Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack
