There’s a well-known saying, “If you want to know what someone is like, look at their bookshelves." Since one purpose of the SASSIE blog is to help our customers get to know the people of SurfMerchants better, I thought it would be interesting to ask a few SurfMerchants what they’d been reading lately, and see what kind of picture that paints. Read on and learn a little more about your favorite Surfies and what interests and inspires them.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and
Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
Reviewed by Colleen Mirabello, Director of Engineering
I recently read Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. It describes the inception and rise of the gaming company id Software.
My husband recommended this book to me because, as a programmer, I’m very interested in case studies of software companies, whether they succeed or fail. However, this book was fascinating to me on many levels.
As a teenager, I played many of the games that id created. At the time, I didn’t give much thought to the people or technology behind them. It was interesting to discover that the two lead programmers at id, John Carmack and John Romero, were barely in their twenties when they released those games. Each game was more successful than the last, using custom-built technologies that advanced the entire gaming and PC industries. What I saw as merely entertainment was in truth groundbreaking technology built by guys who weren’t a whole lot older than I was.
Unfortunately, id’s success did not last forever. The personalities of the two lead programmers began to clash. They eventually went their separate ways, neither of them as successful independently as they were as a pair. The book gives an interesting perspective on the notion that people who achieve greatness together may not be capable of that same greatness on their own.
However, personality conflicts weren’t the only thing behind the diminishing of id’s success. Anyone who has read Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne will also recognize that the gaming industry turned from blue to red during the time of id’s rise. In the early days, they were able to easily stand out against the relatively small number of games being released each year. But as time went on and more game companies started up, they began to be overshadowed by the competition.
id is still around and are about to release their newest game. It will be interesting to watch how their story continues to unfold.