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Prepare to Meet Thy Doom
- And More True Gaming Stories
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
Non-member price: $29.22
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Publisher's Summary
From Masters of Doom author David Kushner comes Prepare to Meet Thy Doom, a compilation of true gaming stories covering many facets of America's biggest entertainment business: the video game industry. In addition to more than a dozen fascinating tales of game creation, play, business, and controversy, Prepare to Meet Thy Doom follows up on Kushner's previous best seller, Masters of Doom, with a long-awaited update on id Software founders John Romero and John Carmack.
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What listeners say about Prepare to Meet Thy Doom
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Daniel
- 04-01-2019
An uninspired cash in on the success of Masters of Doom
Masters of Doom was a thoroughly researched, insightful and highly entertaining account of gaming history. Prepare to Meet Thy Doom is a collection of articles that lack the depth and insight that made its predecessor so interesting and entertaining.
I can’t help but feel this is nothing more than a cheap cash in on the previous books success.
Will Wheaton once again does an excellent job of narrating but is sadly let down by the lack of interesting content.
If you are interested in what has happened to the original creators of Doom, I suggest looking up there respective Wikipedia pages. This book will give you no additional insight on their lives than that. Nor does the additional stories offer anything particularly interesting to make the book worth reading.
1 person found this helpful
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- Atlas Talisman
- 27-12-2019
Gamer’s Biscuit Tin
Loved this assortment of short stories providing insight into some icon development studios and the games which shaped the industry!
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- James Bradley
- 17-05-2016
Great mishmash of stories of the history of gaming
Great stories and wonderful narration. I just wish he would say the date each story was written before starting them. It got VERY confusing.
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- Scarlet Spark
- 18-03-2017
A mixtape of essays
Not too original here. The first chapters in the book are simply awesome. There's inspiring stories of D&D, Atari, Flappy Bird,..
It's getting worse at some point. The essays become loosely related to games, short and leave the cut off in the middle aftertaste, like the one of a cancelled TV show. They hype up games that eventually failed to deliver on their ambitious promises (original texts being written before the release) and thus I felt questioning more and more on how true is what I hear, whether something was actually as great as the author portrayed it or was simply a marketing stunt. The last few chapters focus heavily on the GTA and the controversy around it.
Nevertheless, some stories in this collection do rock. They made the listening worthwhile.
6 people found this helpful
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- Daniel E. Power
- 29-03-2016
Another great book on games.
Tells the stories of multiple games and companies over the years, good book length also.
2 people found this helpful
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- SA Developer
- 22-02-2016
Gamers - amateur or hard code will like it greatly
Would you listen to Prepare to Meet Thy Doom again? Why?
Yes! Will Wheaton is both an Excellent narrator/voice actor and has lived through so much of the personal computer history's beginning that we can really relate to him.
Any additional comments?
Great history of game developers and the companies they built and how it changed the video gaming landscape forever. These stories recount how several of the more popular game titles and gaming genres got started as well as how game developers get to dictate the direction of the business rather than corporate pencil pushers. Read it - you not regret it.
1 person found this helpful
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- Donald comstock
- 09-04-2018
meh...
Not what I was looking for. I'm a huge fan of Masters of Doom, so I was hoping to get a bit more id software out of this. There's hadly any.. While some of the chapters are interesting, I don't care about Flappy bird, Neo-Pets, or Second life. Those chapters felt very dated, since no one talks about them anymore, and they didn't leave much impact on the industry. I havent read JACKED, but this book spends A LOT of time talking about GTA and Rockstar. I guess check it out if you read JACKED and want to hear more, but I'm guessing it will be stuff you already know. I wouldn't recommend paying for this, and hardly recommemd using a free credit, but if you do, it's an ok book.. sometimes
2 people found this helpful
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- Greg
- 05-11-2015
An interesting and unsorted collection
David Kushner starts off by billing "Prepare to Meet Thy Doom" as the successor to "Masters of Doom", a rambunctious tale of the formatin and success of id Software while following both John Romero and John Carmack lives in and out of gaming. In reality, Prepare to Meet Thy Doom is a collection of stories David Kushner wrote many non-gaming A-list magazines such as Rolling Stone / Wired / Playboy / Salon / Blendr / Spectrum. While both Johns kick off the story with "Where are they now?" pieces, the rest of the book is a mish-mash of unrelated tales over the past decade. Stories aren't limited to video games, as it diverges to the world of DnD and even chess. The book's high point is when David Kushner gushes over Atari founder, and original anti-establishment digital bad boy, Nolan Bushnell, who put the roof up on the start up culture. Kushner's excitement is palpable, and makes for a better read, and better researched than the few other books in the same vain like Jeff Ryan's "Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America".
There's also a few interesting stories on distant memories like Second Life, which has been nearly 3-4 years since I recall any major media discussing it, the ambitious and somewhat forgotten Spore and once activist lawyer (now disbarred) Jack Thompson. There's even a story dedicate to a flo like AFP which sent me to google as it bombed so badly that I had never heard of it. The end of book trails after Rock Star, and due to the nature of reprinting separate articles for separate publications, finds a few steps retraced.
