Book Review: Masters of Doom

I just finished "Masters of Doom" a couple of days ago, and I've been on a sort of Doom/Quake/id/Carmack/Romero information frenzy ever since. It is beginning to consume almost too much of my time but very fulfilling since I was a huge Doom fan back when it came out (I created many levels and mods) and I also really liked the early Quake games.

So in the past weeks I read up on all the early id guys, and what became of them after they were fired or left, I did quite some (probably too much) reading on the mess that was Daikatana and how it came to be. I actually find this really interesting, to learn how a project backed with so many employees and so much money can fail so badly, there're probably lessons to learn here (I've even watched somebody play through Daikatana on Youtube).

While being on my search, I've found a lot of interesting or not so interesting things. So if you want to spend some time, here's an unordered list of trivia that I stumbled upon:

• Somebody playing through Daikatana
• Romero Himself on Daikatana, including a GB port of the game that actually got good reviews (never made it to the US though)
• Awful public clash between John Romero and Mike Wilson (former Ion Storm Marketing guy)
• Ravenwood Fair is a Facebook game that Romero did a couple of years ago (so that's what he's been up to recently):
• If you read Masters of Doom, you'll remember that it all started at Softdisk, when Carmack and Hall created "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement", a Super Mario Bros copy. Romero uploaded the original game including their level editor, you can find it here
• Unreleased Doom Midi Music Files

Also, look how young they all looked:

Sadly, the original Doom editor, DoomEd was never released. I read that it wasn't particularly good (compared to what is available nowadays) but since it was written in NeXTSTEP, I'd love to port it current OSX (or at least give it a go).