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.

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Another great book on games.

Tells the stories of multiple games and companies over the years, good book length also.

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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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Interesting content yet somehow repetitive

The reading was pleasant as I expect from Wheaton. I felt the stories seemed to repeat content. Perhaps with a slightly different perspective that the previous story but they felt to similar in essence. Still enjoyed it overall.