John Romero

History

Before he had a computer of his own, John Romero was copying assembly language out of magazine listings and typing it back in to see what it did. He was born on October 28, 1967, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, of Mexican, Yaqui, and Cherokee descent, and he did this on an Apple II through most of his childhood. By his teens he had finished dozens of small games. Nobody played them. There was no store to sell them in and no one to show them to, so the only thing a finished game gave him was the next one.

In 1990, Romero met John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack at Softdisk, a software publishing company in Louisiana. The four worked on assigned projects during business hours and developed their own games at night. They built a smooth-scrolling PC game engine and used it to create a demo clone of Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo declined to publish it. In February 1991, the four founded id Software. Their first major release was Commander Keen, a side-scrolling platformer series designed by Hall and co-developed by Romero.

In May 1992, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D. It was fast, violent, and immersive in a way PC games had not been before. Romero designed half the levels. The game sold over 250,000 copies in its first year and established the first-person shooter as a commercial genre. What it did not have was other people. You walked the corridors alone, and every single thing that moved was a machine deciding when to shoot you.

Doom was scheduled for December 1993. With roughly a month left, John Carmack was still building the multiplayer, and he went with peer-to-peer networking because — as Romero puts it — it was the quick and dirty solution instead of a client-server model. When it ran, Carmack called Romero into his office. Romero wrote later: “Both PCs in his office had the game open, and they were syncing up with two characters facing one another.” Two people, in one room, aiming at each other instead of at monsters. There was no word for that yet. Romero went looking for one: “I thought of boxing or an extreme wrestling match, where you go in a cage to fight. This was much more violent, more deadly… I searched for a way to describe it. ‘This is deathmatch,’ I said.” The team latched onto the name, and it has never been replaced.

The idea did not arrive from nowhere. At id Software the breaks were spent on Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, with house rules, trash talk, and furniture that occasionally did not survive. Romero has said where the impulse came from: “Japanese fighting games fueled the creative impulse to create deathmatch in our shooters.” A kill needed a word too. Romero took the question into the art room and told Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack that each kill in a deathmatch needed a name that was not ‘kill’. Cloud offered ‘frag’ — the word American soldiers in Vietnam had used for turning a fragmentation grenade on an officer who gave a dangerous order. “So, in a deathmatch we’re all fragging each other!” Romero said. Cloud agreed, and that word stuck as well.

Doom shipped on December 10, 1993. It went out over the early internet and onto millions of machines, and by 1995 it was estimated to be installed on more computers than Microsoft's Windows 95. The part of it people are still playing three decades later was the quick and dirty part, added in the last month. It was built by a team that spent that year losing to each other at Japanese fighting games.

Quake followed in 1996. Romero designed a quarter of its levels and wrote the tools the rest of the team worked in, including QuakeEd, the level editor. What he wanted the game to be was something else — a medieval fantasy with melee weapons and a story. Most of the team wanted a shooter with Doom's guns. They put it to a vote, and Romero lost. He has said he knew at that moment that he would leave when the game was done. Then he stayed and finished it. He was fired later that year, after five years, following disputes with Carmack over scope and direction.

In November 1996, Romero co-founded Ion Storm in Dallas with the designer Tom Hall, the investor Todd Porter, and Mike Wilson. The pitch was that designers would decide what the games were and no publisher would tell them otherwise. Romero announced Daikatana, a first-person shooter he would direct himself, for Christmas 1997. Then a full-page ad ran in the gaming magazines with his name in it: 'John Romero's about to make you his bitch.' He has said since that it was a mistake, and that it changed his relationship with the people who played his games.

Six months into Daikatana they switched from the Quake engine to Quake II, and much of the work started over. People left — more than fifty of them across the project, and by 1999 almost the whole Daikatana team had resigned together to join another studio. Two people stayed on the game from beginning to end. It shipped in May 2000, more than two years late, to reviews that called it dated, and it sold about forty thousand copies. The Dallas office closed.

He kept making levels. He left Ion Storm in 2001, and in July of that year he and Tom Hall started Monkeystone Games to build games for phones. On January 15, 2016 he put out a new level for the original Doom — his first in more than twenty-one years — and gave it away. On Doom's twenty-fifth anniversary he announced a whole new episode, SIGIL, and gave that away too. People are still downloading both. He gets asked about Daikatana in interviews and answers without putting it on anyone else: he wanted more than he had built the discipline to finish. What are you still finishing that nobody has asked you for?