John Romero is an iconic figure in the gaming industry, most well-known for co-creating Doom and helping to pioneer the now-ubiquitous first-person shooter genre. Romero was at the forefront of 90s gaming innovations that shaped the entire industry, and countless games today can trace their roots back to Romero and the developers at id Software who created Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D.
Romero recently published a highly detailed account of his life up to now, titled Doom Guy: Life in First Person, beginning with his difficult upbringing in the desert of Tuscon and giving an intimate look into his life as a young coder with an insatiable passion for creating games. In an interview with Game ZXC, Romero reflected on his experiences in the book, his thoughts on modern first-person shooters, and how he hopes his story will encourage aspiring creators to pursue their passions. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What made you decide that now was the time to write the book on your life?
Romero: It’s kind of a funny story. About four years ago, I went to give a talk in Canada. This conference basically said, “We want to hear about your life and how you grew up. We want to know how the person who created those games came to be. How were you raised?”
So I wrote up the talk and while I was giving it, I could tell that people were kind of shocked and not prepared for the story. They had no idea that I was raised in the desert in Arizona, and my family had a super low income, drugs alcohol, and some deaths. Just a difficult upbringing.
Someone had said that that should really be in a book, and because it was new information, I had no idea. While thinking about what would go in the book, I thought that I could do a whole book – not just the beginning, but everything – and that it could be a really good “definitive id Software history book” where all the dates, all the games, everything that we did up until 1996 with Quake was in there.
Anyone that needed to research it or refer to game dates or times or whatever could just go back, and it's right here: this is where it happened. So I kind of combined both of those things. Like “What happened after Ion Storm?” I also get asked a lot about Blackroom, so Blackroom is in there.
Q: Was there anything that you were reluctant to share, but felt that it needed to be said?
The early stuff. I wasn't trying to withhold anything. I wanted to share it even if it was difficult, and I think people could relate to it. It was important that people felt like they could relate to me because I think it's important that people feel like they could do the same thing that I did, that they can come from any kind of background and still have a chance to make it no matter how bad it is and that there's hope for everybody.
When they read my story, there's no magic there. It's just like “Oh, this is what you do to do that. You just kind of focus on the thing, and you just keep doing it.” Whether it's programming or design or writing or art or whatever, you just stay the course. And I want to make sure that everybody knows I totally love my family. We’re still in touch. It was a great family, but that's where I grew up. I’ve totally made peace with anything bad because when you're a kid, you don't know it’s bad that you don't have any money because money is not even a concept kids get, so you just grew up there.
Now some people, when they get a little older and they're teenagers, and they feel like they're disadvantaged, I think this is a good book for them to look at and go, “You can do it. You can totally do it.” Technology is transformative. Learning technology can get you anywhere, and so I think that's part of the message.
Q: In the book you wrote about that first moment experiencing Doom’s multiplayer and blowing up another player, recognizing immediately that it was an incredible milestone for gaming. Have any innovations in recent years struck you as similar milestones?
Romero: When internet gameplay happened, that was huge. When we made Doom, there was an internet – we were using email and all kinds of stuff – but there weren't any games playing over the internet, they were playing on local area networks and over modems. So getting a game to play over this new internet thing was going to be the future. You will always be playing on the Internet. We did that in Quake.
With Doom, we knew where it was going to go. We knew that gaming was going to be on the internet and not just on LAN all the time. What we needed to do was get it running on a LAN, just to get the very first multiplayer gaming working and come up with, “What are the rules? What is it called?” all that kind of stuff.
And so it was like baby steps, it was the first thing. Before Quake – because Quake was going to take a little while for us to deliver – there was an in-between step because the limitation with Doom at the time was like, “I want to play at three in the morning, who am I going to play with? I can't call anybody up at three in the morning.” The internet would have done that.
So there was a step in the middle called DWANGO, where you dial up with your modem to a server and there's all these people there, and you can connect with them and play right in DWANGO and they connect computers together. That was pre-internet gaming, but it was close. It was almost there. That was like the half step before actually full internet gaming with Quake.
Q: You mentioned in the book how you recently had a conversation with Adrian Carmack about the state of first-person shooters and current trends. Can we get a window into that conversation? How do you feel about FPS today with retro shooters and Battle Royales popping up?