It's an interesting retrospective through of-the-time case studies but really could use follow ups for "at the time of publication" as most (if not all articles) collected are freely available online. I enjoyed the stories but would have liked to see Kushner's lens focused again on another set of digital misfits.
9 people found this helpful
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- James
- 02-12-2020
Great voice as usual but dated stories
first let me say I absolutely loved masters of doom. that said, I didn't feel like stories in this were as timeless. something about the phrasing just made almost all of them feel dated. I also feel like with as much focus on GTA that the title mine as well reflect that. I feel like the GTA stuff was all pretty well splattered over most news and sites.
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- Lukasz Rewerenda
- 28-06-2020
Lost a bit of relevancy
I liked Masters of Doom - its still a great read in 2020. This one, not so much - most of the stories are about things that quickly faded into obsoletion. Great performance by Wil Wheaton, as always.
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- Scott George
- 27-12-2019
Not bad but not what I was expecting
If you’re looking for an in-depth follow-up to “Masters of Doom”, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. While the first book was a deep dive into the creative lives of Carmack and Romero, this one is nothing more than a smattering of articles on the videogame industry originally printed in magazines over several years. The check-in with Carmack and Romero to see what they’re working on “now” is so short you could miss it if you blinked. As for the rest of the articles in the book, some are interesting but most are laughably dated. I hadn’t even heard of one of the games covered and had to look it up Wikipedia to see if it had undergone a name change or had busted before being released.
All in all, the book was interesting for its snapshots-in-time feel but isn’t worth a credit or full price. Either wait until it’s discounted below 30% of original price, or go look up the individual articles online.
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- deusprogrammer
- 13-07-2019
An okay book, if all you care about is Grand Theft Auto
Too much of the book covers Grand Theft Auto and it’s controversy. I was hoping to hear more about Romero and Carmack than was presented. If you are expecting something the caliber of “Masters of Doom”, you will be disappointed.
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- Andrew Robinson
- 11-03-2019
Not a continuation of the previous story as the name suggests
Whilst the author does ‘touch base’ at the start on the previous story, the rest of the book is just recycled articles that were written for a variety of magazines. As such it really lacks the deep dive of content that I enjoyed so much in the previous title and what I ultimately bought this book expecting. That said, the actual production and performance by Wil Wheaton were still quite good. They just didn’t prevent me from getting a little frustrated with some of the individual short stories. It is also a little telling that these are seperate pieces of work as some of the chapters mention events in previous chapters and then go on to explain them briefly again.
1 person found this helpful
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- J. Griffin
- 24-01-2017
good solid book
but not as great as masters of doom I was looking for more of what made masters so great, instead it was a bunch of controversies I was not remotely interested in I was more so wanting to hear about 3d realms, bungie, monolith and other grateful development teams that put so much effort and creativity into the game world.
2 people found this helpful
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- Chris
- 21-02-2019
Interesting, but disappointing
This is a tough one - what's in here is interesting (if you're interested in the subject matter) but it's basically just a collection of articles most if not all of which seem to be available on the internet to read.
Further, and more annoyingly, for at least one of the articles it isn't the full article - I noticed when once chapter just abruptly ended ('The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band'). Not sure if there are others.
But, as I say, what is in here is interesting, and the audiobook is read by the always excellent Wil Wheaton, so it's probably worth an Audible credit...
1 person found this helpful
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- P. Healey
- 01-12-2015
A tiny Doom update
If you're interested in this after listening to Masters of Doom, then you may be disappointed. The book is a collection of articles by David Kushner on various gaming related topics.
The first couple are John Carmack / Romero based, but they are repetitive and if you want a more complete update on what they have been up to since the first book, read their Wikipedia entries. There is the odd tidbit, but it is a bit thin.
The other articles are American centric. They are interesting, like the history of Dungeon and Dragons and Atari, but I wouldn't have gone out of my way to learn about them otherwise. Kushner's style of writing also repeats itself due to its format of repackaged articles, which did grate for me. It's not as tightly edited as a proper book would be. Also because these are articles, they miss the context of dates. They all read as happening recently, but that isn't the case since they are spread over the last ten years.
Wil Wheaton's reading is good, as always, it's just the book title is misleading for Doom fans expecting a sequel to Masters of Doom.
3 people found this helpful
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- Hedgehog
- 01-08-2020
Should be called random gamedev stories
Has mix match of random game dev stories. I only found a few to be interesting.
Not entirely about ID software and there current situation so I don’t think the title of this book is justified.
Fixed the itch for a book about game devs but for me only about 50% of the book was interesting.
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- littleflyingunicorn
- 19-09-2018
Just a bunch of articles bundled into a "book"
The original Doom book by the author is great. This, much shorter, book in comparison is rather boring in comparison - just a bunch of magazine articles not related one to another bundled into a book. Disappointing.
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- Merritt
- 10-09-2018
worth a listen if you like gaming history
worth a listen if you like books about the gaming industry but not as good as the first book 'masters of doom'.
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