John Romero and his wife Brenda have been awarded by the Develop magazine as Development Legends at their latest Develop Awards, for their work in game studios – on Wizardy and Dungeons & Dragons for Brenda, and in id Software and other studios for John.
John was also recently interviewed at the East Coast Game Conference:
noclip did an extensive interview of John Romero about his career and his new home in Ireland. Subscribers to the patreon of noclip can also watch a very interesting tour of the huge collections of old games and pieces of software history that John gathered or created across time.
noclip did also an interview of the last of the founder members of id Software still in the company, Kevin Cloud, about his career and the new Doom game.
You can also watch other videos about Doom with extended interviews of the development team.
The author of the great book “Master of Doom”, David Kushner, about the life and career of John Romero and John Carmack from the late seventies to the beginning of the 2000s, has posted a new article about these two legendary developers, and their life after the era of the book, until now.
From the ashes of Ion Storm to the recent campaign of Romero on kickstarter for BLACKROOM, and the departure of Carmack from id Sofware to become the CTO of Oculus and create new VR headsets, you can discover how they managed to continue their career after creating some of the most important games in the industry.
John Romero and Adrian Carmack have revealed last monday the name of the project they were working on: BLACKROOM.
They’ve started last Monday a kickstarter campaign based on the concept of a fast multiplayer first-person shooter game taking place in a holographic world, using the Unreal Engine 4. But without any live gameplay demo to show that concept in action, their campaign was quite ill-fated, as they were asking for 700.000 dollars – which is quite realistic for the development of a game during several months in a small team, but a very high amount when you have only some ideas and concepts. But as they received only more than 100k after some days, and the trend was not very good, they decided to stop the campaign and work on a demo of the game before restarting it. Good luck to them!
John Romero and Adrian Carmack are back together in order to create a new first-person shooter game! They had already worked together at id Sofware on games like Doom, Quake and obviously Wolfenstein 3-D, and have always kept in touch since. But Adrian left id in 2005, and sued the company in court afterwards for some forced stakes sales. He retired from the video game industry, and became the manager of an hotel in Ireland.
And in 2015, John Romero moved to Ireland in order to found his new company – Night Work Games – with his wife Brenda Romero and apparently Adrian, and create a new FPS – his first one since Quake in 1996, before he left id Software, and Daïkatana in 2000. John and Adrian have just posted a video teasing this new game – which will be officially announced next Monday!
John Carmack won’t be part of the project. He’s still working as the CTO of Oculus on their virtual-reality headsets, and received recently a BAFTA Fellowship award for his “outstanding and exceptional contribution to video games”. Here’s his brilliant acceptance speech (transcript here):
John Romero has celebrated Monday on his facebook page the 25th anniversary of the founding of id Software.
HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY id Software! It’s incredible to think that the little 4-person company we founded has grown into a 100+ person studio, and even more amazing that the studio is still working on our 22-year old franchise – still bringing the high-tech and fast action we started with. Thank you, everyone at id, for carrying the torch.
To celebrate, let’s all listen to one of the most prolific and talented metal guitarists in history, Buckethead.
Some of his colleague from that era also added some comments to his post, like Tom Hall:
What a long, strange, awesome trip it’s been. 🙂
And Scott Miller, from their publisher Apogee, who argued about the exact founding date of the studio:
My paperwork in my files shows that I made an agreement with Id in 1990, which would be 26 years ago!
… with John Romero answering:
We’re going by the official DAY 1, full-time, all-day, id Software. Not the sneaking-around, clandestine, Keen-making, IFD-turned-id that we remember. See, this first letter even says so… (picture from the letter)
… and Scott:
True, but Commander Keen was released in Dec 1990, as an “Id Software” game. So that would seem to make it official. But, there are numerous ways to pick the official date, like the actual date the company was legally filed.
If you want to learn more about this epic era, you can read the page explaining the story of the studio on this site, or read the book “Master of Doom”.
