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John Romero: The Escapist Interview

by Russ Pitts

Romero.

Perhaps it's something about the name itself that brings to mind great things. Some combination of etymological triggers, perhaps; a heady mental mixture that's part romance, part Camaro - sex in a Z28.

The man himself evokes a similarly visceral response. Meeting him, speaking with him and tracking his movements across nearly three decades of life in the game game, one can hardly imagine John Romero as anything other than a smashing success. Which is why, perhaps, so many take such pleasure in pointing out his one great failure.

Romero has developed, or been involved in developing nearly 100 games, at least half a dozen of which have sold more than 100,000 copies. Having cut his teeth in the game industry coding games for the Apple II, Romero worked for Origin and Softdisk (founding a few of his own companies along the way) before co-founding id Software in 1991 with John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation) and Tom Hall.

In the five years he worked with id Software, John Romero contributed heavily to developing a number of innovative PC games, including id's breakout hit Wolfenstein 3D and one of the most widely recognized and controversial games of all time, Doom; the game that has been accused of inspiring the Columbine High School shootings, made its designers multi-millionaires and ushered in the era of the "rockstar game developer." Yet inside the game industry, Romero is even better known for the one that got away.

In 1996, following a widely-publicized feud with John Carmack - centered around the belief among key id staffers that Romero talked too much to the press and worked too little on the games - Romero founded his own company, Ion Storm, with fellow designers Tom Hall and Todd Porter and artist Jerry O'Flaherty. The men leased the penthouse of a prestigious Dallas, Texas office building, deep in the heart of oil country, for the company's headquarters. A monument to excess, the Ion Storm offices featured a movie screening room (complete with leather furniture), arcade machines, a bank of computers devoted to Doom and Quake "deathmatches," 60-foot glass ceilings (which prompted the company's programmers to erect felt tents over their workspaces to reduce the glare of the daytime sun), oak furniture, steel cubicles, and a pool table. It was an office fit for the man who had once referred to himself as "God," and it would be within this 54th floor glass cage that John Romero's Icarian flight would come (at least temporarily) to an end.

Ion Storm, backed by publisher Eidos, planned initially to ship three games, each designed by one of the company's three co-founders. Romero's long-time friend (and Softdisk and id Software colleague), Tom Hall, planned to develop a science-fiction roleplaying game called Anachronox , which was eventually released in 2001 to poor reviews and lackluster sales. Todd Porter, former ministry student, exotic dancer and Origin employee, was to develop a game called Doppleganger, which was eventually cancelled. Romero's game was Daikatana . It was intended to be larger and grander in scale than any videogame ever made, and was heavily advertised as the game that would make you, the player, John Romero's "bitch."

That Daikatana eventually sold 200,000 copies - a smashing success by some standards - is irrelevant. Cost

When I was young & in my prime (and an underemployed student) I rarely bought anythign but instead ogt "free" versions from friends.

I'm employed, and a father, and now I buy the games.

My 3.5yo son loves robots. So last week I bought the LEGO Star Wars game. He has no clue who R2D2 is, but dammit, he knows R2 is a robot, so he wants to play! My boy was crying he was so excited to play the game.

The install was slow, but it it was copying media to the HD, so thats fine. I'll sacrifice space for speed. After a few minutes it finished and I started the game. My boy was holding a joystick, staring at the screen, and just shaking. I thought he was gonna start seizing.

"Wrong Disc Inserted"

Yeah, turns out EIDOS released a version of the game with defective copy protection. Their website flat out tells you that the disc is defective if it says "Disc 1" in yellow text on the disk. Ours does. We bought this year-old game brand frickin new, and its defective. And EIDOS knew it. Their website gives you a number to call to order a replacement.

http://support.eidosinteractive.com/GI/CustomerSup port/FaqSearchResults.jsp?problemType=3&searchText =&game=177&platform=3

So instead of 'splaining to junior that EIDOS quality control needs a kick to the sack, I hit up good ol'gamecopyworld and found a no-cd crack. Game starts right on up. The downside is the cracked version is not what I'd call stable, so I'm gonna have to send off for a replacement CD anyway, but at least we can keep the boy playing with robots until EIDOS sends the replacement.

So if EIDOS knows they released a bad batch, then why haven't they recalled the shitty ones & replaced them already? Strike one for EIDOS. I'd tell them I was so pissed that I refuse to buy the next Boobraider, except Lara Croft bored me to tears so it would be an empty threat.

