We sat down with the legendary John Romero (romero) to discuss DOOM GUY: Life in First Person, which is required reading for fans of video games and their evolution:
DOOM GUY: Life in First Person is required reading for anyone interested in not just video games, but the creative process in general. It's not hyperbole to say that John Romero is one of the most important figures in video game history. Very few developers can accurately state they've assisted in creating new genres, and from Commander Keen to DOOM to SIGIL Romero has solidified himself as a monumental icon in the industry.
Screen Rant: As somebody who's read pretty much every book by game developers, yours was so refreshingly open, detailed, and honest about everything. You tell a story in the book about a terrible accident at your house, and you were scared of losing a lot of your memorabilia. In terms of game preservation, do you see the book as an oral history of everything that you've been through?
This book [Doom Guy] is about, "Here's what it was like every day." Just to present how well we worked together, how great it was to work together, and how in sync we were. It was not about butting heads all the time at all. It was amazing, and I think the book really shows people what it was really like. Because if it's not written by any one of us on the team, then it's up to interpretation.
D&D forces us to really understand what games are at the foundational level. Passing through D&D is kind of an essential path for game developers, especially game designers, because it gives you a solid grounding. You have a language that you can use to talk to other developers and other designers, and you all understand what you're talking about. That is a base to work off, instead of, "Do you understand what hit points are?" It's really helpful to have as a base.
In Anaheim, when you see some part of that amusement park change, they're keeping part of the original thing they just replaced and putting it as a secret in the new place. I could go on forever talking about Disney, but as a designer, their real-life design using their properties and how they translate them digitally is just masterful. People can really learn a lot from that company and the way that they do everything. John Romero: It's knowing that there's more to discover.
John Romero: I'm really happy about the things that are going on with the sequel to SIGIL. I can't say too much, other than it's consistent with the original design. We have the Baphomet's eyes, and I'm still using the experts that I used in the first place to make sure that every byte of data is perfect in the levels.
John Romero: It's amazing. The technologies of Unreal 5 are changing the rules of development, which is something that's really impressive. Senior-level talent on a team is always pre-thinking optimization strategies for the types of code paths that are happening with AI and other systems that might eat up CPU. And there's also a ton of pre-think around the geometry that goes into a game, with levels of detail and geometric complexity. But you can just forget it with Unreal.
Richard Garriott was one of my idols back then, and I got to work at Origin. I just love the fact that I could be at his company, and he has such a storied life with his adventures into space and Antarctica and South America — beyond just the games that he has made. There are these explorers out there, and it would be really great to just read about how they think, how they came up with their ideas, and what they did. I'm very excited for people to do that and get in there.
That mindset is weird, because then it's like, "There can only be one game." There can't be one game; there has to be thousands of games. Everybody needs to make stuff. But we give out information and celebrate our success. We tell people how we do things and what decisions we made, or why we made them. When people don't reveal information, maybe they're protecting technology secrets, which we never have been about. As a team, we're pretty open.
Where do you see the next plateau going? What do you think was the last big jump that we had, and where do you see it happening next? Do you think it's hard sometimes to really convince people? There's been a lot of pushback with AI nowadays, because of ethical reasons. [Note: At the time of publication of this article, both the WGA and SAG-AFTA are currently on strike due to, among other things, the uses of generative AI in the film industry.
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