Go Like Hell, Masters of Doom
I'm wrapping up a decent year of reading with two books: one about people building fast and durable cars, and the other about people making games for computers. At best, these stories recount tremendous perseverance and ingenuity; at worst, they are perilous tales of stubbornness and burnout.
Go Like Hell begins with the rise of Henry Ford II ("the Deuce"), whose attempt at staving off the decline of his inherited empire makes him an unlikely nemesis across the Atlantic: Enzo Ferrari. Ford sets his sights on winning the Ferrari-dominated 24 Hours of Le Mans, a grueling distance race of a 8 1/2 mile circuit testing endurance of both man and machine.
However, this endeavor would not simply be a matter of slapping the biggest Ford engine in a race car chassis and calling it a day.
They say automobile racing is as old as the second car. Since Karl Benz first patented the “motorwagen” in 1886, cars evolved into two diverse species on either side of the Atlantic. In America, with its vast roads, mapped out by urban planners who literally moved mountains to make way for them, cars were all about the big engine. […]
Europe, in contrast, was the cradle of racing. Town-to-town road races spread the gospel of the automobile across the continent. In contrast to America, roads in Europe molded to the contours of the earth, with twists, bends, hills, dales. Cars evolved with smaller engines capable of quick bursts of power. Constant acceleration/deceleration and cornering required durable gearboxes, supple suspension, quick steering mechanisms, and long-lasting brakes. European automobiles evolved into lighter, more sophisticated devices. Twisty racing circuits were the laboratories where new technologies were tried and proven.
The story is replete with triumph and failure, false starts and world records, loyalty and deceit, and a seemingly endless bodycount of drivers dying left and right on the racetrack.
Masters of Doom follows John Carmack and John Romero ("The Two Johns") of id software, creator of the 1993 breakthrough title Doom. Although night and day in personality and temperament, Carmack and Romero follow similar paths driven by their common obsession of the computer. Their journeys converge in Shreveport, LA, where they are separately hired to build games for the same publisher. Soon they start a secret side project:
Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. No one slept. They consumed huge quantities of caffeinated soda. Pizza deliveries came repeatedly. Jay worked the grill, churning out a stream of burgers and hot dogs, which often went uneaten.
Pizza and diet coke would be the supporting cast for their winning formula: Carmack's ability to conceive of, implement, and perfect wholly new game engines—managing the physics, the lighting and shading, resulting in realistic renders—complemented Romero’s masterful crafting of the world and story that would make the game engine shine. From a flat world of small sprites of pixels relying on the player's imagination to do the heavy lifting, they bring people into a rich, immersive landscape with free movement in a way never seen before.
Given generous resources—money, capital, people, or time—even the loftiest goals are within reach. But try and win Le Mans with no experience in the European race circuits, or endeavor to build an immersive digital world with 1% the computing power of today's smartphones—these are the intoxicating challenges that inspire creativity, require concentration, consume iterations, and demand patience.
Despite spanning decades and industries, the commonality between these stories are the people who devoted their lives to the mission or the glory. Foregoing normal societal ties, families, health or personal safety—they pushed to go faster, to go farther, or to build what's never previously been built. This is not to say lifetime bonds were not formed between those who shared these goals.
As we trudge into, leap towards, or simply arrive at the next decade, I await in anticipation what will be Le Mans of 2025. Will we land on Mars? Reverse climate change? Overcome cancer? Only time will tell.