I think the copy protection of Steam & CD-keys works very well. I don't find Steam intrusive; I don't have a problem with it. I never "loan" out cdkeys because I'm keen on not getting banned. Of course, these work best on online games.

In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied

Well, that explains Daikatana

4 PC's in the house none XP, Curse you Lucas.

--
To confirm you're not a script, Repeat I am not a script 4 times.

... but did you ever notice that not a single politician slams Thief?

Try this on for size.

Its the video game of your favorite star wars lego figures. (Windows only I think at present)

Its kept my eldest entertained for a while :)

The problem is, it's all 3D shooters, basically.

The thing is, developers see Doom3, and think only in terms of small changes.
I have not seen anything interesting in 3D perspective game in a looong time, the only one that comes to mind is the Soul Reaver line of games.

Better graphics doesn't make better games. The youth of today doesn't get that.
I prefer IRL fistfighting, so I do that on my spare time. Because it's a challange, and exciting too.

Startopia is a game that follows allong the same lines as Dungeon Keeper, except that you play it in a space station rather than under the earth.

Its quite entertaining, and can be found in the bargain bin in quite a few stores.

Another link

There has in fact already been a game that people bought for the sound. Friends of mine actually went out and upgraded their PC sound purely to get a better play experience out of Thief: The Dark Project (1998). It was one of the first games that used positional sounds as an integral part of the game, making for an innovative play style that spawned the stealth genre which now also includes games like Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. Thief works slightly differently to the other Stealth games, since you are very weak in open confrontation. Not paying attention to certain important sounds (like a guard's footsteps for example) can lead to a swift and painful death. This new genre is very successful at the moment, with sequels for all three games mentioned coming out this year - Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, all of which have received good to excellent reviews.

Demo download available here.

This game is all my childhood, i played it for month, and if there's someone around here that knows the carribean sea better than me, he'll taste my sword for sure. But for /. readers it's perhaps out of sight, i played it on the C=64 last century, then on the amiga, and got it on the PC for a birthday. Anyway, i hope the "remake" will keep the promises of the first game.

Other games i like: "Soul reaver", "Black & White", "Trick Style", Tibia, Nomad Soul, and of course all the Lucas Art Series..

Like X, Flash can be extremely suckass, but it doesn't have to be. In both cases, this comes from separating policy from mechanism. Since Flash unlike HTML gives you a completely free-form palette on which to paint, it's easy to make it do things that would be more appropriate in a structured medium. And also the opportunity to do useless, self-indulgent intros. To choose a random example: here.

But there are times when Flash is good: when you are dealing with data that does not easily lend itself to html-ish structure (e.g. animated graphics) and when you need to preserve state in a more complex way than forward-back: e.g. Flash games.

That's a trivial example, I know. But recently, my company had to develop a kiosk system for a client: shininess was at a premium, and the underlying dataset (maps of the facility) lent itself to a highly visual interface.

If used in its proper place, Flash is just fine.

The only computer game that makes me think of politics and politicians is Thief. Not because of the gameplay...

You have to give the installer a flag to force it to install, even though it thinks you shouldn't. Read here to find out how.

Well, I use my PC as a game box with some browsing only (with SSH if I need to access one of the unixish machines) so here's my stuff:

10 : Spybot Search & Destroy (Excellent spyware killer)
9 : Spyware Blaster (Recommended by Spybot author to run concurrently)
8 : Some form of browser.
7 : PuTTY (SSH client w/ tunnelling)
6 : Thief (awesome game)
5 : Thief 2 (more Thief!)
4 : Darkloader (allows one to run custom fan missions in the Thief games)
3 : System Shock 2 (creepy sci-fi rp/fps)
2 : For those days I feel like a slug-fest? Doomsday and the ol' Doom games. (adds real 3D and all the video card eye candy to Doom/Heretic/etc. A MUST HAVE!)
1 : Half Life You know it! (still has one of the best stories of any game around)

Well, I use my PC as a game box with some browsing only (with SSH if I need to access one of the unixish machines) so here's my stuff:

10 : Spybot Search & Destroy (Excellent spyware killer)
9 : Spyware Blaster (Recommended by Spybot author to run concurrently)
8 : Some form of browser.
7 : PuTTY (SSH client w/ tunnelling)
6 : Thief (awesome game)
5 : Thief 2 (more Thief!)
4 : Darkloader (allows one to run custom fan missions in the Thief games)
3 : System Shock 2 (creepy sci-fi rp/fps)
2 : For those days I feel like a slug-fest? Doomsday and the ol' Doom games. (adds real 3D and all the video card eye candy to Doom/Heretic/etc. A MUST HAVE!)
1 : Half Life You know it! (still has one of the best stories of any game around)

The third sounds like an outsourced game in the dated Tomb Raider mould (the two games even share the same developer).

