John Romero

• 1. Introduction

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  John Romero was born six weeks premature on the 28th of October, 1967, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, into a family that had driven west in a 1948 Chrysler with three hundred dollars, hoping a new state would be more tolerant of an interracial marriage. That fragile beginning set the stage for one of the most turbulent and consequential careers in the history of video games.

  By his mid-twenties, Romero had helped invent an entire genre. His name was on games that tens of millions of people played, and he coined a word that competitive gaming still uses today: deathmatch. Then came the fall. A bruising public dispute, a notorious advertisement, and a game that critics savaged placed him at the center of a cautionary tale that the industry has never quite let go of.

  But the story does not end in failure. Decades after the collapse of Ion Storm, Romero kept designing levels, founding companies, and asserting his identity as a proud Yaqui and Cherokee man. What drove someone to create so relentlessly after so public a stumbling? And what exactly did he build during those five and a half years when id Software was changing the world?

• 2. Roots and Early Games

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  Romero's father, Alfonso Antonio Romero, was a first-generation Mexican American who spent his working days fixing air conditioners and heating systems at an air force base in Tucson, Arizona. His mother, Ginny, had met Alfonso when both were teenagers. The couple married and headed to Colorado hoping their interracial relationship would find more tolerant surroundings.

  The game that first made young Romero think seriously about design was Namco's Pac-Man, released in 1980, the same year he got his first Apple II. Space Invaders had introduced him to video games before that, but Pac-Man was the first title that sparked what he later described as actual thinking about game design. The programmer Nasir Gebelli, whose fast 3D work on Apple II shooters like Horizon V and Zenith influenced Romero deeply, became his favorite coder and a lasting inspiration.

  Romero's first published game, Scout Search, appeared in the June 1984 issue of the Apple II magazine inCider as a type-in program. His first industry job arrived in 1987 at Origin Systems, after eight years of programming games. At Origin he worked on an Apple II to Commodore 64 port of 2400 A.D., a project eventually scrapped when Apple II sales slowed. He then moved on to Space Rogue, a game by Paul Neurath, who asked whether Romero wanted to join his soon-to-start company, eventually renamed Looking Glass Technologies. Romero declined, left Origin Systems, and co-founded Inside Out Software instead, where he ported Might and Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64.

  Those restless years of porting and freelancing were teaching him how to work fast inside tight constraints, a skill that would matter enormously once he reached Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana.

• 3. Turbo Mode at id Software

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  Romero moved to Shreveport in March 1989 and joined Softdisk as a programmer in its Special Projects division. He helped run the PC monthly disk magazine Big Blue Disk before starting a PC games division in July 1990 called Gamer's Edge. In that division he assembled the team that would become id Software: he hired John Carmack away from freelancing in Kansas City, moved Adrian Carmack from Softdisk's art department, and persuaded Tom Hall to come in at night to help with design. The group left Softdisk in February 1991 to form id.

  Romero later labeled this stretch of his career Turbo Mode, a phrase he used in his keynote at the WeAreDevelopers Conference in 2017. In five and a half years with a team of fewer than ten developers, he counted 28 games created. His hands were on everything: he designed most of the first episode of Doom, a quarter of the levels in Quake, and half the levels in Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny. He also wrote the tools the studio ran on, including DoomEd, QuakeEd, TED5, and the installers for every id game up to and including Quake.

  He also coined the term "deathmatch," the multiplayer mode that would define competitive gaming for years.

  Nested inside Doom II was a private joke that became a legend. In level 30, titled "Icon of Sin," the final boss is a giant demon head. The distorted demonic sound that plays on first encounter is Romero's own voice saying "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero!" reversed and distorted. Players who used the noclip cheat could walk inside the boss and find Romero's severed head on a post. Romero later explained, at a 2013 Doom anniversary event, that the reversed voice clip and the hidden head were both in-jokes between the development team members, not a calculated piece of marketing.

• 4. The Break with Carmack

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  During the production of Quake, Romero clashed seriously with John Carmack over what direction the game should take. Romero wanted to pursue his demanding creative vision without compromise. Carmack insisted on steady progress toward a shippable product and accused Romero of not contributing as much as the rest of the team. Romero eventually gave in on his vision and joined a months-long crunch to finish the game, but the tensions did not resolve.

  In a 1997 interview, Romero framed the departure in measured terms, saying that leaving after finishing a hit game was the right choice and that he kept on good terms with the id team because they had been friends for years. The public story carried more friction than that private framing.

