Mountains and DOOM!

My first computer was an HP with no internet and a copy of Encarta. I asked my parents for a dial-up connection more times than I can count, and the answer never changed. "You've got all the information you need in the encyclopedia. Why do you need the internet?"

So I lived on AOL trial discs. Thirty free days, cancel, wait for the next one in the mail. Then one afternoon I walked into a friend's room and Doom was running on his machine. I was twelve or thirteen. I have never been a gamer, and I didn't play that day either. I stood behind his chair and watched. It was like watching a fast-paced movie that glued you to the screen. The speed, the colors, the gore. The only thing I had ever seen a computer do was show me an encyclopedia, and here was one doing this.

I walked home thinking: this is what computers can be.

Then one night I told my parents Princess Diana had died in Paris, and they didn't believe me because it wasn't on TV yet.

The drive out of the mountains. Last week I put 500 miles on the road in Idaho and listened to David Kushner's Masters of Doom, among other things. It's the story of the two Johns, Carmack and Romero, and the company they built, id Software. The usual read is simple. Technical genius plus creative genius equals a breakthrough. That's true, and for the first few hours it's what I was hearing.

Somewhere on the drive south, coming out of the mountains into Boise, the book stopped being about two people.

The scene that did it is from 1990, before Doom, before Wolfenstein. Carmack had figured out how to make a PC scroll a game world smoothly, which PCs were not supposed to be able to do. He and Tom Hall stayed up all night rebuilding the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 to prove it, and left the demo on Romero's desk. Romero walked in the next morning, saw it, and knew immediately what it could become. It was as if he had all these ideas in him and was waiting for the right engine to be in front of him.

Then it happened again, at scale. When Doom shipped in December 1993, Carmack had separated the engine from the game itself. Levels, monsters, and sounds lived in a separate file players could open and change. Thousands of people built their own levels. Doom's engine was licensed to other studios, Quake's engine became the base of Half-Life, and in 1997 Carmack released the Doom source code for anyone to use. They kept handing the code to the players.

Carmack didn't seem to care that much about the games. He was coding for other people to build things on top of. Romero was his client. So was every kid who opened a level editor. Same audience, different distance from the machine.

That's the part that landed for me, and it told me something about my own reading. I love biographies of builders and I can't get through pure business books, even the ones told as stories. I always assumed I read the biographies to learn how to build a business, which never explained why the business books bored me. Coming out of the mountains it did. It was never the business they built or the revenue they made. It was how they built.

Which one am I. I finished the book and immediately searched who did better afterward, secretly hoping it was Romero. Both did fine. But the honest answer to which one I am is neither.

I was never a coder. For most of my life I was the kid behind the chair, watching what other people made computers do. The engine came along for me much later than it did for Romero, and what I've done with it isn't a game or a product for strangers. I put my company's data in one place and started building on top of it for the people I work with. The part I didn't plan is what happened next. The team started bringing me problems I didn't know were eating their week, and sketches they'd made for a day when something like this might be possible. They'd been waiting for an engine too.

Here's the part the book couldn't help me with. Carmack didn't take the meetings. Other people did that so he could stay in the dark room. I don't have that arrangement. There is a part of me that wants nothing more than a dark room, no meetings on the calendar, and a blinking cursor in a terminal. There is another part that wants DGW and Foster Greatness to grow, and the people on the team to do well. Most weeks those two get along. Carmack and Romero were those two parts in two people. I'm trying to hold both in one.

This week they collided. An email deliverability problem landed on my desk. The tools I'd been building for the team were in the home stretch, the fun part, and they went on the shelf while I got on calls with IT teams and worked through our mail configuration. The business has to come first. It always will.

What the book gave me is a way to see those two parts as one job. Carmack's engine only mattered because Romero had the freedom to go crazy on it, and the file format gave that same freedom to everyone after him. The hours in the dark room are not the opposite of leading, as long as what gets built there is designed for other people to build on. Hire the right people. Give them the tools. Then give them the freedom to use those tools in ways you didn't plan. Most leaders do the first two and call it done.

That's the bet I'm making where I work: tools that scale what the team knows, without sixteen-hour days, so the people stay the part of the business that grows. They get the parts of the work they like, the relationships, and the upside of the scale.

My parents weren't wrong about the encyclopedia. It had a lot of information. It was also complete. Nothing could be added to it, and nothing could be built on it. It worked right up until the night a question showed up that wasn't in it.

A process book is an encyclopedia.

So here's the question I'm asking about my own team, and the one I'd take into Monday. Is my team following a process book, or do they have the freedom to find problems and solutions, and the right tools to do it?

This book was the soundtrack for that week in Idaho with no builds. The web service schema issue is still owed, and it's still next.

P.S. If you've read Masters of Doom, reply and tell me who you rooted for. I already told you mine.

Source: David Kushner, Masters of Doom (2003).