No, they don't. Crystal Dynamics is just handling the latest game in the series. They're better known for the far superior Legacy of Kain series.

And even if Core Design, the original developer of Tomb Raider, was making this new Deus Ex, they managed to do a pretty good job on Project Eden, so I wouldn't be so depressed about it.

Rob

I can't agree with their conclusions. Three days after I bought Thief: The Dark Project I was out shopping for a blackjack, dark cloak and rope arrows.

The rope arrows were a bit hard to find..

I think your points are dead on...

System Shock, then Half Life, and then later Deus Ex were so successful--at least in the critical establishment, if not popularly--precisely because they integrated adventure gaming elements into FPS.

Adventure gaming didn't die, it just got folded into other genres.

I still play text IF, and love it. But I do think more could be done to improve the status of adventure gaming more generally.

One thing I would like to see that would raise the status of adventure gaming is adventure-action games--as opposed to action-adventure games ala Half Life, NOLF, etc. That is, first-person games that include action as well as adventure gaming, but emphasize the puzzle-solving and environment exploration over action.

Project Eden was an example of one such game. Admittedly, it had severe problems with the action element of the game, including massive problems with AI and combat-gameplay characteristics. But I loved the game, and if anything, it left me wondering why no one had made a similar game, but keeping the action elements of the game up to par with what is now standard.

Among current games, Deus Ex 2 may fit this characterization somewhat. But even that game doesn't emphasize the puzzle-solving as much as it does RPG and nonlinearity of action gameplay. It's not really the same.

I think you're right that the pure adventure game, with a few remarkable exceptions--e.g., The Longest Journey--is no longer tenable. However, I do think it's possible to create games that are easily identified as being more in the adventure genre than other genres. I just think few developers are taking this really seriously.

Mod me to hell, you happy lads, but where in Hades is THIEF 3?!?!!?

Thief 3 is scheduled for June of 2004, so expect it next Christmas. On the upside, however, they've already registered the domain name, and you can download the new trailer here.

I'm running Thief II: The Metal Age on Windows XP (and previously, on 2000 and 98SE) with no troubles... it even installs properly. I do have to re-install the flaming Indeo codecs every few months though so the movies will play, but that's not a big hardship.

With Thief: The Dark Project, you need to use a command-line argument with the installer to force it to install on 2000 or XP...

I'm running Thief II: The Metal Age on Windows XP (and previously, on 2000 and 98SE) with no troubles... it even installs properly. I do have to re-install the flaming Indeo codecs every few months though so the movies will play, but that's not a big hardship.

With Thief: The Dark Project, you need to use a command-line argument with the installer to force it to install on 2000 or XP...

I'm running Thief II: The Metal Age on Windows XP (and previously, on 2000 and 98SE) with no troubles... it even installs properly. I do have to re-install the flaming Indeo codecs every few months though so the movies will play, but that's not a big hardship.

With Thief: The Dark Project, you need to use a command-line argument with the installer to force it to install on 2000 or XP...

I'm running Thief II: The Metal Age on Windows XP (and previously, on 2000 and 98SE) with no troubles... it even installs properly. I do have to re-install the flaming Indeo codecs every few months though so the movies will play, but that's not a big hardship.

With Thief: The Dark Project, you need to use a command-line argument with the installer to force it to install on 2000 or XP...

The following is an excerpt from a post I made to a mailing list, where this very subject came up for discussion:

...The moment you declare content of a particular type or nature as verboten is when you enter the realm of censorship. You must then analyze the motives of the censors very, very closely to try and find what their actual goals are.