Here is a gallery of pictures of that period:
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Note that this happens two weeks after John released his first map for the original Doom game after 21 years – as an warmup for his new FPS to come!
I would like to wish you a merry Christmas and, in advance, a happy new year!
2014 has been a great year for all the Wolfenstein fans, with the release of a new game, Wolfenstein: The New Order, which got a great success and many very positive reviews. The game is regularly added in lists of the best games of the year, like on PC Games N, God Is A Geek, Game Informer, The Sixth Axis, Slant Magazine, and Stuff, even winning some awards like on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where it has been selected as the best FPS of the year! It was also nominated for the Best Shooter and Best Narrative categories at the last Game Awards, and for the “Best Storytelling” category at the Golden Joysticks awards.
Update: Polygon has just chosen Wolfenstein: The New Order as one of their Games of the Year, with great comments:
It helps that The New Order’s old-school influences find a positive middle ground with modern design sensibilities, and it so rarely seems to run out of things to say or do. It’s a fun, often bombastic action game. The veteran developers at Machine Games have made many of those in their long careers, but this is arguably the best, the one that feels the least like a support mechanism for storytelling.
Update 2: The french website NoFrag – dedicated to FPS – made a poll about the best games of the year, and Wolfenstein: The New Order was chosen as the best sequel game, with this comment:
Congratulations to Bethesda, who succeeded to resurrect the Wolfenstein licence. Indeed, there was no multiplayer part, but the solo one was very nice. We didn’t believe in it, so the surprise was even better.
Update 3: The game has been chosen as “2014’s Dark Horse” by HardcoreGamer, and “Best FPS in 2014” by the French website GamAlive!
This is also a great Christmas for some legendary Wolfenstein developers like John Romero, who received a wonderful present from his wife, Brenda Romero: a great Doom sculpture!
This object has been created by an artist called Jason Hite, and sold to the Romero’s. Polygon has written a post about it, and the artist added an entry in his blog about this work.
The English website Games TM recently interviewed John Romero in order to remember his career, and his work at id Software. They talk about many things including Wolfenstein 3-D:
We were all brainstorming one day for the next game to make, and I said ‘Why don’t we just redo Castle Wolfenstein in 3D?’ Me, Carmack and Tom Hall were all major Castle Wolfenstein freaks, so that was it. We were going ‘Can you imagine killing Nazis in 3D? There’s no game like that!’ One thing people don’t really know is that the game ran at 70fps because the video controllers of the time ran at 70fps, unlike today, where they’re mostly working at 60. So all of the technology behind it was built in four months, from January to April 1992, it was released on 5 May 1992 and the response was just massive. Like, Commander Keen’s sales were a joke compared to Wolfenstein. That first month we sold 4,000 copies and were doing phone interviews, and the local news came over and videoed the team. We really knew we were onto something – this 3D, violent thing is huge! [laughs]
They also discuss about his departure from id, and his difficult relationship with John Carmack soon before…
In 1995, when I wasn’t working directly on Quake, and John was working really hard on it, I was busy with all the other stuff in the company. Heretic had just come out, and I was dealing with that, as well as the development of Hexen with Raven. There was also the re-release of Doom to retail, the amount of things going on was huge, and I was the only one doing these things, and I think John didn’t feel like I put enough into Quake. I was building the level editor with John so that all of the level designers could build levels, and I kind of waited until the engine was ready to make the game. It took about a year to get to that point, and so I think that he was mad because I wasn’t on the game like he was on the game. I think that upset him, and it could have gotten fixed if we had reorganised the company into an engine development team and a game development team. If we could have carried on making games in the Doom engine and then when the Quake engine was ready switched over to that, that would have been an optimal strategy for the company, but we did not really analyse the problem back then. All we really knew was how to work on the game together. Looking back, I believe that was a mistake.
A sad view of what could have become id with a better internal organization…
