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Comment by radmuzom | Hacker News Reader

The post title is misleading. 'Masters of Doom' is not a book on John Carmack's adolescent years alone, but a book focusing on the lives of both Carmack and John Romero, with a few other 'minor' characters, who were the main people behind idSoftware. It is a fascinating read.

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I wish there were more books about the PC game industry at that time. I grew up with Apogee games and I'd love to read more about the company's history and the creation of Duke Nukem 3D! It's too bad that interest in early console gaming overshadows early PC gaming, especially since there were a lot more "hacker"-types working in PC games in the 90s.

There's a nice collection of interviews[1] that Apogee did with many of the original developers a few years ago, but it's hardly enough!

The poster that Interceptor Entertainment made for the 3D Realms Anthology[2] is like a nostalgia bomb for me. :)

[1]: http://legacy.3drealms.com/legacy.html

[2]: https://3drealms.com/catalog/3d-realms-anthology_50/

I enjoyed "The Making of Prince of Persia" [1]. It is a journal and thus misses out on some of the dramatic storytelling the strong, contrasting personalities of Romero and Carmack provided Masters of Doom. However, I found it very interesting from a design and programming point of view.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985/dp/...

There is also a book [1] about Blizzard that I really enjoyed.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8UL474

Yeah, I wish there had been a similar book about the Warcraft side of the company, since Warcraft was one of the first non-shareware games I played on my first PC. Patrick Wyatt's blog[1] has some pieces on it, but more would be lovely.

[1] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/archives

Here, you'll enjoy this, on me. Apogee's old catalogs and all their mailing materials : https://www.scribd.com/doc/134559074/Apogee-Catalog

There's a bunch of other id and Carmack related docs up there too if you look including the "Book of id" from the id Anthology and a few GameDevMag articles.

Masters of Doom actually mentions Apogee a few times, and discusses a bit of detail about the Build engine and Ken Silverman (particularly pointed at its influence on the guys at iD, and how it influenced the development of Quake). The author does a good job of describing the landscape for developers and publishers at the time in general as well.

Yeah, it's why I brought this up. I loved the Apogee/3DRealms talk in Masters of Doom! Brought me back to being a budding gamer in the 90's. Just wish there was more; a "Masters of Doom" for Epic, Apogee, Blizzard, and all the other big names at the time.

The link doesn't go directly to the page with, "If life felt unstructured and unyielding when Carmack lived with his mother", for you?

Nope, just shows me the landing page with the book cover.

I apologize...I should've checked in another browser (works in Chrome, w/o cookies) and/or mobile...not being sarcastic here, I've never been quite sure how stable Google Books's permalinks are outside of Chrome. But yes, the submission is meant to point to a specific chapter about Carmack growing up and acquiring an Apple ][

For what it's worth, it took me to the appropriate page in Firefox as well.

I think it might be based on location (UK here), it doesn't link directly to a page in any browser I tried.

It worked fine on IE11 too.

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