Masters of Doom (2003)

I learned a lot and remembered a lot in David Kushner’s account of the developers responsible for the video game sensation Doom (and Quake, among many others). I never played it much myself, mainly because I’m never good at any game based on hand-eye coordination. But I knew a lot of people who went for Doom hard. I even worked with a group who set up so-called “death match” bouts and went at it on their (slightly extended) lunch hour. I bought my first PC in 1988 and was a consumer of shareware, including games, and later went to work for Microsoft doing content chores. So I have been adjacent to a lot of the milieu described in this perfectly delightful book. But of course there was much more I didn’t know, starting with the term “Silicon Alamo” for a game creation nexus in Texas and Louisiana (compare “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Alley”). Doom is most famously the origin of first-person shooter games, which among other things Joe Lieberman blamed for Columbine. In a way it's not hard to see how you get there. The basic goal of Doom is to kill everything you can, and the rich graphic environment leaned into that with shrieking on the soundtrack, gore, and a lot of splatter-type special effects. One of the game’s many innovations was the persistence of corpses, which had generally been cleaned up quickly in most games before it. The U.S. Marines picked up Doom for training purposes, whatever you might want to make of that. I think of these games, including Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty (which I also know only by reputation ... Kushner actually has another book that looks good about GTA)—think of them more as cathartic than anything, in addition to the fun and kick of any game. They may be triggers for unstable people, and we seem to have a lot of unstable people around the place nowadays, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go to condemn them. I also loved the way Kushner’s story goes deep into the strange, utopian world of shareware. I missed a lot of the origins of Doom there but was off on my own little gaming adventures, notably Hack aka The Amulet of Yendor. Masters of Doom is a great tour of computer gaming in the ‘90s. It’s appropriately fast-paced, readable, and highly entertaining. If you played Doom and/or Quake then you’re probably going to want to play them again. If you ever stopped.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.