Summary of David Kushner's Masters of Doom

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 Romero, who was 11 at the time, jumped onto his dirt bike and went to the local arcade. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be there, but he couldn’t help himself. That was where the games were. He tapped the control buttons as the rocks flew toward his triangular ship and the Jaws-style theme music blipped in suspense.

#2 John Romero was born in 1967 in Arizona. His parents had married only a few months before, and his father had taken a job in the copper mines. The work was hard, and his father often came home drunk. But Romero loved going to the arcade with his stepfather.

#3 Dungeons and Dragons, a pen-and-paper role-playing game, was the hottest thing going in 1972. It was like a computer-game version of the game, and it attracted many adults who lazily dismissed it as geeky escapism. But for a boy like Romero, it was much more than that.

#4 The computer gaming industry was dominated by arcade machines and home consoles like the Atari 2600. But computer games were accessible, and the people who had the keys were not authoritarian monsters, but dudes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669354130

IRB Media

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Insights on David Kushner's Masters of Doom

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 16

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Romero, who was 11 at the time, jumped onto his dirt bike and went to the local arcade. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be there, but he couldn’t help himself. That was where the games were. He tapped the control buttons as the rocks flew toward his triangular ship and the Jaws-style theme music blipped in suspense.

#2

John Romero was born in 1967 in Arizona. His parents had married only a few months before, and his father had taken a job in the copper mines. The work was hard, and his father often came home drunk. But Romero loved going to the arcade with his stepfather.

#3

Dungeons and Dragons, a pen-and-paper role-playing game, was the hottest thing going in 1972. It was like a computer-game version of the game, and it attracted many adults who lazily dismissed it as geeky escapism. But for a boy like Romero, it was much more than that.

#4

The computer gaming industry was dominated by arcade machines and home consoles like the Atari 2600. But computer games were accessible, and the people who had the keys were not authoritarian monsters, but dudes.

#5

Romero was a fourth-generation game hacker: the first had been the students who worked on the minicomputers in the fifties and sixties at MIT; the second, the ones who picked up the ball in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University in the seventies; the third being the dawning game companies of the early eighties.

#6

Romero had first seen the Apple II computers at Sierra College. While a mainframe’s graphics were capable of, at best, spitting out white blocks and lines, the Apple II’s monitor burst with color and high-resolution dots.

#7

The Apple II was a hit, and its popularity helped launch the gaming industry. Romero was already a prodigy, but he became even more famous when his stepfather took him to work with him.

#8

For a kid working with an Apple II, there were two ways to get published in the nascent industry. The big publishers, like Sierra and Electronic Arts, were fairly inaccessible. More within his reach were