This has been mentioned extensively before, and corroborated by other people. I think it's true. He had an old podcast he'd ask old time Apple II/PC developers about stuff they developed, and they'd be struggling to remember stuff that Romero knew every detail of. It's remarkable, and even a bit frustrating to listen.

Also, about some stuff not mentioned in the book... I do think it gets light in details the further it goes, but you also need to read the disclaimer: there are people who asked not to be covered in the book and he respected that. There's one particular storyline that is never mentioned at all... to me it's very clear the person involved likely asked not to be mentioned because they've moved on.

When one's writing from the first person, about friends and acquaintances, they have to be more polite than someone who's acting like a neutral observer, like in "Masters of Doom".

>There's one particular storyline that is never mentioned at all... to me it's very clear the person involved likely asked not to be mentioned because they've moved on.

who's that then, and what's the storyline?

I just finished Doom Guy a few days ago and really enjoyed it. The start of the book is definitely not what I (or probably anybody else) expected but it was a hell of a story. I also appreciated his honest conclusion near the end where he comes to the conclusion for his post-Id failures.

I did think he should have gone into more of a deep dive into why Daikatana was a bad game. Yeah, turnover. Yeah, delays from chasing the new shiny engine. But for a company he started where "Design Is Law", why did his game suck when Deus Ex being developed at the same time at the same company turn out so great? And how was id able to pump out Quake II and Quake III in the time he was buggering on Daikatana?

Somewhere in the book (start or end, can't remember) there is a quote from Carmack that references Romero's amazing recall ability, so I'll give hime the benefit of the doubt here.

If you’re interested, I worked for a short time on Daikanana and have some thoughts on this topic, some of which match up to themes in John’s book: https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1596-5-things-w...

To make this more HN-relevant, I will say that the whole point of Ion Storm was supposed to be unleashing Romero’s game direction, but the business partners who were supposed to give him that space instead provided another level of distraction.

John worked insanely hard and doesn’t blame others for what he’s responsible for, but with all the business chaos at Ion which he dealt with personally, he just could not be on top of everything and that’s the major reason why DK was not the epic game it could have been. That’s the part that he doesn’t want to say, but to me it’s clear.

It’s a good example of why a startup needs its product visionary highly focused at the most critical times. As a rough approximation, every night John went to bed thinking about Ion’s latest issues instead of thinking about Daikatana was a lost chance to make the game 2% better. That adds up.

Cool to hear from someone that lived it, if just for a short time!

I read the article and it certainly touches on the high points, but to John's credit, he goes into much deeper detail in the book. Eight people left because of high level infighting, but John knew of the problem and didn't do anything about it until it was too late. John was for buying the Anachronox crew thinking it was an easy way to knock off one of their game commitments to Eidos. Turned out it wasn't so easy. Eidos was all in on the fancy office tower and happy to pay because it would be their corporate HQ as well.

I was a bit surprised that the article said Dallas was a difficult place to staff. My impression from the book was that good people were so keen to work with a big name game developer that they'd go anywhere to do so. My memory from the book was that John got pretty much anyone he made an offer to.

I was not as aware of all the drama that happened before I got there (August 1999) except for reading Stormy Weather* and hearing the weird twice-daily all-office pages for Todd Porter that made me wonder if he was holed up somewhere.

From what I learned about it since that time, the details John shares in the book are definitely much more significant factors in why things happened why they did. And if anyone needed to learn what the words “vertical slice” meant, it was the DK production team. Programming the sidekicks, a definitional feature, was left until close to the end of the project, with disappointing results.

So the complaints about how hard staffing was and how people didn’t want to come to Dallas were straight from John’s mouth, but I think it had a lot to do with the state of the project and Ion. Steve Ash (RIP), our fourth lead programmer, was just about ready to return to California where he would end up helping to start Double Fine, so that situation was on his mind (speaking to me as a California fly-in AI programmer).

