Just finished Masters of Doom on the plane Sunday. Fantastic read. I highly recommend it to all software folks, even if you're not a gamer. Tons of a highly relevant stories and accounts in there.
I agree. I devoured it in two afternoons and found it quite motivational in terms of a business book.
Here, there were a handful of programmers, experimenting with different pricing models (shareware vs. retail), dictating their terms to publishers, starting ethical and legal discussions (Columbine Highschool shooting related to violent computer games? Export laws of software, especially violent computer games to Germany), helping Microsoft to establish Windows as a gaming platform (by making Doom a Direct X game) and so on.
They not only made games, they established a genre and nobody had a clue what the future would look like.
Slight nitpick, but Doom was a DOS game and it's DirectX port (Doom95) was written by Microsoft, not ID Software.
In fact the developer a MS who wrote of Doom95 is another famous name in the world of gaming; Gabe Newell (who has obviously since left Microsoft).
The reason I nitpick is because ID Software have always been pro-OpenGL rather than favouring Dx3D. What's more, most of their earlier games (I've not played anything since QIII) have been ported to other platforms by ID Software themselves and often not even developed on Windows PCs to begin with. So I think Gabe really deserves the credit (or criticism hehe) for kick starting the Windows/DirectX culture we see now.
Which is ironic as Gabe is now -in my opinion at least- the biggest threat Microsoft faces for the future of Windows games. But that's another topic entirely :)
http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...