David Kushner > Quotes

“In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks.
Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world.
“In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“At 4:00 A.M. on May 5, 1992, the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D was complete.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute. A lot of people didn’t seem to enjoy their work. Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“In another assignment, he wrote about how one day, when he refused to do extracredit homework, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“John Carmack was a late talker. His parents were concerned until one day in 1971, when the fifteen-month-old boy waddled into the living room holding a sponge and uttered not just a single word but a complete sentence: “Here’s your loofah, Daddy.” It was as if he didn’t want to mince words until he had something sensible to say.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them."

This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“If we can get this done, [Doom] is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Death leaves trails of mutes.”
― David Kushner, Alligator Candy: A Memoir

“Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“a poem called “The Night Before Doom”: “ ’Twas the night before Doom, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that Doom, / soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision he printed in an editorial called “A Parent’s Nightmare Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums, they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“This is my daily work . . . When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day. Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed. Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“game. A Kentucky entrepreneur hooked up a version of Wolfenstein to virtual reality goggles and brought in five hundred dollars a day at the Kentucky State Fair. But players didn’t need virtual reality goggles to feel immersed. In fact, the sense of immersion was so real that many began complaining of motion sickness. Calls were coming in even at the Apogee office saying that people were throwing up while playing the game. Wolfenstein vomit stories became items of fascination online. Theories abounded. Some players thought the game’s animation was so smooth that it tricked the brain into thinking it was moving in a real space. Other gamers thought it had something to do with the “jerkiness” of the graphics, which induced the feeling of seasickness. Some felt it was simply disorienting because there was no acceleration involved; it was like going from zero to sixty at light speed. Gamers even exchanged tips for how to play without losing one’s Doritos.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“He was doing what he had always wanted to do: code games. And he was happy, in the moment as always, not thinking at all about what would come next. If he could be here working on games with enough money for food and shelter, that was good enough for him. As he told the other guys on one of his very first days, put him in a closet with a computer, a pizza, and some Diet Cokes, and he would be fine.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Neither technology nor Carmack would be his ruler. In fact, he would simply license the Quake engine—which id had agreed to do—and make a game around it. He would have three designers, working on three games at a time in different genres. And he would give each designer a large enough staff to get the jobs done quickly. It wouldn’t be just a game company, it would be an entertainment company. And the mantra of anything they produced would be loud and clear: “Design is law,” Romero said. “What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting. "Why can’t you just give us a project and let us perform it?" Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. "I can perform anything you want me to!" After enduring two semesters, he dropped out.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero himself couldn’t believe the way people were harping on Doom, a game that was six years old. It just showed how clueless the politicians had become. It was just the same old crap from the same old people. And Romero was tired of the blame. Those kids were defective, he thought, so don’t blame it on my game. Don’t blame the games. Blame the fucking parents.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important"
-John Carmack”
― David Kushner

“His first suspicion came shortly after they were working on their new game for Softdisk, a ninja warrior title called Shadow Knights. Al had never seen a side scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.” Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality he had struck what was growing into an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic. All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong. Patents were jeopardizing the very thing that was central to his life: writing code to solve problems. If the world became a place in which he couldn’t solve a problem without infringing on someone’s patents, he would be very unhappy living there.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would allow at least one thought on his own. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“The best way to sell yourself is to sow what you have produced, rater than tell people what you know, what you want to do, or what degrees you have. You want to be able to go to your prospective employer and say "There is a community of then thousand people actively playing a mod that I wrote in my spare time. Give me a job and I will be able to devote all of my energy to gaming, and produce something vastly superior.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Doom deathmatch was taking over lives: fans hijacked their office networks to play all weekend, threw their kids out of their basements to wire together their own arenas, and put off so many trips to the bathroom that at least one player (who had been consuming Ding Dong cupcakes during a marathon match) explosively defecated in his pants midgame.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“Romero’s stepfather knew something was up when an officer working on a classified Russian dogfight simulation asked him if his stepson was interested in a part-time job.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“If deathmatch was a release from stress, work, family, and drudgery, it was a release that Carmack didn't need or, for that matter, understand. In fact, he had never really gotten the appeal most people found in hapless diversions. He would see things on television about drunken spring break beach weekends, and none of it would compute.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate solution. “You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.”
― David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture