John Romero: From Gaming Legend to Mobile Pioneer

The word legend gets overused. That’s true even in the games industry, where the collaborative nature of development creates few genuine celebrities. But the word applies to John Romero, who was one of the first true rock stars of gaming.

With John Carmack, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack and others, he defined the first-person shooter genre. Titles like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom broke technical boundaries. They saw the id Software developers become idols of the burgeoning 1990s games industry.

But Romero also has a history with mobile gaming. Following Ion Storm and the challenges of Daikatana, Romero went from being an FPS A-lister to a pioneer in handheld and mobile gaming. Over 20 years ago, his outfit Monkeystone Games realised the future would be portable and developed early hits Hyperspace Delivery Boy! and Congo Cube, as well as the mobile port of Red Faction.

Now he’s an indie developer again, working on an as-yet-untitled Unreal 5 project. Doom celebrates its 30th anniversary this December, and Romero publishes his autobiography later this July. In a nod to his most famous creation and its protagonist, the book is called Doom Guy: Life in First Person.

John Romero’s Childhood and Early Experiences

John Romero grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He’s part Mexican-American, part Yaqui and Cherokee. Before reading about his first games experiences, we’re hit with an eye-opening account of a difficult childhood, including drugs and murder, all before page 5.

“I could tell people were shocked and surprised!” he says, recalling the first time he spoke publicly of his childhood. “I was at a conference in Canada. Instead of hearing about a specific game, the organisers asked that they’d like to learn about my life and what made the person who made Doom. Afterwards, people said, ‘You should really put that in a book!’ That’s a good idea, so I just laid it all out there.”

He writes matter-of-factly about his formative experiences, his young parents living with very little, the support of his grandmother, and about domestic violence – the “poverty and alcoholic chaos,” he calls it in the book.

“It was definitely difficult to write about those things,” he confesses. “But writing about them not in a harsh way either was important for me. I love my family, so I didn’t want to write anything that made people think I didn’t like where I came from. But it was a difficult experience growing up. And I came through it. I hope people in a similar situation might see themselves in the book and see that they can get through it as well – I thought it’s important to put the difficult stuff in there so that people could identify with some of those stories.”

In preparing the book, Romero spent time “fact-checking” and making sure friends and family were comfortable with the stories he would tell. “People were really supportive of it. Everybody in the family knows about everything that happened,” he tells us. “I heard from people that they really appreciate me being candid about my experiences.”

Breakthrough in Games and Worldwide Acclaim

Games were a passion right from the start for the young Romero and inspired a period of voracious learning, and he landed a gig coding for the US Air Force aged 15.

A big chunk of the book is about his adult experiences working in the games industry, the programming breakthroughs of the early 1990s, turning the PC into a games machine, learning about business, and subsequent disagreements in the boardroom.

What was the atmosphere like in the early days? Even before Doom, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero were getting noticed. “People were aware of us after Wolfenstein – and Commander Keen!” he recalls fondly. “The people who reviewed the Commander Keen games were just, ‘Mind blown!’. They appreciated the hard technical work we did to make it possible for a PC to be like a Nintendo.”

So much so that the team felt confident in hyping the next project, Doom, as “the greatest game ever!” in pre-release publicity. It sounds arrogant, but it was more than just youthful bravado – they’d had eureka moments in the office and released they were breaking new ground.

Wolfenstein 3-D showed the way, but Doom was the game that made FPS games a phenomenon in 1993. Carmack enabled smooth side-scrolling in a test they jokingly called Dangerous Dave In ‘Copyright Infringement’, followed by 3D environments running in software (no GPUs back then) and other pioneering techniques that would later come to dominate the games scene: PvP multiplayer; game engines that could be re-used and licensed; in-game recordings for speedrunners to share their videos; easy modding tools for fans to build their own levels.

The list goes on, and many of these staples began 30 years ago on the desktops of id Software. Romero is even credited with inventing the term deathmatch. “Carmack was definitely the most exceptional programmer I’ve ever known,” Romero tells us. “We knew that technology jump was massive, to go to full 3D. It was huge. It’s stuff that graphics cards now do! He was doing that in software at 60 frames a second, which is difficult. And multiplayer, too – just incredible. Nowadays, if you make a game, you need to know at the start if it will be multiplayer or else forget it. But we remembered [Doom] needed to be multiplayer a couple of months before we released it! So we had to figure it out and get it done immediately.”

Public Perception and Doom’s Impact

They received the recognition they deserved for these technical achievements: Doom made them superstars with rave reviews in all the magazines. And it also changed their fortunes.

The book describes “a collective car-buying binge” as they awarded themselves $110,000 bonuses so Romero and Carmack could buy Ferraris. Romero also bought his father a house.

The success and celebrity also made id Software a target for campaigners complaining about violence in games. There’s a short chapter in Doom Guy: Life in First Person about how Doom became “an unwitting scapegoat” in the media after the Columbine shooting. Just as PocketGamer.biz is about to speak with Romero in July 2023, French president Emmanuel Macron blames video games for the rioting in France. Is this a conversation that’s ever going to go away?

“I don’t know if it will ever go away. Not everyone is informed about the studies that have been done regarding video game violence and the games themselves,” sighs Romero. “They haven’t read up on it. They just take a quick, hot take. Anytime there’s a new technology, there’s going to be something. Comics, heavy metal, and Dungeons & Dragons: everything has been blamed. Anything people don’t understand.”

On Quake and the Break with id Software

After the highs of Doom, the autobiography makes it clear follow-up Quake was troubled, with the level of ambition way too high for the amount of time they gave themselves…