  In 2022, during a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman, Carmack addressed the episode directly. He said that in hindsight he regretted how he handled the firing of Romero, naming immaturity and a poor understanding of corporate structure as the primary reasons he got it wrong. He also confirmed that the two were currently on good terms.

  Romero had been credited as executive producer on Heretic and Hexen even while the cracks inside id were forming. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had already popularized the first-person shooter genre, a form that Romero's design work and John Carmack's programming techniques had built together. The split separated the genre's two founding forces, and what each of them did next would look very different.

• 5. Ion Storm and Daikatana

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  Romero co-founded Ion Storm in Dallas, Texas, with fellow id co-founder Tom Hall. The studio's flagship project was a first-person shooter called Daikatana, announced in 1997 with a target release date in time for that year's Christmas shopping season.

  The schedule slipped repeatedly. Negative press accumulated. A 1997 advertisement bearing the line "John Romero's About To Make You His Bitch....Suck it down" sparked widespread controversy. Romero later apologized publicly for the ad in a 2010 interview published in Gamesauce, which also featured him on its cover that year.

  Daikatana was not released until April 2000, more than two years after its announced date. The reviews were damaging; the game appeared on multiple "top 10 worst games" lists. During the wait, rumors spread online that Romero had been killed, accompanied by a photograph of a staged corpse with a bullet wound. The photograph had in fact been taken for the magazine Texas Monthly.

  Romero and Hall departed Ion Storm in 2001, after the release of Hall's own game Anachronox and the subsequent closing of the Dallas office. Romero said in the interview that the Daikatana advertisement, of all the missteps, was the one he most wanted to take back. The game's failure did not stop him from moving quickly toward his next project, which would be built not on the ambitions of a big-budget shooter but on games for mobile devices, a platform that barely existed when id Software had made Doom.

• 6. Reinvention and Romero Games

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  In July 2001, Romero and Hall founded Monkeystone Games to develop and publish games for mobile devices. Over roughly three and a half years, Monkeystone released approximately 15 games, including Hyperspace Delivery Boy! for Pocket PC, Windows, and Linux, Congo Cube, and a version of Red Faction for the Nokia N-Gage. The company closed in January 2005.

  Romero joined Midway Games in mid-October 2003 as project lead on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, moving from that role to creative director of the internal studio, and then left at the end of June 2005, months before the game shipped. On the 31st of August, 2005, he confirmed he was working on an unannounced MMOG at a newly opened studio called Slipgate Ironworks, which later became part of Gazillion Entertainment. He departed Gazillion in November 2010 to co-found Loot Drop with Brenda Brathwaite, the game developer who would become his wife.

  Romero and Brenda Romero established Romero Games on the 11th of August, 2015. The studio released Gunman Taco Truck in 2017, SIGIL in 2019, and Empire of Sin in 2020. In March 2022, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Romero created a new Doom II level and listed it for sale on his personal website, donating all proceeds to the Ukrainian Red Cross and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund.

  Blackroom, the FPS he had announced in April 2016 alongside former id artist Adrian Carmack, with a Kickstarter goal of $700,000, was cancelled four days after the campaign launched. Romero confirmed in his 2023 autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, that a demo had been shown to publishers behind closed doors, but no publisher agreed to fund the game, and it was fully cancelled after that.

• 7. Identity and the Long Game

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  Romero has Mexican, Yaqui, and Cherokee grandparents, and his sense of that heritage has shaped choices that go well beyond game design. In 2002, he cut his famously long hair and donated it to Locks of Love. He began growing it back in 2003. On the 11th of January, 2022, to mark the 120th anniversary of William Arthur Jones's "Indian haircut order" of 1902, Romero posted a public statement: "I wear my hair long as a proud Yaqui and Cherokee man, and will continue to do so until the day I die."

  On the 19th of December, 2023, Romero acquired Irish citizenship, after living in Ireland for about eight years. His children from two previous marriages are Michael, born in 1988, Steven, born in 1989, and Lillia Antoinette, born in 1998.

  His recognition across decades has been varied and wide. GameSpot ranked him seventh on its list of the most influential people in computer gaming of all time. Time magazine placed him in its Cyber Elite 50 twice. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2023. In 2017, he won the Bizkaia Award at the Fun and Serious Game Festival in Bilbao, Spain.