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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.

I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fuck himself about midway through the project. Quake is my favorite FPS from that era, and my favorite id game in general, but it sounded like a pain in the ass to work on.

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If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.

It's been on my list, but I haven't read it yet.

I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.

[1] https://sharewareheroes.com/

Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.

Yeah Romero said they signed an agreement saying that it was accurate: https://qr.ae/pFH291

For anyone who wants more books that dig into the games industry, all of Jason Schreier's books are fantastic.

> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.

Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.

I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.

Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.

I think the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" campaign in particular was an incredibly bad call, especially in the "gay panic" era, and made people want to see it fail.

Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.

Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing.

The N64 version is irredeemably bad, but in 2026 I don't really see any reason to play the N64 version.

Agreed that the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" was a pretty questionable marketing strategy. I guess it did get peoples' attention, but I don't think it was the attention that they wanted.

Deus Ex is such a sad story though. I really loved the first one but then was dissapointed by Invisible War. Fast forward a decade and there is Deus Ex Human Revolution which hit all the right notes for me. Fell in love with the series all over again. Mankind Divided was everything I wanted from the sequel until it just stopped. Read all the novels, even played The Fall and love everything about the universe. Shame how it died without a resolution to the Jensen story.

It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.

The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.

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