John Romero



"Oremor nhoj, em llik tsum uoy emag eht niw ot." "-- a reversed message in Doom II"

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967, in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is a game developer who is best known for designing influential FPS games.

After programming and designing video games for over eight years on the Apple II, John Romero left Softdisk after two years to form Id Software in 1991. At id, Romero was involved in the production of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, the first two Doom games, and Quake. (Gamer Chick Stevie "killcreek" Case defeated him at Quake and became his girlfriend.)

In 1996, after some long-running disputes with the other members of Id Software, he and co-worker Tom Hall formed Ion Storm. Ion Storm's flagship title would have been Daikatana, an ambitious first-person shooter set for the holiday season of 1997, a seven-month development period that his former superiors at id saw as patently ludicrous. When he decided to switch to the Quake II engine in the middle of development for its advanced graphical effects, people didn't take it very well...

In 1998, company morale had eroded and most of the team had quit. John set another deadline, February 15, 1999. That deadline came and passed. It wasn't until April 21, 2000 that Daikatana was finally released, with marketing so infamous it became a minor phenomenon in gaming.

For lack of a better word, it sucked.

On July 17, 2001, Ion Storm's parent company Eidos Interactive closed its Dallas office. Four years later, Eidos closed the Austin branch.

John, apparently still intent on making more games, founded Monkeystone Games with Tom Hall. They developed and published about fifteen games for mobile phones. John joined Midway Games as project lead for Gauntlet (1985 video game): Seven Sorrows, and the Monkeystone team moved to Austin, Texas to work on Midway's Area 51.

By now, the only company he bankrupted - albeit unintentionally - was Looking Glass, a gaming studio responsible for games such as System Shock and Thief, which allegedly died because Eidos supported it too little in favour of Daikatana.

Penny Arcade and Megatokyo have poked fun at him. In the former case, they use him in a Running Gag where other characters think he's a woman.

For more information about Romero's antics in the gaming world, we suggest picking up David Kushner's Masters Of Doom.


 * Creator Cameo: The final level of Doom II required players to fire rockets into a secret room and hit John Romero's disembodied head with splash damage.
 * It was originally intended as an Easter Egg Take That at Romero from his co-workers, but when he found it, he became enamored of it and recorded the backwards message (quoted at the top of the page) that plays just before it starts tossing out monsters.
 * Disappeared Dad: Romero's biological father, Alfonso, abandoned the family for two years. Romero would later reluctantly become an absent father to his own children when the demands of his job took up all of his time.
 * Genre Shift: He pretty much gave up on FPS games after Daikatana, with the exceptions of Red Faction and Area51.
 * Lighter and Softer: Cartoon Network Block Party and Ravenwood Fair.
 * My Greatest Failure: Daikatana
 * Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner: The infamous advertisement for Daikatana was "John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch".
 * The Precious Precious Car: Like his collaborator John Carmack, Romero spent the fortune he made at Id Software on exotic sports cars, particularly Ferraris.
 * Prima Donna Director: A longtime tenet of Romero's design philosophy. It's not a coincidence that the credo for his company, Ion Storm, was "Design is Law."
 * Red Baron: Romero was nicknamed "The Surgeon" for his proficiency in FPS deathmatch.
 * Small Name, Big Ego: While Romero legitimately earned his reputation as a talented programmer and gamer initially, he fell under this trope once his fame snowballed out of control.
 * Trash Talk: Romero all but invented FPS trash-talking, as friends and colleagues will testify. He then took that invention and used it in the Daikatana ad campaign.
 * Up to Eleven