This weekend I didn’t play anything. Didn’t really want and wasn’t in the mood. But the main reason was that I got lost in a book that anybody involved in gaming should read: Masters of Doom.
It’s not, obviously, a horror book, it’s about about the two Johnes: John Romero and John Carmack, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. They invented the First Person Shooter style of gaming, they brought deathmatch to millions of players and made the world of gaming much more visceral.
The book goes over a period of about 20 years, since the two guys met, until the launch of Daikatana and Quake 3 Arena, the titles that weren’t as successful as any previous work they’ve done.
One quote I found interesting is about gamers’ behavior when it comes to paying:
Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply to take what they could get for free.
Go, have a read. It’s a good way to understand the things happening inside a small team once it grows.