Romero: I am interested in all shooters, whether they're boomer shooters/retro shooters, or they are the latest and greatest game-as-a-service massive shooter. I like all of them, I'll jump in and download a bunch of them on Steam like Ultrakill, TurboOverkill, and SeveredSteel.
There's a whole bunch of these really cool little shooters to play, and they all have their own take on what is retro and what is old school. Then, they add some cool stuff in there like TurboOverkill’s slide kills where you're sliding across the ground killing everything that gets in your way.
It's cool to see people still trying to keep that aesthetic alive – which I know is kind of a trend, and it's more like the PlayStation 1995 graphic style versus like PC graphic style – but it's cool that people have that nostalgia for that era and want to make games like that knowing that they can even do it better nowadays because design language has evolved beyond those years. So you can make a game better, but make it look like it belongs in that era.
I'm a massive fan of the GhostRecon series and GhostReconBreakpoint, to me, has got to be the best tactical shooter I've ever played. I'm going back and doing Wildlands now because I hit Breakpoint first, but 2023 Breakpoint is the best tactical shooter ever. It's incredible.
I play hero shooters like Valorant and Overwatch, and it's cool to see what they're doing there. Destiny 2 is such a great game. There are just so many of them to play, and it's really cool to see where we started and where it has exploded into all of these different realms and subgenres. I just enjoy playing all of them, they all interpret things differently. If you remember the game XIII, that was super innovative with the cartoon panels and stuff and I love that kind of innovation.
Q: Mechanically, shooters are fairly similar. What do you feel is the difference between shooters that fall flat and ones that captivate players for hundreds of hours?
Romero: First of all, your controls need to feel really good. You have to have super responsive control, but you also need to give the player something new all the time. Every time you get to a new level, you should have not just one thing new, but a lot of things that are new so that you feel like you're on a real adventure and it's not like, “Oh, it's those five monsters in a different level.” It's got to be an evolution and the narration should follow the movement through these levels, like you want to feel like the story is evolving and you're an important part of it.
Half-Life 2 has got to be one of the best-designed shooters ever. They did so much perfectly and that game is a blueprint for perfection. That's what you want to feel like when you play a shooter. You want a lot of capability, you want the player to feel some fear, a lot of curiosity, allow them to have a lot of exploration, and then some arena moments, but you don't want those arena moments to feel formulaic or predictable. As soon as your game becomes predictable, you start losing the player. So keeping the player surprised is really exciting and critical to keeping people in your game.
There are several games that follow a formula like that. I love the game F.E.A.R. Near the end of F.E.A.R., it became formulaic because there are a lot of offices that look the same, but up until and after the offices was an amazing journey through that game.
Not just the scary parts, but the slow-mo stuff and especially to me, the hilarious shit that those dudes were saying when you're blowing away the soldiers – they were the best. If you haven't played Breakpoint, that is similar to Breakpoint, 100%. Breakpoint makes me feel like those F.E.A.R. soldiers were in the game.
Q: You might’ve just answered this, but you mentioned you love to talk about games whether it’s programming techniques or games you’re currently into. What game has had your attention the most lately?
Romero: Breakpoint has had a lot of my attention because when the original GhostRecon came out in 2001, I loved that game. I got Desert Siege, I got Island Thunder, and every single computer I ever got those were the first things I installed on it, and then I unlocked everything all over again. So I played that series for 20 years. I saw GRAW, I played Future Soldier, but they didn't grab me. When I hit Breakpoint, I was like,” Finally, they've done it again!”
The games that I'm developing, I play a lot. For example, Sigil, so much gameplay goes into making that many Sigil levels, and I'm making the sequel to Sigil right now. It's a ton of modify, test, test, test, play around, over and over and over again. But that's the way that you make good games. Whether you're developing a game or a level, you have to play them a million times for them to feel good.
I know a big part of your process is replaying the level any time you make a minor change. It sounds very tedious but clearly pays off.