But as the 1300x960 arrow story typified, experienced developers were hard to find as team sizes were doubling from 20 to 40 throughout the industry. At the same time, Daikatana was being roasted constantly on Old Man Murray, Something Awful and various messageboards, and Half-Life made Daikatana’s story and cinematic ambitions seem less impressive. So by 1999, it’s fair to say Ion Storm was a hard sell as a place to work for a lot more reasons than the Dallas area...

* - https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/stormy-weather-6427649

For what it's worth I have fond memories of Daikatana.

Sure it was buggy as hell (at lest the build I had and how it behaved on my specific machine) and had a ton of flaws, and I could not complete the game due to a particular bug, but I could not help but feel something happening deep down inside this game. Frustratingly I can't exactly put my finger on it, but if I tried it'd be like I was reading between the lines^Wissues and in a way experienced that instead of the thing you directly interacted with.

And that wasn't because of the hype as it was handed over to me among a pile of other discs before I even heard of it (which is what happens when you live in some random remote area).

Romero does have some amazing recall.. it’s a little weird but it does cause his apple 2 podcast to get a little strange when he remembers things for his guests.

It’s probably the least steady released podcast (1 per year?) about apple 2 but some of the interviews are pretty fun and the stories of the biz back in the day are interesting. Also one about the apple disk imager “applesauce”

https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/

Also now on YouTube

https://youtube.com/@appletimewarppodcast1264?si=gXGs6VAFzPo...

I'm not quite finished with it but I thought Masters of Doom had more drama. This one had more personal/childhood stuff, which I wasn't personally interested in. Romero's narration of the audiobook was a bit quirky though

One thing I've learned from reading the Factorio blogs is that you can easily get caught up in details and forget to make the game fun.

I read the book. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, where he describes how he encountered the tools of the "stone age" of computing and learned to build games on his own. He starts from fairly nothing and gets to the point where his games are regularly the feature game in the computer games magazines of the time. All of this is juxtaposed against and with the constant background of his frequently gasoline fume volatile home life.

I found the second part of the book which begins after Doom is launched and Doom II goes into development to be more of a slog to get through. He also goes at length into his post-Id Games games and how he made some mistakes and some successes. For example. Deus Ex came out of his game company because he gave Warren Spector the independence to build it and many influential personalities in the game industry nowadays got their start at his game company.

My recommendation? Read the first part of the book if you want to get a real FPV of the Wild West in which pioneers like Id Games built the first complex, performant 2D and 3D games and game engines in a world where performance was mostly determined by assembly language wizardry and mastery, not a GPU.

I don't doubt that John Romero has that superpower ability.

I like how his childhood gets covered extensively. I wish we could see the same thing from Carmack. I'm particularly interested in his contract and softdisk days.

Watch Carmack's interview with Lex Fridman. At least an hour is spent on this topic.

Yeah I did. It's not as detailed as I wish for but it's a lot of fun listening to him talking about the contractor days.

I loved the part where he was still with id; how he grew up, and how id came to be. The magic of that founding id games makes you wish you were a part of that group. After that, the Ion Storm stuff gives some context to the failure, which was interesting to read. But it becomes a bit more incoherent. Towards the end, post Ion Storm, it just feels like he's going through notes he wrote down, and you're reading them in a chronological order. All in all one of my favorite books, but the end was a bit of a drag.

I feel for the guy.

I'm not saying I have the same memory, but the part that I find so frustrating is having conversations with people and then remembering it clearly while others either don't remember or seem to recall the conversation being completely different.

But I can recall the specific words and sentences used, not just impressions.

I listened to "Masters of Doom" as an audiobook.

It went from good to excellent because it was narrated by Wil Wheaton.

> which to me sounds like some big ego bullcrap?

Umm... Suck It Down?

I 100% believe the story about how he was goaded into doing this, rather than beating the sorry of jerk that think that's hilarious.

Romero was impulsive and a bit naive (go read his IRC logs from the day!), and this is the shirt of stuff I can see someone who acts like an overstimulated 14yo doing.

Hahahahah I’m interested in what he said on IRC. Got some examples?

I can't find it right now, but there was a collection of crazy stuff he said on IRC while Quake was in development. Basically promising the world (e.g. the dragon). Very energetic, but clearly not well thought out.