[briangray]

Responding to you because Masters of Doom is the right answer here. It shares a lot of details from Doom Guy, but gives a more complete timeline and better views, from multiple sides. It's a book that just makes you want to hack a game together. That's coming from someone who wasn't old enough to idolize the devs when they hit celebrity status.

Other books I really enjoyed:

- Spelunky by Derek Yu: Written by the sole developer of the game. Covers idea to development to release. Really captures a nice feeling of indie solo game making.

- The WoW Diary: Focused development 'journals' from one of the WoW level designers. Has a lot of original concept art and early alpha images. Goes over a lot of history and is just a fun read with some good insight.

- Half-Lift 2: Raising the Bar: Concept art, journals, iterations, and details from devs and HL2. Simply a fantastic insight into what they went through progressing from Gold Source to the Source Engine. Where Masters of Doom gives the written history of Doom, this book gives the nuts and bolts of HL2 and CSS. It is highly sought after by fans and developers alike and can be hard to come by.