I read the book. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, where he describes how he encountered the tools of the "stone age" of computing and learned to build games on his own. He starts from fairly nothing and gets to the point where his games are regularly the feature game in the computer games magazines of the time. All of this is juxtaposed against and with the constant background of his frequently gasoline fume volatile home life.

I found the second part of the book which begins after Doom is launched and Doom II goes into development to be more of a slog to get through. He also goes at length into his post-Id Games games and how he made some mistakes and some successes. For example. Deus Ex came out of his game company because he gave Warren Spector the independence to build it and many influential personalities in the game industry nowadays got their start at his game company.

My recommendation? Read the first part of the book if you want to get a real FPV of the Wild West in which pioneers like Id Games built the first complex, performant 2D and 3D games and game engines in a world where performance was mostly determined by assembly language wizardry and mastery, not a GPU.

I don't doubt that John Romero has that superpower ability.