First person shooter fans you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. The book chronicles the lives of John Romero and John Carmack, the creators of the games DOOM and QUAKE, from their childhoods through and beyond the id software days.

If you are a gamer, like me, who grew up playing DOOM 2 and QUAKE, you’ll appreciate little nuggets of details on each game. For example: the name for the game Quake originated from one of Carmack’s Dungeons and Dragons characters, fighter with a magical “Hellgate Cube” floating above its head named Quake. Factoids such as these fill the pages of this book.

But the book is more than that. The book is packed with the information on the business decisions that drove the PC industry during the 90s and how id software would go on to be one of the most successful independent developers of its time.

This is the kind of inside information, that you as a gamer, only dream of obtaining. And that has kept me turning the pages late into the night the last couple of weeks. So do yourself a favor and pick up the book at Amazon or at a local library and have a read.