Book: Doom Guy, a life in first person (John Romero, 2023)
I'm reading books more often these days, hence you'll see more articles tagged with "Books".
This book is no exception.
Context
I didn't write down how I came to buy that book, but I think I saw it announced on Hacker News.
Anyway, John Romero is a well-known figure in the video game industry, being the father of Doom and Quake, among other titles.
So I figured out it would be nice to read his autobiography.
My thoughts
First things first: this autobiography is very, very detailed and long - Romero takes us back to the early days of his career, even before id Software.
I consider myself fluent in English (most of my work days are spent speaking and writing English), but even with that, it took me a couple of weeks to finish the book - granted, I do not read every day and most of the time, I do it before going to bed for 30 to 45 minutes, but still.
Anyway, the book is full of anecdotes and stories and will speak to any video game fan. I myself came pretty late to the PC gaming industry - I think the first id Software game that I played was Quake III Arena. I played PC games before that (e.g. Half-Life or Duke Nukem), but since I got my first PC circa 1997, I could not really enjoy other games before (most gaming I did before that was through consoles).
What I found very interesting is that not only did Romero give technical details
about how they developed, but because he was also dealing with a good chunk of
the "Sales" process at id, he also explained how he was getting $$$ in while
Carmack was busy on Quake's engine.
Of course, this is an autobiography, so this is told from Romero's perspective
and things may have happened slightly differently, but this still makes for a
very interesting story.
TL;DR: highly recommended, not only for video games fans, but anyone interested in understand how to run a company, with the needs to get revenues in, thus allowing to focus on mid/long term developments.
Fun fact
I don't think I'm the only one who discovered this: the "id" in "id Software" is not pronounced "idea", but "eed" as in "did" or "kid". Romero mentions this in the book, and id Software's Wikipedia page also mentions it:
The company writes its name with a lowercase id, which is pronounced as
in "did" or "kid", and, according to the book Masters of Doom, the group
identified itself as "Ideas from the Deep" in the early days of Softdisk but
that, in the end, the name 'id' came from the phrase "in demand".
Tags: Books