But he’s made headlines recently by creating a couple of surprise expansions for Doom, and his forthcoming sci-fi blaster, Blackroom, is an object of much interest among patrons of the old school.ĭoom. Romero himself has been somewhat estranged from shooters since releasing the widely panned Daikatana in 2000. Doom’s grungy hellscapes have given way to the authentic militarised killing of Call of Duty and the Pixar stylings of Overwatch. Over two decades since Romero, John Carmack and the other founders of id Software inaugurated the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D, the genre has changed beyond recognition. “I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun’s design is really deep – that there’s a lot of cool stuff you learn about it.” “I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with,” he says, sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy. Doom co-creator John Romero has a rather different opinion.
“Give us more guns!” is a common battle-cry among players of first-person shooters, the videogame industry’s bloodiest genre.