Romero: When you're developing levels, sometimes one thing can make a massive difference. You need to test it because you don't want to go “Okay here's 10 monsters,” like that's the solution for the player. It’s about “where can you place a single monster” because the combinations of different kinds of enemies in a place can drastically change everything. You put one enemy somewhere, and you have just altered the entire area. Like, “I'll throw in a cyber demon. Have fun with that.” That's just changed a whole area. How do you even solve that area when you're underpowered, and you don't have enough ammo or health?
It's really an interesting problem, but that's why I keep on playing my levels over and over again. It’s funny, it's never tedious when I'm making my levels. It's always fun. I need to feel that fun because I think the player is going to feel the same fun. If it's not fun for me, I need to change it.
That's how you make good games. Like your game.
Q: When it comes to innovations for developers, have there been any technologies or techniques that have impressed you lately?
Romero: I think, overall, Unreal 5 with the Lumen and the Nanite system. Those are the two biggest systems that really are truly next-gen and have changed development. The traditional ways of optimization while you're developing and the things that you know that you have to do down the road totally changed with Unreal 5. And those aren't just the two areas that they focused on. They've added Quartz, which is for the audio to have a perfect timing mechanism. They also have Chaos, which is great for destruction. If you want to ruin the entire environment, Chaos will do that for you.
But it's also just amazing how the engine is so open to plugging in other technologies if they don't support it, someone else will, and they allow that. It's just the best, and the thing that's critical about Unreal 5 is that Unreal 5 delivers shipped games. That's critical for an engine for you to have confidence. It ships games.
Q: You wrote about how the process of writing the book itself has been transformative for you. How has it affected your outlook?
Romero: It was great to have everything out there on a high level where I could actually see patterns of behavior that were created from the way I was raised, and go, “Oh, that's why I do that. Because this happened back there.” So pattern recognition was part of it. You can quantify mistakes by looking at the whole thing and go “That was a mistake right there.” That's why I kept some of those lessons learned in the book because that's the thing that I learned from.
The biggest thing was that I'm just really grateful to be making games because when I was a kid, my only goal in my whole life was that I just wanted to make games every day. That was the only goal, there was no money goal ever. It was always just “I want to be able to do that.” When you set your sights not too high, hopefully, they're achievable, and that was mine. I was really happy to be able to keep on doing that.
Q: The book has a chapter about the tragedy at Columbine, and how the media used Doom and violent games as a scapegoat. Has that continued to be an issue, or do you feel like people have finally moved on from that notion?
Romero: I think that we have moved on because I really don't see news that is bringing up video games whenever there's another incident. There have been studies for so long that debunk the connection between the two, so now whenever that happens the focus is never on games, it's always on guns, that becomes the focus. So it's nice that games are not getting such a bad rap after all the years of massive tragedies. They're just horrible, but that's a different problem. It's not a game problem.
Q: You wrote about the initial falling out with John Carmack during Quake’s development, and it looked like a lot of the trouble was due to the pressure from months of intense crunch and people breaking down. Do you think the push toward better work-life balance in game development will help prevent more instances like that?
Romero: I think so. What we've learned from COVID is that people really do enjoy being able to work from home and having that freedom to work from home, and it's changed everything. With that lesson, I think that whatever works for people works. If they are more effective four days a week because they can have a three-day weekend every weekend, that might really work for a lot of people. I think it's a good experiment. There are a lot of really interesting social experiments, but it depends on what you're making. It depends on the team.
I love to work with the people that I work with, and it's funny because we’re so dedicated that if we went on a vacation together, my coders would just want to code and are talking about code if they don’t have a computer. Their hobby is what they do for work and they just love it.
It might be challenging to schedule a five-day week project and switch to four days. Our industry might be heading in that direction, I'm not sure. But there are lots and lots of lessons like, “Hey, don't work too long because you will become less effective, you might actually hurt the game. If you're on the computer too long, stop and take a rest and then come back in the morning.”
Q: Overall, what do you hope readers will take away from their experience reading the book?
I hope people really enjoy the history that's in there. I think people will take away the message of “Do the thing that you love.” And I feel that people will come away with this overall tone of positivity that I have with my story.
And also, if I can do it, you can totally do it. There's nothing different about me than anyone else. It's all about spending the time. You’ve got to spend the time and just do the thing that you're interested in doing.
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