John Romero

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Romero (2012)

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967 in Colorado Springs , Colorado ) is an American game developer and, together with John Carmack, is the father of the first-person shooter genre. He is one of the founders of id Software .

Life

Romero and Carmack met during their game development work for Softdisk , a computer magazine that appeared on floppy disk. Together they developed some games for softdisk and then started their own company id Software with the game Commander Keen . This gained great fame with games like Wolfenstein 3D , Doom and Quake and is considered to be the main founder of the very popular first-person shooter genre today.

After Quake was released , John Romero and Tom Hall (also formerly at Softdisk) founded Ion Storm to develop the first-person shooter game Daikatana . The ambitious project was advertised very self-confidently in advance, but the development was problematic and suffered several delays and personnel changes in the development team. Daikatana did not become vaporware , but it was only released in May 2000 after more than three years of development, was technically immature and was received very negatively by the trade press and the majority of players. After this debacle, the heavily criticized Romero and Ion Storm, now taken over by the publisher Eidos Interactive , separated.

In addition to Daikatana , Ion Storm brought the real-time strategy game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 , the role-playing game Anachronox and the successful Deus Ex onto the market, in which Romero was not involved. Romero subsequently founded Monkeystone Games , a small development company to develop games for the rapidly emerging market of games for handhelds , mobile phones, etc. Since March 1998, Romero Chairman of the Advisory Board of e-sports -Liga Cyber Athlete Professional League .

In 2003, Romero returned to the PC games sector and worked with his former colleague Tom Hall as a project manager at the publisher Midway Games . There Romero worked together with former Black Isle employee Joshua E. Sawyer on the development of the action role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows . The collaboration with Midway ended for unknown reasons before the game was released in July 2005.

In late August, Romero announced that he would be co-founder of a new development studio in California's San Francisco Bay Area , which was named Slipgate Ironworks (Slipgate for short) in mid-2006. The name is an allusion to a teleportation device that appeared in the game Quake .

In an interview with a US magazine in September 2005, Romero confirmed that he was working on an MMOG . According to their own information, more than $ 10 million has been invested in the project. He allegedly found his business partner through Internet research. Quotation from the interview: “We are not an ordinary game development company and we do not produce any ordinary games.” The video game, currently only known as the Super Secret Mystery Project, is supposed to be something unique, as Romero reiterates later, and could “a bit 'shock.

In 2010 he was also instrumental in developing the Ravenwood Fair social network game .

literature

  • David Kushner: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture . Random House, ISBN 0-375-50524-5 (English, hardcover)

Web links

Commons : John Romero  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Romero exits Midway
  2. ↑ Life After 'Doom': Estranged Creators of Era-Defining Game Speak Rolling Stone
personal data
SURNAME Romero, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Romero, Alfonso John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American game developer
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Colorado Springs , Colorado