Alfonso John Romero was born on October 28, 1967. He is an American and Irish video game developer. He helped start id Software and designed their early games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), Doom II (1994), Hexen (1995), and Quake (1996). His designs and tools, along with programming methods created by John Carmack, made the first-person shooter (FPS) genre more popular. He is also known for creating the multiplayer term "deathmatch."
After arguments with Carmack, Romero was fired from id Software in 1996. He helped start a new studio called Ion Storm and directed the FPS game Daikatana (2000). This game did not do well with critics or sales. Romero left Ion Storm in 2001. In July 2001, he and another former id employee, Tom Hall, helped start Monkeystone Games to create games for mobile devices.
In 2003, Romero joined Midway Games and led the project for Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2005). He left shortly before the game was released. In 2005, he started another company called Gazillion Entertainment. In 2016, Romero and another former id employee, Adrian Carmack, announced a new FPS game called Blackroom. However, the game was cancelled because it could not find a publisher.
Early life
Romero was born on October 28, 1967, six weeks too early, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He has said that his grandparents were from Mexico, the Yaqui people, and the Cherokee Nation. His mother, Ginny, met Alfonso Antonio Romero when they were teenagers in Tucson, Arizona. Alfonso, who was born in Mexico and moved to the United States, worked as a repair worker at an air force base, fixing air conditioners and heating systems. After Alfonso and Ginny married, they traveled in a 1948 Chrysler with three hundred dollars to Colorado, hoping that living in a place with more acceptance would help their relationship.
Among the early influences on Romero, the arcade video game Space Invaders (1978), which involves shooting aliens, introduced him to video games. The maze game Pac-Man (1980) had the greatest impact on his career, as it was the first game that made him think about designing games. Nasir Gebelli, a programmer who worked for companies like Sirius Software and Squaresoft, was Romero’s favorite programmer and a major influence. Gebelli’s fast 3D graphics work for Apple II games, such as the shooters Horizon V (1981) and Zenith (1982), inspired Romero’s later work at id Software. Other influences include programmer Bill Budge, the Super Mario games by Shigeru Miyamoto, and fighting games such as Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Virtua Fighter.
Career
John Romero began programming games on an Apple II computer he received in 1980. His first game was an unpublished copy of the arcade game Crazy Climber. His first published game, Scout Search, appeared as a type-in program in the June 1984 issue of Apple II magazine, inCider. At least 12 of his games published in print and disk magazines were developed under the name Capitol Ideas Software. He entered a programming contest in A+ magazine during its first year of publishing with his game Cavern Crusader. The first game Romero created that was eventually published was Jumpster in UpTime. Jumpster was created in 1983 and published in 1987, making Jumpster his earliest created, then published, game.
Romero's first industry job was at Origin Systems in 1987 after programming games for eight years. He worked on the Apple II to Commodore 64 port of 2400 A.D., which was eventually abandoned due to slow sales of the Apple II version. Romero then worked on Space Rogue, a game by Paul Neurath. During this time, he was asked if he would be interested in joining Paul's soon-to-start company, Blue Sky Productions, which later became Looking Glass Technologies. Instead, Romero left Origin Systems to co-found a game company named Inside Out Software, where he ported Might & Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64. He had almost finished the Commodore 64 to Apple II port of Tower Toppler, but Epyx unexpectedly canceled all its ports industrywide due to their large investment in the first round of games for the upcoming Atari Lynx. During this time, Romero created the artwork for the Apple IIGS version of Dark Castle, a port from the Macintosh. During this time, John and his friend Lane Roathe co-founded a company named Ideas from the Deep and wrote versions of a game called Zappa Roidz for the Apple II, PC, and Apple IIGS. Their last collaboration was an Apple II disk operating system (InfoDOS) for Infocom's games Zork Zero, Arthur, Shogun, and Journey.
Romero moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, in March 1989 and joined Softdisk as a programmer in its Special Projects division. After helping with the PC monthly disk magazine Big Blue Disk for several months, he officially moved into the department until he started a PC games division in July 1990 named Gamer's Edge (originally titled PCRcade). Romero hired John Carmack into the department from his freelancing in Kansas City, moved Adrian Carmack (no relation) into the division from Softdisk's art department, and persuaded Tom Hall to help with game design at night. Romero and the others left Softdisk in February 1991 to form id Software.
