I understand what you're getting at, but how exactly does the book make Romero look bad? Sure he certainly made more mistakes than Carmack, but does that make him look bad? At worst the book makes Romero look a little arrogant. But the book is also filled with accounts of Romero doing great work and notes that when the two Johns met it was Carmack that admired Romero for having more impressive programming knowledge. Clearly things changed but implying that the book makes Romero look bad is a stretch.
In the book he comes off as an overly confident showman. Carmack was everything behind ID software (and to Romero's credit he pretty much admits that).
That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC.
So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM.
Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.
Romero and Jobs both get slammed on HN consistently. One of the things people like to point out about Jobs is that he couldn't program and never did any real engineering.
To be fair to Romero, he could actually program, make games, and design levels. It's really hard for me to accept the claim that he contributed nothing to id:
>He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D;Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D; Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.
He might have made some really poor decisions, but the guy has legitimately been developing games for 30 years. Just look at how many projects he has been involved in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
Somehow I came out of Masters of Doom with a lot less negative opinion of Romero than others did. Carmack, while clearly a genius, actually seemed like a real jerk at points.
At the time of the troubles, Romero was portrayed as the 'indispensable one' (protip, everyone can be replaced) and threw down a very public gauntlet with Daikatana. It was not well received. Which for many proved that Romero wasn't the secret sauce Carmack was. But like Jobs/Wozniak, Lennon/McCartney, Simon/Garfunkel and any of a doze pairs who often did things together that were often better than what either could do alone.
I think Jobs was more extraordinary as a businessman than Wozniak was as a programmer.
I don't think Carmack is a jerk so much as he's just, well, different. More like a machine than a human. I guess that could cause him to be heartless at times but he came off as fair.
Romero was important for ID's success, but as the story played out, Carmack was able to find success without Romero but Romero was not able to be successful without Carmack. Read into that as you will.
Over his life, Jobs has had a greater impact. But at the time Apple was formed, Wozniak singlehandedly designed and engineered a machine that was simply peerless. The Apple ][ made every other system on the market look like a toy for years while costing less to build. Jobs' contribution at the beginning was modest in comparison. (BTW Woz was never much of a programmer, just a killer electrical engineer.)
carmack sells middleware to other studios. id hasn't had a good game since quake 3 which is largely just a technology update of quake -- a game romero was integral to. he's a gifted programmer and i admire his work with armadillo aerospace but his post-quake accomplishments aren't much better than romero's. his biggest edge over romero is his humility. if romero had quietly released daiktana instead of endlessly promising how great it would be his reputation would be much the same as carmack's
From the book I got that Romero had the vision. He had kind of an epic vision of what games could be, and would do everything with his money to achieve that vision. Sometimes he failed, and other times he succeeded massively.
He also, like Jobs, had a sense of what could be insanely great. In the book, when you read about the offices that he wanted for Ion Storm, you get a feeling of Jobs' perfection and micro-management. Romero, like Jobs, wanted to take things to the next level.
I feel compelled to do that, too. Sometimes I think it's a curse.
Right now, I'm working on the same engineering problems that Twitter and Facebook have already solved[1] for a tiny, underfunded startup in San Diego, and I can't just do what Twitter or Facebook did and get paid for it. I have to do it better, "take it to the next level".
I feel absolutely compelled to do something that would make my engineering buddies go: how the fuck did you do that? Oh well—at least I still get paid either way. :)
[1] Or did they? Now that I've spent time in that space, I've developed a taxonomy of how social networks are constructed and grow, and it's obvious (at least to me) that what we've got today is like the Altavista of search engines, just waiting for a Google to come along and apply superior algorithms and data center design and kick some ass. We'll see.
HN has come full circle for me. I'm pretty sure that I actually heard about this book through a recommendation in a comment on HN a year or so ago. First book I purchased since the last harry potter book too.
It's a great book. I'm not a gamer and was only mildly familiar with the majority of the games mentioned in the book but I'd highly recommend it to anyone who finds HN interesting.
