Masters of Doom

Masters of Doom

David Kushner

Name Game

The hunt for words that stick

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.”
Joy Dividend

Joy became more productive than efficiency optimization.

This was what he truly loved: the work, the rolling up of the sleeves, the challenging of his intellect. ... He had even gone out on a few dates with a woman whose parents owned a Chinese restaurant he frequented, Still, he was spending the majority of his days and nights at id. Nothing pleased him quite like sharpening his chops with low-level programming work.