There was the familiar setting of Super Mario Bros. 3: a pale blue sky, puffy white clouds, bushy green shrubs, animated tiles with little question marks rolling over their sides, and, strangely, his character, Dangerous Dave, standing ready on the bottom of the screen. Romero tapped his arrow key, moved Dave along the floor, and watched him scroll smoothly across the screen. That’s when he lost it.
Romero worked at id Software from its start in 1991 until 1996. He was involved in the creation of several milestone games, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, and Quake. He served as executive producer (and game designer) on Heretic and Hexen. 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 wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series and Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others. In his keynote speech at the WeAreDevelopers Conference in 2017, Romero named this period Turbo Mode, in which he emphasized creating 28 games in 5.5 years with a team of fewer than 10 developers. Romero is also credited with coining the multiplayer term "deathmatch."
In level 30 of Doom II, "Icon of Sin," the boss is a giant demon head with a fragment missing from its forehead. When first viewing the demon, a distorted and demonic message is played, which is actually John Romero saying, "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero!" reversed and distorted to sound like a demonic chant. Players can use the "noclip" cheat to enter the boss and see Romero's severed head, which is skewered on a post. The player defeats the boss (without the "noclip" cheat) by shooting rockets into its exposed brain after activating a lift and riding it. Romero's head functions as its hit detection point; when he "dies," the boss is killed, and the game is finished. In the 2013 IGN Doom playthrough to celebrate the game's 20th anniversary, Romero shared the backstory behind the inclusion of his head as the final boss and the reversed sound effect—they were both a result of an in-joke prank between development team members.
During the production of Quake, Romero clashed with John Carmack over the future direction of id. Romero wanted the game to follow his demanding vision without compromise, but Carmack insisted the project had to make steady progress toward completion and accused Romero of not working as much as the other developers. Although Romero relented on his vision and joined a months-long crunch effort to finish the game, this did not resolve the tensions within the company, and Romero was forced to resign. In a 1997 interview, Romero said, "Leaving after finishing Quake was the right choice—leaving after finishing a hit game. I keep on good terms with the id guys, and it was pretty easy because we've been friends for years." In 2022, during
Personal life
In January 2004, Romero married Raluca Alexandra Pleșca, who was born in Bucharest, Romania. They divorced in 2011. In 2012, Romero and game developer Brenda Brathwaite became engaged on March 24 and married on October 27. Together, they worked on the game Ravenwood Fair, with Romero as Lead Designer and Brathwaite as Creative Director and Game Designer. In November 2010, they founded a social game development company called Loot Drop. They also worked on Cloudforest Expedition and Ghost Recon Commander together. Romero has three children from two previous marriages: Michael, born in 1988; Steven, born in 1989; and Lillia Antoinette, born in 1998.
Romero’s long hair has received both praise and criticism from his fans. In 2002, he cut his hair short and donated it to Locks of Love. Discussion boards such as Doomworld and BeyondUnreal had threads discussing his new look at the time. He began growing his hair back to its original length in 2003. On January 11, 2022, Romero shared a statement on Twitter about his hair, timed with the 120th anniversary of William Arthur Jones’ “Indian haircut order” from 1902. He stated, “I wear my hair long as a proud Yaqui and Cherokee man, and will continue to do so until the day I die.”
In 2000, during the development of Daikatana, Romero listed Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, Super Mario Bros. 3, Age of Empires, Duke Nukem 3D, and Chrono Trigger as his favorite games of all time, with Chrono Trigger at the top. In 2017, his favorite games were World of Warcraft and Minecraft.
As of 2017, Romero’s favorite programming language is Lua. He has a condition called hyperthymesia, which allows him to remember nearly every detail from his past. He is an atheist and has stated that everyone involved in creating the original Doom was also an atheist, except for game designer Sandy Petersen, who is a Mormon. On December 19, 2023, Romero acquired Irish citizenship after living in Ireland for about eight years.
Romero was referenced in the 2020 video game Doom Eternal as King Ormero.