My highlights from the book: 

1. Carmack and Romero personified an American dream: they were self-made individuals who had transformed their personal passions into a big business, a new art form, and a cultural phenomenon. Their story made them the unlikeliest of antiheroes.

2. The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanthropic programmer who built high-powered rockets in his spare time; his game and life aspired to the elegant discipline of computer code.

3. As Carmack put it shortly after their break-up: “Romero wants an empire, I just want to create good programs.”

4. The computer underground did not discriminate by age; a geek was a geek was a geek.

5. In the real world, children, especially, have no power; they must answer to everyone, they don’t direct their own lives, but in this game, they become super powerful and affect everything. 

6. “You’ll never make any money-making games,” he often said. “You need to make something people really need, like business applications.”

7. Ken and Roberta Williams, a young married couple in Northern California, also pioneered the Ziploc distribution method, turning their homemade graphical role-playing games into a $ 10 million–a–year company, Sierra On-Line.

8. His mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door.

9. “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.”

10. 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.

11. Though he was barely getting by, Carmack relished the freelance lifestyle. He was in control of his time, slept as late as he wanted, and, even better, answered to no one.

12. 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 of problems and solutions, imagination, and code. 

13. 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. 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.

14. Shareware dated back to a guy named Andrew Fluegelman, founding editor of PC World magazine. In 1980, Fluegelman wrote a program called PC-Talk and released it online with a note saying that anyone who liked the wares should feel free to send him some “appreciation” money. Soon enough he had to hire a staff to count all the checks. 

15. When it came time to distribute the games, Scott took a long, hard look at the shareware market. He liked what he saw: the fact that he could run everything himself without having to deal with retailers or publishers. So he put out two text-based games in their entirety and waiting for the cash to roll in. But the cash didn’t roll; it didn’t even trickle. 

16. Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply to take what they could get for free. Scott did some research and realized he wasn’t alone; other programmers who had released games in their entirety as shareware were broke too. People may be honest, he thought, but they’re also generally lazy. They need an incentive.

17. Then he got an idea. Instead of giving away the entire game, why not give out only the first portion, then make the player buy the rest of the game directly from him? No one had tried it before, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. The games Scott was making were perfectly suited to such a plan because they were broken up into short episodes or “levels” of play. He could simply put out, say , fifteen levels of a game, then tell players that if they sent him a check he would send them the remaining thirty.

18. For every dollar he brought in, Scott was pocketing ninety cents. By the time he contacted Romero, he had earned $ 150,000 by word of mouth alone.

19. They didn’t need any help getting motivated. Carmack seemed almost inhumanly immune to distraction.

20. 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.

21. The first Keen trilogy was now bringing in fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per month. Carmack was only twenty years old, Romero, twenty-three. 

22. He approached the dilemma as he had in Keen: try the obvious approach first; if that fails, think outside the box.

23. The Keen games were at the top of the charts, bringing in close to sixty thousand dollars per month.

24. Carmack wasn’t interested in running a big company, he just wanted to program games.

25. “We make the best stuff in shareware,” Romero proclaimed, “that’s why we’re making so much money.”

26. It was, he said, “an ugly hack.” This meant that it was an inelegant solution to an unnecessary problem. Making a game, writing code, for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.

27. The check was for $100,000. And this reflected only the first month. Together with the continued sales of the Keen games, id was heading for annual sales in the millions. By releasing the first episode as shareware, they’d instantly hooked the gamers, leaving them craving more. It defied logic — the thought of giving something away for free. But Scott’s plan had worked.

28. The more business responsibilities they had—things like order fulfillment and marketing—the more they would lose their focus: making great games.

29. Carmack shrugged it off and returned to work. The same rule applied to a cat, a computer program, or, for that matter, a person. When something becomes a problem, let it go or, if necessary, have it surgically removed.

30. In the company’s brief history, a pattern was emerging that emulated Carmack’s programming ideology: innovate, optimize, then jettison anything that gets in the way.

31. Since they were self-publishing Doom, they would be getting twice the earnings they had on Wolfenstein. Games distributed through the regular retail channels would bleed cash to middlemen. 

32. “If we can get this done,” Romero said, “this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!” Carmack couldn’t have said it better himself.

33. The plan was that id would upload the shareware on cue, then the gamers could download it and transfer it around the world. So much for high - priced distribution. The gamers would do all the work for id themselves. Jay had announced the day before in the chat rooms that Doom would be available at the stroke of midnight on December 10.

34. It was also a cash cow. The day after Doom’s release, id saw profit. Even though only an estimated 1 percent of people who downloaded shareware bought the remaining game, $100,000 worth of orders were rolling in every day.

35. Carmack was no longer a boy dreaming of computers in his Kansas City bedroom; he was the twenty-three-year-old owner of a multimillion-dollar company, and he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

36. No sales force, no inventory costs, no royalties to Nintendo or Sega, no marketing costs, no advertising costs, no executive parking spaces. This is a new and exciting business model, not just for games, and not even just for software, but for a host of products and services that can be sold or delivered via an electronic underground. 

37. He had become the man he had envisioned all those years before.

38. Carmack 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.

39. Carmack began the project as he often did, by reading as much research material as he could gather. He paid thousands of dollars for textbooks and papers.

40. Carmack had long behaved this way, unconcerned with the conventional etiquette of how to begin, continue, and conclude a dialogue with another human being.

41. “For any given project there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and just plain entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for id is very small.”

 42. “Romero is chaos and Carmack is order,” he said. “Together they made the ultimate mix . But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?”

43. The dream of the Big Company seemed to be proving too big after all, too loose, too high, too ambitious. All those things Carmack had berated him about — the hyperbole, the lack of focus, the dangers of a large team — had come back with a vengeance. 

44. Even Eidos, Romero’s publisher, agreed. In return for their sinking by now nearly $30 million into the company, Romero had to change his ways once and for all. As the Eidos president, Rob Dyer, put it: “Shut up and finish the game.” 

45. The magic of the self motivated id Software team was gone.

46. “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.”