the protagonist. As he chose his actions, he’d go deeper into the woods until the walls of the lab seemed to become trees, the air-conditioning flow a river. It was another world. Imbued with his imagination, it was real. Even more ...
Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg · 8 Dec 2015 · 315pp · 92,151 words
by Gibson was William Gibson, “Burning Chrome,” Omni (July 1982). Information on John Carmack’s inspiration by the Star Trek holodeck is from David Kushner, Masters of Doom (London: Piatkus, 2003), p. 25. The experiment relaying images from a cat’s retina onto a screen is described in G. B. Stanley, F. F
We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin · 1 Oct 2018
him that creating something cool in the world, even a business, could effect more change. A few months later, Huffman gave Ohanian a copy of Masters of Doom. The 2003 book by David Kushner tells the story of the founding of Id, a scrappy startup that pioneered massive technological innovations in video gaming
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and antisocial John Carmack and charismatic “idea guy” John Romero. Ohanian adored it—and he could see something of Huffman and himself in the duo. Masters of Doom helped breathe life into what Huffman had laid out. One gray afternoon, Huffman sank into one of the recliners and launched into a rant. A
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going inside to order—only to have to wait again for his sandwich. Why not use similar technology to order ahead? Ohanian, fresh off reading Masters of Doom, and currently perched on the opposite recliner, sprang into idea mode: “That’s brilliant!” he thought, saying, “We could totally make a business out of
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris · 19 Feb 2019 · 561pp · 163,916 words
Game Rage.” Venture Beat, October 3, 2011. 3.Schiesel, Seth. “Wasteland of Mutants and Thugs.” The New York Times, October 11, 2011. 4.Kushner, David. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. New York: Random House, 2003. 5.Abrash, Michael. “Valve: How I Got Here, What It