John Romero
Alfonso John Romero ( born October 28, 1967 in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is an American game designer, and is together with John Carmack as 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 Soft disc, a computer magazine that was published on diskette know. Together they developed some games for soft disc and then started with the game Commander Keen their own company id Software. This earned with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake great fame and is considered as the main founder of the now very popular first-person shooter genre.
After the release of Quake John Romero founded with Tom Hall ( also formerly of Soft Disk) the company Ion Storm, to develop the first-person shooter game Daikatana. The ambitious project was advertised very self- confident in advance, the development was problematic and suffered a number of delays and staff changes in the development team. Although Daikatana was not vaporware, but appeared only after more than three years of development in May 2000, was technically immature and was then very negatively received by the trade press and the majority of players. After this debacle, the strongly been criticized Romero and the ion subsequently adopted by Eidos Interactive Storm parted.
Besides Daikatana Ion Storm gave birth to the real-time strategy game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, the RPG Anachronox and Deus Ex successful on the market, where Romero was, however, not involved. As a result, Romero Stone Monkey Games founded, a small development company to develop games for the rapidly emerging market of games for handhelds, mobile phones etc.. Since March 1998 Romero is Chairman of the Advisory Board of e- sports league Cyber Athlete Professional League.
Already in 2003, however, Romero returned to the PC gaming sector and worked with his former colleague Tom Hall as a project manager with the publisher Midway Games. There Romero employed along with former Black Isle employees Josh E. Sawyer in the development of the action role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. Cooperation with Midway ended for unknown reasons before the game's release in June 2005.
The end of August gave Romero known to be co-founder of a new development studio in California's San Francisco Bay Area, in mid-2006 in the name Slipgate Iron Works (short Slipgate ) was baptized. The name is an allusion to a teleportation device that appeared in the game Quake.
In an interview with a U.S. magazine Romero confirmed in September 2005 to work on a MMOG. Claims to have been considerably more than $ 10 million invested in the project. He allegedly found in Internet searches his business partner. Quote from the interview: " We are no ordinary game development company and we do not produce ordinary games. " That currently known only as Super Secret Mystery Project video game is how Romero again reiterate later, be something unique and could in his first presentation the audience " a bit of " shock.