Masters of Doom is an entertaining, well-written, and insightful story about John Carmack, John Romero, and the other founds of id Software, the makers of Doom and Quake.

The relationship between Carmack and Romero is a good case study of the perils and potentials of founder personality dynamics. Their company was very successful while the two remained together, and failed quickly after their relationship fell apart. The cause of the breakup seems to be 1) Romero lost discipline and focus after their initial big success and 2) Carmack didn't have sufficient appreciation for Romero's contributions, which were in the nebulous realms of design and marketing. One crucial component of their collaboration was that Romero, to a greater degree than anyone else including Carmack himself, was enormously enthusiastic and optimistic about the world-changing potential of Carmack's engineering work. There are a lot of parallels to the Jobs/Wozniak story about Apple's founding.