In November 1993, about a month before Doom was due out, John Carmack called John Romero into his office. Two PCs sat there with the game open on both. Two characters, one on each screen, were standing face to face, and the two machines were keeping them in step.
Romero had not asked for this. By his own later account, the team had nearly forgotten to put multiplayer into the game at all, and it was built in a matter of days near the end. Standing in that office, he looked for a name for what he was seeing. In his memoir, Doom Guy, he writes that he thought of boxing, and of an extreme wrestling match where two people go into a cage to fight. This was more violent than that, and more deadly. 'This is deathmatch,' he says he told them.
He had been making games since long before he had a company. Romero was born in Colorado Springs on October 28, 1967. He began programming at eleven, in the student computer labs at Sierra College in California, and by 1988 he had a small game, Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirate's Hideout, published on a disk magazine. In March 1989 he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, to work at a disk-magazine publisher called Softdisk. He started its PC games division there in July 1990.
In February 1991 he and several colleagues left Softdisk and founded id Software. Wolfenstein 3D followed in 1992, and with it a way of playing that put the player's eye inside the game. Doom followed on December 10, 1993, uploaded to a university file server in Wisconsin and handed out for free to anyone who wanted to try it.
The deathmatch he had named that November went out with it. The word was new, and so was the sentence that came next. Kevin Cloud, another id artist, suggested the word 'frag' and explained that it came from the Vietnam War, where it meant a fragmentation grenade. 'So, in a deathmatch we're all fragging each other!' Romero says he answered.
Quake came in 1996, and with it a quarrel. Romero and Carmack disagreed over how the work should go. By the accounts we have, Carmack wanted steady progress and Romero wanted to chase his own larger idea. Romero joined the final crunch, but the tension stayed, and he left id Software in 1996, forced to resign. That same year he started a new company in Dallas, Ion Storm, with Tom Hall, the designer who had been pushed out of id before Doom shipped.
In 1997 Ion Storm put up a red poster for its first game, Daikatana. It had black lettering and almost nothing else: 'John Romero's about to make you his bitch.' The game was announced for Christmas 1997. It was delayed again and again, and it was released in 2000.
Thirteen years after the poster, in 2010, Romero was asked about it in an interview. He said he regretted it and apologized for it, and that he had never wanted to make his players or his fans anything of the kind. He went back to making games. In August 2015 he and his wife, Brenda Romero, founded Romero Games. In July 2023 Abrams published Doom Guy: Life in First Person, his own account of all of it.
A game and a poster. One was made in a few days in an office in 1993, and it gave players a word. The other went up in 1997 and promised something that took three more years to arrive. Which of the two have you been making lately: the sentence you have said out loud, or the thing you have finished?