#21 Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso, or four energy drinks, before or during the show, so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. Let's go ahead and jump into today's book, which is Masters of Doom, How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. So it's about John Romero and John Carmack, who are the people that created some of the most iconic video games of all time, Doom. Most of the book, it's basically about not only the partnership that they created in the early 20s, but then what tears them apart later on. And then it also goes into, which I find the most interesting part, the differences of their philosophies on business. And I'll be going chronologically through the book. So I'm going to start in the introduction. For a new generation, Carmack and Romero personified an American dream. They were self-made individuals who had transformed their personal passions into a big business, a new art form, and a cultural phenomenon. Their story made them the unlikeliest of anti-heroes. Esteemed by both Fortune 500 executives and computer hackers alike.
And heralded as the Lennon and McCartney of video games. Though they probably would both be preferred being compared to Metallica. The Two Johns had escaped the broken homes of their youth to make some of their most influential games in history. Until the very games they made tore them apart. The 29-year-old Carmack was a monkish programmer who built high-powered rockets in his spare time, and made Bill Gates shortlist of geniuses. His game and life aspired to the elegant discipline of computer code. The 32-year-old Romero was a brash designer whose bad boy image made him the industry's rock star. He would risk everything, including his reputation, to realize his wildest dreams.
As Carmack put it shortly after their breakup, Romero wants an empire. I just want to create good programs.
So in the introduction, it starts off when they're at a video game conference. This is a few years after they broke up. So they referenced a 29-year-old Carmack and 32-year-old Romero, but they started working together in the early 20s. It lasted a few years, and then they obviously go their separate ways, and we'll definitely dive into that. That's basically what the whole book is about. So I'm going to start with John Romero, and the story that's in the book at the very beginning, which is just terrible, and it's about Romero and his stepdad. So let's jump into this. 11-year-old John Romero jumped onto his dirt bike, heading for trouble again. A scrawny kid with thick glasses, he pedaled past the modest homes of Rockland, California, to the Round Table Pizza Parlor. He knew he wasn't supposed to be going there this summer afternoon in 1979, but he couldn't help himself.
That was where the games were. What was there was asteroids, or as Romero put it, the coolest game planet Earth has ever seen. There was nothing else like the feeling he got tapping the control buttons as the rocks hurled toward his triangular ship and the Jaws-style theme music blipped in suspense. Dum da dum.
Actually, I don't think that's how it sounded, but that's how it's written. Romero mimicked these video game sounds the way other kids did celebrities.
Fun like this was worth risking everything.
The crush of the meteors, the theft of the paper route money, the wrath of his stepfather. Because no matter what Romero suffered, he could always escape back into games. This is another theme that pops up throughout this book, is the escapism that video games provides for people, especially people in living lives that they're currently unhappy with. At the moment, what he expected to suffer was a legendary whipping. His stepfather, John Schneuneman, a former drill sergeant, had commanded Romero to steer clear of arcades. Arcades bred games. Games bred delinquents. Delinquency bred failure in school and life, or so his stepfather's logic went. As his stepfather was fond of reminding him, his mother had enough problems trying to provide for Romero and his younger brother since her first husband left the family five years earlier. His stepfather was under stress of his own with a top secret government job retrieving black boxes of classified information from downed US spy planes across the world.