Review: Doom Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero (2023)
★★★☆☆
I think that DOOM (1993) is the pinnacle of Gen X artistic achievement, alongside it being "the best" video game ever made. It is really, truly, in the year 2025, fully worth playing for the first time (or replaying if it's been a minute). John Romero seems nice a nice and earnest guy. The form of the "nonfiction autibiography" by default quite boring. It's like: wow, you did some stuff, and then you did some other stuff? Awesome man.
I think this book is at its most appealing to me walking through Romero's arc ad id Software. A little life lesson that I have held onto and periodically rotate in my mind is that "the true measure of the strength of an organization is not how it does in success, but how it navigates conflict" or something like that. I found it rewarding and thought-provoking to attention to the qualities of early id Software (its organization, what that affects, what it doesn't provide) and how they positively reinforce each other up through DOOM vs. negatively reinforcing during the development of Quake. This is not at all to say that id Software failed financially -- but it is interesting that a handful of guys got together full of enthusiasm and camaraderie, made some of the most significant (and profitable!) works of art of the 80s & 90s, but then by the mid-90s a bunch of them had left and there was near-omnidirectional animosity.
Also: the critical video game spaces that I pay attention to these days often discuss the impact that the chase for technical fidelity and complexity has had on production cycles. Increased personnel demands, computation demands, time demands, budget demands for essentially aesthetic benefit (that, admittedly, and and often is in itself a sort of quality in its novelty that is highly sought after on the market). I did not realize that the transition from DOOM to Quake was already a perfect object lesson in this, all the way back in the 90s.
My action take-aways from this reading:
- I gotta replay DOOM.
- I gotta check out some Commander Keen, and give Quake an actual shot.
- I will not be reading another nonfiction autobiography for a while.