John Romero

History

Alfonso John Romero was born on October 28, 1967, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is of Mexican, Yaqui, and Cherokee heritage. As a child, he programmed games on an Apple II and taught himself assembly language from magazine listings. By the time he was a teenager, he had made dozens of small games and absorbed the craft of level design from the ground up. It was work without an audience, but it gave him the foundation for what came later.

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, but the technical breakthrough was real. 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. The studio followed with Doom in December 1993. Romero designed most of the first episode and coined the term 'deathmatch' to describe its multiplayer mode. Doom became a cultural phenomenon, distributed over the early internet and played by millions. By 1995, it was estimated to be installed on more computers than Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system.

Quake followed in 1996. Romero designed a quarter of its levels and contributed development tools, including QuakeEd, the level editor. But the project had been turbulent. Early in development, Romero pushed for a story-driven medieval fantasy game with melee combat and role-playing elements. Most of the team disagreed. They wanted to build a traditional shooter with Doom-style weapons. A company meeting was held. The team voted to pivot. Romero later said that when that decision was made, he knew he would leave when the game was finished. Following disputes with Carmack over project scope and direction, Romero was fired from id Software in 1996.

In November 1996, Romero co-founded Ion Storm in Dallas with designer Tom Hall, investor Todd Porter, and business partner Mike Wilson. The studio was funded with venture capital and positioned as a place where designers would lead development without publisher constraints. Romero announced Daikatana, a first-person shooter he would direct himself, with a planned release date of Christmas 1997. The studio placed a full-page print ad in gaming magazines that read: 'John Romero's about to make you his bitch.' Romero later said the ad was a mistake that changed his relationship with the gaming community.

Daikatana's development became a case study in what can go wrong. Six months into production, the decision was made to switch from the Quake engine to the Quake II engine, restarting much of the work. Over 50 employees left Ion Storm during development. By 1999, almost the entire Daikatana team had resigned to join Gathering of Developers. Only two staff members remained on the game for the entirety of its production. The game was released in May 2000, more than two years late. It received negative reviews for outdated graphics, poor AI, and repetitive design. It sold approximately 40,000 copies. The failure contributed to the closure of Ion Storm's Dallas office.

Romero departed Ion Storm in 2001. In July of that year, he and Tom Hall founded Monkeystone Games to develop games for mobile devices. He continued working in the industry, contributing to independent projects and occasionally returning to the Doom community with new level packs. In 2016, he released a free megawad for Doom's 20th anniversary. In subsequent interviews, he has spoken openly about what went wrong with Daikatana and what he learned. He has said that the lesson was not to avoid ambition, but to understand that ambition without discipline is performance art, not production. The dream was real. The execution was not.