In this case, it's ostensibly to, "protect children." (From what, is rarely made clear.) To that end, they propose to shield children from viewing violence against law enforcement officers. This would preclude a minor from buying a copy of Deus Ex, which I think would be an unacceptable side-effect. Deus Ex is almost eerily important and relevant today, and I feel would be a good game for a teenager to play, despite the fact that the player is expected to subdue UNATCO personnel who are, in the context of the game, law enforcement. [ ... ]

Schwab

Let's see. I've enjoyed Cutthroats

Going back to ancient games, my favorite sea faring game was Dreadnaughts (can't find a link for it.)

Defiance was revealed at the last minute along with Eidos other offerings.

There's some other cool-looking products at this year's E3, but I know what *I'm* pre-ordering as soon as it's available =).

2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.

Plenty of "weird games" still out there. You could be playing games like this, this, or this. Or even this.

I'm as big a fan of old-school gaming as anyone and still have my Atari 2600 hooked up. But there are just as many offbeat games now as there always were - and not every game back in the old days was all that innovative either (like now, most of them ripped off formulaic concepts). It's just that we don't remember the crappy games, despite the fact that they made up the bulk of the Atari 2600's 1000+ game library. There was a reason for the crash of 1984, after all - a deluge of junk on the market.

A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas. I would argue that the big guys are better at breaking their own formulas than any inexperienced, underfunded "little guy" ever could be - it's just that when they do, the games don't sell. Can you blame EA for putting out Madden 200X every year when a game like Rez sells fewer than 10,000 copies and Vib Ribbon isn't even released here for lack of interest?

There was a PC version of FFVII ported by Eidos for the Windows PC. It works fine on older video cards (Voodoo2), but I have heard of problems with newer ones.

I had forgotten how fun this game is. Time to fire up WINE...

You're right. For pretty much any FPS game out there, where the main purpose of your soundcard is to generate the sound of gunfire and explosions, pretty much any noisy old piece of crap will do. For other games, such as, say Thief: The Dark Project, where sound is absolutely essential to gameplay, it would have been wonderful to have the features Slothy enumerated available in hardware. As it was, the sound engine had to compute all these things in software, which made it much more bloated and less efficient than it might have been otherwise. (To be fair, it may not have been possible to eliminate most of the sound-related code. This is the only game I know of where the NPCs react primarily to the sounds the nearly invisible player makes, and this is achieved by using the actual audio geometry to decide NPC reactions.)

... throw Lara Croft in there as an 'agent' so I can stare at her ass while she fetches files for me :)
Sean

In Understanding Comics , Scott McCloud does point out that it's easier to attach oneself to an abstract form than a realistic one. McCloud explains that is is because other people look very realistic, and are obviously "not you", you most people only have an abstract sense of "self." An abstract character is easier to project myself into. However, he points out that there is a place for the realistic. Realistic things tend to look more "other." The comic Tintin placed the very abstract Tintin against much more realistic backdrops for this purpose.

While it's important to remember these details when designing a game, the lesson is not "don't make games realistic." The lesson is "it's easier for a player to project him or herself into an abstract avatar than a realistic one."

One good example of this working against a game is Diakatana . I never felt I was Hiro, Hiro was the nicely rendered character in front of me. On the other hand, it may be easier to feel for the characters of J et Grind Radio , who are rendered as cartoons.

Thief does a generally good job of making Garrent, the main character, abstract. In actual gameplay, you don't see Garret at all (it's first person). I always found it very jarring when Garret spoke while I was playing, it reinforced that I wasn't Garret.

That said, Understanding Comics is a great read. Anyone who reads comics will probably appreciate it. I suspect anyone involved in graphical arts of any time will find some valuable information.

Definately looking like it could be a good game... maybe I'll dish out my money and buy a copy of this. Last game I bought was Quake II and haven't played anything since (after q3 disappointed me...)...

but anyways. I'd recomend grabbing the demo over here eidos ASAP. :) Time to try some multiplayer :)

Look at the variety of gaming that is done for PCs beyond what you said. You mentioned FPS and sports games -- but those are sold for the console markets too. Instead, look at the intense diversity of games we have: Sim-Games like SimCity, multi-player strategy games like C&C and Starcraft, massively multiplayer MUDs (graphical and text-based), simple but beautiful games like Deer Hunter, text-based games like NetHack (and its cousins), problem-solving games like Myst, and much more.

My point is: don't think there is no innovation in gaming because the top sellers are all FPS and sports games. People come out with new PC games every fricking day -- I am glad the platform is still around! (btw, I am looking forward to Daikatana when it comes out... very soon, check out the demo!)