Reddit reviews Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

The following books:

• Hackers by Steven Levy
  
  
• Masters of Doom by David Kushner
  
  
• A history of the Amiga - a series of articles by Ars Technica which are great.
  
  
  Films/documentaries:
  
  
• Tetris: From Russia With Love - About the creation of Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov and the whole market explosion that came after. It's pretty nice.
  
  
• Pirates of Silicon Valley is the best film made to date about Microsoft and Apple.
  
  
• Silicon Valley - New show about the start-up scene. Just finished its first season.
  
  
  If I remember something else I'll edit the comment :)

Irrelevant game? Maybe you've heard of a game called Doom? Pretty popular. A company named id software developed that game. Guess where they got the money to develop that? From their previous wildly successfully series, Commander Keen. Since you seem to like books, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Masters of Doom, which tells the whole story of id's success. A little history goes a long way.

I tried to play this game after reading the amazing book Master's of Doom. I couldn't get past the first 2 minutes of the game. Literally.

This and more fun Wolfenstein facts can be found in David Kushner's Masters of Doom.

I enjoyed the doom book that is in similar vain.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture-ebook/dp/B000FBFNL0/

Masters of Doom

It's the the story of how Carmack and Romero basically revolutionized the video game world with the foundation of id Software and the creation of the Doom and Quake series.

It was published 10 years ago so it's a bit dated, but if you can get past that, Masters of Doom is a really great read.

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This is awesome.

I love Doom and still remember the first time I played it. It totally changed gaming for me but then it totally changed gaming - period. Fans of Doom, the time period, and gaming in general would do well to pick up Masters of Doom - excellent book!

It's not a book, but it's a really interesting YouTube documentary series I stumbled upon while in a "History of Games" class which didn't even scratch the surface of the modern businesses and games. In fact, it only talked about stupid old analog shit. I know there's value in the older counting and race games, but this stuff is more important in the present to someone looking to get traction in the industry.

The channel is called All Your History.

It was a good show until Machinema ruined it in the final season. It's just a great documentary series in general though.

Just noticed this was for a gift. In that case, "Masters of Doom" is a great book. Covers the rise of one of the first indie software companies to AAA dominance. A lot of the people that are mentioned in the book are big developers in their own right these days. It covers ID software's success through about 2003. It would be really interesting to read an updated version, but I digress.


Beyond that, hmm...

Yep, can't play Doom-era FPS games for more than ~30 mins at a time because of this. Interstingly, in the "Masters of Doom" book, it's mentioned one of the guys who worked on the audio on Doom also got motion sickness from playing it.

Not really compsci in the spirit of Turing, Church et al, but I think some of the olden game diaries etc might be inspirational for todays youth. Personally I enjoyed The Making of Karateka quite a bit; I have Masters of Doom on my reading list, having heard positive things about it.